Words Have Meaning

Words are important to me. They are a tool I work with. They also happen to be useful in conveying what is in one person’s mind to another person’s mind. Words are closely connected with thoughts. So when someone controls words in an attempt to control thoughts, that is a very intrusive and serious form of tyranny.

There are various ways of resisting thought/word control. Logic—which will include dictionaries, word histories, and modern usage. Refusal—which includes ignoring attempts at control and maybe rebellious increase in the condemned word. And humor—including mocking.

I’m not comfortable with mocking—particularly of individuals. But there are certainly ideas ridiculous enough to be worth mocking. And maybe humor is a better response to the ridiculous than many other ways. I wish I were better at responding with humor. (New Year’s goal, maybe.)

Cartoon found on Facebook

Let’s start this discussion with a personal story. We have a relative, someone rather tangentially connected by marriage for now, who has changed her name. She didn’t have an ugly name. The claim was it was to avoid stalking by a family member of hers, but she afterward reconnected with the very person who had always given away her location in the past. So—that was stupid.

I’m altering her name in a way that allows me to talk about the idea without giving any identifying info. Let’s say she changed her first name from Amanda to Ivorson—no, not spelled like that. Her soon-to-be-ex accidentally spelled it that way and got a chewing out. It’s Ivorsen—because she doesn’t want the male word “son” in there, because men are horrible.

When I was told this, I said, “So she wants her name to mean ‘son of Ivor’ in Norwegian instead of ‘son of Ivor’ in Swedish?” Because that is the difference between "-sen" and "-son." If you don’t want the name to mean “son of” the father, then you use the suffix “dotter.” As in Ivorsdotter (sometimes spelled dotr, depending on the country). The names are literal that way. I have in my family files a woman whose surname is Andersdotter; she is the daughter of Anders Jonson—who of course is the son of Jon something. That’s how it works in Scandinavian family history.

So Amanda/Ivorsen went to the trouble of legally changing her name and had no idea what the name she was choosing meant. (She also changed her last name, but I literally can’t even remember to what, because it also had no particular heritage or meaning.) The irony is that she insisted some years ago that the family leave a nice home and steady career in Texas, because she couldn’t stand the lack of intellectuals here (including us, apparently).

Next story. A week ago the representative, a former pastor, who opened the 117^th Congress with prayer ended it with “Amen and Awomen.” Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

Urban Dictionary: Awomen

A bastardized English-Hebrew term that translates to "I am an idiot," commonly used in the Hebrew phrase "amen, and awomen," which translates to "I am an idiot, and so be it." It is also used colloquially, to express strong ignorance of Judeo-Christianity.

The term “Amen,” as you may be familiar, is a common way to close a prayer or as a term of agreement, meaning in Hebrew “let it be so.” It is unrelated in every way to the English word men, which is the plural of man, which can mean a male of the human species, or sometimes more broadly to mankind, or humankind, including both males and females.

found on Facebook

Doing stupid things tends to bring about unintended un“woke”consequences. This made me laugh:

Meme found on Facebook

In that spirit of humor, I thought it might be fun to point out how ridiculous altering “men,” “man,” “him,” “his,” “son,” and other word parts from the language would be.

 

Word unrelated to maleness	Femalized version of the word	Meaning of the femalized version of the word
Abdomen	Abdowomen	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Abridgement	Abridgewoment	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Acumen	Acuwomen	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Amanda (name)	Awomanda	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Bison	Bidaughter	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Boson	Bodaughter	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Commensurate	Comwomensurate	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Consonant	Condaughterant	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Demand	Dewomand	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Frisson	Frisdaughter	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
History	Herstory	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Histrionics	Herstrionics	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Humanitarian	Huwomanitarian	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Hymen	Hywomen	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Hymn	Hermn	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Judgment	Judgwoment	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Maneuverable	Womaneuverable	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Manilla	Womanilla	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Mansion	Womansion	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Mantel	Womantel	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Manual	Womanual	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Manufactured	Womanufactured	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Mensch	Womensch	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Mental	Womental	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Mention	Womention	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Necromancy	Necrowomancy	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Nomenclature	Nowomenclature	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Permanent	Perwomanent	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Roman	Rowoman	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Romantic	Rowomantic	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Semantics	Sewomantics	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Sonar	Daughterar	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
Sonic	Daughteric	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.
This	Thers	I am an idiot and don't understand how to use words.

Thank you, Babylon Bee, for playing the game:

 

from The Babylon Bee, found here

It turns out, if you’re playing Scrabble, you can go online and search for words that contain certain letters. Depending on your source, there are around 6525 words that contain “man” and 5883 that contain “men.” The vast majority of these words have nothing to do with maleness.

In many languages, nouns have gender, which determines the article that goes with them. Some nouns apply to men and logically have a masculine gender, like “el hombre,” which means “the man” and has the masculine article “el.” Some have nothing to do with who uses them, but are simply a result of the way the language developed, like “la mesa,” which means “the table,” with a feminine article for reasons that have nothing to do with the femininity of tables in general. There is not a numerical preference for either male or female gendered nouns; they’re about equally distributed.

If you’re going to go about your life looking to be offended by a set of letters, and you assign a meaning to those letters that the rest of humanity does not share, you not only fail to communicate, you simply have a stupid way of going through life, making yourself and those around you miserable.

But this is all part of a larger issue: freedom of speech. The representative who gave the “woke” prayer and is being ridiculed for his stupid misuse of the language will not be censored for it; by other would-be "woke" folk, he is admired. But if I say the un“woke” truth that there are only two sexes for human beings, I could get censored, deplatformed, doxed, and prevented from making a living. That more serious issue is something we’re likely to encounter more and more in upcoming days—if we can keep finding a place to talk about it.

Freedom of Speech Is Priceless

There’s been bias in media for a very long time. I think it was probably 1989, maybe earlier, when Rush Limbaugh gave new life to AM radio by using it as a platform for conservative talk. He did that because there wasn’t another platform for those opinions. There was mainstream news, which by comparison today may have appeared nonpartisan, but even then it wasn’t.

Eventually Fox News got started, with a bias toward conservatism—from its commentators. But the news is still pretty centrist. It’s just that anyone who wanted a Democrat or progressive slant could get that on ABC, NBC, CBS, and then CNN, then MSNBC, and in the New York Times and just about any other newspaper.

There are some of us who get tired of being fed news that we know is slanted, so that we have to search elsewhere to get the real story. While it would be preferable to get the actual truth straight up, since journalists are human that might be too much to ask; if so, then next best is knowing up front the bias of the presenter, to allow the listener to cautiously sift out the bias.

The internet has been good at opening up conversations—also for opening up contentious arguing. But that’s a risk you take when you have free speech.

Those who’ve had control of the message for all these many decades are up in arms now about the lack of control over the message that gets out to the masses. Because—obviously, from the last presidential election—that has consequences.

So there have been covert efforts to quash non-sanctioned messages. And now we’re also seeing overt efforts.

Among the covert efforts, from within the Obama administration, was the weaponization of the IRS against conservative groups.  The court case for True the Vote is about to be settled, about eight years in. The IRS did indeed target them illegally. Founder Catherine Engelbrecht said this about it: here. [Correction added 6-20-2019: there's an additional video I intended to link to, from June 6, 2019, here.]

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht
screenshot from here

Meanwhile, the overt efforts are heating up. It sort of heated up some months back with shock jock/conspiracy theorist (and non-conservative) Alex Jones being banned. There were people who spoke up—not because they agree with anything he says, but because the reasons for banning speech were just wrong. If you’re not calling on people to act violently, or doing some other of a very short list of illegal speech (making threats, libel, slander), then what is the reason? And if the reason is arbitrary, who is safe?

Lately Steven Crowder has been attacked. YouTube demonetized him. That means his videos, which he places on a platform that allows for them to bring in money through advertising can no longer do so. The purpose is to prevent him from having the resources to speak. If he were actually inciting violence or doing some other illegal speech (see short list above), that would be understandable for YouTube to do. But, after investigation, they find that he has not violated their platform rules.

Steven Crowder, of Louder with Crowder
image from here

YouTube is a private company; they can set up their own rules, but they admit he has not violated them. Nor has he violated any laws. But they decide—because they don’t like his message, or maybe his tone—that they are demonetizing him anyway.

There’s a bit more to the story. The progressive/socialist “news” outlet Vox complained about Crowder—for using terms to describe one of their commentators that the commentator uses to describe himself. Vox put pressure on YouTube.

Ben Shapiro and friends talked about this last week. One aspect is that the leaders of the Big Tech platforms support Democrats and their progressive/socialist agenda, so they’re willing to give in to pressure toward their natural leanings. But there’s also this, which is even more insidious:

The mainstream media that are proclaiming day in and day out that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the press—people like Jim Acosta who are doing books about how Donald Trump is calling them an enemy of the people, and therefore he’s trying to shut down freedom of the press. These people are all in. I mean, all in, in trying to get Big Tech to censor people. Vox is a supposed journalistic outfit. It is a pseudo-journalistic trash heap. Their editor-in-chief put out a letter explicitly saying, “We know that Steven Crowder didn’t violate any of your rules. That’s why we are telling you, as an editorial newspaper, we are telling you that you should change your rules.

In recent Senate hearings Google president Sundar Pichal responds to questions concerning employee behavior during the 2016 election. Senator Jim Jordan questions him regarding a four-page memo, written the day after the November 2016 election by Eliana Murillo, Google’s head of Multicultural Marketing, concerning her work with the Latino vote. The memo talks about Get Out the Vote efforts, which aren’t a problem, but then the memo indicates they were only targeted in key states for a specific outcome—which means for political purposes. Sundar’s response is that they have found no evidence—but the evidence is the memo before them that he’s being asked about.

Again, Google is a private company and can set its own rules. However, right now those rules apply to it as an open platform; if it is not essentially randomly open, but is favoring or disfavoring based on content, then it cannot continue to be treated as an open platform.

That’s the case with YouTube as well. Is it an open platform or a content curator?

Facebook has been facing these questions for a while. Facebook jail is a real thing. People I have known have been put in it. That means their specific content is removed and no longer seen, or it may mean they cannot post anything for a certain amount of time, usually a day or a week. The punishment happens without notice, and often without explanation. There’s supposed to be an appeals process so a person can learn why they were barred from posting, but it doesn’t seem to be because of any identifiable—and thus avoidable—reasons.

Recently it was leaked that Facebook has a “hate agent”status they apply to users based various bits of data from on and off the platform. It’s a guilt by association formula. If you appear in photos with someone they deem hateful, without knowing context for your being there, that can get you labeled. So can comments about immigration, particular tattoos, being neutral about someone Facebook thinks you should disapprove of, or saying something in private that is later made public that Facebook deems unacceptable.

The attempt is to draw a circle of association around actual haters or violent groups to claim a person should not be heard. This is an extension of what the Obama administration did when it created a terrorist watch list that included things like being in a Tea Party, or being patriotic. I think I checked 28 boxes on their list, as a conservative Christian grandmother with nothing more that a couple of traffic tickets on my lifetime record. It’s how you get crazies saying that Ben Shapiro (Orthodox Jew, conservative) is a white supremacist leader of the Alt-Right. (The actual Alt-Right criticized Shapiro more times than any other media person last year.) It’s how you get them saying Candace Owens is all about white privilege (she’s black).

In other words, you can’t trust their algorithm, because you can’t trust people who believe that only their ideas should be allowed.

One of the things Facebook has been doing lately is to alter your feed. They notice if you’re getting “too much” content from one point of view, and then they send you similar content from a different point of view. They’re trying to keep people from being radicalized, they say. That is a little creepy, but it would be mostly innocuous—except that it’s aimed only at correcting people who see conservative content. The thing is, conservatives see opposing viewpoints all over the place. 

Meanwhile, there are those on the Democrat/progressive/socialist side who seem to be unaware that it’s possible for thinking, functional people to differ from them.

It turns out that Pinterest, our personal online bulletin board, where we go for crafts and food and other interests, has joined other Big Tech monitors of speech. They recently fired a whistleblower, Eric Cochran, for coming forward about their censorship of conservative voices. Specifically, they labeled Lila Rose and her pro-life organization, Live Action, to be porn, so they could ban it. There isn’t anything in it that could be construed as porn; they lie. They also removed Zero Hedge and PJ Media. Bible verses—a common use for Pinterest—are also considered too “sensitive” to be allowed.

I think Ben Shapiro is right; the opposition to freedom, prosperity, and civilization are trying to control the message, to keep anything they disagree with from getting out to the people. And the intensity at this time is tied to the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

We saw it with Obama, with the IRS attacks that affected the 2012 election and beyond. Only now, most of a decade later, when that administration is no longer in office, does a resolution come.

Suggested solutions include regulating the Big Tech companies. But we know that greater regulation on big businesses—which are regulated according to how those big companies want, and pay their lobbyists to get—support only the big companies and cause barriers to entry for startups.

Another suggestion is to break up the big companies, the way the phone companies were broken up some decades ago.

An alternative is to start—and support with subscriptions—alternative platforms. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, both with subscription fees, have been attempting that. But to reach beyond their current subscribers, they depend on YouTube and Facebook to allow their content to be seen.

Jordan Peterson announces Thinkspot.com
image from here

Another announcement last week was from Jordan Peterson, who has been working to develop an alternative subscription free-speech platform called Thinkspot.com, which will not limit speech beyond legal limits. It will be an anti-censorship version of Patreon. No censoring content based on using a “wrong” word or having a “wrong” opinion. This is meant to be useful both for content providers and for responses, to encourage dialogue. There will be rules, such as a minimum comment length, to encourage deeper thinking. As Peterson puts is, “If minimum comment length is 50 words, you’re gonna have to put a little thought into it. Even if you’re being a troll, you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.”

My preferred solution is whatever best allows truth to flourish. I don’t have a lot of money to spare, but if the subscription is worth it, I’m willing to pay a bit to make it happen. Because our freedom of speech is priceless.

Self-Evident No Longer

The Constitution doesn’t grant us rights. It’s the other way around. We, the People, grant certain limited, enumerated powers to the federal government.

There’s a reason we need to limit government power. Mainly, it’s because governments have a long and storied history of tyranny. In other words, governments can’t be trusted to limit their power.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were added before the Constitution itself was ratified. The original Constitution didn’t include them, not because there was any question about the importance of those rights. It didn’t include them because they were self-evident; they were so widely understood to exist that they went without saying.

Then the representatives of several of the states spoke up. What if there came a time when these things weren’t still understood? Maybe some of them needed to be spelled out, just as an additional guarantee. This included Virginia’s George Mason, who had proposed major portions of the Constitution, but was suddenly saying he wouldn’t vote for the Constitution unless it contained these guarantees.

What is a right? In the context of the Bill of Rights, we’re talking about natural rights. That means the rights you’re born with. You’re granted these by God, because you are a human being.

There are five listed in the First Amendment. Most of these have to do with freedom to think, or express ideas: 

·         Right of Freedom of Religion

·         Right of Free Speech

·         Right of Freedom of the Press

·         Right to Peaceably Assemble

·         Right to Petition the Government for redress of grievances

    

So, you can believe what you want, and live your religion, even in public. You can say what you believe. You can publish what you believe. You can gather together with other like-minded people. And, if there’s any disagreement about government infringing on your rights, you can sue to hold the government accountable.

We’ve had plenty of contrasting evidence, much of it in the past century, showing what harm comes to the people when government tyranny steps on these rights.

The Second Amendment concerns the right to protect yourself. The main proper role of government is to protect us—our lives, liberty, and property. We hire government to take on this role so that we don’t have to spend all our time and energy protecting ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we give up our right to protect ourselves as well.

It’s like any other service. If you hire someone to clean your house, that relieves you of much of the need to do it yourself, but you don’t give up the right and ability to do some additional cleaning yourself whenever you feel like it. If your kid spills cereal all over the floor, you’re not required to leave it there until the cleaning service arrives.

If you’re receiving particular threats, you might hire your own extra security team, in addition to the local, state, and federal police forces. They’re busy spreading their protective force across the whole population, so you might not feel confident they’ll be on hand when you’re vulnerable. You retain the right to protect yourself. If someone tries to attack you, physically or with a weapon, you have a right to protect yourself—even physically or with a weapon.

There’s an extra, historical meaning attached to the Second Amendment. It has to do with defense against government. The founders knew, because they’d had to break free from tyranny, that they needed weapons to prevent that tyranny from coercing them into submission. The Constitution prevents government from getting out of hand—but only if government is held to obedience. Government could come and threaten your life, liberty, or property as easily as any thug. Maybe easier, since a thug may have to face prosecution. Who do you appeal to if government is the perpetrator?

Anyway, foreseeing the possibility, because they’d lived through it before, the founders guaranteed the right to self-protection from both outlaws and government.

We could go through the rest of the amendments as well. But let’s summarize by pointing out that the Ninth Amendment says that, just because it isn’t enumerated here doesn’t mean the people don’t have other rights. And the Tenth Amendment says those powers not delegated to the federal government are still held by the states and the people.

It’s troubling when people, in ignorance, start saying things like, “They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment,” as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said a couple of weeks ago. Is a former justice ignorant? Apparently. Did he fail to read the Ninth Amendment? Because we would still have the right to self-defense whether it is written in the Constitution or not.

Pretending that “common sense gun laws” that restrict law-abiding citizens doesn’t interfere with the right of self-defense is disingenuous. It’s not a matter of weapon availability. People have said, partly in jest, that if they took all our guns (if they even could), murderers would still get them. And if, in an invented world, criminals couldn’t get guns, they would use knives. What are you going to do, outlaw knives?

And then, following a series of knife attacks in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan outlaws knives. He tweeted, “There is never a reason to carry a knife.” 

I can think of reasons. Like, if I’m going to a friend’s house to help cook. (I have better cooking knives than most of my friends.) I carry a knife with me when I travel, because I have to take care of most of my own food because of allergies. If I were going to do a project at a charity that required opening boxes, I’d consider bringing my own box cutter. If I were going fishing, I’d carry a knife for gutting the fish. If I went shopping and found an excellent cooking knife, I’d need to carry that home. So, those are all logical and common reasons to carry a knife. But, being who I am, no one around me would be less safe because of my carrying a knife.

Oh, one more reason: if you’re living in a city where they’re having a spate of knife attacks, and you weren’t allowed to carry a gun, you’d want a knife for self-defense.

Remember that moment from the movie Crocodile Dundee, when he’s in New York and some thug mugs them at knife point? And Dundee says, “You call that a knife?” And then he pulls out his own, bigger near-machete, and the thug runs off. No one is injured. No one is robbed. That’s what non-criminals can do with a weapon. It’s not the weapon that is the problem; it’s the person wielding it. And if it’s a bad guy, you need a way to defend yourself.

Back to that First Amendment. We’ve been listening to Senate hearings with Mark Zuckerberg, about Facebook’s use of private information, and about its policies to prevent conservative messages from getting through.

In his questioning of Zuckerberg, Senator Ted Cruz asked him about purposeful and routine suppression of conservative ideas from trending stories. And he listed CPAC, Mitt Romney, Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, Glenn Beck, Chick-Fil-A Customer Appreciation Day page, a Fox News reporter’s page, more than two dozen Catholic pages, and Diamond and Silk’s page (two sisters, black, who support Pres. Trump). Diamond and Silk were told their content—which is clean and pro-American—is dangerous to the community.

Cruz went on to ask if he was aware of any suppression of stories for Planned Parenthood, MoveOn.org, or any Democratic candidate’s page. 

Zuckerberg claimed to be unaware of any of these. He claimed his personal goal was to have a free place for all these ideas—with exceptions we can all agree on such as terrorism, self-harm, or human trafficking. I want to believe him. But, if his company is doing this censoring, he’s responsible whether he’s personally aware of it or not.

In Cruz’s list was the IRS targeting. I got an update email this week from Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which trained me in poll watching here in Houston. She brought us up to date on recent results. Besides the nonprofit being held up illegally by the IRS—even though it was what ought to be considered politically neutral, in favor of free and fair elections—her personal business was targeted by the FBI and multiple other agencies, preventing her and her family from making a living. This week things were supposed to have been settled finally. But the result has been essentially nothing. No one is held accountable. And anyone in those organizations just got carte blanche to target anyone they want in the future. And we’re left wondering what good it does to oust a corrupt regime if the new regime is too timid to stand up.

Senator Ben Sasse, in his questioning of Zuckerberg, asked about the definition of hate speech, which Zuckerberg was hard pressed to define. There are large categories we can agree on, such as calling for violence. But Senator Sasse was more concerned about the “psychological categories.” 

Sasse: “You use language of safety and protection earlier. We see this happening on college campuses all across the country. It’s dangerous. 40% of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous, because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else’s feelings.

Those are frightening and discouraging statistics.

YouTube is another supposedly neutral online platform—i.e., a non-news site, accepting all views (with the exceptions of those terrorist, violent, or other illegal activities we already agree on)—that has been censoring content based on political leanings. PragerU is involved in a lawsuit because YouTube deemed a number of their short information videos “unsafe for the community.” No profanity. No sketchy images. Nothing that couldn’t safely be watched by a 10-year-old. There seemed to be no standard by which certain videos were disallowed, so there was no way to “correct,” if there had been errors. But in the end, it looks like they were censored for having conservative political views.

Conservative comedians Steven Crowder and Owen Benjamin have been YouTube censored for much the same reasons. Owen Benjamin was on with Andrew Klavan today, and he quoted comedian George Carlin as saying, “Political correctness is fascism disguised as politeness.”

Fascism is statist tyranny. Snowflakes worried about hurt feelings need to get a clue: they’re line of thinking is what led to millions of people being killed by their own governments in the last century. But, then, I also read this today:

According to a new survey released on Thursday by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, fully 41 percent of Americans don’t know what Auschwitz was, including two-thirds of Millennials. Approximately 22 percent of Millennials had not heard of the Holocaust, and 41 percent of Millennials thought 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

Ignorance is probably the result of “political correctness,” or, if you will, fascism, running amok in our education system. But it’s no excuse. We don’t have to get along with people who want to tyrannize us; we just need to stand up to the bullies. And educate them if there’s any openness in their minds to allow for it.

Why were those first Ten Amendments put in the Constitution? Because the founders had the foresight to envision a time such as ours, when people have forgotten what was supposed to be self-evident.