For decades we were sensitized to fallacies like 'racism' and 'sexism', and learned to police our own thinking and speech so that we wouldn't be attacked by all right-thinking people for making judgements in which race or gender played too great a part... or, according to some,
any part.
Now I'm wondering what term we could use for this kind of thinking:
'In London, Ms Rice - on her first overseas tour as US secretary of state - insisted that attacking Iran was not on the US agenda "at this point in time".'
We need a concept that allows people in a room where that phrase is being spoken to think, immediately and simultaneously, "That's blatant --ism!" and to erupt into howls of disdain and a storm of protest. It would be a word, and a concept, which recognised the military threat inherent in that phrase, the astounding judgemental arrogance, the presumption, the aggression, but, more than that, which declared these things completely unacceptable and completely outdated.
I'm struggling to come up with a suitably atavistic phrase, and all I can think of is something like 'Death-rattlist-sabre-toothed-rattlesnakist-sabre-rattlism'. A bit unwieldy...
― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 5 February 2005 05:25 (twenty-one years ago)
"Death-rattle-Ramboist-sabre-toothed-rattlesnakist-Rambo-sabre-rattlism" hmm not bad.
― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 5 February 2005 05:39 (twenty-one years ago)
From that page, I feel Condi well summed up by 'Dictatorial duck-billed Borgia!'
― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 5 February 2005 05:43 (twenty-one years ago)
'Fancy dress fascist' or 'misguided missile' also work well here (with a nice secondary spelling of 'Miss Guided Missile' or 'Miss Misguided Missile'). So 'Misguided Missilism'? Perhaps even, for good measure, 'Missionary Misguided Missilism?'
― Momus (Momus), Saturday, 5 February 2005 05:46 (twenty-one years ago)
Call me old school, but I'm still partial to plain old "Bullshit."
Blistering barnacles.
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 5 February 2005 08:17 (twenty-one years ago)