Outing your rage -- Please put it back in the closet

Everyone seems to be raging: about race-resentment, gender-confusion, neuro-variance (which looks a lot like neuro-sameness), marginalization, and more. 

Are you among the outraged, or are you the rage-fatigued? Do you need a holiday from opinion, both others' and your own?

Outrage leads to cancel-culture, as moralistic and totalitarian as any Victorian rules, and today's "influencers" are as censorious as Victorians against non-compliance with their ideology.

The Victorian Age actually had an energetic sub-society of transgressors and free-thinkers. So, of course, do we: the non-PC. Victorian Age politicians were afraid to join the transgressors; so are ours. 

Social-media corporations make huge profits monetizing outrage, while politicians check the direction of public opinion so as to know how to follow it.

Regarding outrage the American investigative journalist/editor Ida Tarbell in the 1890s gave her staff at Maclure's Magazine some advice. The magazine's owner/boss (Sam Maclure) was driving staff mad with his erratic bi-polar behaviour. "Try not to mind", said Ida Tarbell, calmly sympathizing with everyone. So simple, so sane, such Stoic philosophy. 

"TNTM" is wisdom in today's unforgiving climate of opinion when everyone feels their tribe is getting the short straw and is full of ideological anger about it. Why is it so hard not to mind when other people's opinions differ from one's own? (Oh ... right ... it's because we're right and they're wrong ...) But you don't need to take your rage for an outing at the drop of every ideological hat. Not minding, once in a while, is such a relief. Be balanced, like Ida. Your identity will survive. 

 

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I want a word with you, CBC Radio & TV

 Never mind, it's all a "First world problem" anyway -- but there's something lame indeed (sorry, but it's the best word for it) about a national broadcaster (like CBC the narrowing-caster) lecturing the public about what vocabulary they're permitted to use. Or hear. Making an actual list of terms to be censored?!?

How can there be something wrong with a phrase like "spirit animal", it being a concept embedded in almost every culture in history? No one owns concepts. Logically, it would seem aboriginal groups that object to Latin & Greek as artifacts of "Euro-centrist colonialism", shouldn't be using the words "spirit" and "animal" anyway, their roots being Latin: "spiritus" (breath) and "animus" ( moving living thing).

And "tribes" (which were simply groups settled along a river, itself a tributary of a greater river and conTRIBUTING to its flow) means everybody. Their languages flow one into another. To pick up expressions one from another is a way of giving a tribute. And (although CBC social justice warriors won't like this tool) these words are also related to 'tribunal' -- a hearing to confront governments (e.g. Roman senate) in defense of preserving citizens' liberties. CBC seems not to like liberties, like free speech, for example.

Anyone who speaks English or Romance languages speaks Latin; it's embedded in the flow, the confluence, the fluency of these language-streams. More examples among the favourite Latin woke-hates are actually their most-used: 're-conciliation', 'ap-propriate', 'geno-cide' (cidere - to kill, genus - group), 'misogyny' (from 'gynus' - Greek for woman), not to mention the Top Trio: 'diversity', 'equity', and 'inclusion' (vers, aequus, and cludere - to close).

Maybe Canada needs An Act To Defend Threatened Vocabulary, meaning words that stand for concepts we're losing, words like 'skepticism', 'satire', 'irony', 'jocosity', 'ribaldry'. Maybe there should be a contest like CBC's "Canada Reads". Call it "Canada Speaks". A panel would vote on the Worst Words of the Year -- all hysterically disagreeing on which words those were, of course. (The winner would win William Worstword's latest volume of illusional-allyship verse) and get a place on the show "This Thought Has 22 Micro-seconds". 

Worst Words would be chosen in categories, like Worst Adjective ("systemic" would be the favourite), Worst Hybrid ("BIPOC" should win that), Worst Trans-Words meaning nouns converted to verbs (e.g. 'expensing') and verbs to nouns (an 'ask'), and Worst Epithet (if anyone still learns what an epithet is). 

Meanwhile we'll have to ban Halloween and Carnivale (they're full of spooks), and replace savage (wild) with tame, black sheep with harlequin sheep, powwow with bowwow (an off-leash dog meeting), blind spot with failure-to-see spot, and brain-storm with brain-fog, the last 2 being what we've now got.

CBC has a strong objection to the existence of "black-face", but they should be experiencing red-face. It all makes us feel very jocose in anxious times, anyway ... so thank you CBC.

The Race to Innumeracy

 Some School Boards, acting on the calculations of social-justice-diversity-inclusion, have declared that math is racist. The Ontario Ministry of Education has ruled that two "Mathematics" exist (how do they count them?). There is both "euro-centric mathematical knowledge" and "indigenous mathematical knowledge". (Guess which one is "racist"?)

One, says the School Board, is about indigenous shape categories (as for canoes and baskets), and the other is about mathematical probabilities and prediction of how long jail sentences are for non-white criminals who re-offend.

Probably not many Humanities types understand mathematical probability, but we do think it improbable that 2 + 2 suddenly equals 5. And in a dizzyingly unstable world, we want at least arithmetic to hold steady, 100% of the time (that would be 100 of 100 times, in case you only took math recently). We may not have all been great at high school math in pre-woke times, but we count on the fact that some people were. Who wants a banker or an engineer that can't do math, or a pharmacist who can't measure the quantities of medications you've been prescribed? Who wants an accountant who can't add? For them "reconciliation" is about reconciling numbers on the income and the out-go sides of the balance sheet. Let's hope someone can balance it.

It's not rocket science -- except when it is rocket science -- but ordinary measurement, calculation, and balancing of weights, measures and distances do make the world of commerce, construction and transportation go round.

Regarding Math-Humanities Intersectionalism, there's a parallel downward race to innumeracy and illiteracy illustrated by constant media misuse of the term "decimate", as in "their rights are being decimated" -- apparently meaning devastated, although the word actually means reduced by ten percent. (cf. "decimal" etc. -- get it?) One fears that soon, school Math departments will be more than decimated.

If Math teachers are to be replaced by Social Justice Warriors, what will numbers "mean" in future? As for whether public trust in the statistics which politicians, experts and "influencers" trot out -- don't count on it.

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