RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/my-native-english-must-i-now-forgo/

The decline of our language may have been certified when the new term for teaching English in K-12 schools, “Language Arts,” substituted vague complexity for simple precision, as it is in K-12 that English dies. For anyone of the old school, recent graduates have made reading even the leading newspapers exquisite torture.

When language is ungrammatical, asyntactical, or illogical, everything follows—the practice of medicine, flying of airplanes, building of bridges, writing of love letters, and ars gratia artis. Carelessness in expression infectiously hastens the general decay. Here are just a few choice examples from publications that should know better.

Whereas one advocates for a person, one advocates a policy—of which, not for which, one is an advocate. You do not arrive to, but in or at a place. As Cleopatra might say, there is no such thing as an ask: it is a request. You don’t resolve obstacles, you overcome them, just as you don’t solve questions, but answer them. Although an issue can be a problem and a problem can be an issue, they are not synonymous, and when they are used as such it’s a problem, not an issue. “This” is not an indefinite article. Missing an antecedent, you don’t say, “I saw this dog,” but “I saw a dog.”

Unlike The New York Times’s bedeviling usage, now everywhere as people pretending to be journalists migrate from one asylum to another, “on” is not the universal preposition—as a study of, not on, this would show. One expresses concern for or about—not on—something and finds clues to, not on, it. Even my favorite newspaper, for which I wrote for decades, has decided that national adjectives are too much to bear. Hence, “Turkey restaurant” (you wouldn’t know if you were getting cranberry sauce or shish kebab), the “Italy government,” though not yet the “America Constitution.”

Battlefield momentum is not taken; it is achieved or restored. China’s population does not “take a drop,” it drops, although falls or decreases would be better. Residents and fellows are not “unique from other healthcare workers,” although they may be different. “Majority” requires a quantity of at least three. There is no such thing as the majority of Paris, rather than most of Paris. Assuming it isn’t simultaneously specious and fallacious, and doesn’t use a cigarette holder and sip martinis, no weapon is sophisticated; rather, it is complex, advanced, or highly capable. An acute problem is not necessarily intense, but of limited duration. “Like” is a comparative for nouns, “as,” for verbs, as I just said.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-antiracist-racket/

Beyond its falsity, there is no current idea so destructive as the fiction that America is systemically racist. It harms black Americans by shrinking their horizons and stoking their resentment; it has fueled crime and disorder in our cities; and by replacing our national faith in the unique excellence of our self-governing republic with a sense of its pervasive injustice and oppression, it makes us more vulnerable in a dangerous world. Confidence that we have a civilization worth defending is vital to our future.

After all, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s succeeded. In what was the defining political experience of a generation, that movement turned the nation inside out in order to remedy the overt racism that then marred America’s promise of civil equality. Two decades of sit-ins and marches, of sermons and voter registrations, yielded changes that fully opened political, educational, and employment opportunities to blacks, while society grew dramatically more welcoming. Just compare the advertisements or movies—or college alumni magazines—of the 1950s to today’s to get a sense of the revolution in racial attitudes that occurred. Or consider the change in the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage—4% in 1958 versus 94% in 2021.

But as the number of Americans who remember the civil rights era dwindles, the harangues of Black Lives Matter and the critical race theorists have obscured that era’s accomplishment. The Gallup Poll tracks this trend: in 2014, respondents’ satisfaction with U.S. race relations reached a high of 55%, versus 35% dissatisfied, but it began dropping thereafter, in the wake of Eric Garner’s death in July of that year. Only 28% expressed satisfaction in 2022.

Because what people believe affects their actions as much as their real circumstances do, the imaginary world these propagandists have conjured up—in which racial injustice pervades everything, racist insults wound blacks at every turn, racism closes off advancement and shuts out fellowship—really does constrict black opportunity by denying it exists. By and large, the civil rights pioneers assumed that, once their movement succeeded, black Americans would gear up to seize the new opportunity, especially through wider educational choices. But the schools and colleges that were to arm black Americans for success now teach systemic racism, infusing a strange mix of suspicious resentment, fatalistic victimology, and aggrieved entitlement that doesn’t fuel initiative but instead feeds a resentment or hostility that hinders advancement and poisons race relations again. The poet William Blake wrote strikingly of “mind-forg’d manacles”; for many black Americans, the schools rivet them on, and BLM reinforces the chains.

https://jamieglazov.com/2023/07/16/glazov-gang-marijuana-psychosis-and-mental-illness/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Heidi Swan, the author of  ‘A Night In Jail’. Visit her at ANightInJail.com.

Heidi discusses Marijuana, Psychosis and Mental Illness, revealing the dark and frightening side of usage, legalization and denial. 

Don’t miss it!

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/while-the-culture-war-rages-americas?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When I was in my teens and 20s, I used to chuckle at the older guys who complained about the state of the country and America’s young people. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that each generation worries about societal changes and those coming behind them. Despite a few bumps in the road, America keeps rolling and the kids turn out just fine. The old worries eventually become fodder for good conversations between generations. I’m mindful of this pattern as I get older. But now, like the old guys I laughed at when I was young, I find myself looking around at the state of our young people and seeing some disturbing trends.

I wanted to be sure these trends are real and that I wasn’t being a worrywort, so I checked the data. Unfortunately, my intuitions were correct. America’s young people are floundering. The cumulative effect of the data I present below is a bigger threat to America’s future than any of the culture war issues pundits and politicians argue about. People who care about America should care about the state of its children and young people. It’s the right thing to do. It’s also in everyone’s best interest, because too few of our children are becoming the productive adults we need to sustain our economy and institutions. Fewer still are capable of becoming leaders of those institutions.

I’m worried. Others should be worried, too, when 14% of America’s high school girls say they’ve been forced to have sex. They should be worried when 14% of America’s teachers say they’ve been victims of physical violence from students. They should be worried when high percentages of America’s young people say they’re having mental health issues, 18% of high school students have created a suicide plan, 10% of them have attempted suicide, and 3% of them required medical treatment as a result. And let’s not forget about those whose suicide attempts were successful. Suicide was the third leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 in 2020 according to the CDC’s WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) database.

A review of multiple data sources suggests that alarming percentages of America’s children and young people are struggling. Too many of them are

Born to economically disadvantaged single mothers
Living in single-parent households
Overweight or obese
Suffering from mental health issues
Victims and perpetrators of violence
Struggling academically
Unable to transition into stable, self-supporting adulthood.

Here’s a high-level summary of each of the topics mentioned above.