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   PoliticsSupport the French! Viva Democracy!


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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7338)7/8/2022 9:54:43 AM
From: Joachim K
1 Recommendation   of 7704
 
In the meantime British lefties will have a hay day when they are elected and start rearranging British society for the greater good.


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From: Joachim K7/9/2022 12:28:13 AM
   of 7704
 
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness

The decline and fall of American English, and stuff
Winter 2011, by Clark Whelton

I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.

Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.

My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.

Then came 1985.

The first applicant was a young man from NYU. During the interview, he spiked his replies so heavily with “like” that I mentioned his frequent use of the word. He seemed confused by my comment and replied, “Well . . . like . . . yeah.” Now, nobody likes a grammar prig. All’s fair in love and language, and the American lingo is in constant motion. “You should,” for example, has been replaced by “you need to.” “No” has faded into “not really.” “I said” is now “I went.” As for “you’re welcome,” that’s long since become “no problem.” Even nasal passages are affected by fashion. Quack-talking, the rasping tones preferred by many young women today, used to be considered a misfortune.

In 1985, I thought of “like” as a trite survivor of the hippie sixties. By itself, a little slang would not have disqualified the junior from NYU. But I was surprised to hear antique argot from a communications major looking for work in a speechwriting office, where job applicants would normally showcase their language skills. I was even more surprised when the next three candidates also laced their conversation with “like.” Most troubling was a puzzling drop in the quality of their writing samples. It took six tries, but eventually I found a student every bit as good as his predecessors. Then came 1986.

As the interviews proceeded, it grew obvious that “like” had strengthened its grip on intern syntax. And something new had been added: “You know” had replaced “Ummm . . .” as the sentence filler of choice. The candidates seemed to be evading the chore of beginning new thoughts. They spoke in run-on sentences, which they padded by adding “and stuff” at the end. Their writing samples were terrible. It took eight tries to find a promising intern. In the spring of 1987 came the all-interrogative interview. I asked a candidate where she went to school.

“Columbia?” she replied. Or asked.

“And you’re majoring in . . .”

“English?”

All her answers sounded like questions. Several other students did the same thing, ending declarative sentences with an interrogative rise. Something odd was happening. Was it guerrilla grammar? Had college kids fallen under the spell of some mad guru of verbal chaos? I began taking notes and mailed a letter to William Safire at the New York Times, urging him to do a column on the devolution of coherent speech. Undergraduates, I said, seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness.

By autumn 1987, the job interviews revealed that “like” was no longer a mere slang usage. It had mutated from hip preposition into the verbal milfoil that still clogs spoken English today. Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching (“What I said was, I said . . .”) sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation (“So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he’d noticed any change in Vassar students’ language skills. “The biggest difference,” he replied, “is that by the time today’s students arrive on campus, they’ve been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought.” He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. “Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers.” Where, I wonder, did Vagueness begin? It must have originated before the 1980s. “Like” has a long and scruffy pedigree: in the 1970s, it was a mainstay of Valspeak, the frequently ridiculed but highly contagious “Valley Girl” dialect of suburban Los Angeles, and even in 1964, the film Paris When It Sizzles lampooned the word’s overuse. All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).

Is Vagueness simply an unexplainable descent into nonsense? Did Vagueness begin as an antidote to the demands of political correctness in the classroom, a way of sidestepping the danger of speaking forbidden ideas? Does Vagueness offer an undereducated generation a technique for camouflaging a lack of knowledge?

In 1991, I visited the small town of Bridgton, Maine, on the evening that the residents of Cumberland County gathered to welcome their local National Guard unit home from the Gulf War. It was a stirring moment. Escorted by the lights and sirens of two dozen fire engines from surrounding towns, the soldiers marched down Main Street. I was standing near the end of the parade and looked around expectantly for a platform, podium, or microphone. But there were to be no brief remarks of commendation by a mayor or commanding officer. There was to be no pastoral prayer of thanks for the safe return of the troops. Instead, the soldiers quickly dispersed. The fire engines rumbled away. The crowd went home. A few minutes later, Main Street stood empty.
Apparently there was, like, nothing to say.

Clark Whelton was a speechwriter for New York City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani.

city-journal.org

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To: Joachim K who wrote (7340)7/9/2022 7:20:44 AM
From: Tom Clarke
   of 7704
 
A verbal tic with many journalists is saying "sort of" before making a declarative statement. Instead of sort of speaking their mind, they could say what they mean and mean what they say!

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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7341)7/11/2022 5:54:57 PM
From: Joachim K
1 Recommendation   of 7704
 
Satanic Secularism

JUL 11, 2022 11:00 AM

BY ANDREW HARROD

1 COMMENT

Vincent Miceli

“It should not surprise the person alerted to spiritual realities that in an age of atheism diverse forms of the religion of Satanism have sprung up all over the world and are gaining followers at a rapid rate.” So wrote the late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior, recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, with observations about secularism’s evils highly pertinent forty years later.



Miceli noted that the “decline of Christian Faith has led to the decline of man’s confidence in the powers of human reason to attain reality and truth. Man has concluded today that all truth is relative.” “In rejecting the permanent authority of truth as founded by God in reality, reason, and revelation, man set himself up as the autonomous source of truth,” Miceli added. “Yet man is to himself an insoluble dilemma” and “must admit that there remain many phenomena that his autonomous intellect cannot explain.”

Ironically, Miceli perceived, secularism and the satanic therefore went hand in hand. A “religion of modern secular humanism is powerless intellectually to stem the rush to the coves of occultism. Indeed, secular humanism is one of the primary causes of the revival of the religion of Satanism,” he wrote. As he explained:

Despairing of his reason or of revelation to make this realm intelligible to him, man has convinced himself that he can get in contact with the mysterious, with the unknown, by means of his emotions and his will. To aid himself in making this contact man has consulted the seer, the fortune teller, the prophet, the sorcerer, the medium. Hence man is no longer a philosopher nor a believer; he has become the atheistic scientist who has gone on a ghost hunt. For without the God of reason and of revelation, man is condemned to dabble at diabolism. Thus to explain the many phenomena that escape rational laws, man has recourse to table tapping, to spiritualists, witches, seance people, yoga people, the Mystical Church of Cosmic Vibrations people.

This turn to the dark side also has political consequences, Miceli warned, for

when the true God is banished from man’s society, new gods rush in to replace Him. But perhaps what has not been clearly seen today is that when man accepts new gods in his practice of the occult, he also necessarily brings about a revival of the politics of ancient paganism. A normal development of the worship of pagan gods was the creation of a divine state that rested on a theology of continuity, that is, on the denial of the Creator-creature distinction. The pagan theocratic state could take the lives of its children, or any members, as a sacrifice to the god of the state. The worshippers of Moloch ordered their sons and daughters to pass through fire as a form of sacrifice and testing. Thus God’s prohibitions to the Chosen People against occult worship were not only a means of protecting people’s lives morally from perverse practices, but also a means of restricting the power of the omnipotent political rulers who were theoretically unbounded by the restraint of limited, reasonable men and could take human life indiscriminately in the name of the god Moloch.

Belief in any version of Moloch “begets” a “man-centered, oppressive, demonic order,” Miceli wrote, namely the

totalitarian state. The modern world everywhere is succumbing to the power of such a Moloch state. For secular, rational, and occult humanism denies that there is any really transcendent, higher-than-human voice or authority that cares. Secular and occult humanists are at one in denying the true God. They are at one in divinizing man, the secularist through science, the occultist through demonic powers. Both seek power. The secularist seeks political power in the name of humanity; the occultist seeks the power of the underworld in the name of humanity…And both eventually come together to create the super-instrument of power, the modern omnicompetent state that claims absolute authority over the life and death of each citizen.

“The somber lesson to be learned is that a religion that promises progress in liberty, science, education, economic, and social welfare, without belief in a transcendent God, cannot produce a secular utopia,” Miceli rightly warned:

The starry-eyed men of the Enlightenment produced a Moloch state that ruled with a Reign of Terror and plunged Europe into nationalist wars that led to the apotheosis of the emperor-god, Napoleon. The incurable optimist-rationalists of the nineteenth century produced the secular gods and architects of totalitarian Molochs—Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao—the imperialistic tyrannies of Communist Russia and China. The Moloch states of race and blood were engendered by the Nazi-Fascist tyrants, Hitler and Mussolini.

“Moloch states” have also formed in Western countries, Miceli noted, through policies promoting mass abortion, which reveals a

nation that has usurped the power of God over life and death. In the name of its new secular gods, Progress and Liberty, titles that are false fronts for Rebellion and Licentiousness, many formerly Christian nations are driving their sons and daughters through the demonic fires of sacrificial murder.

As Micelli discussed, “ Christ or chaos,” as preached by both Catholics and Protestants, is no mere pious platitude. The American-Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony has likewise documented how a free Western civilization has its basis in the “Hebrew Bible,” as received by Christians through belief in a Jewish messiah. Life without a loving God, whether expressed in satanic or secular terms, ultimately serves the “ father of lies.”

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To: Joachim K who wrote (7342)7/12/2022 7:25:07 AM
From: Tom Clarke
   of 7704
 
I used to have that book. Scary cover.


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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7343)7/12/2022 9:13:40 AM
From: Joachim K
   of 7704
 
Elon Musk is The Antichrist.


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To: Joachim K who wrote (7344)7/12/2022 9:33:23 AM
From: Tom Clarke
   of 7704
 
...the Norns wove the skein of wyrd long ago, and all will happen as foredoomed.

grimbeorn.blogspot.com

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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7345)7/12/2022 9:39:44 AM
From: Joachim K
   of 7704
 
Herger the Joyous: The All-Father wove the skein of your life a long time ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won't live one instant longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing.



Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Merciful Father, I have squandered my days with plans of many things. This was not among them. But at this moment, I beg only to live the next few minutes well. For all we ought to have thought, and have not thought; all we ought to have said, and have not said; all we ought to have done, and have not done; I pray thee God for forgiveness.

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To: Joachim K who wrote (7346)7/12/2022 6:55:32 PM
From: Tom Clarke
   of 7704
 
The Prayer


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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7347)7/12/2022 7:18:29 PM
From: Joachim K
1 Recommendation   of 7704
 
Ahmad ibn Fadlan

Babbel and Rosetta Stone have nothing on this...


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