Category: Education

Posted on

Was Pollyanna Stupid or Evil?

It’s a tough question. If you’re unfamiliar with the reference, take some time out. I’ll wait. Meanwhile, I’ll leave this here for interim consderation:

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.–Napoleon Bonaparte (ascribed)

There is such a thing as human evil. I’ll allow no argument on that point, because any argument otherwise is simply either stupid* or evil. Period. So, accept as axiomatic that human evil exists. Is it then stupid or evil to look human evil in the face and see good? (I’ll allow a third option: insanity.)

Examples abound:

Idiots who defend Islam as a “religion of peace”. Stupidity or witting enabling of the evil hate cult of Islam?

People who assert that America is an unjust society, because we have people they class as poor? Evil or stupid? Consider this:

Ahhh, I’m tired of this already, and my BP is starting to climb… *sigh*

So, are those who are enablers of the hate cult of the Butcher of Medina evil or stupid (or both–likely, IMO)?

Are those who seem to be actively attempting to destroy our society via such activities as encouraging the kleptocratic “gimme” culture evil or stupid (or both–likely, IMO)?

And when do we stop ascribing destructive behaviors to stupidity alone and start calling it malice?

Yes, I aborted a bunch of stupid/evil material ranging from “pro-choice” (which is really, “Deny ANY choice to the unborn”), “Edumacation”, the Thugs Standing Around program of full employment for goons and petty tyrants, and “feddle gummint” tyrannical meddling in citizens’ lives while actively enabling outlaws to The Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Scare-ism and numerous points in between. One can select any issue dominated by the lies of the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, politicians *gag-spew* and Academia Nut Fruitcakes and plug it right into the “Stupid or Evil” matrix for consideration.

*I include in my use of “stupid” acts of witting, deliberate avoidance of facts. Witting, deliberate distortion of facts is evil–slander against truth.

Posted on

Yet Another Rant from the Literacy Loon

Son & Heir spent about $7 on a new hardback novel recently ($4 of that in shipping!). He let me read it first. Nice guy. It was well-written by just about every metric. I spent about $7 for a paperback the other day and found gripe after gripe to make about the writing:

Wrong words abound, e.g., “brake cables” instead of “brake lines” when speaking about the possible sabotage of a car. (Cars have only emergency brake cables; the main brakes are hydraulic and served by lines, not cables. Not a quibble.)

Bafflingly stupid grammar in a published work, e.g., “have rode” where “have ridden” is de rigueur. (“Rode” is simple past tense; the past perfect takes the helper, “have” and requires the use of “ridden”.)

With these kinds of things scattered all over the place, my primary “enjoyment” of this book has been using a red pen to correct the errors.

And this thing made the NYT book list.

No, I’m not naming the author or citing the book title. I wouldn’t want to let Google find those here. Just check page 176 on new paperbacks you’re considering buying, Mmm’K?

Posted on

Phractured Frases

Yes, I meant to write that. And I know that the words are “Fractured Phrases”. So, why? Simple. Most people I see and hear botching common words and phrases do so unwittingly. And therein lies a stealth danger to society, especially a society built, as ours once was, on shared cultural memes that cut across multiple imported ethnic and cultural traditions, enabling the kinds of cross-cultural communications that created the Melting Pot Society.

The single largest factors in the destruction of a healthy common culture here in the US are the growth of illiteracy* in the US and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. The illiterate among us aren’t limited to those who cannot read at all but include those who simply do not read and those who, when they do read, read only crap and scarcely understand even that. Having not read much at all, they are easy prey for the lies about current events, history and civics that are the toxic stew served up daily by the Hivemind in entertainment (“news” and other crap on TV as well as movies and manufactured “music”) that is designed to misinform and twist values away from those which made America, at one time, a great nation.

But what’s this gripe I have against fractured phrases and words? Simple, really. I see an apparently growing trend toward the subliterate and illiterate who simply do not know the meanings of common words (look for consistent uses of “then” for “than” or “affect” for “effect” in a person’s writing, for a couple of common examples: subliterate tending toward illiterate) or are so lacking in grounding in any broader culture than the simplistic, twisted culture presented by the Hivemind that they botch even simple child’s games.

Really? Yes. I ran across a long, massively stupid, “discussion” on a social media site recently where someone asked why paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper. About one in four answers made any sense at all. No, seriously. A failure of both basic literacy and any sense of a culture beyond the Hivemind. (BTW, rock-paper-scissors has been around for thousands of years. Apparently, it takes a modern American Hivemind-dominated culture to denude it of any coherence.)

Minor examples of a major problem. “Major problem” because these minor examples are much, much less than the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading “Phractured Frases”

Posted on

Not Just Sloppy Writing

The two people credited in a byline for an article that included the following should be whipped with a dangling participle, along with any editor who passed on their work:

“…the recently re-ignited 40-year-old cold case that has haunted the FBI for years.”

?!? OK, I don’t get paid to write anything, but even I know that is unnecessarily awkward. How about, “…the recently re-ignited cold case that has haunted the FBI for 40 years” instead? It’s even easier to write than the other, too. Clarity, simplicity, brevity: watchwords for reporters to observe carefully, IMO.

Of course, now that I think of it, where would the “journalists” of today find such writing to emulate? (And I’ll admit they’d not find it here, but then I don’t take anyone’s money for this gig.)

Just another small piece of the “literacy means more than just being able to painfully puzzle out those weird chicken scratches on paper” puzzle, along with idiot Hiveminders who don’t know such things as the difference between “affect” and “effect” or “than” and “then” (and don’t pretend you haven’t seen such abortions of literacy in print or heard them from Podpeople Pie Holes).

Such people don’t even qualify as subliterates in my book. That would be giving them too much credit.

OK, OK, these sorts of things have been around forever, I suppose. I just notice them more and more often nowadays. But… re-reading (and taking very little time to do so *heh*) a book from the so-called “Golden Age of Science Fiction” authored by one of its pillars, I ran across,

“…according to their desserts.”

Where the author meant, “according to their deserts.”

Yes, the first instance is incorrect and the second is correct. Check me, if you wish. I’ll wait. 🙂

OK, back now?

Now, that incorrect word usage may have been a slip of the typewriter 61 years ago, though since I’m conversant with this author’s work in print, and he was more literate than 99% of fair-to-middlin’-to-pretty darned good contemporary authors, even given the space opera-ish tone of his work, I suspect an error in transcription crept in along the way to the eBook edition.

And naturally, it went flying right past any proofreader or editor with nary a pause.

Chaps my gizzard, it does… *heh*

Posted on

Another One from The Aliterate Society

Every now and then I see another piece of evidence that people simply do not read–or think.

“paper view”–the words heard when someone said “pay per view” in the presence of someone who doesn’t read and, apparently, has no idea what the words mean.

Posted on

Dog Bites Man Redux

*yawn* Old, old news in new clothing. The subject line? “AP flunks science”. So? What else is new? Don Surber quotes the Associated Press:

NEW YORK (AP) — The extreme heat that’s been roasting the eastern U.S. is only expected to get worse, and residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point. [emphasis added]

Wow! That’s some heat wave! Temps near or above 212°F? 100°F would be boiling point for such highly flammable chemicals as acetaldehyde, but “boiling point” in normal parlance refers to the boiling point of water at standard pressure, 212°F.

But what can you expect from one of the chief Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind mouthpieces of The Cult of Anthropogenic Global Climate Scare-ism? Ordinary knowledge of common science? Nah. Never. Ain’t a-gonna happen on the AP’s watch!

Dumbasses.

Posted on

New Math or Just Innumerate?

(Note the date of recording.)

I think I’ll go with innumerate twit:

See? I told y’all not to trust that so-called “birth certificate”. Even The Zero (inadvertently) admits it’s hinky. (A guy who has created such a big fuss about the issue but doesn’t even know when he was born–or worse, when he IS NOW–is incompetent to manage his own affairs, let alone be president of a garden club. Just sayin’… )

Posted on

Just One More Example

from the litter of our post-literate society:

“suaree”

While I admire creativity and good story telling, and I appreciate folks who put themselves and their work on the line, online, it does bother me a bit when I see repeated examples of this sort of evidence of a lack of literacy in someone who’s offering up an otherwise rollicking read. It’s not a typical misspelled word, and it’s certainly not a typo. No, it’s a word the author has heard but is not well read enough to ever have seen in print before (or at least not in something written by someone else who’s literate enough to know the word is “soiree“).

Oh, one example of such a thing is certainly not enough to bother me, or at least not enough to keep me from reading an otherwise well-told tale, and, frankly, in an unedited rough draft I’m more than willing to accept more than a few such problematic and weird spellings and even word usage errors (although instances of such things as the repeated use of “then” for “than” really grate [“greatly” *heh*] on my nerves *sigh*) in otherwise good yarns. Still, I wonder how such a person managed to get through high school or even eighth grade English… until I reconsider the state of pubschool education in these (dys)United States.

Oh, well. It takes a bit more work, but copy-pasting forum-published “fun-fic” into a file I can edit for grammar, usage and spelling corrections isn’t all that difficult. Really. *heh*

OTOH, when I read such things in a book that’s actually been through the eyes of proof readers and an editor and then made it to print, I do get a tad steamed.

In case you’d missed it, I do NOT accept “can laboriously decipher and sound out weird heiroglyphs” as “literacy” even though that seems to be the current “edumacational” definition…

Posted on

And These People Are Allowed to Vote…

…no wonder we have the kleptocratic, anarcho-tyrannical “feddle gummint” kakistocracy we have. Massive ignorance (and shameful–WILFULL–stupidity) reign supreme in our society today.

Remember third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom:

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

More and more I’m convinced that truer words were never spoken.