Need help with language

[Adam H. Kerman]

I need to write something up about encouraging housing development. I'd
like to translate what I write into new woke speak, 'cuz housing will
become more "equitable", but I don't write like that and don't know how
to do it. My brain rejects the use of "equitable" in that manner and
it's a word essentially without meaning from what I can tell, except to
imply criticism and declare evidence of racial discrimination.

There's no Google translate for wokier writing. If I just give
it to moviePig to re-write, it won't be readable by a 20 year old
either, so that's out of the question.

What do newspaper editors and tv news producers use since they all talk
like that these days, even the ones my age?

[Rhino]

Adam, Adam, Adam. I'm surprised at you. Haven't you cottoned on to the
fact that woke simply means that whites are evil oppressors so that
anyone non-white is automatically oppressed but virtuous? Therefore,
"equity" is anything which puts whites (and their Asian allies) in their
place - the bottom of the heap - and that elevates non-whites to a
position in keeping with their superior virtue (and simultaneous
compensates them for their oppression).

With respect to housing policy then, all the good places go to "people
of colour" and all the dumps go to whites (and their allies). THAT is
"housing equity". In much the same way, "educational equity" would
involve putting "people of colour" in all the best schools with all the
best teachers while whites getting what's left over.

In housing, education, etc. white heterosexual males get the absolute
worst of everything, white heterosexual women get slightly better, white
gay men get slightly better than that, and so forth. The more boxes you
can tick for being "different", the higher you are in the pyramid and
the more you get, although the white or Asian with the absolute most
bonus points still gets less than the lowest-rated "person of colour".
The same process takes place among "people of colour": simply having a
colour (that isn't white) gives you the lowest level of housing,
schooling, etc. for people of colour. You get additional points and
therefore better education, housing, etc. for being female, "differently
gendered", homosexual, pansexual, disabled, etc. etc.

I hope that helped.

--
Rhino

[Bill Idgerant]

I recommend the following item from Jonah Goldberg, an issue of the G
File from the Dispatch titled Looking for Policy Solutions in the
Dictionary as a starting point for your research...

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon allegedly
says Rome’s slide into decline was a period in which “bizarreness
masqueraded as creativity.” Alas, I haven’t been able to find the Gibbon
quote in the book(s)—then again I’ve also never been to Lima, Peru, but
I’m perfectly happy to take it on faith that it exists.

Anyway, whether he said it or not, this observation struck a chord with
me. It’s a bit reminiscent of the famous distinction drawn by Hubbins
and Tufnel: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” But I
think there’s a subtle difference. Most stupidity isn’t bizarre, and not
all cleverness is necessarily creative.

I know I’ve mentioned it a few times before, but I think it’s worth
repeating one of my favorite scenes from Don Quixote. I’ll paraphrase:

A man walks to the center of town and invites a crowd to watch the show
he’s about to put on. The man then picks up a dog and inserts a tube
into its rump. He begins to inflate the dog. The crowd watches,
fascinated. The dog grows larger. Eventually, the man pulls the tube out
and lots of air noisily escapes, fart-like, from the dog’s butt as it
runs away. The man turns to the crowd expectantly and asks: “You think
it’s easy to inflate a dog with a tube?”

I often bring this up when someone tells me there’s a lot of effort
behind stuff I think is artistically unimpressive or worthless. I have
no doubt it took some doing for Piero Manzoni to defecate in a can and
call it art, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to be impressed
with his artistry (even though one can argue it was simultaneously
clever and bizarre). It wasn’t easy to make all the Transformers
movies—I couldn’t do it—but that doesn’t mean I have to be impressed
with the end result.

One of the themes I’ve been harping on—a phrase that entered the
language in the 1500s, which originally meant to play the same string
over and over again—is that we as a culture have given words too much
power. I’ve already done more recycling than an old fashioned girl scout
paper drive, so I won’t repeat all of my arguments. Suffice it to say
that any society where people can plausibly claim that violence is
speech and speech is violence has a problem grasping some fundamental
distinctions; it’s lost the ability to distinguish between bizarre and
clever. I think this stuff is most prevalent and intellectually
developed on the left, but it’s in the cultural groundwater now (the
defenders and minimizers of January 6 often pay hypocritical tribute to
this sort of thinking in myriad ways, but I’ll avoid going down that
rabbit hole).

I think what unites cultural combatants on all sides is the weight they
give to taking offense. Not everyone thinks offensive speech is
equivalent to violence, but being offended has become a new American
pastime. Indeed, offending your opponents—and taking offense at their
reciprocal efforts—is now the primary means of cultural combat and the
coin of the realm as well.

Here’s a good example I heard about from Katie Herzog, via Bari Weiss’s
newsletter. A medical school professor told his class:

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply
anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would
really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a
student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for
that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst
thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women
can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

Let’s put aside my well-known objections to people—particularly those
who insist they “believe in science”—claiming that men can get pregnant
and look at this statement: “The worst thing that I can do as a human
being is be offensive.”

The ancient Persians practiced a form of torture called “scaphism.”
Victims would be set adrift in a stagnant pond, tied to two floating
logs or small boats. But before that, they’d be stripped naked and
smeared with milk and honey. They’d also be force-fed even more milk and
honey so that they developed irrepressible diarrhea—the better to
attract biting insects, which would not only feast upon their flesh, but
lay eggs in various places most people would, all things being equal,
not want eggs laid. They’d then be left to float in the sun for days or
weeks until they died of sepsis, exposure, or dehydration.

Call me crazy, but on the hierarchy of the worst things human beings can
do, that ranks at least a few notches above offending people, never mind
saying “pregnant women.” Other things that edge out offending people:
murder, genocide, animal abuse, conning old ladies—or gentlemen!—out of
their life savings, and distracting a surgeon by constantly tapping-out
the Jeffersons theme song on your glass eye with a ballpoint pen while
he’s trying to perform a heart bypass.

None of this is to say that offending people is harmless, never mind
desirable or good. But sticks and stones and all that.

Can’t fix the problem? Fix the words.

While perambulating my canines the other day, I heard a segment on the
radio show MarketPlace. I generally like the show, in part because it’s
very well done, but also because it’s attitudinally left-of-center and
thus covers economics and markets outside the “rah-rah capitalism”
bubble I am all too familiar with. I often learn things from it. But it
lives in a bubble all its own.

The piece set out to ask, “Can changing home appraisal language help
close the wealth gap?” The headline is a little misleading because it
doesn’t include the word “racial” between the words “the” and “wealth,”
and that’s what the story is really about. And it’s a legitimate issue.

Anyway, apparently Fannie Mae thinks it can alleviate the wealth gap by
purging racially-loaded language from home appraisals. The value of
homes in “black and brown” communities are often set lower than in white
neighborhoods and that fuels the intergenerational wealth gap over time.

Now, I have no objections to looking at such things. The racial wealth
gap is real and I have no problem believing it’s significantly related
to property values. But here’s my problem. The sorts of phrases Fannie
Mae wants to get rid of are ones like “crime-ridden” and “integrated
community.” I’m still trying to parse how “integrated community” is
obviously racist, given that liberal politicians often boast about how
integrated their communities are. Other terms we’re told are racially
coded include “desirable community” and “safe neighborhood.”

On the one hand, I think reasonable people can agree that these phrases
are sometimes used euphemistically in undesirable ways. But I think
reasonable people can also agree that sometimes they’re not “code” for
anything. Not everything is subtext, some things are just, you know,
text. Some neighborhoods are, in fact, crime-ridden. Some are safe, some
are not. Some have good schools, some don’t. The communities that are
safe and have good schools are—regardless of race—more desirable than
ones that are not.

You can get rid of all of these terms in favor of more neutral or even
woke language, but the new language won’t make bad schools good and
crime-ridden neighborhoods safe. In other words, you can do a lot with
words, but words are not magic. And if you think that home buyers—and
mortgage lenders—won’t find other ways to get accurate information just
because of some new mandate to make appraisals more difficult to parse,
you’re not only foolish, you’re begging for punishment from the god of
unintended consequences.

This is something my rah-rah capitalism friends grasp far better than
the woke capitalism folks do: Markets are tools of discovery. Prices are
tools of discovery. Successful investors—including home buyers—are the
ones who utilize the process of finding new or relevant information
better than others. Making the information-gathering process more
complicated, opaque, or difficult won’t change the reality of the
underlying information. But it will reward those who have the resources
to gather information despite the obstacles put in their way. Again,
complexity is a subsidy. Making home appraisals read like the minutes
from a Yale Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity workshop is just as likely
to reward market players with the time and resources to get to the
truth. Again, I’m sure there are problems and abuses in the appraisal
process, but the better—albeit harder—way to get rid of terms like
“crime-ridden” and “safe neighborhood” is to get rid of crime and make
neighborhoods safe.

The point is that everywhere you look, people think changing the way we
talk about things is a substitute for changing the way things are.

Contra-contrarianism.

Which brings me back to bizarreness masquerading as cleverness (and yes,
I’m aware of the irony of the author of this “news”letter complaining
about bizarreness operating in the guise of cleverness).

The lowest form of cleverness—or what passes for cleverness these
days—might be the belief that contrarianism qua contrarianism is smart.
(I’m sure there’s a long history behind this idea, probably going back
to Rousseau or the philosophes, but because I’m lazily recycling old
arguments of mine I’ll lay the blame on Slate.) If everybody says X,
I’ll say Y and show the world what a brave maverick I am.

Look, sometimes being the person who says the emperor has no clothes is
brave or bold (though in the original story, the kid just didn’t know
any better). But if you shout, “The emperor has no clothes!” when the
emperor is, in fact, fully dressed, you’re either an idiot, delusional,
or both. In a land of flat-earthers, you’re a hero for saying the world
is round. But when everybody is convinced the world is round—because it
is—you’re wasting everyone’s time by insisting it’s flat.

The most annoying form of this stuff is when people aren’t even being
brave or maverick-y because their contrariness is actually fan service
trolling. They’re not contradicting anyone on their own “side,” they’re
just picking the opposite position of the other side as if that alone
was bold or virtuous. Charlie Kirk, who hawks fish oil for his aches and
pains, paints himself as a bold truth teller dunking on Simone Biles as
“weak.” Left-wing Oscar winners preen as if they’re courageously
speaking truth to power when they tell their audiences exactly what they
want to hear.

Again, I’m sure some of this is baked into every society. But I think
we’re heading into Rome-style decline when contrarianism turns into flat
out denial of reality for fun and profit. Consider Eric Metaxas, who has
become a self-styled prophet of asininity by telling his audience
exactly what it wants to hear while pretending to be some kind of MAGA
Jeremiah. Here he is explaining that you should refuse to take the
vaccine, if for no other reason than because the government/everybody
wants you to.

This is quintessential bizarreness masquerading as cleverness. You know
what else the government wants you to do? Pay your taxes. You know what
“everybody” says you shouldn’t do? Murder people.

Defenders of this kind of garbage will sometimes tell me that it takes
real courage and effort to buck conventional wisdom like this, and that
some rhetorical excesses are forgivable in the larger context of
standing up to the powers that be or groupthink or some such.

I don’t buy it. This is false profit masquerading as false propheting.
It also takes effort and a certain kind of courage to stick a tube in a
dog’s ass and inflate it for the fart sounds, but that doesn’t mean it
deserves any kind of respect or commendation. It does, however, mean
that the dog is talking out his ass—or that Metaxas isn’t.

--
Bill Idgerant
(Not a real person)

[moviePig]

Good read. My only stumble is his suggestion that "contrarianism qua
contrarianism" is valueless. A little noise enhances signal-recognition.

[Adam H. Kerman]

Bill Idgerant <Non...@fake.net> wrote:
>On 2021-08-04 2:50 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:

>>I need to write something up about encouraging housing development. I'd
>>like to translate what I write into new woke speak, 'cuz housing will
>>become more "equitable", but I don't write like that and don't know how
>>to do it. My brain rejects the use of "equitable" in that manner and
>>it's a word essentially without meaning from what I can tell, except to
>>imply criticism and declare evidence of racial discrimination.

>>There's no Google translate for wokier writing. If I just give
>>it to moviePig to re-write, it won't be readable by a 20 year old
>>either, so that's out of the question.

>>What do newspaper editors and tv news producers use since they all talk
>>like that these days, even the ones my age?

>I recommend the following item from Jonah Goldberg, an issue of the G
>File from the Dispatch titled Looking for Policy Solutions in the
>Dictionary as a starting point for your research...

Thank you.

Good find. That was a good read.

[chromebook test]

On Thursday, August 5, 2021 at 10:45:05 AM UTC-4, Bill Idgerant wrote:
> On 2021-08-04 2:50 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> > I need to write something up about encouraging housing development. I'd
> > like to translate what I write into new woke speak, 'cuz housing will
> > become more "equitable", but I don't write like that and don't know how
> > to do it. My brain rejects the use of "equitable" in that manner and
> > it's a word essentially without meaning from what I can tell, except to
> > imply criticism and declare evidence of racial discrimination.
> >
> > There's no Google translate for wokier writing. If I just give
> > it to moviePig to re-write, it won't be readable by a 20 year old
> > either, so that's out of the question.
> >
> > What do newspaper editors and tv news producers use since they all talk
> > like that these days, even the ones my age?



> I recommend the following item from Jonah Goldberg, an issue of the G
> File from the Dispatch titled Looking for Policy Solutions in the
> Dictionary as a starting point for your research...

> A man walks to the center of town and invites a crowd to watch the show
> he’s about to put on. The man then picks up a dog and inserts a tube
> into its rump. He begins to inflate the dog. The crowd watches,
> fascinated. The dog grows larger. Eventually, the man pulls the tube out
> and lots of air noisily escapes, fart-like, from the dog’s butt as it
> runs away. The man turns to the crowd expectantly and asks: “You think
> it’s easy to inflate a dog with a tube?”

> I don’t buy it. This is false profit masquerading as false propheting.
> It also takes effort and a certain kind of courage to stick a tube in a
> dog’s ass and inflate it for the fart sounds, but that doesn’t mean it
> deserves any kind of respect or commendation. It does, however, mean
> that the dog is talking out his ass—or that Metaxas isn’t.

You forgot to include the epiloge:


Canine update: Everything is pretty much as it should be on the quadruped front. The girls are getting their treats. Zoë is chasing rabbits and Pippa is thwarting her. Pippa tries to nap and Zoë thwarts her. Zoë even agreed to accommodate the spaniel in the shotgun seat this morning, albeit with some eye rolling. Chester spends much of his days waiting for the Fair Jessica to bring him tribute (I somewhat unfairly made him seem scarier than he is by photographing him mid-yawn). And everyone demands more love than they need, but not as much as they want. Nobody, including the bipeds, likes the hot weather.

> Bill Idgerant
> (Not a real person)

https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/looking-for-policy-solutions-in-the




<mime snickers)

[Bill Idgerant]

I didn't forget. The omission was deliberate since I don't care about
Goldberg's dogs.

--