Thursday, June 11, 2009

Secret decoder ring

How to understand conservative commentary regarding the Holocaust Museum shooting?
Recognize that for conservatives, "bad" and "left" are interchangeable!

Atrios noted this first:
Everyone Bad Is A Lefty
We've spent several years having fundamentalist anti-women anti-gay Muslim extremists being somehow aligned with liberals, and now anti-government anti-Semitic white supremacists are as well.
Yep - if you're a conservative commentator, anything bad must derive from the Left!

No - I don't understand it either... but then, I didn't understand Jonah Goldberg's title: Liberal Fascism.
A willingness to assign personal meanings to words is ... well, psychotic!

... though "meaning" has confounded very smart folks from Plato to Wittgenstein, and Lewis Carroll probably had a point:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
[Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6]
I note that Tom Tancredo believes Sotomayor is too liberal... because she is associated with La Raza, which he takes to be the Latino version of the KKK!
The KKK: that bastion of commie, pinko, fellow-traveling Leftists!

[semi-pointless aside: I am currently working with a director who can't tell 'right' from 'left' - as in "stage right" & "stage left"... it makes rehearsals challenging. I provided her with a job-aid: a simple diagram from the "house/audience" perspective showing Stage Right, Center, Stage Left, Up Right, & Up Left.
Even if YOU can't tell right from left, if you intend to convey your intentions to others it's important to use the terms consistently and in a way that will be understood by others!]

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