George Rebane
Fake News – Assertions in the media (including blogosphere) disguised as news items which are purposely meant to mislead. This includes assertions of data (facts and beliefs about the real world), information (various formatting of data to promote certain types of decisions/conclusions), and outright lies of the various types (more here). Most, but not all, propaganda (“information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”) is delivered as fake news.
In the spirit of promoting operational definitions on RR, ‘fake news’ has been used in this sense in my commentaries, and will continue to be so used. Commenters who do not subscribe to this definition are welcome to offer their own in order to clarify their remarks, else the reader is invited to interpret such uses in these postings according to above definition (now added to Download RR Glossary&Semantics_v181124).
[Addendum] Perusing the comment stream of this commentary brought to mind that we may have another important learning moment here along with another revealing peek into the working of liberal minds. I draw your attention to Steven Frisch’s 819am comment from which we abstract the following –
“… when a new vocabulary has to be invented and the meaning of existing words interpreted or changed to fit the message….that is a pretty good indication it is propaganda…..as evidenced by George's ridiculous glossay(sic).” (I believe he meant ‘glossary’)
The quick response to Mr Frisch’s latest contribution to the conservetarion/collectivist exchange (dare I call it debate?) in these pages came in my 1048am comment (here). In this addendum to a new term defined, I’ll expand on my view of the century-long ‘weaponization’ (another new term) of language(s) by the global Left, and attempt a basis for how modern language grows to support the communication of ever more complex and diverse ideas.
Mr Frisch serves as a good exemplar or even a template for 21st century progressive thought, and therefor deserves an introduction to the new reader in addition to that available in these pages by simply searching ‘Frisch’. Steven Frisch is the chief executive of Sierra Business Council (here), a carefully chosen name that instantly misinforms the casual reader about an organization that is really a strongly leftwing regional NGO which engages in the propagandizing and politicizing of progressive causes. As such, Mr Frisch may also be considered to be among, or better yet, the leading local leftwing intellectual. He most certainly deports himself as such, and there is nothing I want to say that diminishes his well-positioned prominence among his constituency.
In contrast, my own background – including bio, credo, and glossary (about which more later) – has always been available to the reader of these pages through the ‘About’ link and right panel. Apropos to this addendum, I should add that as a research scientist and engineer I was privileged to spend my career in a field that over the last century has vastly expanded English (both technical and lay), along with other languages, and I have also had the opportunity to teach the tools of critical thinking to both technicians and journalists at the university graduate school level. From such experiences many people like me have assembled a number of linguistic principles that guide and facilitate the facile and reliable communication of complex ideas.
A basic starting point is that when we communicate, we are all free to interpret words any way we wish, including their use in the currently understood vernacular. The only thing to note is how some interpret certain critical words explicitly by openly telling all what they mean in the current context. This, as opposed to how some others interpret words sub rosa and post hoc, inducing others to think that the interpretation of the word(s) initially used is the one commonly held. The Left have been masters of the latter approach for over a century, and today continue that practice on steroids.
Another equally basic concept is that the utility of a language depends not only on the size of its lexicon, but also how much information each word (i.e. lexicographical string) can carry/convey. Good languages have lots of words with very distinct meaning, preferably using the fewest characters. In the military we are taught the three-Cs of communicating a message – it should be clear, complete, and concise. More primitive languages have small lexicons and require lots of additional modifying words to constrain the meaning to that desired. A broadly used language in Africa surprisingly did not have the word ‘green’ in its lexicon of colors, but did have ‘blue’. Hence green was expressed as ‘the blue of the grass’.
One more fundamental tenet of language and thought is brought together in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (we have visited before in these pages) – “the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience.” – in short, you can’t think thoughts that your language does not support. The impact of such a deficit on the advancement of a culture should be obvious, as should be the persistence of such a deficit if custom or tradition in the culture makes expanding language a taboo.
Since Sapir-Whorf has become a basic stave of modern linguistics and semantics, modern dictators ranging from Orwell’s fictional Big Brother to China’s Mao Zedong have put in practice linguistic strictures that limited their populations to form, develop, and communicate ideas detrimental to the stability of the state – e.g. expressing kinds of dissatisfaction, organizing/planning revolt, … . Supporting such policies is the strong version of S-W which states that, in addition to determining thought, a language’s linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories available to the speaker.
With these basics under our belt, we can understand why a new vocabulary has always been needed and subsequently invented (by enlightened cultures) when it was required to communicate new thoughts and experiences, or to describe something more precisely or correctly to further understanding. To do otherwise would create the Tower of Babel, that we have now managed to visit on our country, which hobbles communication and continues to promote polarization of ideologies without hope of finding a ‘common ground’ (i.e. where we start by speaking the same language) upon which we can build roads to somewhere that is acceptable to both sides.
Polarization is sustained by our speaking past each other. RR’s attempt over the years has been to suggest means of alleviating this through more precise uses of language and reasoning, hence the availability of the host’s credo, bio, glossary. Such communications are anathema to the progressive elites since it promises to reveal the dismal attributes of their bankrupt collectivist ideology, no matter under which variant of it they invite people to assemble. Hence, true to the Alinsky playbook, they denigrate and attack such attempts, accusing their opposites of exactly the confusion they sow daily into the public forums.
Mr Frisch happens to be a posterchild of such a progressive elite. Is it not hyper-hubristic to denigrate another’s good-faith attempt to communicate clearly instead of using words with malleable meanings that can later be claimed to be something other than what was heard? What kind of a person attempts to make a mockery of someone openly revealing his belief system (ontology) and clearly defining his use of potentially confusing and already confused terms in the explication of his ideas? I don’t want to imply here that Mr Frisch is somehow unique as an apologist and spear chucker for the progressive cause; the liberal mainstream media (aka ‘lamestream’ in these pages) overflows with commentators and ‘journalists’ who daily dispense a similar worldview in their labors to bring us all compliantly to their brave new world.
I want to conclude this little missive by giving the reader some specific examples of how the new politically correct era has mangled and continues to mangle our language. And also illustrate how conversations between the two sides become derailed and wind up with each looking at the other over an ever wider chasm of misunderstanding.
Hero used to be a label that identified someone who has knowingly gone above and beyond the accepted norm of behavior for some recognized beneficent purpose and altruistically risk his life, limb, treasure, or honor. In this new age of ‘self-esteem above all’, people who do an ever-wider range of things which are not above and beyond anything – i.e. non-heroic -, they get gratuitously hailed as a ‘hero’ in the press and/or public gatherings. So when someone is later referred to as a hero, the listener has no idea what manner of ‘heroism’, if any, was required to earn that appellation. We should understand that in the classic sense an athlete with an exemplary performance record is not a hero; nor is a firefighter on a ladder bringing down a kitten from a tree, and most certainly not a father who rushes into a burning building to save his child. All of those behaviors would be considered normative. In the latter case, the father was simply brave in doing what he was expected to do – in that case he might also have saved himself being known as a craven coward for letting his child perish.
But I think you get the idea, today we have no unique word for a classic hero since we have confused and diluted the term by gathering so many different meanings under its mantle. Should our society still have a unique word that describes someone who has knowingly gone above and beyond the accepted norm of behavior for some recognized beneficent purpose to altruistically risk his life, limb, treasure, or honor? To differentiate what we may recall as a ‘true hero’, we have to embellish the term with a story; we have to resort to the linguistic equivalence of ‘the blue of the grass’.
Climate change has also become a label used to befuddle the ill-read listener. Climate change is now the well-used code word for ‘preventable man-made catastrophic global warming’ – all modifying terms here are necessary, since they are the foundation and raison d’etre of the politicized public image of impinging disaster, and the subsequently necessary political and economic remedies/sacrifices needed to save humanity. Therefore, discussions in which the question ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ and ‘Are you a climate change denier?’ don’t go anywhere productive. Why have we buried ‘preventable man-made catastrophic global warming’ under ‘climate change’, a perennial dynamic of earth’s atmosphere? Doesn’t such an important component of public discourse deserve its own unambiguous label? Both sides of the ‘debate’ know the same answer – it is to bamboozle the light-thinking share of the public into supporting policies that will demonstrably enlarge pro-globalist government, and weaken America (in the hegemonic sense) within the community of sovereign nation-states.
Such a politically motivated confounding also adorns the new and expanded meanings of ‘immigrant’. We no longer have a term that uniquely can identify a person who seeks to follow American laws in his application to enter our country and join us as its citizens – in short, to participate in a lawful two-party process. In America’s public consciousness immigrant used to evoke images of Ellis Island where stood people, fresh off the boat, in long lines waiting to be processed for entry and life in the US on the path to citizenship. We all know that America is an exceptional nation that has and continues to benefit from such an influx of people from all over the world. The Statue of Liberty and its appended poem then made sense of an orderly and assimilating increase of our population. Today no more.
To illustrate how dismally and destructively politicized ‘immigrant’ has become, we are now daily being told that a person planning to illegally enter the US becomes an immigrant while still in his own dysfunctional (aka shithole) country. How come? Well, it turns out it’s our fault that the country is dysfunctional – we should have done something to save it – and the fact that the emigrating individual has declared the US as his destination, then automatically makes him a ward of the American taxpayer no matter how near or far he is from our border. That being so, it is further our responsibility to ease his passage from his homeland to and through our border, our immigration laws be damned in the process. And if in this process such people suffer any level of insufficient succor, it is again America’s fault, and doubly so if we deign to secure our border with either infrastructure (including, yes, ‘the Wall’) or appropriate personnel to repel, restrict, or repatriate the illegal entrants. For after all, are we not a nation of immigrants? And are they not seeking to immigrate by whatever means available?
And the semantics game is literally over once they are successful in setting foot in our land – they are then anointed as legal immigrants, pure and simple, with an abundant set of rights and benefices that far exceed those who stand and wait after following our immigration laws in their application for entry. This is the dastardly game played by our Left as part of their larger anti-American agenda as they daily distort our history of immigration with their constant drumming of the term ‘immigrant’ in their continuing coverage of migrant and border security issues. The sad part of this linguistic jiu-jitsu is that lame-brained conservatives and Republicans have fallen in line with this usage, having even dropped the formerly clarifying ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ when referring to such people in our country. Calling them by the proper label ‘illegal alien’ is politically incorrect and out of the question in the lamestream media and even left-migrating outlets like Fox News. In our minds, these pre-registered Democrats belong right there in the Ellis Island photo with the other huddled masses yearning to be free.
A couple of more points – does anyone know an accepted definition of ‘social justice’ or is able to identify what is socially just? Google it and find out. And remember when ‘discriminate’ meant to be able to tell the difference between things, ideas, …, and when you were known as a discriminating individual, that was a social plus on your resume? No more, today to discriminate only means to exclude and/or reject an individual on the basis of his race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and maybe even propensity for flatulence, all of which is manifestly politically incorrect and will invite more pejorative descriptors to be heaped on your head. The classical definition of discriminate and discriminating have been stricken from our language, as have many others (more every day) including words like ‘niggardly’ (ungenerous, stingy) which are now prohibited as code words used by wrong-thinkers to elicit forbidden thoughts. And in the leftist lexicon, to ‘embellish’ something is now to tell a pernicious lie.
An antidote for all this is for people in such discussions to clearly define their use of terms that may be misunderstood or terms that have already had their semantics compromised. But as we have seen from the introduction to this dissertation, such clarity is strongly dunned by the Left as being a “pretty good indication of propaganda” – which, BTW, has also had half of its definition amputated so that now it only means “information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.”
rebanesruminations.com 
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