Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

New Name

Health, LGBTOSTFU

Seeing as we’re renaming every damn thing — women to womyn, Latino to Latinx, his/her to xis/xir, Wuhan virus to Corona virus, and of course homosexual to gay, I think we took a hard look at this monkeypox thing, and courtesy of Insty, I think I’ve come up with the (data- / reality-based) proper name.

First, the data:

All patients identified as men who have sex with men and there was a median age of 41.  90% of the patients who responded to the questions on sexual activity (47/52) reported at least one new sexual partner during the three weeks prior to symptoms, and almost all (49/52) reported inconsistent condom use in this same time period.  Over half of the patients (29/52) had more than five sexual partners in the 12 weeks prior to their monkeypox diagnosis.”  [my emphasis]

So, ladies and gentlemen, as monkeypox has in fact got pretty much nothing to do with monkeys, herewith its new name:

HOMOPOX

Please adjust your grammar / spelling correction systems accordingly.

Moi? Never!

Technology

From MicroSquish’s Terms of Agreement / Code of Conduct:

a. By agreeing to these Terms, you’re agreeing that, when using the Services, you will follow these rules:

i. Don’t do anything illegal. [check]
ii. Don’t engage in any activity that exploits, harms, or threatens to harm children.  [check]
iii. Don’t send spam or engage in phishing. Spam is unwanted or unsolicited bulk email, postings, contact requests, SMS (text messages), instant messages, or similar electronic communications. Phishing is sending emails or other electronic communications to fraudulently or unlawfully induce recipients to reveal personal or sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, credit card information, financial information, or other sensitive information, or to gain access to accounts or records, exfiltration of documents or other sensitive information, payment and/or financial benefit.  [check]
iv. Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).  [ummmm…]
v. Don’t engage in activity that is fraudulent, false or misleading (e.g., asking for money under false pretenses, impersonating someone else, manipulating the Services to increase play count, or affect rankings, ratings, or comments).  [check]
vi. Don’t circumvent any restrictions on access to or availability of the Services.  (I dunno what that means, so probably [check].)
vii. Don’t engage in activity that is harmful to you, the Services or others (e.g., transmitting viruses, stalking, posting terrorist or violent extremist content, communicating hate speech, or advocating violence against others).  [oops]
viii. Don’t infringe upon the rights of others (e.g., unauthorized sharing of copyrighted music or other copyrighted material, resale or other distribution of Bing maps, or photographs).  [check]
ix. Don’t engage in activity that violates the privacy of others.  [check]
x. Don’t help others break these rules.  [oh fuck off.  I can’t help what other people do.]

I’m not sure about the “pornography” one — to the best of my recollection, I’ve never posted any porn.

Unless it’s “art”, of course.

As for the “graphic violence” and “criminal activity”, I’ve never done that either, although I’ve certainly highlighted it (e.g. Dept. of Righteous Shootings).

However, when it comes to “advocating violence against others”, I gotta fess up.

Oh well.  Nobody’s perfect.

What He Said

Culture, Old Fartism

…on the topic of manners.

What do bad manners have to do with the end of imperialism, you might well ask: in a nutshell, nothing and everything. Moral authority disappeared with the empire, just as its successor, socialism, undermined the authority of the family and the pursuit of excellence. The media suddenly presented itself as a tribune of the people, sympathetic to the sensitivities of the masses, with the rich always ruthless and the poor always perfect, the children always innocent and trusting, unless they were white, then they were crazed and feral.

All good stuff, and more besides.

Bowdler’s Dash

Grammar Nazism

In an otherwise good article, Naomi Wolf (or maybe her editor) falls prey to the regrettable sin of using dashes to purge “objectionable” words of their, well, objectionableness.  It’s in the headline, even:

I’m Not “Brave”; You’re Just A P—y

If one were even less of a pussy, one might use the word “pussy” (or insist on its use, rather than the removal of sufficient letters to readers to play the “what does that spell?” game).  What’s really interesting about this particular bowdlerization is that “pussy” in this context is short for “pussycat”, i.e. small, skittish and fearful, rather than referring to a “vagina” — which it does not mean here, for obvious reasons, but the word is doomed by its dual meaning.

If we were talking about a farmyard rooster, would we refer to it as a “c*ck”?  Of course not.  We would only insert the  asterisk if we were talking about Willie Brown inserting his c*ck into Kamala Harris’s c*nt.  (Well, I wouldn’t, but you get my drift.)

If you really want to be “brave”, write the word “nigger” instead of “the n-word” — the other night, I read that Joseph Conrad’s excellent novel is now called “The N-Word of the Narcissis”, and my howls of enraged laughter woke up the neighbor’s dog and got him barking.

When I do the News Roundup feature, I spend an inordinate amount of time editing the headlines by removing “a**hole”, for instance, and replacing it with its proper spelling.  (No small feat, because of the multitude of fonts and backgrounds used, by the way.)

Note to the editors of all the rags I link to:  if you’re quoting someone who called someone else a dickhead, for example, you’re allowed to use the actual word instead of Mrs. Bowdler’s dashes or asterisks.

I know, I know, people are going to complain about the foul language.  Then use different words, or don’t quote them at all.

But to be honest, “wimp” just does not have the same scornful impact as “pussy”.

Honking

Marxists, Politics, Resistance

An interesting piece sent from Loyal Reader Bill V arrived in my email.  For the first time, it gives a name for the two groups facing off against each other all over the world — the Physicals and the Virtuals.  Read it, it’s all good, but this is especially noteworthy:

The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.

Hence their hatred of the working classes — the “Physicals”.  (By the way, you may recall the predicament of Manhattanites about a decade or so ago, when told they needed to seal off their apartment windows with duct tape against aerial contamination — and learning that these twinks not only didn’t know what duct tape was, they had no idea where to buy it.  It was funny back then;  it’s a fact of life for them now.)

We are heading for interesting times.