ALAN writes:

Your comments and those of Robert Manning about the “transgender” Folderol are excellent.

“We are prisoners of our premises. Hence, we had better choose them carefully.” I sat in an auditorium in Syracuse, New York, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in 1971 and heard Dr. Thomas Szasz speak those words. Truer words were never spoken.

To permit our enemies or adversaries to define our premises and vocabulary is, in effect, to surrender our independence of mind and judgment – they know it, but people who are too trusting don’t.

People who imagine they can surrender or alter their vocabulary to placate their most conniving enemies or not to “offend” them will soon surrender everything. Bet on it. I have watched gullible Americans do this over the span of my life. The “transgender” Folderol is merely a current example.

Men will not even call thugs “thugs” for fear of hurting their feelings. That is one proof not only of cowardice by grown men but of moral-philosophical bankruptcy throughout the culture. Nothing reveals moral courage or cowardice more clearly than the words men choose to speak and write.

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.”   — Analects of Confucius

Likewise, calling things what they aren’t – a principal pastime of modern Americans – is a step toward stupidity and surrender.

The contrived “debate” over “transgender” Folderol and all related Folderol is a splendid example of sophistry:  Debating about things that do not exist.

“…[T]he idea is to call ‘em what they ain’t, and maybe people won’t notice. And, alas, it seems most people under 35 don’t know any better….” wrote Clancy Strock in “What’s Convenient about ‘Convenience Stores’?,” Reminisce magazine, Sept./Oct. 1991, p. 48.

Not only was he right in that judgment; it is a judgment and principle that applies to a wide range of matters in modern American life, including the alleged wisdom of “authorities” and “experts” in law, medicine, and morality.

He didn’t claim to have done so, but in those few words, Mr. Strock summarized much of what there is to know about modern life in order to understand the monstrosity that recent generations of Americans have made of it — and that substantial portions of older generations contributed by their lack of opposition. And of course the younger generations — mis-educated, mal-educated, and uneducated by modern schools — are the ones who don’t know any better and the most enthusiastic participants in such contrived debates about things that do not exist.

— Comments —

Robert Manning writes:

Alan writes:

“Debating about things that do not exist.”

Yes.

I have often compared this to the existence of fictitious unicorns. Not the re’em in the Bible or creatures from classical antiquity, but the one appropriated from children and adopted cynically by the so-called queer community in the 70s.

Unicorns were kidnapped and corrupted, not as stallions and mares, but as the geldings that identified with them.

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