Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (20051)	1/9/2004 2:13:08 PM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 81996

> Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the most beautiful of us all? Certainly not the one who writes the best English. lewrockwell.com >>>In England the aristocracy and its schools, as for example Oxford and Cambridge, maintained linguistic standards; in ancient Rome, the ruling classes who studied under the great rhetoricians. In the United States the tradition survived awhile in a variety of schools. My own experience was of Southern colleges such as William and Mary and Hampden-Sydney (in which latter my grandfather was professor of mathematics). As is usual in civilizations not yet in decline, people at these institutions cared about language and literature. I remember that we played a parlor game in which the contestant called out numbers, as for example 234, 2, 6. He was then read whatever word was found on page 234, column two, entry six of a massive unabridged dictionary. He was expected to spell it, and give its etymology and first and second meanings. People do not, I think, play that game today. Today of course we have no elites of any influence, and we are prescriptively hostile to what is called “elitism.” Elitism is simply the idea that the better is preferable to the worse. Why anyone with good sense would be against it escapes me. The unwashed have discovered that it is easier to ignore the language than to learn it. Given that the unwashed now run the schools, that, as we say, is that. I do not know how one repairs the chain once it is broken. The unworthy like to argue, almost as if they had some slight idea what they were talking about, that any language is acceptable provided that it communicates. The problem with unschooled and degraded English is precisely that it doesn’t communicate well. In an America that has embraced the tastes and standards of the black ghetto, I occasionally see it written that Ebonics is a language to be respected as much as English. Oh? But how in Ebonics does one say, “The entropy of a closed system tends to remain the same or to increase”? <<< "the fckng mthrfckng piece of sht is fckd and why the fck do you fckng want to know anyway mthrfckr now shut the f*ck up"

To: sea_urchin who wrote (20051)	1/10/2004 8:09:31 AM
From: mcg404	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81996

Searle, Spengler provides fascinating insights (imo). I had not seen that article (and had lost my spengler bookmark) so thanks for the link. The prospective death of the entire people along with its culture is what creates a particularly nasty type of existential angst, the sort that produces a Hitler or an Osama bin Laden... Unlike all other peoples, Americans need not fear the extinction of their cultural identity, because they have none to begin with... Someone please tell bush that he can stop fighting for 'the american way of life'. There isn't one. Oh, i forgot, it's really about good versus evil. John