Peterkin

In summary re. Polievre vs Canada: Without labelling anyone, I've narrowed the situation to four possibilities: 1. He's aware of the political climate and, signalling to a far right audience ("I speak your language.") 2. He's flipping off French Canada. ("I'm with the Anglos.") 3. He thinks Anglo Saxon words means coarse language (the common touch; man of the people, tough guy.) 4. He's using his short direct English words in blissful ignorance of their cultural and political significance. (Thick as two hot dog buns, me.)

I'm guessing a comprehensive list of people who will never go on a Jordan Peterson program and lie about their language.

Not anymore, and certainly not his.

The superficial information is of a quantity and nature and smell akin to the circumstantial evidence a preponderance of which sometimes gets people hanged. And is it really all that much more noble if he's just insulting French-Canadians?

Sure, that's possible. He may simply mean a strong repudiation of the French influence on the English language, on culture in general and Canadian culture in particular. Maybe he's just a Western Separatist - as ignorant of geography as he is of history and language.

Good advice.

One can be it, yes (Polievre is supposedly of Irish heritage) but very few academic linguists can actually speak it (Maybe he is one, but I doubt he speaks it in public: the audience would have a better chance of understanding French. Still avoiding the extreme sacrifice of listening to Peterson interview, I'm willing to give odds he said it modern, impure, French-Celt-German influenced English. To make a cultural distinction with no embedded political code.) They may have been, before the Norman conquest, though perhaps not English and not royalty as we understand the terms. Now, they're not. And I bet they don't speak it, either. It's not the same as, it's not like, it's not equivalent to or interchangeable with: it's either an informed or an uninformed lie and there was a reason for telling it. https://www.britannica.com/topic/house-of-Windsor Yes. Politicians do keep saying that, but it keeps not happening, except in the aftermath of a military attack from abroad, and what they actually do when they 'get together' is activate the mechanism of war. I don't think that will get universal health care done. So: Which specific people - by name, party affiliation and rank - should be coming together? By what practicable means can the relevant persons be brought together? And how will the forgiveness of mistakes speeches go? That was a response to the actual context, if not the intended one.

I rather think Pierre Polievre is... and it's somewhat at odds, both with his adopted name in a nation where that might otherwise be an asset, and with his own citizenship, though perfectly congruent with the values of some neighbours https://www.thestar.com/news/world/us/2021/04/17/new-conservative-group-would-save-anglo-saxon-traditions.html. Neither. One may question the significance of another's choice of words without calling them names. I asked questions that seemed relevant to the subject. Further to which: In what way is the term Anglo-Saxon a cultural distinction from English, and where did I say anyone was racist - let alone that their use of a specific cultural distinction makes them so? I was simply investigating the possible connotations of a particular person in a particular position making that particular cultural distinction in a particular venue to a particular audience - whether that had any political, rather than purely linguistic implications. Linguistically, it's rubbish: an obviously false claim to a language nobody has actually spoken since the middle ages; culturally, it's an implausible negation of the Norman-French influence which has so pervaded English language, political organization and law that the user would have to go re-learn it from Vikings and Angle farmers who are currently unavailable. I suspect they took their vaunted values with them. Sounds wonderful. Which people should be coming together and how is that approach to be effected?

No wonder so many minions of the F(orces)o(f)D(arkness) want to assassinate her. I'm just glad they're incompetent! But then Bernie Sanders didn't get to be president, either.

I suspect it's too late for that. The chasms are too deep and too old; assumptions and perceptions have been indelibly imprinted on generations of minds. In the graphic-saturated, metaphor-dripping, slogan-heavy, logo-encrusted symbolic communication matrix of our times, anyone speaking in plain text is inaudible.

Well, that explanation of linguistic usage is.... quite endarkening. Thank you.

I believe you. What I'm getting at is the phrase itself. What does it mean literally? What does it mean culturally? What does its use indicate to another person speaking that symbolic language? I don't use those terms, and so to me, as an outsider, they sound like a code - they seem to stand for much assumption that is undeclared and unspecified. The charge "playing the race card" used to be a charge levelled at at anyone who raised the possibility of bias to defend a visible minority from some punitive action by an authority. Sometimes the defence was wrong and bias was not a factor. Sometimes the defence was right and bias was a factor. In all cases, the objective of the phrase "playing the race card" was to stop probing into whether it was or was not: a kind of verbal shut-off valve to inquiry. And that's what I wonder about this blunter, more graphic version of the term. An excellent new topic!

Throwing another vague cliche at an unasked question goes no way at all toward the the question of how language is used, subverted, perverted and corrupted. Yes.... Only the OP question was not so much directed at "What are progressives doing wrong?" as at "What's so bad about progressivism itself, that it must be avoided, even at the cost of reinstating the most grotesquely destructive presidency the US ever had."

This, OTH, is a meaningful question. I would very much like to know the answer. Or at least be shown the way to an investigation of the matter.

I wonder whether using this term 'racism club' (twice) is indicative of a particular sort of pre-judgment of another poster's motivation. And I wonder whether the inclusive but unspecific phrase 'everything one does not like' indicated less than objective or incisive intellectual inquiry. Is the 'racism club' a hyper-inflated version of the old 'racism card'? 'Playing the racism card' was a charge that used to be levelled at anyone who mentioned historical bias in relation to the distribution of anything from baby clinics to public transport to polling stations to secondary schools. Now that the very same inequalities of distribution have remained unchanged or increased through space-age gerymandering, the not-very-effective card has grown into an equally ineffective club.... ....which, I'm guessing, is only ever used by "progressives" who still don't like everything they didn't like 50 years ago.

Guess I'm not voting for that guy!

And would you say that choosing such words might be intended to appeal - possibly even send a signal - to a specific audience?

We're okay with starting change at the bottom and working our way up, one challenge at a time, and we'll eventually get to the top. If you start at the top, you'll eventually arrive at the status quo.

But we can't keep them all in bubble-wrap that long; they'd spoil. Options for activity must be made available while they're still unformed, preferably without making too many of them any more miserable than necessary. So we just have to keep thinking about it, listening to them and experimenting.

I was answering the question: under the assumption that the hypothetical solution will have come to pass at the time the hypothetical problem will have needed to be solved. Indeed, the concept is not unknown to enlightened school districts, even at the present. https://www.independentschoolparent.com/school/mixed-team-sports/ https://www.parents.com/fun/sports/untapped-potential-of-mixed-gender-youth-sports/ It may not be the ultimate solution, but it seems to work for some people.

Have been. That will no longer be the case under the scheme iNow proposed and which seems eminently sensible to me. ....

Damned either way. I tried explaining fully. I tried being brief and direct. Failed at both. Sucks to be me. NOTE: Facetiousness. You said you support equal pay. I said "commendable". You didn't like that. I took it back, even though I approve. You don't believe that. Or you don't believe I meant it. Or something. What, precisely, do you want? Both. Neither. The stupid law that forced them to choose has been struck down. Evidently.

When have I ever given the impression that I disapprove of equal pay for women?

Neither. Merely brief. In an effort to minimize misconstruction. Evidently futile.

I cannot help but wonder: How often do you hear someone use the term Anglo-Saxon when referring to the English language? On now many of those occasions is someone referring to the English they themselves use? How many of the people referring to their own language as Anglo-Saxon rather than English are conservatives running for office in a climate of extreme political division? How many of the occasions on which a conservative candidate running for office in climate of extreme division call the English they use 'Anglo-Saxon' on a televised interview with a high-profile spokesman for the far right, whose audience is guaranteed to be predominantly far right? Just asking.