In over the email transom is the latest missive from Restore America (I couldn’t refrain from subscribing), in which David Crowe offers a collection of prayers for his fellow bigots to use as they work on their referendum petitions.
So, not having followed the origins of the committee which produced the City’s new “sit-lie” law, I have a question, sparked by this item which mentions the unrelated pedestrian interference law.
In the video report on the effort to help bigots proudly stand up for their bigotry, the head bigot of Bigots, AGAIN! has this to say about the laws which her petitions are meant to kill: “This isn’t about discrimination, this is about affirmative action.”
Then again, there are things like this where words do what they are meant to do.
“For one to claim there is no God means that one can see everywhere in the entire universe at the same time, as well as be transcendent, to verify that God really doesn’t exist,” write Dr. Georgia Purdom and Bodie Hodge on the website of Answers in Genesis. “Such attributes are that of God. So, when one claims to be an atheist, they are really claiming to be God, thereby undermining their own position.”
The further I get in books such as Unspeak and Talking Right, the more convinced I become that the human brain simply is far too receptive to being programmed by the combination of the deliberate manipulation of language and a more subtle linguistic drift, with the results ranging from the merely unfortunate to the outright disastrous. Whether intentional or incidental, the ease with which the almost occultish reworking of words can force uncritical minds (of which there appear to be far too many) to create for themselves — and, by their sheer force of numbers, for the rest of us — a world that doesn’t make any actual sense whatsoever, does a fair bit to instill in me the belief that we are all, simply, rather royally screwed.
One of the reasons I don’t think I could stomach attending the forthcoming KATU Portland Bloggers Meetup can be seen in their irrelevant article on the effort to help bigots proudly stand up for their bigotry.
“The Pentagon dismissed suggestions that the communications desk will be a message machine or propaganda tool,” reports the AP, “and instead said it is being set up to gather and distribute information from eight time zones away in a more efficient and timely manner. ‘I would not characterize it as a war room,’ Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said Friday. ‘It’s far less sinister than that. It’s more like a library.’”
An officially-licensed manufacturer of New York Yankees baseball caps has been producing caps for gang members, so you can conveniently and easily distinguish between Crips, Bloods, and Latin Kings.
This is sad. Remember the organization Answers in Genesis, from which the infamous Kris Helphinstine took information in order to teach his Oregon biology class about creationism? One of their lecturers will be on hand this November for the Answers in Genesis Conference across the Columbia in the Vancouver of Washington. Unfortunately, I will be in Los Angeles at Serenity LA that weekend. Not “unfortunately” in the sense that I wouldn’t rather be in LA, but in the sense that I’d have loved to be able to go bear witness to this thing.