William F. Buckley realized in the 1950s that the right wing was going to have to re-package itself, though he didn't use that term. This resolute enemy of academic freedom began with the Wilde-style paradox that he was really FOR academic freedom, while the majority of the Yale faculty, by teaching that capitalism was faulty & inefficient and that human beings were better off not ceding their decision-making to others, were in fact opposing freedom. This Orwellian inversion has been at the heart of the conservative movement: by opposing public education, they were really supporting learning. By wanting to teach evolution as a theory no different than the theory of creation, they were advancing debate and equality. By refusing to admit minorities in higher numbers, they were fighting "reverse" racism.
And so we have now the degenerate fifth-decade conservospawn with their nutso claims of that decent healthcare in fact is an attempt to kill old people and that urging children to stay in school & asking kids to help the president do that is really mind control.
These mind-manipulators should know. They've been in the business of lying & swapping labels since Billy Buckley wrote his "God and Man at Yale," the template for every other right-wring pro-American anti-socialist racist screed ever since . . .
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Jay, have you ever heard of the Confucian doctrine of the "rectification of names"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names In a nutshell it claims that most of the disorder in society stems from a failure to call things what they really are. It seems quite simple, but when you start to unravel it, you realize how complicated and confusing things can get, especially when people deliberately disconnect words from their meanings.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reeference; I'd never heard of the Rectification of Names; but this instantly recalls the realist-nominalist debate, as well as the careers of the Sophists. In my high school humanities class, I defended Plato against Aristotle, only realizing later that my teacher had misrepresented Aristotle as a sort of nominalist. Ironically, the acronym for Rectification of Names is RON, and who was more infamous for cheery falsification of language than President RON, who labelled the radical Muslim Afghans 'freedom fighters' when they were killing Russians in our proxy war?
ReplyDeleteNarcissistic asshats. You've ruined the world and are looking to blame Reagan for it?
ReplyDeleteThe gall.
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