Freedom of Speech and Maturity

[milkweed]

This point is irrelevant

lol... hand waving. Hat tip to Tali.

You complained that I'm taking input from women's writing. What, am I supposed to ask men what women think? Or are you the only woman I'm allowed to ask?

Oh GOOD, its finally impressed on you that I am a woman.

So you're identifying as transgender, now, too?

Didnt identify as homosexual, havent identified as transgender either. More Misdirection.

If rejecting your own straw man is the best thing you ever did for yourself, we might be even more useful to your own self by not burying the best thing you ever did by arguing against rape culture by suggesting masculine evolutionary disposition to animalistic sexual violence.

So you still dont get that some people behave like animals - and can be compared to such - regardless of the surrounding culture?

Maybe this will help you: realizing they are outliers rather than the norm.

Words like faggot and nigger don't drive hatred, they are manifestations of hatred.

After some advocates decided to portray them as such. As I pointed out with the term faggot being preferred by at least SOME gay men. As the video pointed out, nigger is slang for negro. Slang.

The sacrificial word(s) to appear just. Johnny, you cant be a fag anymore, you must call your self gay when self-identifying.

I had fully expected one of you to point out to me, the term gay was adopted to include both men and women homosexuals, fag and dyke were too gender specific and the goal was to present a united front. But you didnt. Why?

Because you had no idea it was about including women; not quite misogyny but you are still a fake. Because its not about homosexual rights, its all about YOU.

Preemptive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyke_(slang)#Increasing_acceptance

Why do you advocate victimization?

ah, misdirection again ...

 

[iceaura]

So you still dont get that some people behave like animals - and can be compared to such - regardless of the surrounding culture?

They don't treat their bosses at work like that. So let's say that culture has some influence, eh?

Maybe this will help you: realizing they are outliers rather than the norm.

Nobody is arguing that actual perpetrators of violent rape are anything except a fairly small minority of men in the US. You are insisting on repeating an ordinary observation always taken for granted by everyone here, as if it were somehow significant. Why?

As the video pointed out, nigger is slang for negro. Slang.

Seriously? Well, now we know how the rape culture in the US escaped your attention. It was mixed in with the equally invisible rest of the culture.

How to approach this gently - - - - look: No white man in the US has ever been able to use the term "nigger" in reference to another white man (outside of close friends) without insult perceived and almost certainly intended. This is so not only among the PC crowd and the liberal elites of recent years, but among the lower status and less frivolous "real people" of the entire history of this country. See how that kind of "slang" works?

 

[Tiassa]

Didnt identify as homosexual, havent identified as transgender either. More Misdirection.

What if I suggest you're too anxious for some manner of zinger, like:

"And you forget this any time someone disagrees with you." (#146↑)​

A question arises. How would you know?

Consider what you're responding to:

That is to say, what attracts me to the idea of actually being a woman is, in fact, twisted jealousy. And when I think about what I envy, I seriously must be crazy. Why in the world would anybody make that trade? Except they're not me, so I can't say what my brothers and sisters are chasing.

(#3337888/363↗)​

How would you know how the discussion goes when I disagree with a transgendered person?

When have you, personally, ever seen that happen? Can you point me to a disagreement here at Sciforums with an identifying transgendered person? And then can you demonstrate your point in that disagreement?

In truth, I don't remember ever having a disagreement with an identifying transgendered person here at Sciforums. Would you have witnessed this somewhere else? It seems unlikely. The more likely explanation is that you simply made an error by isolating a sentence out of context in order to set up your retort. The only ways you begin to make sense, there, are if you're the transgendered person disagreeing with me, or else you didn't pay attention to the implications of your snip job.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

So you still dont get that some people behave like animals - and can be compared to such - regardless of the surrounding culture?

I have always insisted that this culture of ours would be (at least slightly) better if we all could only acknowledge that we are animals! We are certainly not plants, fungi, algae, bacteria or archaea, and these are the only six taxa of lifeforms on this planet.

What we have in common with the other animals, especially the mammals, far outweighs our differences. When it comes to our sexual behavior, we could do far worse than studying the behavior of other mammals.

Our two closest relatives, Pan troglodytes, the "true" chimpanzee, and Pan paniscus, the Bonobo, are a study in contrasts.

• The chimps have a social hierarchy, which is not always observed. Members of rival packs lie in wait for each other and commit murder.
• On the other hand, the smaller Bonobos are the free-lovin' hippies of the jungle. They live peacefully and spend a lot of time playing, and every so often the entire pack decides to have an orgy, in which everyone from the youngest to the oldest participate. And procreation is not the driving force since heterosexuality is not a requirement.

Nigger is slang for negro.

It wasn't always. Negro, pronounced NEH-gro, is the Spanish word for "black." Since Spanish adjectives can be used as nouns by simply adding the definite article el ("the") or the indefinite article un ("a, an"), un negro means, simply and literally, "a black man."

The inhabitants of the southeastern portion of the USA had various linguistic influences, including French and Scottish, in addition to a variety of British accents. As it turns out, they simply mangled the pronunciation of negro into "nigger." I mean this as no insult, since the the inhabitants of the northeastern portion of the USA mangled it just as badly by turning the Spanish E into an English long E, and to this day we "Yankees" pronounce it NEE-gro, which is just as incorrect.

I have never encountered a scholarly article suggesting a definitive point in time when "nigger" changed from nothing more than a word for people of African ancestry, to an insult. But I'm sure that by the end of the Civil War, when the Southerners of European ancestry were told to treat the Southerners of African ancestry as equals, "nigger" was automatically an insult, at least in the South.

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the USA, our ancestors latched onto the euphemism "colored people" because "negro" sounded too much like "nigger." Nonetheless, "negro" came back into vogue around the 1920s. Then after WWII, when successive iterations of civil rights legislation were piled on each other, right up to the fabulous day when a family of African ancestry moved into the White House, black people began to actually refer to themselves as "black people," but of course that's too logical for human society and didn't last long, except in government forms which continue being used until they're all gone. But at least we settled on the perfectly coined and easily pronounced "Afro-American," but then to the tongue-twisting "African-American," which now seems to be the preferred term among us white folks, while black folks seem to prefer the perfect word "black" and despite the difference we manage to "all walk along together," to quote from one of my favorite 1950s children's radio programs. Meanwhile the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, still proudly retains its original name. Doncha just love the American language?

My point is that language can be treacherous when recruited as evidence for or against any particular point of view or social phenomenon.

I had fully expected one of you to point out to me, the term gay was adopted to include both men and women homosexuals.

We heterosexuals do indeed tend to use it that way. But I've never once heard a lesbian refer to herself or other lesbians as "gay." And I spent most of my life in Los Angeles, where the LGBTQ communities stopped hiding years ago and we get to hear them talking candidly all the time.

 

[Tiassa]

But I've never once heard a lesbian refer to herself or other lesbians as "gay."

It happens, though I acknowledge it's considerably less common. But I also think there are a couple of factors in play that might be situationally specific manifestations of something I couldn't identify quite so particularly. But one is that the more often one refers to herself as lesbian, the more likely she will eventually just go with "gay" because it's all of one syllable, and nobody seems to pitch a fit at this point about how it's all well and fine to do so but why do the women have to come back to the word for the men. But that also involves an idea called the "sufficiently invisible lesbian", which in turn is best illustrated by looking at traditionalist political literature concerning the evils of homosexuality and noting particularly a nearly overwhelming proportion orbiting the aesthetics of how people perceive gay men and their sexual congress.

The other thing is that our acronym keeps growing; I remember the LGBA in 1992 when I was in college, the Lesbian Gay and Bisexual Alliance. Association. I forget the A, exactly. But we started adding letters, at one point being both LGBT and LGBQ; but just sticking with either transgender or queer felt limiting in general and exclusive in particular. So people started runinng with LGBTQ; at some point, we added a plus sign, because it intuitively feels like the acronym is already too long, and also like we're leaving someone out if we don't, which is, as near as I can tell, how we ended up with LGBTQ+. We might also consider that while I get around all this by identifying as queer, the idea is actually quite controversial for reinforcing perceptions of homosexuals as alien.

But you will encounter, and mostly in very casual discourse, women describing themselves as gay. Part of the seeming rarity it is politically conscientious, but a lot of it is just habit. I do not, in fact, find it extraordinary that you could have lived your life without hearing, reading, or otherwise observing a lesbian identify as gay.

And there are other factors, whether local and regional, or generational, or some such. It's nearly common in my experience, except I couldn't tell you what that means. Because it's not every day; nor would I disagree with the underlying proposition that not every lesbian I know or have known has used the word gay as a self-description in my presence or observation.

In any case, sapphtastic just doesn't work because you might as well say lesbian.

 

[milkweed]

What if I suggest you're too anxious for some manner of zinger, like:

"And you forget this any time someone disagrees with you." (#146↑)​

A question arises. How would you know?

The more likely explanation is that you simply made an error by isolating a sentence out of context in order to set up your retort.

No, it wasnt an error. It was absolutely with intent to break up your post. For me, the topic wasnt about transgender. But for you, its ALWAYS about transgender. Now I understand.

And I stand by my statement:

And you forget this any time someone* disagrees with you.

*Someone includes happy-with-their-gender people...
ya know...
all the rest of us....

 

[Bells]

No, it wasnt an error. It was absolutely with intent to break up your post.

Are you saying you intended to post it out of context as you did?

For me, the topic wasnt about transgender. But for you, its ALWAYS about transgender. Now I understand.

Is that why you made it about transgender when you attacked him for being "gender confused"?

And I stand by my statement:

And you forget this any time someone* disagrees with you.

*Someone includes happy-with-their-gender people...
ya know...
all the rest of us....

Do you think that being transgender is just a matter of not being "happy with their gender"?

 

[milkweed]

Are you saying you intended to post it out of context as you did?

Like you just did?

No, it wasnt an error. It was absolutely with intent to break up your post. For me, the topic wasnt about transgender. But for you, its ALWAYS about transgender. Now I understand.

 

[Bells]

Like you just did?

You mean like when I then addressed the rest of it in the next sentence and questioned why you were making it about transgender when you started to attack people for their LGBT status by commenting on their being "gender confused" and when you lost your proverbial shit against a gay member because he was offended at being called a "fag" by a guy who decided to harass him for coming out of a bar?

How far will your dishonesty take you, do you think?

How far will your bigotry take you?

Nigger is just slang for negro? That is laughably bad. Surely you cannot be so thick as to not see the history of the use of the word. I doubt you are that stupid or brain damaged, in which case, your defense of the use of such terms paints you as being a bigot. Not to mention your constantly reminding us of how you, as a "fucking kid", had homosexuals around you in your life, as though having homosexuals around you is a bad or negative thing. The thing is, Milkweed, you have consistently made this about gays and transgender in this thread. To now try to feign ignorance or to try to deny it is ridiculous.

 

[pjdude1219]

The text of this post has been deleted due to its insulting and inflammatory content. We must all remember that SciForums is available almost everywhere. The administrators do not want it to be blocked from corporate, government or academic computers due to inflammatory content that does not advance a discussion--especially in Europe, where they take this kind of ugly crap much more seriously than we do.

Fraggle Rocker, Moderator, Linguistics

 

[pjdude1219]

Think of it this way, PJ: You're on the wrong track. That pain you feel trying to deal with Milkweed? It's what she wants.

you mistake my anger. i'm past the pain. She wants to feel good about herself so she attacks the weak the victimized. it makes her feel like hot shit, a predator, top of the food chain. but there is always a problem with people who play at being predators is eventually they run into the real deal. i know the game being played, let me play it and have my fun. in the end she'll either learn some facts and manners or slither back under her rock.

 

[iceaura]

I have never encountered a scholarly article suggesting a definitive point in time when "nigger" changed from nothing more than a word for people of African ancestry, to an insult. But I'm sure that by the end of the Civil War, when the Southerners of European ancestry were told to treat the Southerners of African ancestry as equals, "nigger" was automatically an insult, at least in the South.

I have never seen an article of any kind, scholarly or otherwise, that established any time when "nigger" as used by white men was not denigrating. There is no evidence of any time or place in US history in which it was "merely slang", in other words. And certainly not for hundreds of years now.

There is evidence such denigration was automatic and unremarked - not pointed or "fighting words", but routine terminology in a deeply racist culture - in many times and places throughout US history. The discoverer of the initial hard evidence for the existence of early residents of NA, overturning the conventional science of the time, was routinely referred to as "Nigger George" or "Nigger George McJunkin" , for example, despite his high status as a respected arbitrator of disputes and foreman of a major ranch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McJunkin.

But it is bizarre to regard the denigration and insult of that term as somehow being a creation or invention of the people who object to it, who attempt to resist the role of such language in US culture.

Things like this: "
Words like faggot and nigger don't drive hatred, they are manifestations of hatred.
->After some advocates decided to portray them as such. " are seriously delusional.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I have never seen an article of any kind, scholarly or otherwise, that established any time when "nigger" as used by white men was not denigrating. There is no evidence of any time or place in US history in which it was "merely slang", in other words. And certainly not for hundreds of years now. There is evidence such denigration was automatic and unremarked - not pointed or "fighting words", but routine terminology in a deeply racist culture - in many times and places throughout US history. The discoverer of the initial hard evidence for the existence of early residents of NA, overturning the conventional science of the time, was routinely referred to as "Nigger George" or "Nigger George McJunkin" , for example, despite his high status as a respected arbitrator of disputes and foreman of a major ranch.

I didn't say that it was slang. Simply the accent of the American southeast. The population there had a much different matrix of ancestry, including French, Scottish and Irish on top of the British substratum, as opposed to the northeast, where British accents were more widespread with less influence from other languages except Dutch. It's hardly remarkable that a Boston or New Amsterdam accent would be considerably different from a Memphis or New Orleans accent--especially since that difference still exists today!

And of course the majority of Southerners would automatically regard people of African ancestry as inferior, since their ruling class made sure that almost all of them were slaves, and since their economy depended on slave labor. So regardless of the etymology of "nigger," obviously it would be derogatory.

BTW, I find it amusing that we can use the verb "denigrate" in a discussion of the noun "negro" and its variants.

But it is bizarre to regard the denigration and insult of that term as somehow being a creation or invention of the people who object to it, who attempt to resist the role of such language in US culture.

Sorry if I gave that impression, although after reviewing my own posts, I still don't see it. In any case, that is not what I intended to convey.

Words like faggot and nigger don't drive hatred, they are manifestations of hatred. ->After some advocates decided to portray them as such. " are seriously delusional.

Many Americans today are desperately looking for a humorous, insulting, and at least moderately descriptive epithet for "Muslim." The best they have come up with is "raghead" or "towelhead," although it's often been pointed out that their turbans (other names for the headgear are also used) are not made from folded rags or folded towels. They're made from little sheets, so, as the inflammatory joke now goes, "We should call them little sheet-heads."

I insist that this over-the-top exercise in political incorrectness is clearly not the cause of America's growing anti-Islamic bias, but a reflection of that bias.

 

[iceaura]

But it is bizarre to regard the denigration and insult of that term as somehow being a creation or invention of the people who object to it, who attempt to resist the role of such language in US culture.
Sorry if I gave that impression, although after reviewing my own posts, I still don't see it. In any case, that is not what I intended to convey.

My bad - I was touching off from Milkweed's "like" of your post, in the course of the exchange including your post, and should have addressed that exchange or poster directly.

BTW, I find it amusing that we can use the verb "denigrate" in a discussion of the noun "negro" and its variants.

Ha. Completely unconscious, on my part.

 

[Beer w/Straw]

http://latindictionary.wikidot.com/adjective:niger


blah blah blah.

 

[wellwisher]

I have never seen an article of any kind, scholarly or otherwise, that established any time when "nigger" as used by white men was not denigrating. There is no evidence of any time or place in US history in which it was "merely slang", in other words. And certainly not for hundreds of years now.

There is evidence such denigration was automatic and unremarked - not pointed or "fighting words", but routine terminology in a deeply racist culture - in many times and places throughout US history. The discoverer of the initial hard evidence for the existence of early residents of NA, overturning the conventional science of the time, was routinely referred to as "Nigger George" or "Nigger George McJunkin" , for example, despite his high status as a respected arbitrator of disputes and foreman of a major ranch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McJunkin.

But it is bizarre to regard the denigration and insult of that term as somehow being a creation or invention of the people who object to it, who attempt to resist the role of such language in US culture.

Things like this: "
Words like faggot and nigger don't drive hatred, they are manifestations of hatred.
->After some advocates decided to portray them as such. " are seriously delusional.

The Latin word for black is niger, which is pronounced Ny-ger (long i). I can picture uneducated people, not fluent in Latin, using the wrong pronunciation for the Latin word for black. The mispronounced version caught on among birds of a feather, until the Latin word niger, became misspelled; way it was being mispronounced.

The entire hate speech angle, could have been circumvented if a single black person, who could read Latin, pointed out, the hayseeds could not say the word for black, in Latin, properly. This would make people research until it was pronounced Niger, which in english is black, which is now acceptable.

I see this all the time. I am often amazed at some of the names babies are given, by young mothers from the inner cities. If you sound out some of these names, by the letters, it becomes the misspelled version of a more traditional name. I may say spell the word, buffalo! Not knowing better I spell if Buffellow, which is now pronounced by others as buff fellow, due to his polished look.

 

[joepistole]

The Latin word for black is niger, which is pronounced Ny-ger (long i). I can picture uneducated people, not fluent in Latin, using the wrong pronunciation for the Latin word for black. The mispronounced version caught on among birds of a feather, until the Latin word niger, became misspelled; way it was being mispronounced.

The entire hate speech angle, could have been circumvented if a single black person, who could read Latin, pointed out, the hayseeds could not say the word for black, in Latin, properly. This would make people research until it was pronounced Niger, which in english is black, which is now acceptable.

I see this all the time. I am often amazed at some of the names babies are given, by young mothers from the inner cities. If you sound out some of these names, by the letters, it becomes the misspelled version of a more traditional name. I may say spell the word, buffalo! Not knowing better I spell if Buffellow, which is now pronounced by others as buff fellow, due to his polished look.

Is there a point buried in there somewhere?

 

[milkweed]

I meant to get back to this quicker, but this last week has been very hectic.

It wasn't always [Slang]. Negro, pronounced NEH-gro, is the Spanish word for "black." Since Spanish adjectives can be used as nouns by simply adding the definite article el ("the") or the indefinite article un ("a, an"), un negro means, simply and literally, "a black man."

The inhabitants of the southeastern portion of the USA had various linguistic influences, including French and Scottish, in addition to a variety of British accents. As it turns out, they simply mangled the pronunciation of negro into "nigger." I mean this as no insult, since the the inhabitants of the northeastern portion of the USA mangled it just as badly by turning the Spanish E into an English long E, and to this day we "Yankees" pronounce it NEE-gro, which is just as incorrect.

Just a relevant quote to add to above:

Nigger (also spelled niggar): a word that is an alteration of the earlier neger, nigger derives from the French negre, from the Spanish and Portuguese negro, from the Latin niger (black). First recorded in 1587 (as negar), the word probably originated with the dialectal pronunciation of negro in northern England and Ireland.
--Anti-Bias Study Guide, Anti-Defamation League, 1998

I have never encountered a scholarly article suggesting a definitive point in time when "nigger" changed from nothing more than a word for people of African ancestry, to an insult.

Thats because it was never used solely as an insult; for some it was totally an insult, for others it was a race/class description. Its meaning has always been multi-termed up until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the USA, our ancestors latched onto the euphemism "colored people" because "negro" sounded too much like "nigger." Nonetheless, "negro" came back into vogue around the 1920s.....
Meanwhile the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, still proudly retains its original name. Doncha just love the American language?

There are various places where 'colored' is claimed to have come into use to separate the upper class terms - colored- from lower class - nigger (read rich/educated vs poor/illiterate).

Additionally, here is a 1837 paper/essay written by a northern black minister, using the term colored:

https://archive.org/stream/treatiseonintell00east/treatiseonintell00east_djvu.txt

My point is that language can be treacherous when recruited as evidence for or against any particular point of view or social phenomenon.

Yes it can. Well noted throughout sciforums.

We heterosexuals do indeed tend to use it that way. But I've never once heard a lesbian refer to herself or other lesbians as "gay." And I spent most of my life in Los Angeles, where the LGBTQ communities stopped hiding years ago and we get to hear them talking candidly all the time.

oh. Apparently our life experiences vary. Maybe its a regional difference. Maybe I knew more lesbians than you did. Maybe due to being related to people in hiding.
Notice the women in the 1970 poster below?

Anyways, it is more often than not, a question can have more than one right answer.

 

[Bells]

Is there a point buried in there somewhere?

Of course there is.

He is whining because he cannot call black people "niggers" and he blames this on political correctness. He blames black people for this of course, because if only one of them had been able to understand Latin and they would have seen that the word "niger" means black.

If I were to use his argument, I could very well call him a "fuck wit" and when he would complain, which he would complain, I could simply tell him that it is an Australian word for "idiot" and he should simply have learned to understand "Straylan" and that it really is his fault for not understanding it.

See how that works?

Wellwisher's complaint is that he cannot use racist or insulting and offensive words to refer to people or complain about people because of "political correctness". What he forgets is that the backwater retards who used words like "nigger" back in America's hay-day of lynching blacks or when blacks were "working" (*cough* slaves *cough*) would not have understood Latin either. I would bet that the majority of Americans who refer to blacks as "niggers" do not even know the Latin meaning of the word either. Worst of all, Wellwisher conveniently forgets that black people were denied any formal education in the US during those days he wishes he could hark back to with a noose in his hot little pudgy hands. So he blames political correctness. Much like the Right blame Obama if they fart too loudly.

 

[Tiassa]

The Vacuum, and, Please Let This Be the Requisite Joke About Women's Work―A Vacuum ... er ... Never Mind

See how that works?

Nature abhors a vacuum, as such, and one of the weirdest influences is an insistent absence. The question of words like nigger, bitch, and faggot as pejoratives is also behaviorally associated throughout history. Were they merely words, this desperate defense of their purported legitimacy would not need to take place.

But this is why it is so important for people to pretend they never heard a rape joke, or witnessed the pickup artist presented in any admirable context, and so on. This ignorance is prerequisite to the defense.

The word "nigger" works just fine if it has exactly no prior historical significance, speaks nothing to empowerment, and so on. But it would be irresponsible, for instance, for Americans to pretend that the Three-Fifths Compromise, slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation, and the War on Drugs, at least, never existed.

Similarly, we saw a defense of sexism that fell back to "chivalry", and here we are to consider an unbroken set of customs occurring under a magically transformed ideology; as a result, we encounter a more practical observation: She is my equal but only in the context I allow her to exist. It's kind of like liberation within marriage; men so begrudgingly gave over in prior decades to such revolutionary ideas as women working outside the home, maintaining and even cultivating careersr, saying no to sex, and expecting her husband to be able to do some basic housework or else learn to keep his shit out of his shorts that in a way it only makes sense that so many continue to lament and fight against the existential reality of woman outside the context of marriage. Lesbians and transgenders and unmarried career women with postdoctoral credentials, oh my!

Functionally it is just another attempt to seize the benefits of inequality and injustice while washing one's hands of inequality and injustice.

It's like the bit about having a hard time accepting that Hermione Granger could be black while suspending disbelief enough to swallow the rest of Harry Potter's phenomenon. From an artistic standpoint, the question becomes, "Really? It's that important to you?"

The differences aren't always subtle, but the effect is pretty much the same. Many people want the benefits of something they know is sinister, yet wish to simultaneously convince themselves they are not taking part in that something awful. The result, over and over, is an attempt to fall back to it just being the way things are and history has nothing to do with it.

The online characters, our neighbors here at Sciforums? Some of them simply display a pathological desire to be hurtful to their fellow human beings, and this is their way of doing it.

It's strange; when I was young I used to chuff and chortle at this amorphous block of societal propriety that fretted over the kids of the day, a lack of reverence, a detachment from heritage, and all that. The end of decent society, they lamented.

I've mentioned a verison of them before; there is strong overlap with an old bit about ridiculing behavioral citizenship, and the idea that we were somehow cheating kids by giving ribbons for meritorious behavior that didn't involve running fastest, lifting the most weight, jumping the farthest, and so on.

It turns out these people weren't entirely wrong; they were talking about themselves.

These were the traditionalists thirty-five years ago.

And it happens over and over again. They weren't entirely wrong about the music, or the books, or the movies and television; but they were talking about themselves. They weren't wrong about the lack of reverence; but they were talking about themselves. And like I said, the differences aren't always subtle, but the effect is similar: They weren't so much wrong about the citizenship awards as they were protecting their own interests.

Nor were they entirely wrong about the end of decent society; they perceived the crumbling of their own traditional assertion of decency.

And today, these ideas are detached from history; no path to justification can afford to reasonably attend the historical record. They are irreverant, and disdainful of basic human citizenship.

There is a reason for that, of course. This is what such ideas are reduced to, the only remaining pretense of viability. Which in turn really does make the argument look like pathological behavior.