Personal Pronouns as Badges of the In-Group

I'm amazed that I need to write that there are only two sexes and see here. That said, many people have a felt need to announce personal pronouns that go light years beyond identifying one's sex. At New Discourses, in an article titled "Land Acknowledgment Statements: The Cultural Violence of the Academic Elite," Adam Ellwanger took a stab and trying to understand what is really going on with this fast-spreading custom:

While the stated purpose of explicitly naming one’s pronouns is to foster inclusion and tolerance, the practice actually performs two unstated functions. The first is to compel compliance from those who might not be willing to cooperate with the increasingly complicated lexicon that grows out of the pronoun wars. The paper trail generated through daily institutional interaction (which frequently indicates preferred pronouns) is used to force dissidents to comply. If you “misgendered” someone and that person wishes to file a formal complaint with the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, it is a great boon for their case if they can prove you were aware of their preferred pronouns by showing email communications where they made their preferences clear to you.

The second unstated purpose of listing one’s pronouns is to signify one’s membership in the priestly castes of university life: those intellectuals who, by mastering a complex vocabulary that eludes the grasp of regular people, demonstrate their superior respect for human dignity and their deeper concern for the many marginalized communities in the racist, fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynous hellscape some people still insist on calling “America.” The ways that this group indicates their status among the clerics of social justice often parallels the performative aspects of religious sacraments. Naming pronouns when introducing oneself takes on a formalized, ritualistic character that is akin to making the sign of the cross at the end of a prayer. It serves to signal one’s profound devotion to a particular way of understanding the world.

This particular article uses personal pronouns as an introduction to a recent fad, "Land Acknowledgment Statements." According to Ellwanger, these statements "represent a kind of virtue-signaling that marks one’s belonging to the intellectual elite, there are a number of problems with this trend." And there are many problems . . .

Continue ReadingPersonal Pronouns as Badges of the In-Group

About Brandolini’s Law and Gish Gallop

From Wikipedia:

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

This same article quotes Mark Twain (from his 1906 autobiography:

The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

The super-charged version of this phenomenon is the Gish Gallop:

The Gish gallop is a term for an eristic technique in which a debater attempts to overwhelm an opponent by excessive number of arguments, without regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott; it is named after the creationist Duane Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to a method used in formal debate called spreading.

Some of my posts are simply to record an idea so that I have a quick way to track it down later. This is one of those posts.

Continue ReadingAbout Brandolini’s Law and Gish Gallop

Intentional Misunderstandings, for Better or Worse

In my work as an attorney I often encounter opposing attorneys who object to my written questions (interrogatories), insisting that they are "vague."  Opponents often make these objections in an attempt to avoid answering my questions or to slow down the progress of the lawsuit. I remind my law students that they will often encounter this unfortunate behavior when they graduate.  When it is convenient for them, the people we communicate with often give us the least charitable readings of our words. This common occurrence is one of my least favorite parts of being an attorney. It eats up a lot of time and money trying to force motivated opponents to acknowledge common and ordinary meanings of words.

This isn't just a problem for attorneys.  Whenever any of us communicate, the attitude of the other person often determines whether we will get a responsive answer or no meaningful answer. Word meanings can easily be bent and twisted and it often happens when there is no ill-intent. Consider too the existence of contronyms, words that have some opposite or contradictory meanings, such as "bolt," "dust" or "out."

There is also a fun side to unreasonable misunderstandings. It can make for good comedy.  Here's an example from Monty Python's "Holy Grail":

One of the most entertaining uses of intentional misunderstanding is found in the work of photoshop artist James Fridman. Many people send James requests to improve their photos and James intentionally misunderstands their requests. Over and over. Here are a few examples of Fridman's work:

and here . . .

Check out many more examples of Fridman's work here.

Continue ReadingIntentional Misunderstandings, for Better or Worse

John McWhorter Discusses the “Use” versus “Reference” Distinction Regarding the “N” Word.

John McWhorter now has a Substack column and I have signed up to support his work. He recently expressed dismay that a particular group of people pretend that they don't understand this distinction: it is one thing to use a rude word as an epithet to hurt someone and an entirely different thing to refer to that word (in this case, the "N" word) by saying it or writing it in order to discuss that word. Woke mobs are doing everything in their power (including attempted cancellation) to characterize non-harmful uses of the "N" as "harmful to people in exactly the same way it hurts people to hurl the "N" word as an epithet.

McWhorter's position (with which I agree) is that this is all theater and power plays. No one is hurt when we discuss the "N" word and all of us know that. In fact, we should be able to freely discuss the use of that word by using the word. This Woke trip wire should be dismantled. What truly hurts us all is to pretend that use and reference are the same. Here's an excerpt from McWhorter's essay, "The N-word as slur vs. the N-word as a sequence of sounds: What makes the New York Times so comfortable making black people look dim?"

The idea that it is inherent to black American culture to fly to pieces at hearing the N-word used in reference is implausible at best, and slanderous at worst. But the second and more important is that insisting on this taboo makes it look like black people are numb to the difference between usage and reference, vague on the notion of meta, given to overgeneralization rather than to making distinctions.

To wit, the get McNeil fired for using the N-word to refer to it makes black people look dumb. And not just to the Twitter trollers who will be nasty enough to actually write it down. Non-black people are thinking it nationwide and keeping it to themselves. Frankly, the illogic in this approach to the N-word is so obvious to anyone who does make distinctions that the only question is why people would not look on and guiltily wonder whether the idea that black people are less intellectually gifted is true.

I would like to be the fly on the wall in the private living spaces of all of those people who claim that they are hurt even when someone uses the "N" word merely to refer to it or discuss it (e.g., to discuss the extent to which it is harmful). I smell the strong stench of hypocrisy wafting from the Woke mob.  How long before it is a terrible thing to even write "the 'N' word" or "N*****" when merely attempting to discuss the word?

Continue ReadingJohn McWhorter Discusses the “Use” versus “Reference” Distinction Regarding the “N” Word.