Has anyone else noticed the rapidity with which this bit of rhetoric - speak your truth - has crept into the cultural firmament? I first took note of it a few months ago, and now, like the proverbial buzzing of a light fixture, I can't stop hearing it.
Apparently, it was Oprah who first popularized it, saying it is the "most powerful tool we have." By we, I am quite certain she did not mean me, as I do not fit the demographic profile of those allowed to have their own proprietary version of the truth.
Let me explain. What is meant by the phrase, by those who wield it, is that if you have been abused in some way (presumably by a white male), or you have been generally oppressed (again, by white males and the patriarchy), "speaking your truth" is having the courage to give testimony to your experience.
Most recently, we heard the odious Cory Booker use the phrase to describe Christine Blasey Ford's Senate appearance. Her truth was most definitely that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her.
I have two problems with all this. One somewhat minor, the other not. Using Blasey Ford as an example, let's say, for the sake of argument, she's telling the whole truth. That would mean it was the truth, would it not? Not her truth. Calling it her truth implies there could be other truths. Isn't there only one truth? That's what I was taught. I am bothered on a lexical level - it undermines our language. Words have meaning.
Aly Raisman, the gymnast (pictured at the top), was in fact abused by the abominable Larry Nassar. We know this to be the literal truth. Why undermine it by calling it "her" truth?
Back to Blasey Ford. Let's now say she's not telling the truth about what happened, or more to the point, is telling a story that, while not being exactly truthful, speaks to her broader life experiences. Not truth, but truthiness. This is where I have a big problem. Perhaps she was abused by someone at some point, someone who wasn't Kavanaugh. She certainly seems troubled by something. Projecting on to Kavanaugh could be an outlet for her anguish or maybe a bogus recovered memory - who knows? In that case what she is doing is making Kavanaugh guilty by association. The left has gleefully accepted this approach, basically because Kavanaugh's a man and they don't like his politics. (His being Catholic doesn't help, either.)
The concept of white privilege ties closely into this. It basically says that all white people harbor subtle forms of racism no matter how enlightened they think they are. It's weaponized political correctness, and it is a growing trend. It means anyone can be made guilty of anything if you run afoul of the left's agenda.
What did Beria say? Show me the man and I will show you the crime.
So please, don't speak your truth.
Consider this explanation of the New Age. Beware alcoholic professors controlled by scantily clad foreign satraps planted as their grad students. Oppressive regimes have been known to send diminutive students who already earned degrees to pose as undergraduates to spy on their conationals and punish them or their relatives back home should they stray. That is why most immigrants crave the deniability of assimilation, but our professulas want them intimidated enough to illegally grub grants. WW1 Black Tom (JC NJ) led McCloy to appreciate how immigrants can be manipulated by foreign powers, leading him to recommend internment not just for Japanese but also Germans when many American born Japanese in Hawaii helped conceal downed Pearl Harbor bombers. Venona vindicates McCarthy – would won nam. Next cops axe riot heads. Espionage practitioners call it "Recompromization": They suck you in with a seemingly meaningless infraction of corruption, but then it becomes like drug addiction, they ratchet you into an endless spiral; Vain professulas prone to yap holes and striped pants are especially vulnerable.
ReplyDeleteVaporware is all the millenials produce, all hat and no cattle, all inspiration and no perspiration. See Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues, updated post modern edition: https://thepointmag.com/2010/examined-life/the-updated-dictionary-of-received-ideas
ReplyDeleteCheck out Jack Reylan Blog Spot, the Original Deplrable
ReplyDeleteJack Reylan also puts out https://sites.google.com/site/deplorablepolicyguide/
DeleteSo, dudes, why not start your own social net? Conservatives in the 1980s thought Ted Turner was their guy, then in the 1990s they thought Cap Cities ABC would do the trick, then Rupert Murdoch. They all failed us but competition is great. Set up your own satellites and beam free wi-sat to your supporters. Messrs Bannon and Scaramucci should put their Goldman Sahcs money where their mouths are.
ReplyDeleteSIBL in NYC is closing, merging with the new Niarchos Libaray. Google used NYPL like a spent whore, scanned all their books then dumped them. All the off copyright books are on archive.org, the copyrighted ones on books.google.com. Beware the way google dumped their deja news franchise, they might start censoring books once they do to libraries what big box did to retail. All the scholarly journals are on jstor.org, no longer on paper. There is still scaffolding on the third floor of the “Lions” NYPL. Libraries and schools are disappearing off to the internet. Check out k12.com. No one trusts the professulas, psychatrulas, teachulas and reportulas to teach our kids their fake news. Times v Sullivan is the origin of Fake News.
DeleteFeminazis have a small animal licking their face all day because the same animal licks between their legs all night. Sodomists have no use for men any more.
ReplyDeleteBill Gates told David Rubenstein he doesn't think buying and selling of stocks constitutes a value added activity (October 17th, 2019, Bloomberg Radio). Now it was Gates who destroyed all the conventions of Bessemer, Doriot, Hatsopoulos and Terman as regards VC & IPO. It was Gates who destroyed Great American tradidions like backwards compatibility (he removed the matrix functions from BASIC). Then Steve Case got to avenge The SOurce by decimating CompuServe, a portal which had faxing, shopping, cloud storage, and access to academic and other databases in the 1980s. CompuServe was the first firm to provide consumer internet email through the server of saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu, again in the 1980s. Scott Thompson was an accounting major from Stonehill College. It should be noted that at that time thee were precious few degrees in Computer Science and one studied computer science in departments named Electrical Engineering.
ReplyDeleteMathematical Statistics and Accounting. THe stab at THompson was unfair, given that Obama got to declare his major as National Security instead of Political Science despite there being only two courses in National Security, both taught by his impresario, Zbigniew Brzezinski. And it helped assure the monopoly status of Google.
The cocaine-driven traders of the 1980s have only themselves to blame for the current state of the internet because they did not want to get their hands dirty with real science and engineering but preferred the media facade they call technology but which is instead the modern version of clerical work and typewriter repair.
Given how bad AI misreads online security threats, it is neither threat nor solution but typical space cadet masturbation and reason to abandon social media in favor of usenet newsgroups.
ReplyDelete