So - now you can be pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine at the same time!
I hope they use this definition in the next Yougov poll.
What a Dictionary
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USAmericans seem to have a really weird idea of ‘left’. They seem to think it means someone to the right of Pol Pot. Idpoloonies seem to qualify, by this entirely reality-detached delusion, as being on the ‘left’. The poor buggers across the pond seem to know nothing outside their national delusion bubble.
The people whom this ridiculous MW word-twisting mis-defines should be given the straightforwardly-honest definition of anti-authoritarians or anti-tyrants. Entirely unjustified and illegal tyrannical authoritarianism is what they’re really opposing after all.
Plenty whom I’ve heard speak critically against this ‘obey-zee-orders!’ outrage to basic rights are actually quite pro-vax in general, having not yet reached the understanding that these artificially-sacred talismans are actually pretty useless for almost - though not quite all - medical applications, there being superior treatments in almost every case, frequently well-proven by pioneer patient-treating doctors before the relevant vaccines were even created. Polio is the big shibboleth, of course: actually curable - and frequently cured - before any vaccine was actually created. One of the big still-standing propaganda cons of our time.
You can allow one or two situations where they’re useful. But really, the world wouldn’t be much worse off without them. Just one of those crook-generated widely-held delusions which we-all need to shed. If ever there were a fake-sacred object that’s actually almost entirely worthless, being about profit-grubbing before all else, vaccines are it. And no, that doesn’t put me in the meaningless category of anti-vaxer; just one who prefers truth; and actual healing over sickness ‘management’.
You don’t have to be a doctor, or any kind of alleged expert to realise this. Just review the history of the subject thoroughly, and use lay-person’s common sense; having first clawed your way free of the early-life indoctrination that we all get about the sacred fake.
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The idea seems to be that with ‘anti-vax’ starting to stick as an insulting term, by broadening it it can be used to deter opponents of compulsion.
It’s not the first propaganda favour done for the covid vaccination programme by this dictionary - I remembered this comment of Dr Mercola’s, and dug it out:
"Not to worry, though, the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently updated its definition of “vaccine” to include mRNA technology, just in time for fact checkers to be able to “debunk” the entirely factual claim of the difference between true vaccines and mRNA technology. "
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Language, and by extension the ideas we frame using it, is losing all nuance: good or bad, Left or Right, harmful or harmless (the latter a category that looks set to be abolished).
I can’t help thinking that the web is massively influential in fuelling this. Like/unlike, smiley emoji/frowning emoji, for/against.
I’d be the first to concede that relativism can be and often is extended in risible ways but by decontextualising everything aren’t we moving closer and closer to having all language, all decisions, governed by algorithm? If the dictionary is not colour coded into green OK words and red NOT OK ones already, that can’t be far away.
I won’t post a link to Politics And The English Language but . . .
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I’m reminded here of a recent article by John Walters in which he highlights the work of Israeli psychologist Professor Sam Vaknin. Here’s a snippet from Walter’s article;
Professor Vaknin, who specialises in psychopathy and narcissistic disorders, and also has some interesting things to say about the deleterious effects on humanity of the Internet and, in particular, social media, had been doing some preparation for his 2021/22 academic year syllabus, reading the ‘literature’ — international studies and reports ‘comprising a few million people’, talking with young people and investigating under-35 and under-25 activity online.
He has emerged ashen-faced from this rabbit-hole, declaring: ‘I must say that I’m shaken to my foundations.’
He found that the post-millennial generations live in a personal hell-on-earth, having rendered redundant every existing psychological understanding about human beings.
‘There are two possibilities, either everything we think we know in psychology is wrong or there’s a new subspecies of humanity, homo sapiens 2.0, that has nothing to do, psychologically speaking, with all previous generations going back to the time of Abraham.
‘People under age 35 are walking dead who live in a dystopian hell, a psychopathic landscape… They have no higher functions, no intellectual life, no interests or hobbies. They are incapable of meaningful conversation. Their speech is flat, comprising dismissive one-liners with no depth or background.’ They are, he says, ‘as dull as drying paint.
‘They are zombified, the walking dead.
…
‘It’s an absolutely psychopathic landscape. Devoid of empathy. Devoid of connectiveness. Devoid of emotions. Devoid of meaningful sex. Devoid of meaning — at all. Rates of anxiety and depression among these age groups have quintupled, and this was three years before the pandemic. We know that the pandemic has tripled this rate. . . . More than half of young people binge drink to the point of alcoholic blackout every single week.
‘These people are atomised completely. . . . Their main mode of communication is online, and then they chat. A textual analysis revealed that 91 per cent of all chats are comprised of one-liners and emojis. And the average length of the one-liner is three words. They have lost the capacity of language, which had distinguished us as a species from animals. Luckily they still walk erect, on two legs.’
He is not, he stresses, making value judgements about the morality of the young. ‘It’s not what they do; it’s how they do it. They are sleepwalking; they’re sedated. It’s an anaesthetised generation, or generations.
‘The people I talk to they have no emotions. They think they have emotions. They doemotions. They simulate emotions. They have no emotions.
‘They go through the motions. They participate in all the right victimhood movements and they spew out the slogans, and they march and everything. But even this feels very fake, narcissistic, imitative. It’s like mimicry. It’s not the real thing. I witnessed the real thing in the Sixties. This is not the real thing.
‘I can’t find a single point of light in this picture. Even the levels of literacy had collapsed completely. About 40 per cent of these generations cannot properly read a label on a bottle. That’s how bad it is. Well over 50 per cent of them hadn’t touched a book ever. The average number of books was 1.3. Okay — forget books. What do they do? About five hours, video games. The rest? Surf the internet. What do they surf? Do they educate themselves? No. You know what they’re doing. Their heads are filled with trash. It’s terrifying, actually. If these are the custodians of the future of the human species, it’s terrifying.
‘In matters of critical thinking, and analytical thinking, in tests, they have no idea how to think critically or analytically. They don’t know the most basic syllogisms. They don’t even know what is a syllogism, of course! They don’t know how to think. They have lost this part, this faculty. They regurgitate. They emulate. They imitate. They follow, like a herd of lemmings, gurus, dating coaches, business coaches, all kinds of mystics and . . . that’s it.’
Now that’s quite tough. But in my experience working at a University I can say that much of Vaknin’s analysis rings true where many graduates are concerned - that is, the level of their grammar is truly shocking - - many enter university with an appallingly low grasp of grammar - I can hand on heart say that my generation were entering middle schools with a better ability with language than that displayed by many modern students graduating with their, effectively, gifted 2:2 - - I say ‘gifted’ because the extent of hand holding throughout their 3 year’s of study is remarkable – in fact it’s nigh on impossible for students to completely fail nowadays. There are for sure a number of factors at play, but I’d contest that the main drive to pass students is the university’s (the business enterprise) need to produce attractive KIS data in order to promote their worthless courses. Hence, we have a generation of hoodwinked young adults with very low language and comprehension skills leaving university with a misguided believe that they have achieved a higher degree of education - the truth is they are in many cases educated to a lesser extent than your average 16 yr old school leaver of previous generations.
All told, we are losing language. It’s all about memes - a single meme will, in the mind of the mesmerised, unpack whole complex world views and erroneous corrosive belief systems. Chomsky (I think) made reference to this in an interview one time when he spoke of the challenge of confronting meme-laden questioning in mainstream interview settings - that is, one simply doesn’t have time to adequately challenge a meme heavy question as it requires a too much time unpacking and exposing the meme in the first instance - and then there is challenge of positing convincingly ideas / truths that are incomprehensible to the minds of the mesmerised.
Sorry - this may all be waffle…but I tried. Read the article and watch the video is my recommendation - it really is shocking and scary.
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Apols - I meant to add this:
Students studying at the University of Hull will not be marked down for poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in exams because it would be ‘elitist’.
Ah: Decolonising The Curriculum. Only creepy old white guys care about spelling and grammar. But pronouns, well, that’s something else obvo
A fantastic and 100% accurate rant @NewSi
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