Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In his latest Real Time monologue, Bill Maher discusses pedophilia, how it’s exacerbated by the media (including Disney), celebrated by parents who dress up little kids as adults, and even excused by progressives. His take on “Drag Queen Story Hour” is pretty funny.
Money quote: “I’ve said it before wokeness is not an extension of liberalism any more it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite.”
He then goes on to gender, suggesting that teaching six-year-old kids about gender is a form of “entrapment,” making them do something they otherwise wouldn’t. He’s gonna get in big trouble for that one!
This has its funny bits, but it’s one of Maher’s more serious pieces, bearing on the possible indoctrination of kids into “nonbinary” roles by peers and teachers.
Bill Maher’s latest monologue, “Stuck on stupid,” takes out after what he sees as overreactions to the covid pandemic (including closing schools and denying flatly that the virus came from a Wuhan lab), I remember disinfecting groceries with alcohol and staying a long distance away from people, and, seriously I don’t think that Maher is correct to say that those behaviors were simply stupid. After all, remember that people were dying of a virus that we didn’t understand, and a lot of people hadn’t yet been vaccinated.
So I think here Maher is being snarky with the wisdom of hindsight. He even seems to diss vaccinations!
And yes, we have learned some stuff: how to make RNA vaccines, that those vaccines work, and that, right now, we don’t really need to have our sixth booster unless we’re immunocompromised.
This ain’t one of Maher’s better efforts. I didn’t follow his opinions at the beginning of the pandemic, but I know some reader did, so please weigh in below.
Today we’re really stretching the definition of “wildlife”, which now includes the language of Homo sapiens. Athayde Tonhasca Júnior had a biology contribution in the queue, but, as you see below, urged me to post this first because it’s relevant to one of my recent posts about the spread of logorrhea in our species.
Hi Jerry. I sent you a contribution a short while ago but consider the attached first, which was inspired by your timely post on people babbling way too much. It’s a curse, I tell you…
And so we have this post about language. Athayde’s words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Everything that can be said, can be said clearly (Ludwig Wittgenstein).
People are talking too much, and not talking (or writing) too well.
For Orwell, the corruption of language in public life threatened the intelligent discourse on which democracy depends. (…) We need to feel safe in the assumption that words mean what they are commonly understood to mean. Deliberate ambiguities, slides of meaning, obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words poison the democratic process by leaving people less able to make informed or rational decisions. They erode trust. Don Watson, ‘Gobbledygook’.
PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
A metaphor is both detour and destination, a digression that gets to the point. James Geary.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer, he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything, except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate. Oscar Wilde on George Meredith.
There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. Oscar Wilde.
You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you’ve got something to say. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
That’s not writing – that’ typing. Truman Capote, on Jack Kerouac (Attrib.).
The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is. August Wilson.
The old repeat themselves and the youth have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual. Jacques Bainville.
To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation. Francois de La Rochefoucauld.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. George Orwell.
Good prose is like a window pane. George Orwell.
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now. Woodrow Wilson.
Good things, when short, are twice as good. Gracian.
The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible. George Burns.
A good sermon should be like a woman’s skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials. Ronald Knox.
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance. Robert Quillen.
PCC(E): The next one is the most relevant to what I wrote:
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. Margaret Millar.
Where in this small-talking world can I find / A longitude with no platitude? Christopher Fry, The Lady’s not for Burning.
The first ingredient in conversation is truth: the next good sense; the third, good humour; and the fourth wit. William Temple.
The honourable member’s speech reminds me of Columbus. When he set out, he didn’t know where he was going, when he got there he didn’t know where he was and when he returned home he didn’t know where he’d been. Winston Churchill.
MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought. Winston Churchill.
Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence. Robert Heinlein.
Vacuity, obscurity, ambiguity and pomposity are not much less difficult than their opposites. Winston Churchill.
Blessed is he who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving evidence of that fact. George Eliot.
A man is known by the silence he keeps. Oliver Herford.
Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing. Robert Benchley (Attrib.)
In most instances, all an argument proves is that two people are present. Tony Petito.
His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst until it died of servitude and overwork. William McAdoo about Warren G. Harding.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. Voltaire.
EPSON scanner image
Abuses of Speech: First, when men register their thoughts wrong by the inconstancy of the signification of their words; by which they register for their conceptions that which they never conceived, and so deceive themselves. Secondly, when they use words metaphorically; that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for, and thereby deceive others. Thirdly, when by words they declare that to be their will which is not. Fourthly, when they use them to grieve one another. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech. George Bernard Shaw.
Though he tortures the English language, he has never yet succeeded in forcing it to reveal its meaning. J.B. Morton.
We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint.
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. Samuel Johnson.
Meditation is a gift confined to unknown philosophers and cows. Others don’t begin to think till they begin to talk or write. Finley Peter Dunne.
The cliché is the handrail of the crippled mind. Spike Milligan.
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. H. L. Mencken on US President Warren G. Harding.
PCC(E): Yay for this next guy!
[Captain Hook] is not wholly evil: he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan.
I take the view, and always have done, that if you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it. Lord Brabazon.
OOAQICI82QB4IP. Graffiti in a ladies’ toilet.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them. Philip K. Dick.
Obscurity often brings safety. Aesop’s Fables: The Tree and the Reed.
Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well intentioned letter, anguish of a traveller expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. E. B. White in his revision of the 1935 classic “The Elements of Style”, by William Strunk.
When the meaning is unclear there is no meaning. Marty Rubin.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. William Strunk Jr.
Postmodernists have achieved the ability to write about their thoughts in a uniquely impenetrable manner. Their neo-baroque prose style with its inner clauses, bracketed syllables, metaphors and metonyms, verbal pirouettes, curlicues and figures is not a mere epiphenomenon; rather, it is a mocking rejoinder to anyone who would try to write simple intelligible sentences in the modernist tradition. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.
Here’s a good opening segment from Bill Maher’s latest show: a piece about how even philanthropy that saves lives can be and is criticized by the Purity Police these days. The benefactor in question is a YouTuber named “MrBeast“, who according to Wikipedia is a 25 year old man whose real name is James Stephen “Jimmy” Donaldson. As the site notes, “With over 210 million subscribers, he is the most-subscribed individual on the platform and the second-most-subscribed channel overall.” He rakes in gazillions of dollars, has a team of 250 people, and gives a gazillion dollars away. (His channel is here.)
It’s the fact that a white man gives money away, and directs it to good causes, that has inspired “progressive” critics to deem him simply a “white savior”. As Maher notes, there’s nothing so good for the world that some idiots won’t kvetch about it, and MrBeast is the object of that kvetching. Maher ably defends him in his usual humorous way, getting in some licks against the woke who argue that physical handicaps shouldn’t be fixed.
I’m feeling low today, perhaps because of bad news everywhere combined with the fact that I’m still not over jet lag and have been waking up at 2 a.m. So, in hopes that I’ll inspire some laughs to cheer me and the readers up, I’ll proffer a joke and ask readers to do likewise. Here’s the joke, or, as Anne Elk would say, the joke is coming now. Are you ready for the joke? Here is the joke, which is mine. The next thing I’m going to say is my joke:
A Jewish man lives into a Catholic neighborhood. Every Friday the Catholics are driven crazy because, while they’re morosely eating fish, the Jew is outside barbecuing steaks. So the Catholics work on the Jew to convert him to Catholicism. Finally, after many threats and much pleading, the Catholics succeed. They take the Jew to a priest who sprinkles holy water on the Jew and says, “Born a Jew, Raised a Jew, Now a Catholic.” The Catholics are ecstatic. No more delicious but maddening smells every Friday evening.
But the next Friday evening, the scent of barbecue wafts through the neighborhood. The Catholics all rush to the Jew’s house to remind him of his new diet. They see him standing over the cooking steak. He is sprinkling water on the meat and saying, “Born a cow, Raised a cow, Now a fish.”
p.s. Jokes must be family-friendly. A little risqué is okay but nothing too salacious or filthy.
Fare thee well, readers: tomorrow I’m off for Israel for three weeks. My farewell post (#27,916!) is this ten-minute video showing animals doing humorous things. My favorites include the attacking raptor (0:24), the horizontal sloth (1:20), the rotating d*g circle (2:00), Jesus cat (4:03), donkeys following a ride-on mower (5:26), young sheep practicing head-butting (6:34), the galloping goat (6:48), irritated octopus (7:15), gamboling sheep (8:05), and the dancing Indian deer (8:46).
There will be no more braining today, as once again I got about two hours of sleep. But believe me, these ZeFrank Animal awards (an 11-minute episode) are better than anything I could produce. As always, I do my best.
The winners (I’ve added some links if you want to read more about the behaviors):
Well, there aren’t any photos today (I have about a week’s worth, but am conserving them), but we do have science—in the form of weird titles of scientific papers. Athayde Tonhasca Júnior sent this collection with a brief intro:
Perhaps your readers would be amused by scientists being witty or mischievous (sometimes unintentionally), with varied degrees of success.
