Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

If moral relativists have anything going for them, it is that morals considered good to one social group contradict with those good morals of others. I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I don’t consider myself a moral relativist, but I do think that other than a few things, absolute morals are generally rather elusive. Anyway, enough about me, let’s go over a couple of interesting contradictions.

In our Western Judeo-Christian tradition, the act of Islamic terrorism is vehemently condemned for the killing of innocent men, women, and children. However, when we go to Sunday school, we read about the Holy Wars of the Old Testament. Example:

When the LORD your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the LORD your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance do not leave alive anything that breathes.

Deuteronomy 20: 14-16

Here, our sacred text lauds a genocidal slaughter, conceivably commanded by God. We may answer, “Well, God did command the Israelites to do that.” Maybe so, but consider for a moment that perhaps we are wrong and they are right. Is God commanding them to murder? Interesting, but more interesting would be the responses to the question when I go to Sunday school.

Here is another one: shortly after the 1972 Munich Massacre and shortly before the beginning of Operation Wrath of God, then prime minister of Israel Golda Meir stated, “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” Given the sometimes dark history of the establishment of the State of Israel, like Deir Yassin etc, it strikes me as odd that this was said. Is it inconceivable that mothers of Palestinian schoolboys killed, either intentionally or accidentally, by Jewish settlers thought the same thing? Who, then, is in the right?

One last one, and this one is more recent: in the storm of controversy regarding Jeff Nielsen of BYU’s de facto dismissal following his Tribune piece, I have noticed that an overwhelming majority of those defending BYU’s actions on the basis of it being a private university owned by the LDS Church are the same who criticize Yale — another private university — for stifling conservative speech. Interesting, indeed.

Most likely loathe…

This update has been a long time coming, but I just haven’t felt like talking to you people, so I waited until now to post it. My only interest in politics is the language used in the everyday political diatribe. How we label ourselves reveals scores about our innate understanding of linguistic impliciture, including how we implicitly feel about our opponents.

I will give an example I cite in my biography: pro-choice and pro-life. How these labels describe the person to whom it applies is clear, but what is less clear is how it defines the opposition in the person’s eyes: anti-choice and anti-life. While this is stated explicitly on occasion, it is usually implicit; and really, when you think about it, neither is really accurate. Further linguistic analysis of this issue reveals something relevant, but for a different post: the arguments are irrelevant to each other entirely.

Of further interest to me is the language we use to describe our political adversaries. For example, was Jack Abramoff a business advocate or a business lobbyist. Most of us would choose the latter. However, sometimes the choice isn’t very simple and comes down to pure politics: a gun rights’ advocacy organization or a gun lobbying group. One has a clearly negative connotation, and will usually be used by opponents and vice versa. Interestingly enough, the only people I have ever met who use the term ‘lobbyist’ in a positive or at least neutral way are lobbyists themselves.

In addition, the following words and phrases have become political buzzwords that strike home with the voting public, but are otherwise tame phrases with little meaning outside of context:

· Homeland.
· Middle class.
· Health care.
· Data mining.
· Jobs.
· Oil.

There is a pretty good bet that the first thing that came to mind upon reading these had to do with contemporary American politics. This just goes to show that language is inexorably linked to politics, even to the point of language becoming politics itself.

More from the language front: I have been noticing how common it is among Rocky Mountain natives to pronounce the word comfortable as comftorble. I guess the latter is more comfortable to say, hehe. Also, I have been informed that some villages in the West Bank pronounce the Arabic sound [k] as [ʧ], as in ‘chili.’ Anybody have any further information?

One more thing: you have bad taste in music.