What follows might appear to be me doubling down on my pasquinading the Dean of Arts and Science at the University of Lethbridge. But it’s not. It’s just a standard exercise in the Philosophy of Language. To wit: After his… Read More ›
Black Lives Matter
JUST WALK AWAY
In Canada, the US and the Antipodes, English is the name of the language spoken by us Western settler colonialists. I accept that. So those opposed to Western settler colonialism should have no trouble accepting that the language they’re speaking… Read More ›
THE MEANING OF OBSCENITY
I’m going to make up a stat, but I’m guessing it won’t be too far off the mark. I’m going to claim the mainstream media dedicated 17 times the coverage to the loss of those 5 would-be adventurers in a… Read More ›
REDUCTION
No one can accuse me of being fair. But were I to be, then yes, every discipline has its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own rules of inference … Words, phrases, sentences, they all take their meaning from the… Read More ›
“YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD. I DON’T THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS”
From the Most-Memorable-One-Liners-in-Cinema file, this one’s from The Princess Bride. And here are just some of my favourite words or phrases that don’t mean what either the speaker or the listener thinks they mean: BLACK LIVES MATTER: No one thinks all… Read More ›
HUMOUR
There’s an important difference between twisted and sick. Dead baby jokes are twisted, but telling them at a SIDS funeral is sick. It might relieve the tension in the room, but I’d hold off unless you really know your crowd…. Read More ›
GRIST FOR THE PETITION
I’ve been trying for years now, but to no avail. And so I’ve finally given up hoping for death threats. Instead I’ve decided to settle, if I can get even this, for a petition for my dismissal. To that end… Read More ›
BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE SJW’S DILEMMA
Here’s something I do know. As with everywhere else on the planet, there was tribal warfare in Africa long before European colonialism. What I don’t know – but I stand to be instructed – is whether that colonialism mitigated that… Read More ›
HOW TO MAKE WHITE LIVES MATTER
Now that Asian Lives Matter has eclipsed the Black Lives Matter movement, if only for a week or two, I wonder what it’ll take to get a White Lives Matter movement off the ground. Probably some black man walking into… Read More ›
IN THE WAKE OF THE ‘INCURSION’
Since the – let’s just call it an ‘incursion’ – into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, CNN and MSNBC have been awfulising it as “the end of the American experiment in democracy”, while Fox has been downplaying it as… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 