YES YES YES Come To Us We Have Cookiesssss

YES YES YES come to us we have cookiesssss

it’s never too late!

File under reviews that shock the Hell out of me.

There’s “TED Talk liberalism”. This is largely an economic position that takes an implicitly trickle-down approach; very much concentrated among wealthier cosmopolitan types who drop all kinds of techno-jargon and pseudo-progressive terms when discussing basic capitalist tactics. The Edgy White Liberal page on Facebook is the pinnacle of this. Think millionaire/billionaire CEOs who actively campaign for Hillary Clinton and other establishment shills, CEOs who donate lots of money in bulk at set times to increase their cultural capital and to supposedly offset the structural theft they participate in every day. Obviously not everyone who fits this bill is a CEO, but they are pretty much exclusively wealthy.

There’s “Buzzfeed liberalism”. This one may acknowledge the existence of white supremacy and patriarchy, but it condenses all of the revolutionary potential of knowing these things into a defanged form of privilege politics. White supremacy and patriarchy are understood as merely held in place by attitudes rather than by a structural reality of capitalist class society. Sure, class may get acknowledgement here, but it’s generally within the context of “don’t be classist” alongside the “don’t be the racist” and “don’t be sexist”. This form of liberalism gets insidious because all kinds of mainstream outlets are jumping on this bandwagon. Hegemonic liberalism has become perfectly comfortable elaborating vaguely on injustices, but you’ll never see it point to the root causes, lest otherwise receptive people organize and topple the system that maintains the TED Talk liberal’s power.

At what point will Buzzfeed liberalism go to? Will it ever acknowledge owning the means of production as problematic? Will it ever trace the power of white supremacy and patriarchy to the material oppression of class society? I highly doubt it.

What America thinks of Texas is what the world thinks of America.

What are the important rules you live by? Be kind. Don’t hurt other people. It’s all the sort of Christian ethics stuff I thought was bullshit when I was a kid. No, it turns out it’s not bullshit. Tell the truth, be kind, all that corny stuff.

The State Department number had a message reporting that the mailbox was full, but take 1 minute to write a short plea supporting safe passage here: https://register.state.gov/contactus/

💔🇸🇾 We can stand by and watch a genocide unfold on social media, or we can do something. Turn your prayers into action.

from The Syrian Civil Defense: “The bombs are falling as we write this. For years our humanitarian volunteers have worked to save the lives of our people in Aleppo: operating in underground hospitals, rescuing entire families buried under the rubble and risking our lives to document what the daily war crimes committed by Assad regime and its ally Russia. We can do no more. Now we are with 100,000 civilians trapped in an area of five square kilometres with non-stop bombs, shells and advancements on the ground. In one building more than 500 people are sheltering. People have been underground for days. We are calling on the international community to provide a safe passage out of Aleppo for the remaining 100,000 people. We know that the UN has a plan to get us out across the four kilometres of Western Aleppo to safety: with a few dozen buses and lorries we could all be evacuated in twenty four hours. However, we need the international community to guarantee the safety of their workers and our own. If we stay we fear for our lives. The women may be taken to camps, the men disappeared and anyone who is known to have supported civilians will face detention or execution. We’ve watched thousands of our boys and mens be detained. Countless White Helmets, doctors, nurses and humanitarians have been targeted and killed in the regime’s cruel assault on Aleppo. The regime has been trying to kill us for five years. Please don’t give them this chance. We can not believe that the world’s most powerful countries cannot get 100,000 souls four kilometers to safety. CALL THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY RIGHT NOW TO DEMAND SAFE PASSAGE. State Department: +1 202-647-9572 and Russian Embassy: +1-202-298-5700

Words that Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms

wend You rarely see a “wend” without a “way.” You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. “Wend” was just another word for “go” in Old English. The past tense of “wend” was “went” and the past tense of “go” was “gaed.” People used both until the 15th century, when “go” became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where “went” hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.

deserts The “desert” from the phrase “just deserts” is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for “deserve,” and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean “that which is deserved.” When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.

eke If we see “eke” at all these days, it’s when we “eke out” a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It’s the same word that gave us “eke-name” for “additional name,” which later, through misanalysis of “an eke-name” became “nickname.”

sleight “Sleight of hand” is one tricky phrase. “Sleight” is often miswritten as “slight” and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by “slight,” but an alternate expression for the concept is “legerdemain,” from the French léger de main,“ literally, “light of hand.” “Sleight” comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning “cunning” or “trickery.” It’s a wily little word that lives up to its name.

roughshod Nowadays we see this word in the expression “to run/ride roughshod” over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A “rough-shod” horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.

fro The “fro” in “to and fro” is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing “from.” It was also part of other expressions that didn’t stick around, like “fro and till,” “to do fro” (to remove), and “of or fro” (for or against).

hue The “hue” of “hue and cry,” the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same “hue” as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for “appearance.” This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like “hoot.”

lurch When you leave someone “in the lurch,” you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the “lurch” in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.

umbrage “Umbrage” comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to “throw shade.” However, these days when we see the term “umbrage” at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.

shrift We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don’t want to get a short one. “Shrift” was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase “short shrift” came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.