Cancel confusion? Not needed.
The fights over cancel culture are confused and overhyped. Most "fights" inside the world of celebrities have always been intentional publicity stunts. Fake scandals, fake feuds. Most of this cancel stuff obviously belongs to the old tradition. The "fights" go away after a while, leaving a few celebrities slightly less rich and slightly more famous. Inconsequential.

Non-celebrities are supposed to defend the "right" of free speech. We're supposed to defend the people that "our team" tells us to defend.

Why should we bother? I'd rather defend facts and good products regardless of team.

Two of this week's cancels are good examples in opposite directions.

First example: Some academic witch hunters are hunting Steven Pinker for "racism", which really means "we don't like him." Most people understand by now that "racism" is just a partisan slogan.

Should I defend Pinker? No. He's an idiot posing as an Expert. I'm glad to see his credentials downgraded.

I've talked about him twice.

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Steven Pinker, until now a pretty good popularizer of philosophy and cognition, has ventured into a realm that he doesn't understand.

His new book lists a bunch of "misused and confused words" and tells us to start using them CORRECTLY.

Nope. You're the confused one, Stevie boy. You've failed to understand how language works. And since language is a crucial part of cognition, you've LOST THE RIGHT to call yourself a cognitive SCIENTIST.

If an electrical engineer wrote a book about how cars CORRECTLY run on rabbit fur instead of gasoline, we'd stop calling him any kind of engineer.

If a surgeon wrote a book claiming that humans CORRECTLY have five heads, and advising readers to get four new heads installed for improved health, we'd stop calling him any kind of doctor.

Exactly the same level of error, same depth of stupidity.

Actual linguists have NEVER made this basic mistake. They have ALWAYS understood that meaning and sound and syntax change in various ways, and have spent 200 years carefully mapping HOW AND WHY these changes occur. Linguists sometimes adopt dubious theories about a specific HOW AND WHY, but they generally fix those dubious theories after more observation. They NEVER assume that one form or style is CORRECT. In other words, linguists are among the very few GENUINE SCIENTISTS in today's hopelessly fucked world.

The UK Telegraph article repeatedly describes Pinker as a "linguist", which is blasphemy. Misusing an occupational title is not a question of form or style or grammar; it's a legal distinction similar to fraud or trademark abuse, though probably not actionable.

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....The context is Steven Pinker's recent claim that overall human violence is going down in the last century or so.

Seems false from many different angles. My angle:

In the 20th century mass-produced violence overwhelmed individually crafted violence, just as mass-produced stuff overwhelmed individually crafted stuff. Small-scale warlords were priced out of the market. As Germany, Russia, China, and America roared into various parts of the world with huge forces and huge bribes, the warlords found that their resources were consumed by the big powers, and found that the local appetite for violence was either totally suppressed or mercenarized by the big powers.

After the Cold War ended, some of those warlords resumed serious fighting, but others found an outlet for their power-hunger in illegal commerce of drugs and weapons. See IRA or Taliban for examples.

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Pinker is an idiot. He's also rich and well-connected. He makes lots of money by SELLING LIES. He doesn't DESERVE our defense. If he had been defending us, maybe I might feel differently. Pay for value. Equipoise. But he has been consistently arrogant and condescending, so I return the favor. Pay for value.

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Second example, the other way around: The CEO of Goya Foods is being bashed because he attended a meeting with Trump. He has done a BEAUTIFUL JOB of defending himself, refusing to apologize and stating the facts. He's not an idiot. Should I defend him verbally? Well, I'm doing it right now, but my defense is not needed and won't be heard, so it doesn't matter.

Should I defend Goya by buying their products? No, because their products are inferior.

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When I switched back to vegy diet in 2010, I decided to use barley instead of rice as the 'base'. It's more nutritious and less starchy than rice. I've been buying Safeway's house brand Signature barley ever since, and the product has always been consistent.

Last month Safeway switched brands to Goya. I didn't think a commodity like barley could be different, but this is different. The grains are half the size, and they cook up with a lot more starch and less taste. Most of the grains are missing the structure of a barley grain.

With the house brand, all of the grains looked like barley when dry, and looked like fatter barley when cooked. With Goya, all of the grains are little unmarked white things when dry, and a few of them end up looking like barley when cooked.

I don't understand the difference. Maybe the Goya is milled longer, taking off more of the grain? At any rate it's less satisfying and possibly less nutritious.

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The shortage got worse after the lockdown holocaust started. I solved the problem by ordering barley in bulk from Nuts.com, which is a NON-PROPAGANDISTIC company and thus deserves my support, and also has good barley. No conflicts at all.

Simple answer: Truth and reality and good products are good. Propaganda on either "side" is bad, because both "sides" are run by Deepstate.

Come to think of it, this is really an OLD rule wrapped in a new package. Before companies started to use openly partisan propaganda, everyone understood that good products don't need advertising. A company that uses lots of advertising, whether the old-fashioned kind or the new political kind, generally doesn't have the best products.

Labels: From rights to duties

  ¶ 12:03 AM