Traditionally, humans are accorded five senses – touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.
The function of each of these senses, alone or in combination, is to connect humans to reality.
Today I was thinking about how reality is being assaulted through these senses.
We create fake materials that feel like leather, fake meat that tastes (sort of) like real meat, we recreate smells of flowers, leather, bourbon, and other fragrances to fool the sense of smell but in the grand scheme of things, the most damaging efforts have been through the senses of hearing and now, sight.
Musing about how the political left loves to twist language and how, throughout history, some of the greatest enemies have been linguists (or simple propagandists). Jacque Derrida was a linguist who invented deconstructionism and people like Naom Chomsky, another formally trained linguist, and our friends from the Land of the Woke, have worked to contort words and phrases into things unrecognizable to most English speakers. Utilizing non sequitur, they connect the unconnectable and disconnect the connected to further their revolution – actually, there is such a thing as “revolutionary truth”, a concept that the only true things are those which serve to advance the revolution (this “truth” doesn’t necessarily need to be true).
Let’s not forget the approved language of the “style guides” of the major dead tree media. Major newspapers haven invented a sort of “style guide propaganda” in which they call the butchering gender confused children “gender affirming healthcare”, abortion becomes “reproductive health choices” and in a form of lying by omission, they aren’t allowed to give a full description of an alleged criminal if that person is a member of a favored group.
They write headlines like AP did in the case of Laken Riley: “The killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes”.
Yeah, that’s burying the lede, for sure.
They also create their own language by creating acronyms like BIPOC, LGBTQ2A++, POC and words like “Latinx”. These things spread, not because most people are into left wing linguistics – or even understand what a linguist does – but because they are too ashamed or too afraid to be ostracized by people, mostly well meaning, sympathetic white people, who desperately want to be in with the cool kids.
But think about the masters of propaganda – namely Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Paul Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was technically a philologist, a discipline that incorporates comparative linguistics in a historical context – but who am I to split hairs? Goebbels was a master of combining imagery with words, words that were defined by Hitler himself, to create a powerful wave of persuasion that washed over the German populace.
Given the performance of Gemini, Googles AI language model, and how it initially refused to conjure up pictures of Anglos – the Vikings were black (who knew?) as were the Popes - and to top that off, there were female popes (even though there never has been a female or POC – Pope of Color), it sure seems Google is doing evil (remember their old slogan – “Don’t be evil”?) by changing the imagery they deliver in the same way lefty linguists have changed language.
I guess distorting words covers the sense of hearing and the corruption of images covers the sense of sight.
Earlier, I posted this on Facebook:
What makes information valuable is its accuracy and trustworthiness.
What will kill the Internet will be the actions of companies built on and by the internet to corrupt that accuracy and trustworthiness. The concern trolling over "disinformation" is a license to censor and the minute the Internet giants entered this phase, they became rent seekers.
I mistakenly said people would recognize the devaluation of the information and summarily reject it, but I was wrong. Several friends pointed out there are a lot of people across the Fruited Plain who want to be lied to, to be fooled, to be kept in a state of ignorance.
They are happier that way.
I kinda agree with them and in a moment of clarity, I deduced the goal of the anti-civilizationist forces is to make reality completely synthetic to better control it.
The Matrix it ain’t, but we are getting pretty damned close.
Discernment of truth requires effort and rational analysis. We need to help our fellow travelers Michael -- what you do well. Thank you