Not Tired of Winning XCVII
Behold, one more lovely victory which would have been unimaginable without Donald Trump.
Consider the following headlines:
- Federal Appeals Panel Rejects Transgender Pronouns
Trump Judge Lashes Out at A Transgender Litigant In a Surprisingly Cruel Opinion
Both are meant to convey the facts about an event. Only one is corrupting the language.
This is painfully ironic, since the case concerned whether or not the law could be used as an instrument to force free men to corrupt their own language, and aid their own destroyers.
Thankfully, the case was properly decided. The days of christmassless winter are numbered. Aslan is on the move.
From Dailywire
On Wednesday, a divided panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled, in 2–1 fashion, that a transgender litigant — a biological male who suffers from gender dysphoria and subjectively feels that he is a female — cannot require a court to address him using female pronouns.
The case, U.S. v. Varner, pitted Reagan nominee Judge Jerry E. Smith and Trump nominee Judge S. Kyle Duncan in the panel majority, against Clinton nominee Judge James L. Dennis as the lone dissenter. What made the opinion particularly fascinating was that Duncan’s majority opinion used male pronouns, whereas Dennis’ dissent used female pronouns.
Alas, the latest and most disputatious, headline-grabbing front of our ceaseless culture war has fully hit the federal judiciary.
As highlighted by legal blogger extraordinaire and Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ed Whelan noted yesterday at National Review’s “Bench Memos” blog, Duncan’s majority opinion provided three distinct reasons for denying the plaintiff Varner’s motion for the “use [of] female pronouns when addressing” him:
First, no authority supports the proposition that we may require litigants, judges, court personnel, or anyone else to refer to gender-dysphoric litigants with pronouns matching their subjective gender identity. …
Second, if a court were to compel the use of particular pronouns at the invitation of litigants, it could raise delicate questions about judicial impartiality. … Increasingly, federal courts today are asked to decide cases that turn on hotly-debated issues of sex and gender identity. In cases like these, a court may have the most benign motives in honoring a party’s request to be addressed with pronouns matching his “deeply felt, inherent sense of [his] gender.” Yet in doing so, the court may unintentionally convey its tacit approval of the litigant’s underlying legal position.
Third, ordering use of a litigant’s preferred pronouns may well turn out to be more complex than at first it might appear. … [O]ne university has created this widely-circulated pronoun usage guide for gender-dysphoric persons.
Duncan then inserted the “pronoun usage guide for gender-dysphoric persons,” borrowed from the “LGBTQ+ Resource Center” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which is a colorful five-by-nine matrix. This is potentially confusing, to say the least, as Duncan noted, and “[d]eploying such neologisms could hinder communication among the parties and the court.”
My comment:
Nearly all the errors and evils in the thoughts of men are created, sustained, or allowed by the corruption of language.
Language is corrupted when men follow the illogical and immoral conceit that calling a thing by a wrong name changes the properties of the thing, or changes the proper attitude it deserves.
But these practices are meant as flattery or flummery or puffery at best, or newspeak and deception at worst.
One can indeed influence the reaction, the attitude or the opinion of an audience by crafty language. One can indeed make a sizzling steak smothered in mushrooms sound unappetizing by calling it a “bit of dead cow burnt and coated in fungus.” One can make an intolerable sexual perversion sound like a harmless eccentricity by calling it an “orientation.” One can cloak a hellish act of childmurder in sanctity by calling its a “women’s right to choose.”
You may not have heard, however, that one cannot influence what is the due, apt, proportionate, just and proper reaction, proper attitude, proper opinion.
In life, one can, of course, hate a father, trample a flag, mock Christ, lust for a sister, rejoice at seeing a Muslim woman lashed to death for removing her headscarf, and so on. One has the power to curse the bright face of the sun, and spit out the waybread of the elves like soot and ashes.
One can admire the contents of a modern art museum. One can sniff the contents of a sewer like roses.
One can admire traitors, cheer for tyrants, delight in bloodshed, adore falsehood, praise cowardice, yearn for the sight of virgins demeaned to harlotry and for the sound of children uttering vulgarities.
However, any of these, whatever else it is, indeed is an offense against justice. One who does not hate what is hateful nor love what is lovely cheats it of its due.
Keep in mind that one can indeed change the attitude of an audience regarding a thing by crafty language, misdirection, euphemism, buzzwords, and all fashion of false-to-facts associations, and a whole repertoire of rhetorical sleights of hand.
But what one cannot change is reality, by definition. “Reality” is the word we use to refer to those things that we cannot change: that which is so whether we would prefer it so or not.
Therefore what also one cannot change is what ought to be the proper light in which to regard a reality, or, if variation is permissible, the where fall the boundaries of the variation.
One cannot change what is the fit, proportionate, proper, wholesome, normal, healthy, useful and good response or attitude or opinion.
It is commonplace to regard one’s responses, attitude, and opinion to the various objects to be a matter ordained by the sovereign willpower of a godlike libertarian soul, imagined as being isolated and supreme in all subjective decision. To criticize the tastes and opinions of another is regard not merely as vain and impossible, but as impermissible.
This commonplace is obviously wrong and ugly and blameworthy, because, were it correct, the proper response, attitude or opinion toward this voicing it would be to call it right and fair and praiseworthy.
Indeed, if the kind reader would take a moment to note his own emotional response, attitude or opinion to the proposition that some emotional responses are right and fitting and others are wrong and unfitting, he may detect a rather strong opinion and heated reaction forming in his mind that it is almost blasphemous to say opinions and reactions can be praised or blamed, called right or wrong, and held to objective standards. It smells of tyranny, if not insanity.
Well, that reaction, if it exists in you, dear reader, may be your own sense of the world being insulted or injured.
If your sense of the world is correct, I gently suggest that your sense of injury upon being contradicted would also be correct. If your gods you worship are real, to hear them called unreal, even if stated in polite words, sounds like blasphemy because it would be blasphemy. It is only if they are not real is the emotional reaction inappropriate.
The correctness of the emotional reaction depends on the correctness of the underlying facts and underlying moral imperatives.
In this case, if your reaction to the proposition that not all reactions are subjective hence sacrosanct is the feeling that a sacrosanct dogma is being offended, your reaction is a testimony in favor of the proposition, and your emotions are out of step with your dogma.
Be that as it may, the dirty little secret of dogma of subjective reality is that it is not meant to create peace and soothe controversy. The dogma is meant only to lull those loyal to civilization into a state of foolish disarmament.
If the Catholics and Protestants cannot stop quarreling (so the dogma runs) better to have agnostics and atheists rule the land and silence them, and the quarrels will cease. The Catholics and Protestants have unwisely turned their arms over to the atheist Thought Police, deceiving themselves into believing the atheists have no plans to spread their own worldview, raze churches, erect reeducation gulags.
And likewise with every other pair of groups who have, or can be can be fooled into adopting, a posture of mutual animosity.
Paramount in this attempt to create the divisions needed for the disarmament to seem tempting to the unwary, is the creation of a false, alternate and mutually exclusive and mutually hostile worldview to the true one, or, to use the Leftwing buzzword, narratives.
Rewording reality bypasses all the normal mechanisms of skeptical reasoning and immediately engages the imagination on a visceral level. The unwary need not be persuaded that pederasty and cannibalism are wholesome if one merely rewords these things under softer names, calling it age appropriate sexual choice, or alternative gastronomic orientation.
Then, once the unwary grow acclimated to the rewording process, and the new vocabulary is no longer merely used in a small circle of dunderheaded academics, but has crept out into the general society, the social mechanism that enforce rules of courtesy and politeness, of social taboo and acceptable speech, can be used instead to abolish courtesy, banish politeness, and punish political difference of opinion as if they were moral and ethical infractions against a new Ten Commandments of Thoughtcrime, starting with, Thou Shalt Have no Divinity before Diversity: and It alone shall you serve.
At that point, the unwary are trapped into a system where the very habits, mechanisms, and unwritten rules which formerly protected the weak against the strong, the humble against the proud, and the poor against the rich, now can be used on behalf of international globalist millionaires, high tech companies, government funded academies, and the whole apparatus of the news and entertainment industry to rob the poor, humiliate the humble, and trample the weak. We call it Cancel Culture now, but is is merely Political Correctness in an electronic form, that is, hatred and sadism.
Obviously, calling calling a man, even one who thinks he should be a woman, by the incorrect pronoun is a falsehood, not a courtesy. It harms both him and you.
To a lesser degree, but still in reality, using “they” and “them” in the singular, because the unambiguous rule in English grammar is, and has been for centuries, that when the sex of the antecedent is not known to be female, “he” is preferred. The only reason for pretending this is not the rule is the claim that the use of the pronoun offends women by hypnotizing anyone using English into thinking women are inferior and despicable, on the grounds that using a word in a certain way defines reality.
“He” means “he or she” in English, just as “dog” means “dog or bitch” or “fox” means “fox or vixen.” Those who were taught otherwise, or who have never heard of this rule of grammar, were taught a falsehood. It was not an innocent mistake.
So when someone demands, no matter how politely, that you call him by a mispronoun (ae, e, ey, fae, ne, ne, tey, thon, vae, xe, xe, xie, ze, zhe, zie) instead of “he,” tell him you love truth more than courtesy, and will not sell your soul into hell, no, not even out of sincere pity for Tom O’Bedlam.
Let me quote from a pen wiser than mine.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. ”
~ Theodore Dalrymple
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
