I’m no Mark Twain, but this writing is unreadable. I think this is worse than their normal offering, but it’s the bad writing, rather than the so-so reasoning, that keeps me from reading Reason more than I do.
Anyone who’s read Milton Friedman knows that there’s nothing about libertarianism that produces bad writing. But I do think there’s something about Reason-style left-libertarianism that produces an overwhelming belief in one’s own correctness, and a corresponding urge to make too many points at one time. The result is somehow both cocky and frantic, and I have a really hard time reading it.
Apollo posted this at 9:16 PM EST on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language
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Reading this post, I was briefly confused by the following: “Have a friend who was in Riverside Park (Manhattan) with his baby daughter.”
It took me several seconds of bewilderment before I realized that “baby daughter” is a completely different formulation than “baby daddy” or “baby mama.”
Apollo posted this at 6:15 PM EDT on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language
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Is this a brilliantly ironic turn of phrase, or a hilariously stupid oxymoron?
Traditional peoples have met opposition from the beginning of history.
I’ve read the article three times and simply can’t decide. It’s maddening.
Tom posted this at 1:08 PM EDT on Friday, October 17th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language
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As Hurricane Ike passes, there’s certainly a lot of destruction. My part of Texas didn’t get more than a little wind last night, but the images look bad for Galveston and elsewhere.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people from Houston in the last week, and the first hurricane they always mention is Rita, which seems to be a joke with a self-contained punchline. Back in ‘05, in the face of dire predictions of destruction, oodles of people suffered through long, congested, and hot evacuations to avoid Rita, only to have the storm go somewhere else entirely. At least until yesterday, simply saying “Rita” was a fully sufficient reason not to evacuate, no matter what the predictions. We’ve heard lots of people on the radio and television describe distrust of government predictions as their reason not to evacuate.
Whatever destruction Ike leaves behind, the fact is that it cannot possibly live up to the standard of destruction those boobs at the National Weather Service have predicted. I’m not sure who came up with the idea to tell people that they faced “certain death” by remaining in Galveston, but he should be fired.
The deadliest hurricane in American history was the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. At the time, no point on the island was as much as 10 feet above sea level, and there was no sea wall. There was also 19th century quality construction and medical care. After the storm the first outside help took a day to arrive. That hurricane produced winds well over 120 miles per hour, and a 15 foot storm surge that simply washed across the island from front to back. The city was caught largely at unawares. Out of 42,000 residents, 8,000 died. That’s 19%, nearly one in five. Even if 4 out of 5 people survived, those are terrible odds to risk your life in, and obviously the most intelligent thing to have done, had they known it was coming, would have been to evacuate.
But, importantly, even that terrible storm did not produce anything approximating “certain death.” In fact, it produced something more like “strong likelihood of survival while suffering trauma of some sort.” Given the differences between quality of construction in 1900 and 2008, the presence of a 15 foot seawall, the certainty that outside help would arrive within a few hours…”certain death” was several steps above and beyond hyperbole.
I am not saying that people should have stayed; I would have evacuated had I been near where the storm made landfall. But what I am saying is that each time some government agency uses over-the-top dire predictions, that just means more people will discount what gets said the next time. If a Category 2 storm produces predictions of “certain death,” what sort of language can be used to describe future, worse storms? “You will be vaporized”? “This hurricane will hunt down your family members in other states and remove your genes from the evolutionary pool”? “This hurricane will travel back in time and kill your mother before you were born”? Once you’ve used the “certain death” line on a Category 2 storm, I just don’t know what you say for a Category 4 or 5. But I do know that whatever gets said, more people will ignore it than would have if the National Weather Service consistently used believable predictions of damage and risk.
Apollo posted this at 4:40 PM EDT on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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It appears that Obama’s definition of “change” involves announcing that things will be different and then doing the same thing over and over again. This wouldn’t be so amusing, except that Obama seeks to reduce our entire political discourse to a discourse on the meaning of the word “change.”
Apollo posted this at 9:51 AM EDT on Friday, September 12th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language, Audacity of Hype
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Gideon Rachman deliberately works a cliche into every sentence of his column today. It takes a very good writer to write so badly. A sample:
In the matter of clichés, we are all sinners. And with that appropriately hackneyed thought, let me begin:
The Beijing Olympics is one of those iconic moments that tell us we have reached a tipping point. Our kids are going to inherit a very different world.
As a confident China strides on to the Olympic stage, the US is mired in a credit crunch and a war on terror – it is the perfect storm.
It was Napoleon who said: “Let China sleep, for when China wakes she will shake the world.” The turbo-charged Chinese dragon woke up in the go-go 1980s. Whisper it softly, but there will be no respite. This is not even the beginning of the end, although it may be the end of the beginning.
Read, enjoy, ponder. I might need to re-examine everything I type before writing again.
Hubbard posted this at 1:55 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language, Commie Recrudescence, The Right Words
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