Naming Things

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July 31, 2022

In Genesis, Adam names all the creatures of the earth. “God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name.” There are lots of explanations for why this is significant, depending on your theological viewpoint. To me naming things is not insignificant in everyday life. How you call something shapes the meaning in your mind and manipulates your point of view.

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Years ago, when I represented workers who were challenging their union’s leadership, the wise lawyer who worked with us (someone who had earlier honed his trade working for FDR and General MacArthur) cautioned me to be careful how we described ourselves — we were to fashion our movement Reform Miners, not rebels, insurgents or anything else. Repeated often enough by us in interviews and in litigation papers that’s what the press would call us and that was to our advantage in the public mind.

So to me it’s not a small thing that this administration is changing the definition of so many things like women, vaccines, recession, and illegal immigrants. The press plays along. Wikipedia was forced to suspend the definition of “recession” after there were so many edits to hide the fact that we are in one by the classic definition used for years.

Wikipedia has blocked additional edits to the ‘recession’ page after users attempted to adjust it in response to President Joe Biden’s attempts to redefine the word.

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The page was edited at least 47 times over 24 hours before Wikipedia administrators locked the page so that unregistered users could not change its contents until August. This restriction arrives as Biden administration officials attempt to avoid using the term to describe the current economy.

The online encyclopedia’s administrators froze the webpage’s edit feature due to a “persistent addition of unsourced or poorly sourced content.” The top of the webpage also notes that the recession webpage “may be affected by a current event.”

Users manipulated the page and battled over whether its lead paragraph contained the sentence, “Though there is no global consensus on the definition of a recession, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession.” As of Friday, the line is currently included in the description.

“The article always said something about ‘two down GDP quarters,'” wrote Wikipedia editor JPxG in a Thursday note . “The first section of the article, titled ‘Definition,’ has mentioned it since 2011. As far as I can tell, nobody ever messed with this. The entire current dispute is over whether it should say this in the lead paragraph and the definition section or just in the definition section. Right now, the article gives both that definition and the [National Bureau of Economic Research] definition and takes no position on which is ‘correct.’ The NBER definition is a ‘significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.'”

The clearly understood meaning of the word “woman” is a biological person with two x chromosomes. Presumably in an effort to avoid offense to the minuscule number of trans women who biologically are male (one x and one y chromosome) the administration’s minions pretend not to know how to define a woman and fall back on awkward phrases like “birthing persons” even though some transmen (women transgendered as men who retain their internal organs) can also be “birthing persons.”

Such nonsense has resulted in requirements that public restrooms for men be stocked with tampons (even as there’s a present shortage of them as there is for so many things, including baby formula). It has, as well, been undoing years of work to give women a shot at athletic opportunities.

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There’s a movement afoot seeking a new name for monkeypox on the grounds that it is offensive to gay men who are the principal sufferers of this disease, particularly when they engage in unprotected sex with large numbers of partners.

Of course, monkeypox in America and Europe is overwhelmingly being spread by gay men to gay men.

For example, in New York City, none of its 336 victims so far have been women, in comparison to seven who are listed as “TGNCNB,” an acronym new to me that stands for “Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Non-Binary.” Similarly, in Washington, D.C., which has the highest per-capita infection rate in the country, not one of the 122 patients is a woman.

While monkeypox is centered in virtually the exact same urban and resort gay neighborhoods, such as West Hollywood and Fire Island, from which AIDS dispersed four decades ago, it has already been found in 43 states.

One reason is because many gay men, despite their depiction in the Narrative as oppressed and marginalized, tend to spend a lot of money to travel to vast circuit parties to have sex with numerous male strangers. Numerous municipalities encourage local entrepreneurs to host big gay parties to lure in tourists, despite the role gay sex tourism plays in spreading infectious diseases, such as last summer’s Provincetown Bear Week superspreader event for the Covid Delta variant. And the success of heavily advertised anti-HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs like Truvada has brought back 1970s attitudes toward industrial-scale gay promiscuity.

It’s unclear if this version of monkeypox spreads sexually or through more general skin-on-skin contact, or, most likely, both. It might also transmit through the air, but, at the moment, it appears to usually take a gay bacchanal to strew it far and wide. 

The CDC demanded we all be locked down to dampen the spread of the Wuhan flu but to my knowledge said not one word about the three-day Fire Island gay bacchanalia this month. 

In any event, it seems not to be the “global emergency” WHO would like us to believe as it demands even more money.  

Under the pretense that we can avoid stigmatizing disease by renaming it, I think we exaggerate its reach and at the same time fail to take appropriate measures to stem actions known to spread it. Remember with AIDS we knew that the San Francisco bathhouses were a major disease vector but we never shut them down because… you know. 

In the same way, the Left insisted we never call the China Virus by anything other than COVID-19 on the grounds that it would encourage anti-Asian discrimination. That this conveniently buried information showing it most likely spread from a leak in a Wuhan, China lab which we funded is to me not beside the point.

The misnaming of things is not just out of Washington. Many local communities are playing the game as well. Take Los Angeles, for example. “Trans-affirming” schoolchildren means ignoring their serious mental problems. 

In one of the district’s own materials, “Mental Health Among Transgender Youth,” the Human Relations, Diversity, and Equity department cites a survey by Mental Health America pointing out that, among 11-to-17-year-old transgender youth who were screened for mental health issues, 93 percent were at risk for psychosis, 91 percent exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, 90 percent likely used drugs and alcohol, 90 percent experienced moderate-to-severe anxiety, and 95 percent experienced moderate to severe depression. Additionally, according to a Trevor Project study, 71 percent of transgender youth have been diagnosed with eating disorders, with the ratio even higher for female-to-male transgender children.

These numbers are deeply alarming. But rather than provide a sober assessment of these risks and seek to mitigate them, Los Angeles Unified has adopted a year-round program glamorizing transgender identity and promoting an uncritical, “trans-affirming” culture in the classroom. It is, of course, a noble goal for schools to provide a safe environment for minority groups and to affirm the basic dignity of all children regardless of their sexuality. But Los Angeles Unified’s program goes much further, promoting the most extreme strains of transgender ideology, which almost certainly contributes to the “social contagion” effect documented by Abigail Shrier and others. 

In countless ways, the Left and its front — the Biden Administration — play mind games with us. Don’t go along with this; it’s mind-numbing and only leads to stupid, often dangerous policies.

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