Archives for category: semantics

What is liberty?

as answered on Quora….



Or, to switch to the group level:


Further formulations from alternative contexts:



  3. regulating retaliation by a rule of law —







  • universal (for all)
  • civility
  • voluntary cooperation
  • reduced threats
  • defensive force
  • reciprocity
  • limited government
  • distributed responsibility

Do socialism and communism go hand to hand in relation?

as answered on Quora….

Defining political terms is itself a political act. So people are always redefining labels, to gain some advantage. This should not be hard to understand: a bootlicker prefers to be known as a Footwear Moisturizing Professional, but after the word “moist” has garnered an unpleasant connotation, another term will emerge — Fine Leather Sanforizer, perhaps.

This process has happened to these and related words. My favorite discussion of this can be found in Yves Guyot’s Socialistic Fallacies:

Socialists who range themselves under Karl Marx say: Plato, Campanella, More, Morelly, Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Considérant, and Louis Blanc, forsooth! Why tell us of all these socialists, utopians, dreamers, and more or less enlightened makers of literature, all so far removed from all reality? Neither Owen nor Pierre Leroux were worthy to invent the word “socialism.” As for Proudhon, who said, “Every man is a socialist who concerns himself with social reform,” he proved that despite his pretension, he belonged to those socialists of the clubs, the salons, and the vestries who indulged in elegiac, declamatory, and sentimental socialism in and about 1848.

Proudhon was nothing but a “petit bourgeois,” as Karl Marx said. There is but one true socialism, the socialism of Germany, whose formula was propounded by Karl Marx and Engels in the Communistic Manifesto of 1848.

They chose “communism” because the word “socialism” had been too much discredited at the time, but they subsequently resumed it, for the logical conclusion of all socialism is communism. The word “collectivism,” says Paul Lafargue, was only invented in order to spare the susceptibilities of some of the more timorous. It is synonymous with the word “communism.” Every socialistic program, be it the program of St. Mandé, published in 1896 by Mr. Millerand, which lays down that “collectivism is the secretion of the capitalist régime,” or that of the Havre Congress, drawn up by Karl Marx, and carried on the motion of Jules Guesde, concludes with “the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to collective ownership of all the means of production.

Guyot was writing at the end of the 19th century (in 1894’s The Tyranny of Socialism) and at the beginning of the 20th (1910’s Socialistic Fallacies and 1914’s Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed), before the Bolsheviks failed with War Communism, Lenin struggled to reintroduce markets into socialism with the New Economic Policy, and before Stalin cooked up his Five Year Plans — and Oskar Lange invented the pathetic “market socialism.” All that the earlier French politician and economist had before him was a long history of utopian reactions against markets and private property and some ominous increases in government power at the behest of self-proclaimed socialists, communists, anarchists (!) and other confused reformers and revolutionaries.

Note the general tenor of the quoted passage: yes, the terms socialism, communism, and collectivism had been used as synonyms as well as refined terms of art and rhetoric during the early heyday of red* agitation; but it was also the case that Communism was generally used as the most extreme version of the doctrines — the complete eradication of the private ownership of the means of production — and most people saw the trend of all this thought as towards the extreme. “The logical conclusion of all socialism is communism.”

The reasons for this extremist trend line to total State ownership are several, but I think it can be seen in basic orientation: what distinguishes all these groups from other ideologies is their hatred for private property, free markets, capital and interest, and even money. For people who nurture this hatred, the answer just “has” to be in these institutions’ opposites: public property, controlled markets, and the abolition of money and finance.

But why would they be driven so far to the extreme? Most people who have a distaste for these ‘capitalistic’ institutions don’t spend all their time and attenton on eradication. They have lives, jobs to do, families to feed. But the intellectual classes, they tend to have easier jobs, even sinecures — if jobs at all — are less likely to have families, and pride themselves on their political opinions. So they can take the ideas furthest.

There is something else at work, of course: halfway measures and piecemeal interventions never work as advertised, ending up causing more problems. But people who have given themselves over to the anti-capitalist memeplex cannot concede that their ideas are bad. So they always blame failures on not going far enough. Whatever ill becomes of a mixed economy program, the market and freedom side of the mix must always be judged the culprit.

So, the general trend among those who oppose capitalism is all the way to totalitarian statism.

Thankfully, most people who lean away from liberal capitalism do have lives, so the inertia of everyday life presents a check. But students and professors, often unbounded from normal social reality, can easily become unhinged from everyday reality, and eagerly take on the role of chief drivers of revolution.

* “Left” and “right” were not terms of political art in those days. A color scheme was in vogue: Whites were for republican capitalism, Reds for socialism and communism and revolution, and the Black Flag was flown by anarchists. In the late 20th century, Tim Russert, a Democrat television commentator, confused everything by affixing Blue to the Democratic Party and Red to the Republican Party in America, presumably to wash out from collective memory the older association of Red with “the left” and Pink with the communist sympathizers in the Democratic Party. Nowadays, Democrats are associating themselves openly with socialism, and I think the Pink should be brought back into usage.

What we now know for sure: feminism is crazed lunacy.

But when did we know it?

IMG_2080This varies from person to person, I guess. I have not called myself a “feminist” since my 20s, but for most of those subsequent decades, I tried not to come off as too extreme in my opposition. Why? Probably for the reason most skeptics of feminism have not: the term is associated with sexual equality, which I just call “individual rights” — and I did not want to erode that notion in any way. But as the years have gone on — leading inevitably to my death, to the death of the human race, and (I gather) to the heat death of the universe — it has become clear that today’s feminists are not interested in sexual equality. They talk, instead, about “gender,” cannot keep a somewhat nebulous concept even they straight (oops: my heteronormativity is showing! I should have said “queer”). And their relentless attacks on white heterosexual men, and their demands to give special favors to “the oppressed classes” of women and POCs and LBGT+ers, show their lack of interest in equality of rights before the law, and a nasty itch for compensatory preferences and class-figured “equality of outcomes.”

Which is why they seem so dangerous.

But crazed lunacy? That can be seen in their lack of empathy and broad-mindedness, in seeing other people’s point of view. The grand example? “Manspreading.”

This is a term that grew out of the grand feminist epithet, “Mansplaining.” Now, this concept did not bug me, for it merely meant the habit of some men to explain to women their own experience.

Though male tendencies to do this do seem to spring from the dimorphism of our brains — men are stronger systematizers, so we tend to turn, say, emotional complaints into logical problems, and women, less tolerant of systematically modeled explanations, tend to object to that — you would have to be something of a mome not to see how this could be reasonably interpreted as disrespectful and logically odd (not a contradiction, necessarily, but logically odd, as P. H. Nowell-Smith used the term). So, “mansplaining” did not bother me too much.


Then the word began to be used to condemn men for explaining anything to women — including their own male experiences! The outrageous overreach of this occurs when feminist women accuse of Men’s Rights Activists of mansplaining, just for defending their own individual rights and sexually differentiated experiences.

Which leads us to the moment when it became obvious to me that feminism had run off the rails completely: when young feminists concocted men’s dread crime of spreading their legs in public.

Manspreading, or man-sitting, is the practice of men sitting in public transport with legs wide apart, thereby covering more than one seat. Both this posture and the use of the neologism”manspreading” have occasioned some internet criticism and debates in the US, UK, Turkey, and Canada. The public debate began when an anti-manspreading campaign started on the social media website Tumblr in 2013; the term appeared a year later. added the word “manspreading” in August 2015. Use of the term has been criticized as “a caricature of feminism” and the practice has been juxtaposed with examples of women taking up excessive space in public spaces with bags.

Now, this Wikipedia entry ably indicates its absurdity even in this first paragraph of the encyclopedia entry. It is the reductio ad absurdum of feminism — but advanced by self-identified feminists. And the habit of taking up more than one seat is something I have witnessed, and often, in America — when corpulent women bulge onto additional seats and into the aisle. Not a pretty picture. But “fat spreading” is not something that went viral. Manspreading did.

Why? Because young women have been trained by the feminist tradition to nag at men as a right and a . . . privilege. For being women. The superior sex.

Er, gender.

It is ridiculous in this case because it is exactly the opposite of mansplaining: it is womansplaining — women explaining to men the nature of men’s own bodies.

I remember reading one of the first articles on the subject. The young woman feminist said [something to the effect of] “come on, guys, your balls are not that big.”

Well, one hates to bring up personal experience in such matters. But I can assure the reader, I never boast about testicular massiveness. Nevertheless, I could explain to you, at length, about testicular pain. Merely from keeping my legs together. It is a thing. I believe it gets worse with age. Men spread their legs because they do not wish to incur sharp and persistent pain.

But the young feminists apparently never even asked men what they were doing. The men, of course, may not have noticed what they were doing. And perhaps men, so ready (usually) to please women, have eagerly tried to comply.

I wonder how many men now experience enduring agony in their genitals merely to please these women.

But I won’t do it, and I completely sympathize with those men who despise any woman who complains about manspreading.

Early in the aughts, when public discussion of the penis was everywhere, I predicted that soon “cunt” would become common in everyday speech. The pejorative use of the term for objectionable women aptly affixes to any woman who marshals the term as a critique of icky male habits.

Now, the context: Girls are taught to keep their legs together. And for good reason. Opening a woman’s legs provides easier access to her femalia, into which the penis was designed (so to speak) by nature to penetrate. It is the reasonable life plan of a woman to restrict access to this much desired hot spot, and so keeping one’s legs together became part of heteronormative practice, for heteronormativity doubles down on the basic evolutionary strategies of the sexes, protecting women from most men while enabling them to secure the cooperation of a limited set of men (usually one) in exchange for access to the Delta of Venus.

And, because the female of our species lack descending sex organs of a rather obviously fragile nature held on by the thinnest of tissues, but with all-too many nerve endings . . . their characteristic habit of keeping legs tightly closed, when sitting, is easy for them.

The suspicion we non-feminists have had for a long, long time is that feminists have been trying to turn men into women. This issue is the prime example.

Experience and standards that are apt for females get applied, dogmatically, to men — even when inapt and wildly inappropriate.

And it may be inappropriate indeed. I am no anatomist, or diagnostician, but I suspect that men who have been keeping their legs together at the behest of female expectations may have contributed to the startling decline in testosterone levels in the modern male population. But this is just conjecture. Regardless of medical consequences other than discomfort and pain, men closing or crossing their legs was once seen as effeminate for good reasons.

So, this is now the paradigmatic issue upon which I define feminism: the application to men and boys the standards appropriate for, and experience derived from, women and girls.

As epitomized on Broadly, a few days ago, with “100 Easy Ways to Make Women’s Lives More Bearable.” The tenth demand is most objectionable:


All-caps, even. As if her point had one quantum of wisdom to it.

It does not.

It may be time to stop thinking so much “of the women.” Frankly, Dani Beckett (perpetrator of the above indecent inanity), I am not interested in “making women’s lives more bearable”: feminists can stop complaining about trivialities (their feminist etiquette breached by male extremity splays) and stop expecting the world to revolve around them. Take your female privilege and stuff it.

On a kinder note: I suggest re-introducing into our culture that now-forbidden power, common sense.


Caught a few moments of Scott Adams, on Periscope last night. He explained why calling terrorists such as yesterday’s New York pedestrian killer “cowards” is “not very good persuasion.” Mayor Bill de Blasio just did that, as GWB had in mid-September 2001.

Adams is of course right. “Coward” is inapposite. It makes no inroads into the belief system of would-be terrorists, surely the rhetorical target. As I explained, years ago, in defense of Bill “Politically Incorrect” Maher’s infamous ridicule of Bush’s “faceless cowards” designation, the cowardice charge is weak-minded and pathetic.

A better insult — better even than Trump’s “losers” epithet — would attack the terrorists’ faith and efficacy.

Adams suggests “burning in hell.”

A spin on that might be:

“Damned raisin-eaters.”

You see why, right?



A local theater is advertising a special night for fans of an upcoming movie. In the deal “concessions” are included.

What a bizarre use of the word. The theater managers seem to think concessions means food and drink.

Though it is not specifically so listed in my dictionary (nearest at hand), I am fairly certain that the etymology runs like this:

In certain venues, the owner/manager would subcontract out the food and drink, as in a caterer — or in the case I grew up with (and with which most folks would find familiar) the school would cede, on game nights, the “refreshments stand” to be run by a school club, for the profit of the club as a fundraiser.

Thus the word concession refers to “a right to undertake and profit by a specified activity a concession to drill for oil : a lease of a portion of premises for a particular purpose; also : the portion leased or the activities carried on. . . .”

In my high school’s case, the band would be granted a concession to profit selling goodies for one event, the home-ec club the next, and so on. Concession thus serves as a term of art within the business ambit of management and volunteers of a kind of service at an event and location.

It does not have any legitimate place in consumer lingo. It makes no logical sense, at least, to apply the word like this, to extend the meaning in this way.

But since kids deal with “concessions” in school, when they grow up and find themselves managing movie theaters, they infer that “concessions” is a reasonable name for a refreshments stand wherein goodies are sold. But it makes no sense in the movie theater for the simple reason that the stand is run by the management, not by a contracting third party, a “concessionaire.”

Thus the language changes, with semantic drift, by the inattention and slovenliness of the speakers. And copywriters.

(This has been a very low-level pet peeve of mine for decades, I . . . concede!)



Every day? Really?




Princeton’s Wordnet puts a number of words together:

the savage and excessive killing of many people










More than one a day.






