This Coco Khan piece is pure fluff, but we’re in the middle of a heat wave here and I can barely focus on a dumb TV comedy, let alone the Nabokov novel I’m supposedly reading, so it will have to do, and hey, dumb slang is evergreen entertainment:
If you’ve spent any time online recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s something in the water. Some grown adults – usually of the millennial, gen Z variety, though not exclusively – have regressed to a kind of cutesy, baby language, even while discussing serious topics. In this language, the cost of living crisis is the “cozzie livs”; the upcoming general election is the “genny lec”, and a mental breakdown is a “menty b”. Meanwhile, holidays are “holibobs”, and the wine formerly known as sauvignon blanc is “savvy b”– best paired with a jacky p (jacket potato) for a comforting dinner that’s not too “spenny” (expensive).
This linguistic phenomenon of, well, very silly abbreviations, has created so much confusion, particularly from North American social media users, that decoding British slang is now its own genre in US celebrity interviews (they’ve all done them – Billie Eilish, Emma Stone, Halle Bailey and more). Meanwhile British social media users regularly share their thoughts on the latest language in posts ranging from joy to derision. “If I am re-elected,” joked Labour MP Stella Creasy, “I promise legislation to ban the terms ‘genny lec’ and ‘snappy gen’.” (“Snappy gen” was briefly in the running for the election abbreviation du jour, before being superseded by the overwhelming popularity of “genny lec”.) […]
Yet although slang is likely as old as language itself, I’m convinced that this culture of contractions is something new. The novel thing is just how supercharged the speed of word-innovation has become, and the competitive yet democratic element to the phenomenon. New phrases are created and submitted to the online populus for its approval faster than you can say panny d (yes, for “pandemic”). It’s almost become a national sport of collective wordplay. My favourite at the moment? Although I never much liked “holibob”, I am rather enjoying the working holiday spin-off: “holijob”.
Click through for a deep dive into the sociosemantics of “cozzie livs”; me, I’m going to go fan myself. Thanks, Trevor!
I thought cozzie livs was an Australian invention, but although it was the Aussie word of the year for 2023, the Macquarie Dictionary says it originally came from the UK.
It sounds like an Oz abbrev to my ears though. I must be having a mild menty b on account of the hotty w*.
One of my brothers likes ‘holibobs,’ which I have always thought was way cringe.
*The heaty wee?
Some 20 years ago I wondered why no one calls the president “презик”, reserving this word for condoms.
презик
Indeed, the concepts are similar.
One protects you from the undesired consequences of your behaviour, the other protects himself from the undesired consequences of your behaviour.
We need a comparably slangy clipping of “Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
Hah! You’re missing the postmodern irony!
The Youth of Today intend to make their elders’ teeth ache with their weaponised cutesiness. Take that with your triple locked state pension, Boomer!
Attested as Präserl elsewhere.
(…Not the president. The president is mostly harmless.)
Russian prezervatív and prezidént accordingly.
I thought I was up with all the latest goss but this comes as news to me.
As a side comment, does anyone still care what happens in the UK nowadays?
Arthur, the Once and Future King, does. He’s just biding his time at the moment.
Bide away, Art.
The UK was relevant enough, at least up until Thatcher’s time (not necessarily in a good way), but since it left the European Union its irrelevance has become pretty apparent.
As language enthusiasts, Hatters naturally have an abiding interest in the cradle of the English language, and the British royal family continues to be a focus of intense interest amongst a certain type of person (usually female), but for the rest….
All will be different soon …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armes_Prydein
does anyone still care what happens in the UK nowadays?
Aww it’s been a constant source of entertainment. I’m making the most of it, because I figure it’s about to get a whole lot duller. I used to have a pension fund locked up there. Nowadays it’s worth about as much as a wet bus ticket.
pace Armes Prydein this Anglo-Saxon got driven out of Blighty several decades ago. By the Celts? It turns out Martinet Thatcher had a soupçon of Irish. Blair was Scots allegedly, also with more than a dash of Irish. So it’s happening already?
Truss lived some of here formative years in Paisley. And somebody named Keir. It’s suddenly all making sense …
I suppose Michael Foot/the Welsh windbag then Neil Kinnock was too obvious.
All we need now is to get the Vikings on board ….
Seems to me I’ve heard Tee Sweezy for Taylor Swift. If so, yikes.
I live in the US, and even I have heard of people saying Spag Bol (not flatteringly), since long ago.
Spendy is pretty standard in some AmE. I have only heard it in the Pacific Northwest, from people old and young.
Belatedly, cabernet sauvignon is known in Australia as “cab sav”. Is that usage found in other English-speaking countries?
“cab sav”
Yep, that’s the name in NZ (not surprising). Bolli is now the generic name for fizzy wine. Are you ready to Bollicini?
Spag Bol it was in student flats in Blighty even in the ’70’s.
Here, this should help you cool down: an article on Antarctic English.
As if the Vikings want what the Tories left behind.
That said, I’ll be back in Edinburgh in a hot second once it rejoins Schengen. London?
Dysgogan derwydon meint a deruyd
“Druids will foretell all that will happen …”
Who foretold that druids will foretell it?
Quis praedicet ipsos praedicatores?
Reminds me of the old joke about two mentalists meeting. One greets the other “You are fine. How am I?”
Hans circumvented the intriguing question of who says “thanks” to whom and for what exactly.
(though I must admit that at least in context of love I cease to understand how to tell selfish from selfless and mosly consider these notions wrong).
Who foretold that druids will foretell it?
Taliesin, obvs.
In fact, not only did he foretell it, but he wrote the entire poem four centuries after he was dead. Respect!
I thought so. Thanks!
Poets then. (or bards if you like).
Poets today aren’t what they used to be going to were.
“This prophecy Merlin shall make: for I live before his time.”
LH, er. Is it like “…used to be going to be” just with “were”?
Anyway, poets and priests are obviously complementary. So when Romans destroyed the religion of druids the problems began. The Irish (God saved them from Romans) solution is replacing druids with saints – the scariest creatures (Cruachan kittens only come next) you only can find in Irish sagas.
It worked for a while (cf. st. Columba who protected poets) but who cares about saints nowadays? This is why we have all the bad poetry: many of you won’t even recognise a saint when you meet her!
PS. But I know what to do. When and only when no one is going to do the job for you, you do it on your own, right? Become saint.
LH, er. Is it like “…used to be going to be” just with “were”?
It’s just lexico-temporal gibberish — sorry!
Oh yes. Farage is in the internationale of the nationalists, and the UK has sent a lot of weaponry to Ukraine. Also, Social Democrats the world over are about to study the UK in depth to find out if they have any hope of replicating that, or any, success.
That’s almost explicitly about the year 941.
…if you accept that Arthur the Dalmatian is dead, that is.
That’s almost explicitly about the year 941
Hey, prophecy is not an exact science …
As we economists say, either give a number or a date, but never both.
an article on Antarctic English.
Antarcticish discussed here previously. That one was about phonology; this one is about lexicon.
“Canterbury Doc on Counterbeary Talk”.
(I’ll be here all week.)
Oh yes. Farage is in the internationale of the nationalists
Ok, in a destructive, death-spiral sense, Britain is still relevant.
UK has sent a lot of weaponry to Ukraine
Riding on American coattails. I doubt they’re doing it because Ukraine, Germany or anyone else wants them to.
Social Democrats the world over are about to study the UK in depth to find out if they have any hope of replicating that, or any, success
Am still trying to figure this one out.
Am still trying to figure this one out.
I guess he’s talking about the expected success of Labour at the upcoming elections.
If that happens, the secret is easy – just have a conservative government make such a hash of things that large numbers of its own supporters turn away in disgust.
The other thing is the First-past-the-Post election system favours a two-party sytem (Tory-Whig and then Tory-Labour) with third parties able only to enter government when one of the two parties is unable to muster an overall majority, so that it is very hard to create a dynamic whereby smaller parties can regularly form coalition governments.
Seen from the outside, Labour over the latest many years have not looked like being in touch with the sensibilities of the demographically predictable majority of voters, much less those of future generations (which was what I started out writing, but the immediate issue is that the cohort of middle aged middle-class white voters is being replaced. As in all Western countries, but Labour in the UK seem to be greater laggards than other nominally Social Democrat pretenders to prime ministerial power. I blame FPTP voting. In Denmark, for instance, under proportional representation the xenophobic and/or agrarian interests have been segregated into smaller parties for greater visibility, and the rest of us are just waiting for their voters to grow too senile to vote. Possibly in vain).
Individual actual Labour policies tend to be very popular. This was even the case when Jeremy Corbyn led the party. The popularity disappeared when those questioned were told that the policy they approved of was, in point of fact, a Labour policy.
The unpopularity of Labour as a party largely reflects a media setup dominated by far-right-friendly billionaire proprietors. They have very successfully managed to dictate which issues are to be regarded as important, so that relatively unbiased media (like the BBC) may not parrot the rightist disinformation, but are still supporting the same agenda by the mere fact that they are discussing the issues that the Bastards want to keep in focus. (“If you’re arguing, you’re losing.”)
They don’t actually need a Fox News in the UK. The existing media setup works fine for antidemocratic plutocrats.
Even in the US, all the mainstream news sources focus on what the right thinks is important, so Fox News isn’t necessary for that. Lately a major part of that has been “the crisis at the border”, which somehow is more important for voters far from any border than any number of issues that actually affect their daily lives.
@DE, reminds me of my attempts to describe what are TV news and whether they are important.
TV makes people of all the world discuss think about the same thing the same moment.
To make what Kieth Ivey wrote perhaps a little more precise: The national media coverage is largely determined by what conservatives claim they think is important. The right sets the agenda. However, that does not mean that there is actually that much discussion of what conservatives think should be done, from a public policy viewpoint. Focus groups and surveys show pretty consistently that a lot of voters, particularly the kind of swing voters who decide elections, will refuse to believe that the Republican platform, with its regressive proposals (many which are now actually being implemented), are actually what conservatives want to do.
Yes, these are very odd times. Facts don’t matter, policies don’t matter, insane babbling doesn’t matter, the only thing that’s important is feeding people’s inchoate resentments.
Well, we are like USSR in that respect that we are all right, and people of the West are suffering.
But we are unlike USSR in that state propaganda co-opted the far right, so what people of the West are suffering from is horrible, horrible migrants.
I’m not sure how to insert “resentments” into this scheme. Presumbaly people (Russian) look in their windows, see Tajiks, hate them and then … feel so sorry for poor people of the West.
My impression is that Russians resent the loss of all the half-remembered, half-imagined glories of the USSR. People had jobs! Books were cheap! Men were men and women were women! etc. etc.
Hat: People had jobs! Books were cheap! Men were men and women were women! etc. etc.
And that’s exactly the thing that drives people to the false prophets of a lost paradise everywhere after two generations of economic standstill or backslide.
What makes the old center scared (at least in Europe) is not so much the prospect of immediate fascist rule, which would be a self-evident disaster everywhere, but that the fascists might actually implement progressive socio-economic policies that will prove efficient and popular.
I agree with that. I also think that after initial success as progressives, the reactionaries will campaign even harder on repression as a defense of the national system against the looming threats of immigration, international cooperation, and dissolution of social norms. The hope is that that won’t take them far. It didn’t in Poland. The fear is that it will work and give them a mandate to overturn the liberal democracy.
Relevant is relevant.
Why exactly would it? b.liar did that (along with others in other countries to various extents) because Clinton was so good at winning elections; Sunak has no such role model. In fact, I’m surprised BoJo didn’t protect Londongrad; perhaps he figured this was the last chance to save the last remnants of his reputation. Oh, are there plans to export Challenger tanks or something?
Yes and yes; they’ll still be incredulous enough to figure some serious study is needed. 🙂
See also: Orbán Viktátor. He’s not some kind of Berlusconi who personally owns half the media and can openly dictate to the other half. He doesn’t need to. He has managed to make all the media financially dependent on ads from his government – they self-censor because they know what’s good for them.
Ohrban, the one with the ears in a country next door, got halfway down this path before the rest of the media managed to uncover a scandal that swept him away. His party, which has meanwhile developed an ideology that Austria’s Finest News Source is calling Nationalnormalismus, is still in power and seems about to become the smaller partner in a coalition with a party that is even farther right because that worked so well the last two times.
Lots of people find it simply too hard to believe that anybody could be so cartoonishly evil, and amazing numbers are evidently incapable of imagining a narcissist.
Also… for the most part it isn’t what conservatives want to do. I’ve noticed a lot of usage of conservative as elegant variation for Republican, which was never accurate (Republican economic policies before Trump were libertarian, not remotely conservative*), but especially isn’t now, when more Republicans are fascists or reactionaries than conservatives…
* The two-party system has forced the conservatives and all but the looniest libertarians to be in the same party for so long that few outside or inside the party even seem to have an idea what a conservative economic policy would look like; instead they call libertarian economic policies conservative. But I digress.
Really? The AfD and the FPÖ talk very, very little about their economic policies, but what’s in their programs is pretty hardcore libertarian by European measures. Every once in a while the FPÖ even makes noise about a flat tax. There’s no sign they learned anything from Poland since the fall of communism.
I used a too broad brush, but in e.g. Italy, France and the Nordic countries, the fascist(oid)s speak a lot about the crumbling welfare state, inadequate pensions, and the betrayal of the working class. I don’t mean to say that they’ll become beacons of progressive policy once they’re elected, but they do know what made people turn to them, and there is some low-hanging fruit to be picked that might help them stay in power long enough to do what they really want. The universal child benefit in Poland was an example.
They’ll obviously also make low-hanging regressive measures, like protectionism, reversal of environmental policies like gas taxes and congestion fares, and retraction from international organizations, but I think they know that that won’t keep them popular for long.
“Cash transfers are a proven, practical intervention to address poverty.”
(From UNICEF’s advertisment of the universal child benefit)
Oh yes, but they blame it all on immigrants being lazy and stealing all the jobs!
I’m actually still surprised Poland didn’t already have one. It’s widespread because it’s something Social Democrats and Christian Social conservatives can almost effortlessly agree on.
@LH, it began… no, wrong, I began to notice it ~15 years ago. 90% of people – that is not your usual “half” but a really, really, really large number – began to feel “какую страну развалили!”
(The phrase itself is an idiom. Lankov uses ironically when discussing possible sentiments of future North Koreans if the house of Kims falls – other people say these very words sincerely. Once a teenager said it to me – in apparent hope of finding a shared ideal with someone older).
But without a specific reason. Of the three reasons you give
– one I never heard (but it like the phrase above is idiomatic in the west),
– the other is mine actually:) But I say it in the context of 90s! I do think that accessible books is a good thing about USSR and it should be retained, but in the context of Soviet economy it’s difficult to say what is “cheap” and also there were not many titles.
Why 90s are important because book printing was thriving and yet books (particularly new sceintific monogrpahs) were extremely cheap.
– and I don’t know about men and women. I don’t hear this. And it does not even look like this given that the ideal of a working man and a housewife is popular but could not be realised in USSR.
And not just these – there are just no reasons.
from my fairly uninformed angle, the u.k. looks a lot like the u.s. in that the nominal “liberal”/”center” parties (Labor and Democratic) are so deeply scared of their opponents’ far right positions that they’ve very meticulously adopted them.
quite similar to what I once said about Europe as a whole (that wrt refugees it generally adopted the stance once promoted by Russia).
Oh, it seems “holi bob” means something in Welsh. I suppose “asking each”?
The AfD and the FPÖ talk very, very little about their economic policies, but what’s in their programs is pretty hardcore libertarian by European measures.
Traditional fascists, including Orban, generally do favor the state providing welfare for The People, and then just narrowly define The People along racist/ethnic lines. Obviously from the fascist point of view you can’t provide welfare in an ethnically diverse country like the U.S, Germany or Austria because then the “wrong” people will get the benefits. It is interesting the extent to which Libertarianism, supposedly an ideology of individual freedom, has been co-opted by neo-fascists, but I suppose hardly surprising if you read Rand. The general idea I guess being that a “free economy” is a struggle that will expose and destroy “parasites” in the same way Hitler and Mussolini saw war as a purifying force that would destroy the weak and sick elements in the national body.
Or maybe I’m overthinking things and these parties’ programs simply represent the incoherent wish list of a few very rich sociopaths.
Books were cheap!
Maybe not this one. First of all never in human history have physical books been as cheap as today. You often can’t find takers if you give older books away for free. Maybe less the case in Russia but cheap/free pirated digital books still exist there.
Second of all, the sort of person who is nostalgic for the USSR is often not an avid reader in my experience. They are more likely to rhapsodize about the “decency/ приличность in the movies and TV shows of the Soviet era.
I don’t know how much of this is true for other hard right wing parties in Europe, but the AfD’s policies are incoherent for two reasons 1) they are a coalition of disparate groups, united only by their rejection of a modern, diverse, liberal society; and 2) they don’t have to be coherent, because they’re still basically a protest party for whom it is sufficient to be against unpopular policies. Ad 1), there are people whose positions would have been mainstream conservative 40 years ago and are just stuck in the past (representatives of that wing are always trotted out when the AfD protests that they are just a harmless bürgerliche Partei – “we’re not extremist, it’s the country which has become radically socialist”). Then there are the Völkische, who are not just grumbling about all the foreigners like the first group but actually want to cleanse them and wouldn’t mind a new Führer (Bernd Höcke fancies himself in that role). Then there is the usual bunch of single-issue loonies (like anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers, etc.) Then there are American-style minimum government conservatives. And then there are operators who basically are ready to do and say anything that gets the AfD votes; Alice Weidel is a good example – at the beginning of the pandemic she called for the government to do more to protect Germany from COVID; when the government did and started the lockdowns, she noticed that she could make more hay with the protests against that and pivoted to the position that COVID was not that dangerous and the measures weren’t justified.
So as long as they are sitting in their 15-20% of the votes ghetto and aren’t invited into any governments, they can shout incoherently from the sidelines and their voters will lap it up.
the usual bunch of single-issue loonies (like anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers, etc.) …
“usual”? Since when were there people denying vaccination? COVID-deniers deny what, exactly? I can name names of people who died from it. You’re next going to say the “usual” flat-earthers? It took until the C21st for there to be people using modern navigational metrics to ‘justify’ the claim of a flat earth.
@AntC
I believe there were anti-fluoridation activists in the 1970s, this is a common trope of “interfering with Nature”/”polluting the body”/”encouraging survival of weak genes”, etc.
PP: I believe there were anti-fluoridation activists in the 1970s,
At least up here they were associated with other “countercultural” political movements like opposition to hydroelectric power and/or nuclear power, and the campaigns against nuclear weapons and membership in the EEC. The mother of a friend of mine was into all of that, becoming involved in the young, radical wing of Senterpartiet, the old farmer’s party, at University, and thus wary of everything brought upon us by sinister foreign forces.
She convinced my mum too, or maybe the two of them talked eachother into a conviction that it was just healthy skepticism. Either way, the result was that my friend and I were the only two kids in class with more than one cavity at the first check with the school dentist. I had seven, and he had eight.
Things got better. I was distracted enough that I forgot to deliver the required signed reservation against fluorides. We moved. My mum just dropped her objection when it became too much hazzle. But my teeth still suffer from those early cavities. I use to say that I’m the last pre-fluoride child.
But back to the general point. That seventies’ countercultural conspiranoia* is nowadays epitomized by the old leader of the post-’68 Stalinist-turned-Maoist-turned-Hoxhaist party, Pål Steigan, who owns and runs a “news” site that mainly touts anti-vaccine sentiment and Putin propaganda
* I encountered Konspiranoia in Norwegian as a 2013 book title — or probably a little earlier, since I think both the book and the title were lifted from a blog that had run for a few years. I don’t know if it’s older in English
Maybe not this one. First of all never in human history have physical books been as cheap as today. You often can’t find takers if you give older books away for free. Maybe less the case in Russia but cheap/free pirated digital books still exist there.
Second of all, the sort of person who is nostalgic for the USSR is often not an avid reader in my experience.
Good points both, and I withdraw my imagined objection! (I’ll replace it with “pensions that actually meant something.”)
“usual”? Since when were there people denying vaccination? COVID-deniers deny what, exactly? I can name names of people who died from it. You’re next going to say the “usual” flat-earthers? It took until the C21st for there to be people using modern navigational metrics to ‘justify’ the claim of a flat earth.
I have no idea what you’re going on about. Are you seriously unaware that there are anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers? I know you live in paradise, but pick up a paper sometime.
but pick up a paper sometime.
Golly, do they still have those out there in cane-waving country ? I get the news from a wall socket.
I get mine from something Bill Gates personally implanted in my skull, but like I said, AntC lives in paradise, so I presume they still have physical newspapers.
COVID-deniers deny what, exactly? I can name names of people who died from it.
I can, too, but what does that mean to a real conspiracy nut? I remember reading a report about a German hospital ICU in 2021, how there were people lying under respirators telling the doctors and nurses who were fighting to save their lives that what they had wasn’t COVID, because COVID didn’t exist and was just a government conspiracy to bring everyone under control.
“Good points both, and I withdraw my imagined objection! (I’ll replace it with “pensions that actually meant something.”)”
Well, Vanya’s point is wrong:/
About as wrong as a political generalisation over “liteners of modern music” or “people who drive cars” would be and for the same reason.
Indeed “books” is not what many people discuss (I remember some in Tunisia criticised Marzouki for importing books:) Generally I like Marzouki)
If books is not what people discuss than my point is right.
Well, people discuss books. People don’t usually discuss changes in their prices. This is true for people in general.
(Again, a counterexample comes from Tunisia: my freinds do complain at insane book prices, but those are insane indeed)
What I mean is that (a) presently everyone idelises USSR (b) back in 90s a half of people were as enthusiastic about the regime change as DE would be about say, conversion to Buddhism.
The AfD is indeed unusual among comparable parties in being so heterogenous. The obvious cause is its recent founding from scratch (2013). The FPÖ has been an ideological monolith since 1986…
In France, true to local tradition, such parties just split. Marine Le Pen now accepts that the EU exists, so Éric Zemmour now has his own party to her right.
The Democrats are deeply traumatized by Reagan – except the ones who are too young for that, like AOC. It shows, constantly.
b.liar adopted Clinton’s policies that stemmed, in part, from the above.
The “liberal” party of the UK, however, is now as ever the Liberal Democratic Party (“the opposite” of “conservative” isn’t “liberal” anymore, it’s “socialist”, except in the US); and the center is assumed to lie between Labour and the Conservatives (i.e. nowhere really).
What you suggest is certainly one contributing factor to these wishlists. At the same time, fascism is literally violently against overthinking things…
Notoriously untranslatable. Bürgerlich is quite similar to bourgeois, except it never has negative connotations (not always positive ones either, but never negative ones). Let’s try “party for people who would naturally be expected to vote for some kind of conservative party and are not upper-class twits”.
Quite so! Let’s all be replaced by chondrichthyans. (Trump’s nightmare rather literally.) They do teeth right! Instead of making theirs from hydroxyapatite with minor impurities of fluoride (etc. etc.) as we do, they use fluorapatite from the outset!
Never heard anyone use any of those idioms here in the UK; and 70 million people care very much about what happens here. This blog is becoming quite toxic in its Anglophobia.
Oh, come the fuck on. Because I link to a British publication discussing British slang which you personally haven’t heard, I’m Anglophobic? Grow up and get over yourself.
Huh? Hat’s link is to a British article discussing a trend in British English (be it real or imagined). There’s no flogging of Brits either in the quoted passages or in Hat’s commentary. There’s only Bathrobe’s quip about Britain having doomed itself to a slow slide into irrelevance, and that did not come from a position of not caring, rather the opposite. The following discussion soon turned generally anti-nationalist.
And I contributed a positive plan for national renewal based on a nativist revival. What’s not to like?
The polite condescension of “sliding into irrelevance” differs only in tone from Trump’s reference to “shithole countries”.
The common element is the categorization of other people en bloc as losers.
Well, the context is different. Shithole countries are where the asshole president does not want more immigrants from. That is there are implications as to how he intends to treat such countries, it is not just an observation that a certain country is a shithole.
Obviously the UK is not a shithole country in the Trumpian sense: it produces exemplary individuals like Nigel Farage, Liz Truss and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Many of us yet keep alive the flame lit by Oswald Mosley. We are fully aligned with the highest principles of the Republican Party.
Trump specifically gave the exemplary country which is NOT a shithole: Norway.
(Indeed I know a nice family from Bergen… Er, from Bergen and Casablanca:) I suppose Casablanca is not a shithole? And I also know Trond.)
Instead of “sliding into irrelevance”, how about “regression to the mean”?
There’s a lot to be said for irrelevance. Many peopls would be greatly improved if they were to be rendered irrelevant.
And sliding is much more fun than regression.
This still means decreace in the resource that once guarranteed prominence.
Depending of the resource (Russia, Israel and Hamas are famous for you know what, China is famous for trade and some other countries for culture*) can be good or bad thing.
*this is not to say that Russian, Jewish, Arab and Chinese cultures are not well known.
“regression to the mean”
I like the suggestion of inevitability ! Some are meaner than others, but not for long.
By the way… is not “a place people are willing to emigrate from” a very definition of “shithole*”?
*shitty ho?
I propose “backsliding” as combining the best of regression and sliding. It has the additional advantage of warning against turpitude and slackness.
“Sliding into irrelevance” was my interpretation and may not reflect Bathrobe’s views. My point was that I read the comment as coming from a point of concerned interest.
To speak for myself, I don’t accept the relevance of “condescending” here, nor for that matter the concept of “losers”. I do think that a major reason for the success of nationalist and fascist movements in recent years is that real people have real concerns for their own and their country’s future.
But that’s no excuse. Because we know fascism, we know what kind of people the smooth and modern fascists chose to ally with before they were potty-trained and groomed for TV, so the active decision to let fascism back in is not just wrong but outright evil. Voters should know better, every single one of them, and if they don’t, they deserve all the derision they get. If condescension is smart is another matter. It also misses the main point, which is that choosing evil is evil, not stupid.
Brexit isn’t fascist or evil in itself, but it’s part of the frightening erosion of the international system (imperfect but important, and meticulously built after the great wars of the 20th century) that is cheered on by nationalist and fascist movements elsewhere. Brexit’s chief ideologue Nigel F. certainly is a fascist, and it’s pretty clear that it was the classically fascist tune of anti-immigration and blaming a foreign cabal for your misery that won the referendum, and the post-Brexit government is doing its best to harvest those sentiments. That will do nothing for Britain, just as it’s done nothing for anyone before.
But stupid losers? No. What it tells me is that we are all perfectly capable of convincing ourselves that evil can be good for us, but we do that by choice. It’s the kind of observation that can turn an agnostic atheist into a frothing Christian preacher.
By the way… is not “a place people are willing to emigrate from” a very definition of “shithole*”?
Surely vagina nationum, rather?
inter faecebook et urinam nascimur
There is also a Soviet idiom (from the boring register used in propaganda) “forge of cadres”.
It also misses the main point, which is that choosing evil is evil, not stupid
As a notorious Calvinist, convinced of humanity’s Total Depravity, I am naturally much more optimistic about the motivation of these voters.
It is surely relevant that the fascists currently polluting our politics find it indispensible to push shameless lies in order to garnish votes. Thus Trump and his bestial enablers continually claim that immigrants are violent rapists currently actually creating an enormous crime wave. While it certainly is true that millions of Americans look at Trump’s racism, misogyny and contempt for the law and like him because of it, there are evidently not enough of such moral imbeciles in the US to ensure his ambitions. The lying is a necessary part of the strategy. There is grounds for hope in that.
Most voters are shockingly ill-informed and many really are quite stupid. Accordingly, it is reasonable to be optimistic that they are not personally as evil as their heroes.
I’ve never met anyone I would call evil. I share David’s sunny outlook. Shockingly ill-informed and quite stupid people are par for the course, nothing to get hysterical about.
Am I an honorary Calvinist in all but certificate ? I hope I wouldn’t be obliged to do all those spiritual exercises.
It is to be hoped that the U.S. authorities will filter out any potentially undesirable immigrants from Norway. You let the wrong sort of Norwegian in, next thing you know they’re setting fire to your medieval wooden churches. That said, the pace of emigration from Norway to the U.S. is not what it once was. I blame the welfare state, (possibly) the laxity of the established church, and the inevitably corrupting influence of oil money.
For (some of) the British, the “irrelevance” problem is that they used to be Extremely Relevant because they were universally understood to be a Great Power and that became (for some) an integral part of the national identity, whose absence is thus a stressor. Latvian nationalism, to take one of many contrasting examples, never had that as part of the recipe, so the comparative irrelevance of Latvia to (most) world affairs creates no particular tsuris or agita. It seems a fair observation that a similar fear of “sliding into irrelevance” due to loss of empire etc. is also a significant component of the Muscovite variety of East-Slavic nationalism, and that this gives rise to a number of problems.
Note FWIW, that the U.K. was a net exporter of human beings (some as settlers of its own expanding empire, but others merely to the U.S. or to Patagonia etc.) at the very same time it was an unquestioned Great Power of undoubted Relevance. Part of this is that the supposed lucrative benefits of imperialism were not evenly distributed domestically and e.g. did not spread all the way out to the Hebrides where Donald Trump’s late mother (nee MacLeod, or Nic Leòid if you’re hardcore) was born. Although the other part is perhaps merely that the world is a complicated place.
Stu: ’ve never met anyone I would call evil
Neither have I, and that’s the point. Hollywood bad-guys don’t exist. Evil is done by decent people making choices and soothing stories.
(Obviously I do acknowledge ill-informedness, but partly that too is a choice, and partly people have always been ill informed.)
One strand of Irish Euroscepticism is a desire to stay as irrelevant as possible. Hobbits vs Hobbes.
@mollymooly: One of my favorite facts about the current state of play in European politics is that the “post-fascist”* party currently governing Italy is made up of obsessively nerdy hobbit enthusiasts. Despite the contentions of Bolshevik Tolkien-bashers, I expect that the political alignment(s) of nerdy hobbit enthusiasts shake out somewhat differently in different national political cultures.
*I don’t mean by the quotation marks to doubt the bona fides of their post-ness. The Republic of Ireland is itself a good example of a polity where both of the most boringly establishment political parties are colorably post-fascist or at least have undisputed historical roots in violent ethnocentric nationalism. “Soldiers of Destiny”? What the fuck sort of name is that for a political party in a bourgeois liberal parliamentary democracy? But now FF is part of the squishy-centrist “Renew Europe” faction in the fake European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Despite the contentions of Bolshevik Tolkien-bashers
Hey! I’m standing right here!
“Soldiers of Destiny” is a mistranslation* of “Fianna Fáil” predicated on a spurious identification of the Irish Lia Fáil with the Scottish Stone of Destiny. It was originally propagated by ridiculing opponents but later embraced by the soldiers themselves. The counter-ridicule was to pronounce “Fine Gael” as English “fine gale”; the most juvenile taunts are infuriatingly hard to respond to unless you can master a really deadpan eyeroll.
* not that a more accurate translation, e.g. “Warriors of Erin”, is any less ethnonationalist
“classically fascist tune of anti-immigration and blaming a foreign cabal for your misery”
During the dissolution of USSR everyone believed that their country “fed” others and that now they will be rich:)
However I do not regret it.
Day saved.
(Kaderschmiede exists in German, and is not uncommonly applied to elite schools and the like… but not to…)
There’s always the question of at what point you call the entire person evil… but, even though I’ve met rather few people, I’ve met people who absolutely had evil personality traits. The most common one is probably the ability to lose all sympathy for people when they don’t like them. That’s just incomprehensible to me.
No, but there was Stephen Harper.
Some people really do want to destroy things, or people, just in order to inflict grief.
Worse – it’s liberal! The Liberal Democrats of the UK were in there.
Strasbourg and Brussels because Reasons. *eyeroll*
@Hat I have no idea what you’re going on about. Are you seriously unaware that there are anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers? I know you live in paradise, but pick up a paper sometime.
This particular corner of paradise has both dead-tree papers and the wall-socket variety, thanks. What I’m going on about was given by my first sentence, quoting Hans’ o.p.:
Of course I know there are anti-vaxxers. They’re a tiny number (even if vociferous); not “usual”. We had COVID-deniers demonstrating/camped out on the grounds of Parliament (where they passed round COVID like billy-o). Approx 1,000 out of a population of 6 million. Not “usual”.
NZ has a tub-thumping MP/narcissistic leader of his own party, by no means as outright awful as Trump (more of a Farage). He doesn’t deny COVID, nor advocate snorting Hydroxychloroquine against it. He variously wins just under or just over the threshold for getting into Parliament under our Proportional Representation. Not “usual”.
@Hans o.p. that included the “usual” continued
So as long as they [the protest parties] are sitting in their 15-20% of the votes ghetto and aren’t invited into any governments, they can shout incoherently from the sidelines and their voters will lap it up.
Yes, what NZ’s Farage-alike does. Until his handful of MPs hold the balance of power, so he gets invited to preen in government; and proves so incompetent he gets voted out at the next election.
It’s not “usual” for these protest parties to go actively seeking anti-vaxxers, because that’s not enough voters to make any impact; even the 15% votes ghetto regards them as nutters.
So ‘what I’m on about’ is “usual” appearing alongside electorally insignificant cranks; commentary with the effect of normalising their claims.
It is not “usual” for a gross and persistent liar like Trump or BoJo to get anywhere near power in a democracy. It’s not “usual” for a party organisation in a democracy to have such feeble control over its members as to fail to exclude Trump on grounds of moral turpitude (with the endless legal rulings against his sham businesses and ‘charities’); exclude from getting on the slate, let alone voted as Party candidate. BoJo can’t even remember how many kids he has, nor by how many wives/girlfriends; how was he ever associated with Tory values?
there are evidently not enough of such moral imbeciles in the US to ensure his [Trump’s] ambitions.
Aren’t there? Latest poll numbers I saw, Biden is barely 2% ahead overall. More critically, in the swing States he’s not ahead at all. There are plenty enough morally bankrupt individuals lining up to carry out Trump’s plans and replace all the judges and administrators that are going to get sacked by the ‘dictator for a day’.
How come Trump isn’t down in the 15% ghetto?
Mitch McConnell appears to have always been a moral imbecile/an apparatchik.
There’s a lot to be said for irrelevance.
Yeah, that’s NZ’s strategy. It’ll only work as long as there’s fish left in the more clement parts of the oceans. By-and-by the Norwegians and Japanese will be coming down here for the whales. The Chinese are already hereabouts in large and illicit numbers.
So some of the self-satisfied rhetoric of violent ethnonationalist factions (and/or their turned-respectable successors) turned out to be based on spurious etymologies? Who could have possibly anticipated such an unexpected turn of events?
AntC: the Norwegians and Japanese will be coming down here for the whales
I doubt that, at least for the Norwegians. There’s not been industrial scale whaling in Norway since the sixties. What is left is a few smaller boats continuing the traditional hunting of minke whales along the coast of Northern Norway, taking out about a third of the annual quota. (The stubborn defense of Norwegian whaling against a united international community makes no economic sense. We do it on
spiteprinciple.)AntC: perhaps I can uncross some purposes
I interpreted “usual” in Hans’ “the usual bunch” as meaning “expected”/”habitual” rather than “widespead”/”plurality”. That is, the (possibly small) usual group of single-issue loonies as opposed to any of the (presumably even smaller) less usual groups of single-issue loonies.
I interpreted DE as meaning that Trump’s support was a combination of (a) moral imbeciles and (b) the shockingly ill-informed and/or quite stupid, where (a) alone would be insufficient.
“Kaderschmiede exists in German” – thanks!
I remembered that when I once shared or wanted to share it here I was able to identify the foreign source. But I did not remember what it is….
I’ll concede that there’s been so much ideological and pragmatic reshuffling in Italy that the current installation of their Fascist party may now well be Posted in the territory of traditional Christian Democrats — though it puzzles me why traditional Christian Democrats would choose to channel their efforts through a movement with that recent heritage.
@mollymooly:
You interpret me correctly. I may appoint you my official exegete. (I’m afraid that the position is currently not salaried, but of course it commands enormous prestige.)
Speaking of evil, in 2014 I was quite frustrated both with war in Syria and with how the whole word was helping it by bombing someone in Syria. It was not obvious how the itnernational community could actually help if it wanted (and it would be really nice to know a better way to help). One thing which seemed clearly flawless was of course helping refugees (which wouldn’t solve the problem but was necessary). It is quite obvious that when Russia joined in in 2015, people thought that bombing someone in Syria is a good idea, but what was a surprise is that helping refugees from the perspective of the prevalent ideology is evil
So basically what everyone calls evil is what I call good, and what everyone calls good is what I call evil. That impressed me.
I don’t think you’re exactly alone there, drasvi. Everybody thinks helping refugees is good, except fascists, moral imbeciles and the shockingly ill-informed and/or quite stupid.
I don’t think many will disagree with you here. The European response to the Syrian refugee crisis* is one of the great failings of our generation.
* It was first understood as a crisis for Syrians, and in Norway there was a lot of sympathy for the refugees on foot through Europe. It took only a few Syrians cycling across the border from Russia to make it a crisis for us, and then no border measure was harsh enough.
Thanks @mollymolly. … and (b) the shockingly ill-informed and/or quite stupid
Putting yourself out enough to go into a polling booth and make a mark needs some level of getting informed and brain-power. Those who are blaming immigrants for ‘taking’ their jobs, presumably manage to be informed and bright enough to hold down (or have had) jobs. (The permanently unemployable again aren’t electorally significant numbers.) If those watching Fox News merely stayed in front of their TVs in their apoplexy, we wouldn’t be considering their voting impact.
Anti-vaxxing needs actively (mis-)informing yourself against publicly-promoted health advice. (As opposed to merely being too indolent to go out get the jabs.) Whether it’s just the same “usual suspects” who are COVID deniers, I doubt; but still the numbers (outside of U.S.) aren’t of concern electorally/any party appealing to them would alienate more. Why did Hans even mention single-issue loonies?
So I disagree (with @DE) that the (b)s are morally excusable. Even the (you’d’a thought) less-informed masses in India weren’t suckered into Modi’s lies. Of course it remains to be seen in both the US and UK whether the (b)-category will actually go out and vote/I don’t trust the pollsters.
So I disagree (with @DE) that the (b)s are morally excusable
Not my view. (See Total Depravity.) Nobody is morally excusable.
However, this does not imply that there are not degrees of culpability.
I agree with you that someone who swallows Republican or Tory hate propaganda about immigrants without being actually clinically mentally impaired is culpable because they ought to have known better. (Though “ought to have known better” is easy to say for a Hatter: we are not typical of society in general when to comes to awareness of current affairs. And a great many perfectly nice people take no interest in what they call “politics” whatsoever. Those of us who do take an interest are basically weirdos. Most voters are extraordinarily ill-informed over basic matters of fact: there is, alas, abundant evidence to back this assertion up.)
But I would still maintain that these culpable swallowers are not as bad as someone who actively wills the suffering of immigrants out of simple endogenous hatred, and that even people of that kind are not as wicked as the Trumps, Bravermans, Badenochs, Andersons and Farages who deliberately propagate lies about immigrants in order to stir up hatred so that they can gain power.
The very fact that these criminals feel they need to lie systematically to achieve their ends is, at least to some degree, reassuring: if it were not for the lying, there would be less hatred from the shockingly ill-informed and the quite stupid. As these people are actual experts in their own line of hatred-peddling, we can take their word for it here.
a great many perfectly nice people take no interest in what they call “politics” whatsoever
Yes, that I know. And so long as they don’t go out and vote, that’s their right. The act of voting _is_ to take an interest — even if that’s the whole extent of their participation. Again, they need to focus enough to put the mark against some particular candidate/party. They’re doing more than registering ‘Present’.
“ought to have known better” is easy to say for a Hatter
@Hat stirred this up by accusing me of ignorance of current affairs in re anti-vaxxers. Whether or not these “perfectly nice people” are aware of anti-vaxxers, are there any U.S. voters who didn’t see the violence at the Capitol in January 2021? And remain blissfully ignorant/willfully blind as to the causes? And haven’t noticed that one candidate continues to refuse to condemn the rioters? I’d expect Trump to not even get the votes of his own family (as isn’t Bobby Kennedy Jr).
In contrast, sufficient of U.K. voters seem (to be confirmed in a couple of weeks) to have paid enough attention to recognise the debacle of BoJo and Truss.
Of course I know there are anti-vaxxers. They’re a tiny number (even if vociferous); not “usual”. We had COVID-deniers demonstrating/camped out on the grounds of Parliament (where they passed round COVID like billy-o). Approx 1,000 out of a population of 6 million. Not “usual”.
Lucky NZ.
I don’t have numbers for actual COVID deniers, but the percentage of people in Germany who said they didn’t want to get vaccinated against COVID was around 30%. During the pandemic we had several demonstrations with tens of thousands of participants denying that COVID exists or claiming that it just was a harmless flu. The AfD participated and gave these people a platform, and publicly denied the necessity of measures like mask-wearing, vaccinations, and contact restrictions. Plus, in Germany we have a long tradition of believers in alternative medicine, like homeopathy; many of these people joined the anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers, because they generally don’t trust official medicine. That’s why I said “usual” – we always have these people around, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, but they started to flock to the AfD as the only major party supporting their positions.
The Americans amongst us will know best, but I get the impression that Covid denialism and antivax delusionism are very popular among US Republicans.
In the UK they are (comparatively) marginal, though. The fullblown Paranoid Style has less traction here. Simple shameless disinformation is more the style of our UK rightists. Traditional British understatement and all that …
The home-schooling thing seems to come from the same psychopolitical pathology. Again, this does exist in the UK, but is really very niche here. Basically, we’re all Radical Socialists here. An Awful Warning to godly Americans of the damage that Cultural Marxism can do if not vigorously opposed by all means necessary. Sad.
“home-schooling”
I also heard some people in Africa wear no clothes. IDIOTS.
I brief, I respect any sort of anti-home-schooling sentiments no more and no less than entiments against people who marry [members of some other group which we should not marry]. For the same reason.
As an environment for getting education school is good for some and not others.
But the effect of going to school is not merely education (in this respect home-schooling can give just as much). It makes you similar to all other people who once went to school.
When I said that my ex-wive’s inability to tell a Russian from Jew and the fact that she is not Islamophobic at all (where by Islamophoby I mean something that you will very likelyh feel if you grow up as a Russian: a set of dark associations with Islam) may have (or not, I’m of course not confident) to do with that she did not attend school – I was not kidding. These and many other things you pick up there. Some of your dreams. Your plans.
And I think it is up to everyone to decide whether she wants integrate in this particular respect her child in the society of Russian-who-went-to-school, or a very different society of Tunisians-who-went-to-school or some other society that does not have a country (which would be the effect of home-schooling).
Just for the same reasons why you should not impose your marital preferences on others (well, again, if you’re not a Tunisian for great many Tunisians do impose these on their children).
As in Germany, so in Austria, except the FPÖ has about a third of the vote in current polls; barring a miracle, it’s going to be the bigger party in the next governing coalition, and Herbert Kickl, who has loudly promoted ivermectin and sued someone for libel who claimed he was secretly vaccinated, is going to be the head of the next government – at his rallies he’s already introduced by the neologism Volkskanzler.
The US has never quite grasped the concept of “party”. The parties there cannot exclude members; you’re a member if you claim to be one – not to the party but to your state in most cases, because the states hold the primaries for the parties (unless the party holds caucuses instead), and the parties don’t have membership fees.
Not the same thing. McConnell is clearly devoid of morals, or close; but he’s not an apparatchik, he tries to be the apparatus. He wants to be Senate Majority Leader for the rest of his life (a very unusual life goal for senators, most of whom would rather be POTUS).
I’ve met very smart kids in the US who were homeschooled and were clearly getting a great education. Some people really are qualified to teach children even if they don’t have a university diploma that says so.
But not only are such people really rare, the most common reason for homeschooling in the US is religious fundamentalism – the desire to keep the kids out of godless government school. The average results are… IDIOTS.
As in Germany, the vaccine-hesitant (to use the bureaucratese euphemism) in the U.S. have traditionally come in a quite wide and not particularly coherent range of ideological/philosophical/religious flavors. And I must say that the British medical establishment bears as much blame as anyone, since the 1998 publication by the Lancet of the notorious Wakefield et al. paper purporting to find the MMR vaccine causally implicated in autism is probably unparalleled as giving a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the skeptics. (Yes, the paper was eventually retracted, and most-but-not-all of the co-authors recanted, but to the skeptically-inclined that just looked like a coverup so the damage had already been done.)
Specific hesitancy about the covid vaccines sort of built on that pre-existent set of skeptical subcultures, but also had weird dynamics of its own, which initially pointed in a bunch of different directions ideologically.
I don’t know how large the overlap between the vaccine-hesitant subculture(s) and home-schooling subculture(s) is, but I expect it’s measurable but not overwhelming. In most parts of the U.S. it’s pretty easy to get a vaguely-religious exemption from the obligation to get your kid the standard vaccines before starting school, so it’s not even that the pragmatic ability to use homeschooling to avoid such bureaucratic requirements is particularly valuable in most areas.
But to return to weird Europeans and their weird political behavior, I would be interested in any insight into the recent European-Parliament electoral success of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which appears from a great distance to be a somewhat novel attempt to reshuffle who advances what policy positions to appeal to which voters.
The (definitely weird) BSW basically took the Putin disciples out of The Left. That’s why it makes a few right-wing noises as well.
So much so that, when Trump recently brought up Operation Warp Speed at one of his rallies, he was booed.
Yes, it’s weird. Operation Warp Speed did mean a lot for how the whole world got through the pandemic, and Trump and his health administration deserve a lot of credit for that. It was conceived (or at least sold) as an alternative to unpopular but actually available measures like mask mandates and quarantines — but with the change of government all that was forgotten, and the vaccines were another government assault on freedom.
the most common reason for homeschooling in the US is religious fundamentalism – the desire to keep the kids out of godless government school
Exactly. That’s what I was referring to. Many of the American missionaries I knew in Nigeria (many of whom were truly admirable people) took it as more or less axiomatic that this was the only right thing to do. Because paranoia, basically.
(I enjoyed the frisson I got in Nigeria from being regarded as dangerously liberal theologically. In Real Life, I’m more of a no-enemies-to-the-left hardliner, but the USians left me in the dust.)
The US has never quite grasped the concept of “party”. The parties there cannot exclude members; you’re a member if you claim to be one – not to the party but to your state in most cases, because the states hold the primaries for the parties (unless the party holds caucuses instead), and the parties don’t have membership fees.
it’s even less sensible than this! my description below is of the new york state democratic party, but the variations between the two parties and different states aren’t particularly wide, and basically never improve on this version.
yes, anyone can run in any primary, and even the bare minimum screening for residence in the district has been completely abandoned (witness nyc’s current lifelong far right republican mayor, who has lived in new jersey for his entire career). and yes, ordinary voters enrolled to vote in a particular party’s primary are not “members” in any meaningful sense.
but party membership does exist in a very strong way, with determining influence over who will be the party’s candidate (and thus, often, who will take office) in the vast majority of cases, in the form of “district leaders”/”state committee members” [scroll up from the link for explanation]. these happy few are almost always hand-picked by the party’s apparatus to run, generally unopposed (thus not even appearing on the ballot), in return for which they get to vote for the “Party Chair” (also generally standing unopposed), who holds the practical power within the party (including over the party’s money). they also staff the Board of Elections and select judicial candidates (again, almost never selected through a contested election; in “contested” races, frequently the same person is nominated by both parties). less formally, they constitute the pool from which candidates for higher office are drawn, the pool of people who can get a candidate the party apparatus’ support (and deliver the formal or informal opposition from the party apparatus that sinks other candidates), and generally the group whose influence determines a candidate’s success or failure.
and while there is no formal party discipline, the party apparatus makes it very clear who it considers part of the organization and who it does not, on very specific and explicitly ideological grounds. witness, for example, new york congressman bowman, who despite consistent enthusiastic votes for massive military aid to israel throughout his career is facing the party’s active opposition because he pays lip service to the idea of a ceasefire. it’s not about his actual, practical politics – i don’t think the man has ever voted against arming the far right’s favorite Herrenvolk – it’s about the centrality of explicitly stated unconditional zionism to the party’s self-definition. which is in stark contrast to, say, the place of reproductive rights in that self-definition: the democrats’ titular leader is one of many lifelong antiabortion politiicians who the party welcomes and promotes, often at the expense of candidates whose politics reflect their massively pro-abortion constituency.
the u.s. understands parties just fine; it insists, however, on illustrating the Founders’ stated oligarchic intent for the shape of the state they established, by demonstrating the basic incompatibility of an electoral system with anything even vaguely resembling democracy.
I mean, not as much as they claim; BioNTech/Pfizer did not take money from it, for example. But Moderna did.
True. I forget the details of the hows and whys.
@DM, what’s bothering you, the level of knowledge of mathematics (biology, …) or the fact that children of a fundamentalist are likely to become fundamentalists too?
@DE, so I compared it to marriage to make things clear. I can disagree with a fundamentalist.
But when she marries a fundamentalist (because she’s a fundamentalist) it is her choice. And a natural one.
Same with children.
No, things are not so simple. The motive for home-schooling is a view of secular society which really is paranoid: this is the same impulse that motivates the Trumpodules, viz the Horrid Marxists are going to murder us in our beds and teach our children pornography, so we must turn to our Hero Warrior to protect us – and crush them. The emergency is so great that his flaws are irrelevant.
I am harsh on these views because I actually share much of the worldview of the Trumpodules, to the extent that I actually can understand where they’re coming from. And what they have done is to create a fundamental perversion of Christianity which, whether or not it leads to a fascist takeover in the US, will damage Christianity in the US for generations.
Lots of secularity-rejecting Americans don’t homeschool because they belong to “thick” religious communities that have their own long-established and resolutely non-secular schools. Consider e.g. the Hasidim and the Amish. There are some Catholics who homeschool because they think whatever local nominally-Catholic school is available to them has become too secularized in the wake of Vatican 2, but for many generations a quite substantial percentage of American kids went to Catholic schools to inter alia deliberately discourage their assimilation into the dominant culture. In many parts of the U.S. there are private schools run under evangelical-Protestant auspices that can be as rigorous as one might want or not want (they often have some home-brew “statement of faith” on their websites and will have varying policies re the admission of students whose parents are not on board with that statement). I’m not sure to what extent evangelicals who homeschool don’t live convenient to such an option or have other motives, which would probably involve an unstable mix of radical individualism and a belief that the family is the God-ordained foundational unit of society and thus (there’s some handwaving here because it need not logically follow …) the natural institution to be in charge of education.
Yes, you’re right: the matter is much more complex than I made it appear.
I myself went to a Catholic-free school: you could be Church of Scotland, or (at a pinch) Jewish, but Catholicism was right out. One has to draw the line somewhere …
In the UK, religion-affiliated schools are mostly a dodge for getting your children into a relatively selective school without all that painful business of actually paying for it. One one level, this gives me hope for my country …
@DE, but then a fundamentalist can marry another fundamentalist because she is really paranoid.
And it remains her personal choise, the marriage I mean. I can criticise her thinking but not her choise of spouce (yes, I know, lots of people do criticise other people’s choices…).
Also, yes, attending school in Tunisia is not the same as attending school in Russia (i’m not speaking of language here) which is not the same as being home-schooled. You certainly won’t get “dark associations” with Islam in a Tunisian school.
Instead you’ll learn that al-Kahina is an asshole.
School is not just a place where people study maths. It is a place where people become a part of a particular (but very large and mainstream) (sub)culture. If someone prefers one such subculture to another (or prefers none among those associated with schooling), it is not particularly weird or paranoid. There is something to like or dislike about various versions of such cultures.
(this is why my initial reaction abotu naked Africans: we “all” wear clothes so people who do not MUST be silly or wrong. And so must be people who for whatever reason dislike other aspects of our culture which we pick in school)
Meanwhile, from what I know, homeschooling is not per se “weird”, “wrong”, “inefficient” or whatever. Can be difficult for many but not all, and I guess your child will be happier if she can socialise with other children – and in modern urban society finding this outside of school would require some effort (still a tiny private school remains an option).
It’s not the homeschooling that I’m getting aerated about. It’s the motives for homeschooling.
The (definitely weird) BSW basically took the Putin disciples out of The Left. That’s why it makes a few right-wing noises as well.
To me that looks like mixing up cause and effect. Wagenknecht has for years maintained that current progressive identity politics aka wokery and an immigrant-and diversity-friendly stance have alienated the Left from the working class whose interests it claims to represent, and are driving them into the arms of the AfD. So her approach is to combine (what in Germany passes for) radically left economic and social policies with nativist paroles that would allow the AfD to sue her for intellectual property violation. It just so happens that people receptive for such paroles also tend to be Putin fans (as is SW), so that those naturally ended up in her grouping. But my understanding is that the Left, due to traditions of Pacifism and Anti-Americanism, mostly still objects against military support for Ukraine and find excuses for Russia, even if the most ardent Putin fans have left now.
And in fact the Chomsky Himself has moved on from excusing the Khmer Rouge to becoming a Putin apologist.
“nativist paroles” — is that the German sense of Parole as ‘(politics) slogan’? I don’t think English has that use.
The level of knowledge of biology, history, physics, geography, civics… even reading, writing and arithmetics. Many homeschooled children in the US are much worse at reading than the average of their age.
@Hans the percentage of people in Germany who said they didn’t want to get vaccinated against COVID was around 30%. … Plus, in Germany we have a long tradition of believers in alternative medicine, like homeopathy; many of these people joined the anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers, because they generally don’t trust official medicine.
Thank you Hans, yes I was aware of the homeopathy gig: many of the practitioners in NZ are from Germany or trained there.
The only anti-vaxxer I know personally in NZ is German. He alleges he’s allergic to vaxxes — based on no evidence at all, so far as I can tell/perhaps he’s aware that’s deeply unpopular in NZ with its fine tradition of public health. (The Andrew Wakefield episode didn’t register here.) His partner is a teacher, who was more or less mandated to get COVID-vaxxed, to minimise it passing around at school. So he kept catching it and passing it on to her. Each time, she recovered much more quickly. Eventually he got sacked (for no clear reason I could make out: partly time lost, partly arguing with management).
What I didn’t understand is the high proportion of COVID-deniers in Germany. So why is it “usual” not to trust official medicine? Have there been some specific episodes? Presumably not the ‘experiments’ carried out by eugenicists in the 1930’s(?)
I get the impression that Covid denialism and antivax delusionism are very popular among US Republicans.
And particularly the Religious Right? What was Pence’s stand (I don’t recall.)
In NZ, the vociferous COVID deniers were indeed Religious Right/U.S. influenced. There was one particular so-called ‘charismatic’ Christian leader. At the occupation of parliament grounds, MAGA hats were in much evidence WTF?
Any mention of homeschooling in Ireland will bring up the Burke family of Castlebar, who have done very well in the state exams but less well in their many religious-discrimination lawsuits.
If they were really proper evangelical Christians they would have named at least one daughter Hephzibah. They are obviously a false-flag CIA operation.
I would guess that 60–70% of Americans who are home-schooled or anti-vax come to it from the right side of the map; the rest come from the neo-hippie side. For home schooling, WP’s statistics support this. For anti-vaxing, Matt Bors’s cartoon says it all, back in merry old pre-Trump, pre-COVID 2015, when it became evident that measles is not getting eradicated any time soon.
It appears that the population of the United States was at least once adorned with the gracious presence of a lady named Hephzibah Burke (1877-1917), probably born in Missouri.
@DE, but you would not speak like this if it were “choosing one tooth paste rather than the other” (for very, very weird reasons) or “working in one company (or being self-employed) rather than the other” (and saying of this other company those very things that fundamentalists say about school).
Or maybe you would if (a) really weird things are said about this other company, so weird that they become interesting or (b) it is your company.
Also I compared it to marriage, and you said “No, things are not so simple.” and then… spoke about reasons. But we both know that people marry for all sorts of reasons. How you can dismiss this analogy based on this?
Also ordinary school IS horrible and evil from fundamentalist perspective. It DOES teach things whcih they believe to be evil. And an ordinary Russian school DOES teach things which I believe to be evil (and you too).
_____
Likely if I have children they’ll go to school (though perhaps in more than one country).
I’m sensitive to attacks on homeschooling because in some countries (Germany) to my shock it is banned, and because some people say it should be banned.
So attacks on it are not innocent grumbling.
What bothers me:
1. speaking of it as if it is somehow “weird” and not just one of options you have when you want to give education to your child (and an option that totally CAN work). Not just different tooth paste.
2. Speaking of it as if it is not private matter but public matter.
“The level of knowledge of biology, history, physics, geography, civics… even reading, writing and arithmetics.”
@DM, thanks. Unfortunately I don’t know stats:(
but you would not speak like this if it were “choosing one tooth paste rather than the other”
Well, yes, I would speak like this if the motive for choosing one toothpaste was that the other toothpaste was Satanic or part of a global conspiracy to corrupt my children.
Once again: it’s not the home schooling as such that I am taking issue with, drasvi: it is the motive for choosing home schooling among the majority of those who do so in the US. That motive implies a siege-mentality concept of Christianity which I (as a Christian) believe to be highly damaging both to those who espouse it and to society in general.
US Christians are the least-persecuted and least-threatened group of Christians in the entire world. Anyone encouraging them to believe otherwise has evil motives, and those of them who do believe it are either ineffably ignorant or have evil motives of their own.
Much of this supposed “threat” is, of course, merely the “threat” of being denied power over the lives of non-Christian fellow-citizens. As the actual Gospel is in fact largely concerned with voluntarily giving up power, which in most of its aspects is the antithesis of love, these people are denying the actual core of genuine Christianity by their attitudes.
US Christians are the least-persecuted and least-threatened group of Christians in the entire world.
Even as we speak, the holy and pious state of Louisiana has been sued by a group of godless (or god-differing) parents for enacting a law that requires the ten (10) commandments to be posted in every classroom of every public school. And you have the gall, sir, to claim they are not being persecuted!
True. The Satanic legal system of the US is a threat to all right-thinking persons. I spoke too soon. I was unthinkingly discounting the degree to which Cultural Marxism has been incorporated into the very Constitution of the United States. But help is at hand!
The most-popular or second-most-popular (depending on measuring methodology) brand of toothpaste in the U.S. is manufactured by Procter & Gamble (a long-ago employer of my father FWIW), who have for decades been intermittently dogged by rumors of being in league with Satan, apparently promulgated by what you might call an unholy alliance of wackadoodle evangelical-adjacent types and business rivals of P&G who may have more secular and Mammon-related motivations. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/procter-gamble-satan-conspiracy-theory
I am somewhat baffled by the Davids’ ire. Complaining about people who educate their own children (whether well or poorly) seems like complaining about people who cook their own meals (whether well or poorly) rather than deferring to the credentials and professional expertise of highly-trained restaurant workers. Of course, you do learn a lot of very valuable and indeed sobering life lessons about the dark side of human nature from attending school, just as you do by working in a restaurant. Often the same lessons, about vanity and incompetence and the petty tyranny of people put in positions of authority.
Proctor and Gamble
I knew it! It all fits, I tell you!
By the way, JWB, there is a rumour that you yourself may be … how shall I put this … a lawyer?
I am of course confident that this is merely a scurrilous attempt to impugn your integrity, but I am sure that you would welcome this opportunity to set the record straight.
I was thinking (I don’t know why) about toothpaste “Fiacla óg” which I bought (for the obvious reason:)) once here in Moscow in 90s
And yes, it would suffice to just utter the name, P&G. It’s obvious that something is wrong about P&G.
I am struck by the lack of faith in our governments exhibited here: if the State of Louisiana requires that the Ten Commandments be exhibited in every classroom in every public school, then I think all teachers should comply.
The only matter that is open for debate is to my mind this one: Should the original Hebrew version, the koine Greek version, the official Latin version (i.e. the Vulgate), the French (this is Louisiana!) one, the Spanish one (There are more L1 Spanish than French speakers in Louisiana now…) or an English version (which one?) be exhibited?
If I were teaching in a Louisiana classroom I think I would opt for Latin, French and Spanish: this would be a WONDERFUL way to introduce students to the joys of historical Romance linguistics. Teachers more at home in comparative Semitic might consider juxtaposing Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Ge’ez: Not a bad way to introduce the kids to comparative Semitic. Add a version in Paleo-Hebrew script (plus Latin and Greek) and you would also have the raw material for a good introduction to the history of writing.
And for those of you who think homeschooling by conservative Christian parents is problematic: If my suggestion above is followed, why, parents would be so eager to have their Children read (and be taught the original meaning of) the original words of the Lord that homeschooling will probably be declared a devilish idea.
I can just imagine the tears of joy that every conservative Christian parent would shed upon learning that their child has analyzed morpheme-by-morpheme sentences from the Vulgate Bible- such as “Et iterum dico vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum”. What a radical change from the cultural Marxism the poor children are exposed to today…after all, if the above came true they would be learning actual grammar!
Unfortunately the bill does specify exactly what text should be posted. It’s in English and doesn’t match any Bible version.
Hm. My teacher of … hm.
Let’s call it art (though the Soviet school discipline is called “drawing”) made us make mosaics (paper) of Biblical scenes. A secular teacher.
After neolithic pots (actual clay), Egyptian frescoes and before medieval stained
glassplastic.For a while they were covering the classroom wall but they were large and they moved them to the assembly hall (still there when I graduated, but I hope not now. Hope because mine (Noah) was horrible)
Much of this supposed “threat” is, of course, merely the “threat” of being denied power over the lives of non-Christian fellow-citizens.
That’s slightly unfair. Secular society represents a direct threat to evangelical Christianity because it encourages people to leave the Church. By any measure participation in organized religion in the US is significantly down, churches have lost a great deal of influence in their communities, and, if I am being slightly cynical, a reduction in believers is a threat to the material well being of evangelical pastors. Is it short-sighted of evangelicals to support Trump and similar politicians who actually succeed only in driving young women out of evangelical Christianity? Very much so, but people who are panicking make bad decisions. If I were an evangelical pastor living in a world where religion has to compete with a myriad of material comforts and entertainment options that make traditional Christianity seem like a relic of the distant past maybe I would be panicking as well.
It’s in English
Of course it is. A key tenent of the Americanist heresy is that the United States of America is chosen by God to be the light unto the world, and therefore English is the only proper language of Christianity.
That said, choosing to display the Cecil B. DeMille version of the ten commandments is kind of genius.
“nativist paroles” — is that the German sense of Parole as ‘(politics) slogan’? I don’t think English has that use.
Yes. A false friend made it through 🙂
What I didn’t understand is the high proportion of COVID-deniers in Germany. So why is it “usual” not to trust official medicine? Have there been some specific episodes? Presumably not the ‘experiments’ carried out by eugenicists in the 1930’s(?)
My “usual” was meant in the way of “the usual suspects” – it’s not that everyone doesn’t trust official medicine, but there is a sufficiently significant minority that probably most people in Germany have a couple of them in their wider circle of acquaintance, that they reliably show up in the public debate, and that they are able to influence policy (e.g., several of the self-governed obligatory health insurance societies through which a major part of our public health system is financed pay for homeopathic treatments).
I’m not an expert on the development of these tendencies, but homeopathy was an influential current already before the Nazis, and some Nazi leaders were supporters of alternative medicine, for a mix of reasons – support of romanticised traditional folk medicine, general fondness for occult teachings, and antipathy against “Jewish” modern science. I guess the distrust against official medicine among a significant minority is partly a reaction against the traditional German authoritarian culture that used to command and prescribe rather than convince and explain. And the general tolerance of German institutions and society towards such currents after the war is also a reaction against that traditional authoritarianism. Mostly they were seen as harmless weirdos who harmed nobody but themselves, at least until they started to endanger everybody during the pandemic.
a reduction in believers is a threat to the material well being of evangelical pastors
And, given that so many of these Godly persons subscribe to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
to their spiritual well-being also, as a consequence.
(The Prosperity Gospel was the worst of the many grotesque heresies that ever-creative American Christians have come up with, until they upped the ante with Trumpolatry: to be fair, Trumpolatry is in accordance with their basic tenets. Points for staying true to their principles.)
Prosperity theology
Ah, yes: the ‘charismatic’ I mentioned in NZ takes tithes from his followers, and is a) filthy rich; b) a collector of top-end Harley-Davidsons. On being challenged how ostentatious wealth is consistent with Christianity, he responded “Jealousy is part of the promotion of god”.
‘Thou shalt not covet …’ features prominently on the aforementioned Cecil B. DeMille production, I see.
So far from being anything politically “usual” the Political Party associated with his church “garnered 0.6 per cent of the vote”; dropping to 0.34% in last year’s election where they were in a umbrella grouping of COVID-deniers.
@lh 24/06 17.43
To be fair to Chomsky (OK, why should one), re his defence of the Khmer Rouge at the time there was a total blackout, so the only sources of information were first-person reports by refugees (I don’t know what the Vietnamese government knew or was reporting at that time)
(1) he was conditioned to think of the way the refugees’ stories were used in news reporting as black propaganda or headline grabbing–this was at a time when “Lech Walesa questioned for two hours without being offered cup of tea” was front page news, whereas ” Communist sympathisers accuse government of using stadium as detention and torture centre for thousands” might get a short squib on an inside page below “two-headed baby born in Albuquerque”.
(2) if the only source of information is refugees, or the government they are fleeing, how do you evaluate the information?
If Chomsky had been of age in the ’30s, he would have defended Stalin’s show trials. He’s that kind of leftist.
Re “he was conditioned”: conditioned by whom? Why the passive voice w/o specification of agent? And why is he being treated as if he lacks agency and accountability but is merely a hapless victim of “conditioning”?
I don’t think Walesa became a worldwide celebrity until the Gdansk shipyard strike that commenced in August 1980, 18 months after the Khmer Rouge regime was evicted from Phnom Penh by the invading Vietnamese Communists. Although maybe someone can come up with a date on which Chomsky first said something negative about Walesa? Maybe Chomsky was ahead of the curve on denouncing him as a capitalist-imperialist stooge or something.
If you feel the need to be fair to Chomsky, one might note that he was one of comparatively few voices in the mid-Seventies who inveighed against the Indonesian seizure of East Timor. He only took that position because that was at the time the Communist-approved view of the issue, of course. East Timor eventually got its freedom IMHO in part because with the passage of time it attracted a different set of outside supporters who bought into a Catholics-oppressed-by-Muslims frame rather than a Communists-oppressed-by-a-Kissinger-backed-strongman frame.
If you feel the need to be fair to Chomsky, one might note that he was one of comparatively few voices in the mid-Seventies who inveighed against the Indonesian seizure of East Timor.
Yes, I still remember and appreciate that.
Rather than reply in detail, I would like to apologise for derailing the thread. My concerns were more about evaluation and presentation of information in mass media and less about the political messages or content of the information. I recognise that the two are intertwined and am sorry for not providing a hypothetical example contemporary with the unfortunate reign of Pol Pot, I have no reason even to think there was a report of a two-headed baby born anywhere, much less in Albuquerque, during said interval.
No problem, it gave me an excuse to bash the Chomp a little more, which is always welcome!
I have no reason even to think there was a report of a two-headed baby born anywhere, much less in Albuquerque, during said interval
Why not? There was a pair of conjoined twins born in Bawku when I lived there. (I don’t know what became of them. They don’t appear in the list on WP.)
Admittedly, Albuquerque is more obscure than Bawku, which has its own chieftaincy and everything. I’ve never been to Albuquerque, but I dare say somebody has. Unless it’s like Bielefeld, of course.
Some seem to fall into a third category (and I forgot where I read this). Somewhere in the Gospels, Jesus says his followers are going to be persecuted. Suffering, perhaps, from homeschooled logic, the people in question turn this around and conclude that if you’re not being persecuted, that means you’re not following Jesus!
The natural consequence is that they try to find something, anything, that might count as persecution. Often it’s the fact that they’re “being denied power over the lives of non-Christian fellow-citizens” as mentioned.
Speaking of power, there’s Dominionism, which says Christians (narrowly defined) have the duty to rule this world until Jesus returns. Dominionists are not being persecuted as much as they perhaps should be.
Oh, if only.
Think of the children! I mean it. Unlike meals, children can suffer; society has a certain amount of duties to them, and that includes not letting their parents wreck them.
Lots of problems in where to draw lines there, granted. I’m not surprised that homeschooling is for example broadly legal in the US, legal under heavy regulation in Austria, and completely illegal in Germany, and I haven’t personally figured out which of these, if any, is best or least bad. But – in any case – parents cannot morally do whatever they want to their children. Children are people, not property.
…
…
…
It’s the version from the monumental movie, plus Fraternal Order of Eagles. I have no words for how monumentally hilarious this is. There you go thinking “Republican Jesus” is a parody meme, and then He rises right in front of your eyes!
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.” That’s the one that’s listed separately, not his wife as in Deuteronomy. Much funnier than the Simpsons’s “Presbylutherans”!
We had to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
*raising hand* Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, annual meeting 2018. It’s a nice place, but I can immediately believe it’s more obscure than Bawku.
I concur, and should emphasize the strong and explicit backlash to authoritarianism that happened in Germany (and to a lesser extent Austria) especially from around 1968 through the whole 70s. Speaking of education, antiautoritäre Erziehung doesn’t seem to have spread to other places; it basically consists of never telling your children no and never letting anyone else tell them no either, lest they ever get used to following orders and end up participating in another two world wars or worse.
(There, too, of course, the outcomes vary. Some of the kids turned out fine, some came out confused and unsure, and a few became the exact insufferable brats that your worst conservative impulses are leading you to imagine.)
Well, I don’t understand how one can discuss Chomsky without also talking about what PP is talking about.
Of course, in presence of anti-X propaganda from a source S one can begin dismissing everythin bad said by S about X. Moreover it can be very difficult to determine what of what S says is true.
If it is not difficult (in a particular) case, one must mention that.
The problem with Chomsky’s politics is fundamentally the same as with his linguistics: he is constitutionally unable to admit that he might be wrong about anything.
In science, no matter how clever you are (and he is clever), that makes you a pseudoscientist.
In politics, it means that when you’re right (and he often has been) you’re basically only right by accident.
Come to think of it, Chomsky’s bizarre insistence that language is primarily for thinking inside your own head rather than communicating with others may be a reflection of his own conviction that communicating with others (especially in this matter of listening to the views of others) is not actually very important at all.
@DM, at least I know that as an adult I don’t want to raise my children in Germany (though, again, I’m not against school – unless children themselves are against it*) and as a child – if I knew this – I would be happy that I was born not in Germany. For quite the same reason why if I were a woman I would be glad to be born not in KSA.
*sarcasm about people who remind that chidlren are human beings and don’t care about what children themselves think is tempting, but you may have nothing to do with such people.
To David M.’s undoubted shock and horror, American law and political culture believes in the right of parents to educate their own children as they see fit to such a radical extent that the key Supreme Court precedent usually relied on specifically affirms the right of parents to have a child as young as ten years old taught how to read the German language,* despite the considered judgment of the Nebraska legislature that teaching exotic foreign languages associated with hostile and barbarous foreign powers to a child that young was inconsistent with the public welfare and the child’s own best interests.
*They weren’t homeschoolers, but had sent their child to “a parochial school maintained by Zion Evangelical Lutheran Congregation” in Hamilton County, which sounded suspiciously like a potential hotbed of pro-Kaiser fifth-columnism and/or probable resistance to full assimilation into Unhyphenated-Americanism.
Chomsky’s bizarre insistence that language is primarily for thinking inside your own head rather than communicating with others
Hot off the Press! Ain’t. (Fedorenko et al., Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. Nature 630, 575, 19/6/2024.)
Hah! I just posted about that.
Recent evidence is now thought to suggest that the Pope may be a Catholic.
How did Fedorenko et al get a paper on linguistics into Nature without any Bayesian statistics? Looks like a failure of peer review there …
he is constitutionally unable to admit that he might be wrong about anything
Has Chomsky been an LLM all this time?
There are certainly analogies, at the very least.
A lack of access to any language-external reality, so that correlation of form with meaning is impossible.
You could say (and I think I previously did say) that a Chomskyan true-believer could point to the undoubted abilities of Automated Plagiarism Engines to produce any number of perfectly “acceptable” sentences without any access to real-world meaning whatsoever, and say that this vindicates the core Chomskyan precept that syntax has nothing to do with meaning at all.
(The true believer would be wrong, however: the APE’s ability to do this is parasitic on the abilities of meaning-processing human beings to create the texts it has plagiarised from.)
As to the Chomskybot itself … you can actually download it. It will run satisfactorily even on machines with quite limited processing power.
An off-topic question for David Eddyshaw that I will stick here for the sake of convenience. I was recently listening, as one does, to the 1974 musical composition “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy” by the notorious Welshman (and indeed L1 Welsh-speaker in childhood) John Cale.* I was struck by the oddity that he pronounced “orgy” with a “hard g” (/ɡ/). The internet purports to assure me that the “standard” (RP) British pronunciation is with a “soft g” (/dʒ/) just as in AmEng. So my question is whether the hard g is a Welsh thing or a more individual idiosyncrasy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWSGtZ2ZxaU
*Island Records in its wisdom chose to release this track as a single in the UK market, although it’s not clear to me if it had more potential mainstream commercial appeal than all eight other tracks on the _Fear_ LP.
An interesting question. Daniel Jones is also unaware of a /g/ version.
A Caleism, I reckon.
The Welsh word for “orgy” is orji. Internal evidence suggests that this may be a loanword from English. This would of course be expected, in view of the famously virtuous character of the Welsh people. Prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, the Britons lacked the concept of orgies.
Possibly there has been some confusion with “Oggy oggy oggy!”, an ancient British war cry attributed to Caratacus.
So instead of trying to argue that the Nebraska legislature was wrong about what was inconsistent with the child’s own best interests, the SCOTUS threw the whole concept out?
@David M.: Well, they sort of also said the legislature was wrong, because that was the sort of thing judges were more likely to say out loud in the loosey-goosey days of 1923, but the legislature being wrong was only really relevant against the assumption of a background right of parents to make decisions regarding their children’s education. And also the assumption of a background right to make an honest living as a teacher of German, although that last right has probably fared more poorly over the intervening century.
@David E.: In English “orgy” is said to be a loanword from French, which got it from Latin (“orgia”), which got it from Greek. I know Welsh is chock-full of Latin-origin loanwords left over from a pre-Anglo-Saxon period of invasion and conquest, but perhaps there are particular ways to tell that Welsh “orji” is not part of that Caratacus-era stratum but a more recent borrowing from English?
J.
I assume the virtuous character also prevented them from knowing the concept of orgasm.
The list of translations in wiktionary is about the most boring list I ever saw.
“Oggy oggy oggy!”
“Oyg oyg oyg!”
I assume the virtuous character also prevented them from knowing the concept of orgasm
We are a simple people.
Before the Romans came, we even lacked the concept of “children”, which is why we had to borrow plant from the Latin.
It is evident that, then as now, Britain relied on a steady stream of immigration to mantain our population and standard of living.
Some kidnapping may also have been involved.
However, by the time that the English arrived, we had learnt the knack. Unfortunately they declined to accept our assurances that their help was now superfluous.
It is my pleasure to report that I just encountered an example of nervy bee (nervous breakdown) in the wild.
The ones involving single letters (menty b, jacky p) remind me of Bertie Wooster’s phrases like eggs and b, though I don’t think he ever did the -y thing.
Thinking back through the years, I’ve heard ‘orgy’ in Australia with a hard g in a jocular sense.
As for my Anglophobia, my comment was indeed about Britain’s regrettable slide into irrelevance, as Trond pointed out. IMHO Britain has shot itself in the foot. There was no absolute Brexit mandate. Brexit wasn’t even approved by a majority of the electorate, and certainly didn’t reflect the views of the younger generation. It’s been pushed through to its final ignominious conclusion by the very worst type of politician.
DM responded with the argument that Britain is exceedingly relevant, just not in a way that (it seems to me) should make the British proud. I have to agree with him.
At any rate, it’s my fault that the thread turned into a heated discussion on political trends. My apologies.
BTW, would you accept “Champsky”? He is after all quite a “champ”.
Chempsky (with the expected umlaut.)
Chömpsky for the Metal, though.
I didn’t realise the insulting nuances of “champ” are confined to Australia.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/im-american-never-realised-common-32244231.amp
Although I would call it sarcastic rather than insulting. At any rate, any negative nuances would probably fly right over his head. He would take it as well-deserved flattery.
The cost of Brexit:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jun/29/top-scientists-turning-down-uk-jobs-over-tax-on-talent-says-wellcome-boss
@br
I am very surprised that bankers (maybe together with venture capitalists) have not identified this as a good if niche opportunity to provide loans (at a reasonable profit, taking into account the risk) or even for educational charities or institutions to do the same (at no profit and accepting part of the risk).
I didn’t realise the insulting nuances of “champ” are confined to Australia.
They are not. I wouldn’t say the word is “very offensive” in America, but it is usually, in my experience, used as a form of addresss by American men to condescend or even insult: “nice job there, champ” if someone does something clumsy for example.
When “champ” is used positively as a form of address in America, my sense anyway, it is when adults are talking to children. Hence, probably, the sense of condescension when used as a form of address between peers.
“Champ” used in the third person is generally positive, possibly even in Australia? That was not clear from the article.
I’m not sure if it is a generational divide or a gender divide that made the young American woman so clueless.
In AmE at least, not just “champ”. For a sarcastic “Nice job, —”, most stale, old-fashioned familiar terms of address will do: “ace”, “bucko”, “pal”. But not the current and earnest “buddy”.
I can’t think of good feminine equivalents. “Nice job, lady” sounds sarcastic, but with clashing modes of sarcasm. I am not sure about the nuances of “girlfriend”.
@Y: It’s interesting that some of those can be made to sound menacing with the right intonation: buddy, especially, but also pal and bucko. However, if you say ace or champ the same way, it sounds sarcastic but not aggressive.
In Glasgow, you’re OK so long as you’re being called “Jimmy”, but it’s better not to push your luck if you’re being called “pal.”
So “Champsky” might work? (Even my spellchecker corrected it to “Chomsky” 🙁 )
Could have corrected it to “(1a) *Champsky”
Is there anything definite known about the origin of the insulting use of champ in Australia?
I’ve been puzzled by this ever since I watched this scene in Mr Inbetween.