Category ►►► Language Is a Virus

April 12, 2011

Fiscal Wilding

Hatched by Dafydd

After the umpteenth time (literally!) I've read or heard the phrase "spending orgy" or "orgy of spending," I must finally rise to a point of language.

I strongly and stentorianly object to calling the economic policy of the Barack H. Obama administration a spending orgy: In normal parlance, an orgy is a consensual sexual gathering among like-minded, willing, even eager participants; and most particularly, everyone who gets blued and tattooed enjoys it.

This hardly describes the Obamic frenzy of wealth redistribution (from everybody else to the federal government). The vast majority of bluees aren't even aware of what's happening to them, but are nevertheless frantic with the inchoate feeling that something in their lives has gone dreadfully awry. Like Winston Smith, they feel powerless to resist collaborating even in their own destruction.

So let's have an end to corrupting the word "orgy" by associating such a pleasant pastime with unwanted financial violence, unendingly perpetrated upon an unwilling population by the bloodthirsty, bureaucratic undead.

I suggest a far more descriptive term: The Obama administration, with its Democratic co-conspirators, freebooters, yeggs, and sordid gallows bait, is engaged in fiscal wilding -- which leads inexorably to mass alienation of the citizenry, widespread solipsism, and the final collapse into inhuman decadence and societal self-immolation.

A more despicable enormity is hard to imagine in a Western liberal democracy. To borrow a phrase from the Demiurge himself... President Obama must leave.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 12, 2011, at the time of 12:42 AM | Comments (2)

January 13, 2011

Blood Label

Hatched by Dafydd

Anent Sarah Palin's use of the term "blood libel" to characterize the deliberately false accusation of complicity in murder and having blood on one's hands -- and especially to apply it to an entire group of people known to be innocent of the crime -- I just stumbled across this fascinating (and short!) post on BigGovernment.com:

Exclusive: Alan Dershowitz Defends Sarah Palin’s Use of Term ‘Blood Libel’

In an exclusive statement, famed attorney and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz defended Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” from multiple detractors. As the Media Matters/MSM/Democrat narrative on the Tucson tragedy unravels, they are getting a lot more desperate in their attacks on Palin. Fortunately, there are still plenty of honest liberals around:

The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.

This should close the case. Certainly nobody can credibly accuse Alan Dershowitz, of all people, of being a Sarah Palin supporter; and to suggest that he's not Jewish enough to be sensitive to the term "blood libel" is frankly risible!

At one time in the past, the term may have exclusively meant the charge that Jews kill Christian babies and use their blood in Passover rituals; but that time has long since passed. Today the term is widely used -- well, just as Palin used it: to mean any knowingly false accusation, or an accusation made in reckless disregard for the truth, of complicity in murder, often for political or religious purposes.

Language changes; new words (like "blog," "fisk," "incentivize," and "refudiate") are created, and old words change their meanings ("gay," "slut," "dough," "exploit," "regulate," "nuclear"). Blood libel, used as Palin used it, is nothing new; that certainly is how I've heard it used throughout my life as a (secular) Jew.

And neither is it "antisemitic" nor trademarked by the Jewish people, no matter what some hysterical Jews, most of them suffering from PDS, may claim.

In fact, attacking Palin and calling her a Jew hater for using this term is the same sort of despicable distraction from the real issues as were the Left's original charge: that she and other conservatives deliberately provoked Loughner's murder spree in the first place. Both attacks were failed attempts to silence Palin and the rest of us conservatives and anti-liberals who might otherwise work to repeal ObamaCare, stop Cap and Tax, block Card Check, and otherwise work to overturn, undo, and prevent President Barack H. Obama's radical and revolutionary "transformation" of America into a Eurostate mini-me.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 13, 2011, at the time of 1:52 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack