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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

How to Translate Phony Political Phrases

Thomas Sowell

It is amazing how many different ways the same thing can be said, creating totally different impressions. For example, when President Barack Obama says that defeating ISIS is going to take a long time, how is that different from saying that he is going to do very little, very slowly? It is saying the same thing in different words. Defenders of the administration’s policies may cite how many aerial sorties have been flown by American planes against ISIS......But what is less impressive — and more indicative — is that, in most of those sorties, the planes have not fired a single shot or dropped a single bomb.........We often hear that various problems within the black community are “a legacy of slavery”...... it is another way of saying, “Don’t blame our welfare-state policies for things that got worse after those policies took over. Blame what happened in earlier centuries.”

Nobody would accept that kind of cop-out, if it were expressed that way. But that is why it is expressed differently, as a “legacy of slavery.”.... and whoever set that standard has to prove a negative, namely that he is not guilty of discrimination against group Y. Often nobody can prove anything, so the accused loses — or else settles out of court. Stupid? No. It takes very clever people to make something like that sound plausible. But it also requires people who don’t bother to stop and think to let them get away with it......To Read More....

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