Finally, a solution to the problem of political correctness – political correctification of names!

Stopped reading the column after the first page. I refuse to continuing reading a column complaining that words no longer mean things written by the author of “Liberal Fascism”.

I do love the idea that he knows his conclusions (“society goes ass-over-teakettle… when names no longer describe the things they are assigned to”) even though he’s “just starting my reading on all of this”. What happens if he reads a perspective he hasn’t considered? Will he change his thesis?

I guess that’s not going to be a problem because he’s not really interested (there will be no Goldberg variation), he just wants to throw Confucius and Wittgenstein in as decoration on the icing of his cake. I’ve never read Saul Kripke and it looks like Jonah Goldberg hasn’t either, but I’m sure he’ll be an expert in a few months and I can just read the Goldberg interpretation.

Maybe I’m getting old, but I found the over-caffeinated prose style of the link hard to follow. His words bop and jump around on the page so much that I really couldn’t follow what he was trying to saying. I wanted to tell him, as you would a small child in distress: now, take a deep breath, calm down…what exactly is the matter? But by the evidence of the picture, he is clearly NOT a small child. So what is going on here? Is this what passes for cleverness and wit for you kids today?

Swiss cheese
French fries
English muffins
mutton chops
monkey shines
Alice blue
house band
etc.

And, of course, Abraham Lincoln’s great joke about how many legs a dog had if you called a tail a leg.

-4. Because calling it a leg doesn’t make it so.

@ 7

Wasn’t it Holbo who compared right-wing thought to “free association” a short time ago? Reading Goldberg is a frightful experience. Imagine being trapped in his skull with no way out.

(It’s no wonder he wants to stab people with his fountain pen for expressing enthusiasm about his ‘next book’!)

Admittedly, I didn’t do a close reading, but did Goldberg ever attempt to say why he brought up Wittgenstein? If I drop a name, I at least (generally) try to attach the most recognizable thing I can remember about that person. The thing that sticks around long after I put down their book(s).

Like: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Also, does anyone have the quote of what Obama actually said? For far too long, right-wing pundits have typically made it their business to slaughter the words of their opponents first, and use only the survivors. I imagine Obama’s actual quote in context had a bit more to it.

Is this a piece Goldberg hopes to submit as a sample with his application to write for Cracked.com? I couldn’t make it through the whole thing.

Even by his own lights Goldberg is looking in the wrong places for inspiration. The proper free-market attitude to words is that of Humpty Dumpty. ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ This is surely the right way for a libertarian to think: a rejection of the heavy hand of state-imposed meaning.

And of course HD follows this up with a blunt assertion of the value of property rights over language:

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Free-market semantics, indeed: “When I make a word to a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”

link is bust :-(

Fixing it doesn’t help.

But right before I start looking for places I could non-fatally jam a ballpoint pen into their upper torso, I realize this is uncharitable. The problem, you see, is that people who don’t write books don’t know what an unending, unyielding ass-ache they are. I’d compare them to a non-stop flight in a middle seat between John Goodman’s sweaty former body double who’s now jobless because he “let himself go” and a runny-nosed, cotton-candy-loving small child who is hard to distinguish from a deadly pathogen vector.

I’m not going past that.

What Obama actually said?

There’s a transcript of the speech that Goldberg refers to in his previous column here: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/10/347515100/transcript-president-obama-on-how-u-s-will-address-islamic-state.

I just read that Goldberg piece AND the comments. I’ll need a week or so to recover, assuming the damage is reversible.

“Goldberg and Wittgenstein on the Beach”

Has the makings of an epic Dadaist work. (Where is Anderson when you need him?)

“It would be refreshing if they would criticize him for what he actually says and does …”

But that would require them to explain what they would do instead, which they are incapable of doing. The fault they see in Obama is not in what he says or does, it is in who he is.

“Goldberg and Wittgenstein on the Beach”

Wasn’t that Camus’ original pitch that sold The Stranger to the Book of the Month Club suits

We could let God sort them out without going to the trouble of killing them first.

ITT we learn: if someone expresses interest in his next book, Jonah concludes they haven’t read one of his existing books.

“the values that ended war in Europe”

fear of the atom bomb?

I guess the balkans are in asia now.

Ignoring that it’s a bit soon to decide war has ended in europe, turn the question around. What made wars so popular in europe?

I think the central thing was that nobody wanted to be ruled by foreigners who didn’t care about them. So they had to try to dominate their neighbors, to keep their neighbors from dominating them. They needed foreign empires to keep their neighbors’ foreign empires from giving them too much advantage. So we had the swedes, and the dutch, and the spanish and french and english etc trying to compete.

By the end of WWII they had all lost and europe got divided up between the USA and the USSR. Now they if they don’t want to be dominated they have to work together. If they fight each other the foreigners will control them. But the EU isn’t consolidated enough yet to have an EU army that can threaten or defend much. They talked about it, but at this point the closest they have is NATO which is run by the USA and which has Greece and Turkey for members. NATO’s latest military activity has involved Afghanistan, Somalla, and Llbya under US direction.

But the EU isn’t consolidated enough yet to have an EU army that can threaten or defend much. They talked about it, but at this point the closest they have is NATO which is run by the USA and which has Greece and Turkey for members.

By the end of WWII they had all lost and europe got divided up between the USA and the USSR. Now they if they don’t want to be dominated they have to work together. If they fight each other the foreigners will control them. But the EU isn’t consolidated enough yet to have an EU army that can threaten or defend much. They talked about it, but at this point the closest they have is NATO which is run by the USA and which has Greece and Turkey for members. NATO’s latest military activity has involved Afghanistan, east africa, and north africa under US direction.

Will europe get strong enough to compete and avoid domination? Likely, as the USA gets too weak to dominate them and as Russia gets stronger. Or maybe things have changed somehow.

Maybe we could have avoided ISIS getting started, if we’d made a serious attempt at democracy in Iraq. But we decided that Iraqi Sunnis were the enemy and we didn’t give them much chance to join the Iraqi government which turned into a government just for Shias. So of course the Sunnis made their own. They have to say they’re Islamists to get support from other nations, and there could be some truth to it. The Bush administration had no concept of nation-building, and spent trillions of dollars to create a calamity. I doubt we’re strong enough to do it over and try to get it right this time.

@ 24
Yeah, context is something which conservatives claim for themselves only.

Imagine if there were an organization calling itself the Christian State of Northern Ireland who went about slaughtering its fellow Christians (not that anything like this could ever happen!). And then a president, say, Reagan, remarked that CSNI was not “Christian” in that “no religion condones the killing of innocents,” and that “the vast majority of CSNI’s victims have been Christian.” Would anyone have the slightest doubt what he meant? (Not that Reagan would ever say such a thing!)

Normal people know exactly what Obama said, and what the words mean.

@ 28

Wait. Bill, is that you?!

The painful irony of the author of “Liberal Fascism” referring to both 1984 and “Politics and the English Language” to support his (not even formed?) thesis… well, Eric Blair hasn’t returned as a revenant and strangled Doughpants, disappointingly enough. One assumes that, as most conservatives, he will cherry-pick a few phrases disapproving of Soviet Russia and/or “Communism” out of each and, work done, settle back for a well-deserved nap.

Watson Ladd #29: “the fighters of ISIS are motivated by an ideology that explicitly calls for creating a theocracy a la Medieval Europe.” Care to repeat the theocracy bit to Thomas Becket?

@44,

Exactly. Obama is merely trying to separate the religion from its exploiters, most likely knowing that his right wing critics constantly rant about the evils of Islam itself.

And chickenhawk critics like Goldberg do this and demand, in the vaguest terms, that we “do something!” about this. Watson Ladd mentions Syria above. I’m not here to defend Obama, whom I see as way too conservative, especially on economic and budgetary matters. But, I’d really like to hear, in concrete, specific terms, what, exactly, these chickenhawks think we could have done to prevent disasters in Syrian and elsewhere . . . . short of reversing time and not invading Iraq.

And that’s really the key. The invasion of Iraq, and to a lesser degree, Afghanistan, set this all in motion. Take those two unnecessary wars out of the picture, and there is no ISIS, there is no sectarian bloodbath in Iraq or Syria.

And this isn’t the first time our interventions caused enormous blowback. It happens all the time. Reagan basically created Al Queda with the help of Bin Laden in Afghanistan, going against the Soviets. We set the Iranian Revolution in motion by overthrowing Mossadegh. Bush Sr. all but gave Hussein the green light — or at least no red light — to invade Kuwait, and then is shocked, I tell you, shocked when he does, which leads to yet another war. Dubya is a asleep at the wheel when 9/11 hits and does all the wrong things, like invading Afghanistan, creating a new generation of terrorist links with Pakistan, and following that up in Iraq, which was much, much worse. If we had treated 9/11 as it should have been treated — a criminal act, carried out by 19 people, backed up by a scattered, isolated, very small group of would be revolutionaries, none of this current mess would be happening.

No invasions. No military. We should have used police, CIA, NSA, FBI, targeted special ops, banks, sanctions and so on to isolate and capture the perps.

By going to war, we just made it all too easy for people in the middle east to do the old “enemy of my enemy is my friend” number on us one more time. We need to stop giving them that chance. Our interventions keep doing this, and we keep thinking we need more interventions to fix the botched interventions of the past. It’s like using leeches to fix the anemia caused by the use of leeches.

MPAV,

Very true.

It’s not our country. It’s a sovereign nation. And while it has despicable leadership, and is in the midst of horrific carnage, there isn’t anything that we can do, militarily, that wouldn’t make it even worse. That is our track record. Intervene militarily and make matters worse, create the next disaster, the next war, the next revolution. So we intervene again to fix the thing we botched earlier and it never ends. America has got to stop giving ammo to anyone who wants to follow “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Even when “moderates” really want to go up against the Isils and the Al Quedas, when we stick our noses in their businesses, all we do is give them reasons to join hands against the common enemy — us.

Think about how much better the world would be if we had never invaded Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, twice, topped the democratically elected Mossadegh, created Al Queda out of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, created those death squads in Central and South America, etc. etc.

And I’m not talking about Ron Paul isolationism here. I think we should be aggressively humanitarian all over the world, in place of our history of aggressive militarism. Paul doesn’t want any of that. He’s actually been trying to shut down UNICEF for most of his adult life, for instance. We just need to swap guns for butter in the world, to the extent possible, and we’re strong enough to do it.

To echo those above, Goldberg’s a mediocre stylist and inane humorist who thinks he’s a once in a generation wit. So he layers faux-absurdist image on top of image until reading his columns feels like watching a bad improve troupe take an inexplicable detour in neo-Nazism.

sharculese @49 has it exactly right. But what I really want to point out here is that on the news this very day we have Cameron (the UK PM) saying pretty much exactly what Obama says about ISIL (or Bush II about AQ): he says flat out that Islam is a “religion of peace” and that ISIL are “not Muslims”. So this is pretty conventional talk, if Democrats and Tories both use it.

“liberal democracy is receiving close to no support from the West”

Perhaps because it’s easier to deal with (bribe and intimidate) a few strongmen (of the right kind) than the whole population?

Watson @51,

It’s rather culturally arrogant, to say the least, to assume there is this battle between Western ideas and Political Islam in the Arab world. I’m guessing they agree with Gandhi when he was asked about Western Civilization. He thought it would be a good idea.

The smartest and most enlightened Arabs surely look at the complete clusterF we’ve made of things over the course of the last two centuries (at the very least) and likely say, Thanks, but no thanks.

As for spending money on promoting this or that. Read The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. It shows in great detail where our promotional efforts, energies and dollars have gone. To spread the cancer of capitalism, by any means necessary. And the world is far worse off for our efforts.

#60

“liberal democracy is receiving close to no support from the West”

Perhaps because it’s easier to deal with (bribe and intimidate) a few strongmen (of the right kind) than the whole population?

Also we support Israel, “the only democracy in the middle east”. If there were others it would blur that message.

Also, it’s far easier to bribe strongmen to avoid antagonizing Israel than democracies full of voters who for whatever reason hate Israel.

For that matter, the Saudi royalty has no love for liberal democracy, and we don’t want to antagonize them either, if it’s easily avoided.

Stevenjohnson,

Not true, at all. Orwell was a lifelong, diehard socialist, and an enemy of fascism his entire life. He went to Spain to fight the fascists, though his poor health should have kept him home. His anger against the communists there developed as a result of the danger they repeatedly put him in, along with his comrades. He never had a problem with the theories of communism. Just the way it was bastardized and perverted by the Soviets, and the in-fighting and betrayals he witnessed there. And to his dying day, he hated Fascism far more. It really wasn’t close.

We can also “thank” Goldberg for helping a generation of righties come out of the closet. His Liberal Fascism, with its mountains of lies and errors, did wonders for the psyches of wannabe wingnuts who just couldn’t seem to get over the fact that Hitler, Nazism and Fascism were all right wing. Goldberg came to their rescue, along with other conservative distortionists, so that now, large groups of wingnuts actually believe Hitler, Nazism and Fascism were left-wing. This, despite the fact that Hitler was put into power by prominent German conservatives, who egged on the conservative Hindenburg to install him . . . after which Hitler all but destroyed the German left and instituted ultra-conservative policies. He violently went after socialists and communists before he went after the Jews, and most Jews in Germany were lefties, anyway.

No one at the time thought of Nazism or Fascism as anything but right wing. Fascist parties all across Europe called themselves right wing — and still do. Resistance and Partisan units were dominated by lefties, especially socialists and communists. We know this from countless contemporary letters, newspaper accounts, political minutes, memoirs, histories, etc. etc.

The left has its own cross to bear, but it’s not Hitler, Nazism and Fascism. That’s the right’s to live with. But, thanks to people like Goldberg, prospective and current wingnuts no longer believe they have that burden. In some ways, at least under the service, this has aided their assent in the last three decades.

No more arms, no more training, no more troops on the ground. How about we instead spend the money drilling wells, housing and taking in refugees and providing basic medical care. Less exciting than blowing shit up but we haven’t really tried it before and who knows? It might even work.

“can anyone truly still be a moderate after you give them a couple of Stingers and an RPG launcher?”

MPAV,

Sounds right.

A lot of people seem to be forgetting that Isil was massively outnumbered and outgunned, but still took city after city. And who did they face? Troops we had been training for years. Now, chickenhawks are calling for us to train and equip troops to fight against Isil, even though it already failed. It seems destined to keep failing. Our record has also been one of arming and training troops which eventually end up fighting against us — or, the arms used by others against us.

It’s been a long, long time since any of our “interventions” in world affairs has actually resulted in any positive, longterm gain. Most have had horrific blowback, with great loss in blood and treasure . . . and that goes back at least to the 1950s. Korea and Mossadegh, for starters.

It’s been a long, long time since any of our “interventions” in world affairs has actually resulted in any positive, longterm gain.

I mostly agree, but the election of PAN in Mexico in 2000 appears to me to have had little longterm bad effect. If you were expecting great results it was kind of disappointing, but on the whole it looks good to me.

And the 1989-92 effort in Paraguay has had generally good results. In 2008 the government changed hands peacefully for the first time in Paraguayan history.

Stevenjohnson was surprised to find out that the Russian communists WEREN”T EVEN ANIMALS!!

/Allegory and metaphor what are those?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t “war” have a specific meaning in American constitutional law? And didn’t Goldberg and his forebears change the meaning of that word so they could visit violence on brown people after WWII?

By the way, Orwell settles the matter his own self:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
“Why I Write,” Gangrel (Summer 1946)

and

In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.
Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, as published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell : As I please, 1943-1945 (1968)