What's in a name?

We should call a spade a spade. As long as the word ‘spade’ does not mean ‘cat.’

We have a local circle of farming enthousiasts around here. Our ranch owner is one of them. He has a small garden next to the ranch house where he grows about anything that the climate will permit. Carrots (yummy!), squash, lettuce, tomatoes, you name it and we have some of those plants right here in the garden. In the summer, that is. Many of our neighbours share our passion. Not too long ago, Frank, a guy who owns a ranchette and gardens from time to time, boasted that he now ran a group with over a hundred members on TheHood. Apparently, TheHood is SecondPost’s app that “digitizes neighbouroods.”

(If you don’t recall who social media giant SecondPost is, check out my earlier story and subscribe!)

You’ll remember SecondPost from when Jake and Kelly visited me. They weren’t that happy with how SecondPost pushed certain content onto them, trying to nudge their opinions. This time around, all seemed rosy for Frank. His community kept growing. He was radiant, until one day he stopped by and he was completely cheesed off. “SecondPost can stuff it,” he shouted. Turned out SecondPost had closed his local online gardening circle Bros before hoes for “violating community standards,” accusing the group of “misogynistic and derogatory content.” “All we ever talked about, was how we loosen the soil up with our hoes to grow larger eggplants … and we’d add one of those eggplant icons. There’s nothing sexist about that,” lamented Frank.

A picture shared in Bros before hoes, showing how to use a hoe. Picture by Rodolfo Clix, pexels.com.

It seems that some words don’t entirely mean what they used to. Some words have obtained connotations disconnected from their principal use, like hoes and eggplants. However, some other words have been entirely hollowed out as a consequence of how they have been used by certain political groups and their allies in the media. This trend may seem innocuous, but it reduces the capacity to really differentiate between extremes, eventually even between good and bad and between love and hate. This may be contributing to the fact that some people hold the erratic belief that “hate can be uprooted.”

Every now and then, we get visitors on the ranch who bring some sort of a handheld with them and eat it right before we go on a trail ride. I seems odd to me that they don’t take the time to graze peacefully … but that’s just my opinion. The point is though that many of these handhelds are wrapped in paper that reads “I’m loving it.” Truly? When I watch them gobble their sandwiches in a split second, while some of it drops onto the driveway, it doesn’t seem to me that they’re “lovin’ it.” The word “loving” could be astute marketing practice. Yet if we use words like “loving” for a simple sandwich that we can have ten times a day, which words are still reserved for true love? Ancient Greeks were more sophisticated than us. They had three words for different types of love: eros, phylos, and agape. All three of them expressed much stronger feelings than the consumption of a sandwich.

When superlatives to the positive are abused to relate to banal occasions, it becomes challenging to really discriminate the positive. The same holds true though for more neutral expressions and even for the negative. Let’s descend from the heavens step by step to descriptions of more negative concepts.

When Frank cooled down a little, he said: “I am going to hold SecondPost accountable. I want justice!” Unbeknownst to him is that “justice” is another concept that morphs in the eye of the beholder. In its pure sense, justice is very desirable. It presumes a diligent assessment of the event, which then leads to a balanced conclusion that has a higher degree of fairness and is more probable to lead to positive outcomes for society at large. However, some activist groups these days cannot pronounce a sentence that does not contain at least three occurrences of “just” or “fair,” yet upon scrutiny it is quite clear that the direction in which the sentence would take us does not always overlap with the old and noble sense of justice. Here are a few examples: “social justice” means the introduction of a “fair” (translate: communist) society in which there is no reward for effort, merit or talent, but in which “everybody” receives their “fair” share. Echoing the stock market, that share is than labeled “equity.” However, in the stock market, companies whose products are dismal, go belly up. Not so in the “equitable” world of “social justice,” where zero accomplishment and mediocrity are the ideals. Also, the “equity for everyone” has to be interpreted as “a predetermined government alimony for everybody except for the ones at the top of the pyramid, who will get all the riches in the word.” The Soviet Union has allowed us to observe where that path leads.

“Social justice” is not the only example of distorted use of the word “justice.” “Racial justice” does not mean “equal opportunities for citizens of all colours,” as e.g. Martin Luther King Jr. would have advocated for. Instead, it means introduction of quota for those members of minority communities who do not challenge the official narrative. At the same time, it implies straight discrimination against others who do not check the diversity box. It is thereby the opposite of true justice. “Gender justice” fits into the same logic. Instead of providing equal opportunities to people of each gender, it entails misandric discrimination. However, in this case women will only win out against men if those men do not say they are women. And then, both will lose out to people who say that they have no gender. Why there should be an unnatural advantage for people who decide to engage in equally unnatural medical procedures, beats me. But one thing is sure: it has nothing to do with “justice.”

Frank kept on ranting. While calling for justice, he stated “I have all the facts on my side. All we did was talk about hoes… SecondPost are violating my civil rights!” Little did he know that the meaning of the words “fact” and “rights” have changed pretty significantly too. Facts used to be objectively verifiable entities. However, that seems to have changed with the advent of self-proclaimed “fact-checkers.” An entire industry of “fact-checking” services has emerged. All of them pretend to “check facts independently,” yet what they do is to check if a certain statement fits the desired political narrative.

(Want to “fact-check” Wild Horse Wisdom? Feel free, but please make sure to subscribe.)

There are thousands of examples to this topic. However, here is a good one. Just about a year ago, there was a social media hype about “C40 cities.” The C40 cities organization is an alliance between forty of the world’s most prominent urban areas. The alliance does more, though, than attend each other’s sports games. In 2019, the C40 alliance published a report that outlines how these cities intend to reach “net zero carbon.” To say the least, these plans are drastic. It is stunning in itself that it took two years for some alert observers to spread the word on social media. When they finally did so, the message that “C40 cities will ban all meat and dairy” quickly spread through social media. Even though these plans are public, their originators were not comfortable with them being a concern for the broader public. So instead of taking back what they had written, they went on to claim that the social media hype was “a conspiracy theory.” So-called “fact-checking” organizations were put at work, who claimed in unison that “C40 cities do not plan to ban meat” and that such “rumours were invented.” However, when we do some digging, we can find that the C40 cities have “1.5 degree Celsius climate action plans.” In their knowledge hub, we find another document that then details how these targets can be attained. The answer is to plan for a “future of urban consumption.” That future would not be different if the consumption targets weren’t different from present consumption patterns. Therefore, they outline a “progressive target” and an “ambitious target” for consumption by 2030.

“Potential for reduction of emissions” as put forward in the C40 Cities’ “THE FUTURE OF URBAN CONSUMPTION IN A 1.5°C WORLD“

What is the ambitious target? Well, the ambitious target aims to reduce food emissions by 60% by 2030. The fact that e.g. the same target for electronics only envisages a reduction of 33% is a different topic for discussion, which I will jump into at a later point. However, how do we get to the arbitrary number of a 60% reduction?

Progressive and ambitious target for “food consumption interventions” as per the C40 Cities’ “THE FUTURE OF URBAN CONSUMPTION IN A 1.5°C WORLD”

Well, by adopting consumption targets for 0 kg of meat and 0 kg of dairy per person per year. I know, the C40 alliance does not issue legally binding treaties and so far, none of the member cities have announced legislation to ban meat or dairy. But how else can they get to zero consumption? I can only conclude that this “invented rumour” is very real indeed and this is one of many occasions where so-called “fact-checkers” find the most meaningless word game to claim that the truth is false if the truth does not fit the desired narrative. Yet the so-called “fact-checks” can be found online unchanged to this date.

As to “civil rights,” yes, on paper we still have them. However, the European Court of Human Rights recently convicted Switzerland for not doing enough to protect its citizens against … you guessed it: climate change. Let’s put aside for a minute the fact that solar activity has been driving climate change since the solar system exists and that we have never been able to stop that. The really worrisome aspect of this ruling is that in the ECHR’s eyes, it is now a “right” to be protected by the government. Civil rights have always related to rights of the individual. The ECHR just turned this concept upside down, by literally saying that civil rights are best respected when the government has a broader authority to invade in individuals’ activities to protect them and thus to … undercut civil rights.

In the same vein, while the ACLU is formally the “American Civil Liberties Union,” it has morphed into yet another parrot organization for the elites. Historically, it did fight for individual civil rights. In recent days, though, the ACLU has taken positions that are very questionable. The ACLU is just another symptom of a broader trend in which the word ‘liberty’ and all of its derivatives have lost their meaning. Many self-proclaimed contemporary “liberals” will advocate for censorship, criminalizing speech, government mandates, “equity” and “environmental justice,” none of which respects the true liberal spirit. They will also support all sorts of government-corporate fusion, in areas such as big pharma, big tech and others. In fact, it is stunning to observe that today’s “liberals” have been nudged into supporting what is de facto fascism (government-corporate fusion). They go along with any fascist ploy as long as it dressed up as “anti-fascism” (TM) and “liberalism” (TM).

Even a quarter of an hour later, Jake was still raging on. “You’d maybe accept they’d delete us if we’d advocated for genocide or so …” I’d go along with that line of thought if “genocide” still meant what it did a decade ago. But recently, it has shown up in very questionable contexts, too. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was accused of “genocide” by the mainstream media in his country for criticizing the COVID containment measures. Without jumping into detail on the latter, a true genocide is an attempt to erase an entire ethnic group from the earth. The holocaust was a genocide. The Turkish massacre of Armenians was a genocide. But criticizing lockdowns, I am sorry, has nothing to do with genocide whatsoever. There isn’t even a specific ethnic group involved in that case. The same holds for the negative as does for the positive: if we start calling banalities “genocide,” how will we be able to see that the holocaust was not just about opinions, but that actually six million people were murdered in cold blood? And how will we be able to recognize a true genocide, should it be attempted once more?

I am as angry as Frank. His online community got deleted because SecondPost had recently “updated” their “Terms of Service,” which stipulated that accounts would be banned that “divulge hate speech, profanity, bullying, harassment, and other content listed as ‘restricted.’” In plain English, this should be read as: “Mike Suckercreek and his overlords in the stupidity community think that they not only have the right to determine what you can say, but also how you can say it.”

(If you don’t know what the “stupidity community” is, check out more Wild Horse Wisdom and subscribe!)

Considering all the above, the only way out of this distorted reality is by having an open discussion and by allowing people to express themselves spontaneously, as they see fit. If some think that killing an ant is “genocide,” than others should be allowed to correct that. They should not only be able to speak the truth, but also express their rage with as many expletives as they like. If you think that criticism of COVID measures is “genocide,” then I will call that: “bullshit.”

Sorry, Mr. Suckercreek and your overlords, there is nothing wrong with that word either. Bulls are around and they defecate. So do horses. Even the best horse drops something from time to time. Also, please don’t bring up the argument of “what if children are present?” We horses shit, also when children are present. It is in the best interest of children to learn about that process as it happens naturally, all the time. Likewise, it is in their best interest to learn early on that defecation does not equal genocide and they should learn to call that out. Let’s not delete certain very natural words from the dictionary because some conceited big tech prick thinks he is too “sophisticated” to use them. In fact, true sophistication is reflected in the capacity to use a broad vocabulary in a commensurate way, including negative expressions. Children will see us horses defecate and they need to build vocabulary for that. On the contrary, what children will not encounter in nature, are “genderqueer” animals. I don’t know what a “genderqueer foal” is supposed to be. I have never seen one and most likely, never will. Children, and foals, do not need to be exposed to vocabulary that only serves to reinforce mental delusion.

Eventually, Frank calmed a little down. “We can still meet each other around here, I don’t need SecondPost,” he said, and concluded “Suckercreek can go suck it by his creek.” We horses prefer the creek, though, without anyone sucking it there. And we don’t get enraged by social media. Because, guess what? We don’t use it.

(If you were anxious to get some more cute pictures, well: here we go!)

Some of our friends down by the creek. Photo by “Paul H.”