It's a great way to lump people who simply think that making sweeping blanket condemnations of vast world religions is inappropriate and kosher and halal aren't the worst things ever in with George Galloway-style useful idiots and antisemites of the left, so HT.
Speak of the devil.....
Considering that we’ve established and you’ve conceded in the past that I know what issues I do and don’t fit this description on better than you do, and that I don’t like the word ‘progressive’ or find it in any way offensive or upsetting to be accused of not being one, I’m not sure for whose consumption this sick burn is intended, but the reason I’m necroing this thread isn’t to respond to this, it’s to respond to
this:
AYE! If an aspect of culture is important or otherwise provides a benefit, it will stick around (and may be adopted and modified by others AND THAT"S OK TOO!), if it's not, it will go away just like it always has. Same with languages.
Okay, see, this is exactly the sort of sentiment that
leads me to lean ‘regressive left’ on some issues, because I don’t believe this is a morally acceptable understanding of language. There are many features of culture that it’s more or less fine to look at this way but language really isn’t one of them. To think this about language you have to assume that languages (or dialects) don’t have any unique or intrinsic merit at all—that the only function they serve is to communicate abstract ideas that could just as easily be communicated in any other language (or dialect), or else that they
do have intrinsic merit but some are ‘better’ than others based on how they ~compete~ in the ~global marketplace of ideas~ or whatever. Either way is an incredibly un-literary and inartistic way of understanding language; only sociopathic ideologues and people who are secretly World War II-era BBC personalities admit to thinking these things. You don’t have to believe in kotodama or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the fifty-words-for-snow factoid to know or at least suspect that there’s more to it than this.
That being the case, why the hell are we supposed to just lie back and think of Basic English and let entire frameworks and lenses for understanding the world pass away unrecorded and unmourned just because it goes against the dead0mans of the world’s hyper- [insert here: -rationalistic, -modern, -‘competition’-obsessed, or what you will] worldviews to lift a finger to do anything to prevent that? I’m not even making a call for any sort of ‘enforced diversity’ at this point (I enforce some vanishing Connecticut Valley dialectical features on my
own speech, such as saying ‘tag sale’ instead of ‘yard sale’, but this is part of a general program of deliberate and strategic self-caricature that I don’t expect other people to follow or have any interest in for themselves), only assiduous historical recordkeeping and remembrance, and also maybe not deliberately
hastening these processes by insistently shilling for mandatory linguistic centralization or standardization or for every exciting and new form of globalization going. I hardly think that’s too terribly much to ask.
I don’t really think of this as a leftist or rightist understanding of the subject. I think of it as an understanding based on my theological rejection of consequentialism and insistence that people-and-things-as-such have value, not only ‘utility’, which precedes and, if I’m doing things right, informs any leftist or rightist Issues views I have.
Poll
