Orientation Can language limit thought? If a dogmatic belief system can narrow the kind of vocabulary used, can language itself limit the kind of thinking that is going on? How free are people to think their own thoughts independently of language? My answer in this article is that language can trap thought. In his book […]
The post Speaking with Forked Tongues first appeared on Dissident Voice.
JR Leach Today – 3rd of January 2023 – marks Professor JRR Tolkien’s one-hundred and thirty-first birthday. This is strangely significant as ‘131’ is the same age that Bilbo Baggins was when he was gifted passage aboard one of the last ships to Valinor, when he, Frodo and Gandalf sailed west to the Undying Lands. …
Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. — Aristotle, Poetics (1457b) It all seemed familiar. Anthropomorphised Mother Nature in vengeful mood; humans wondering if they might meet a frozen demise in trapped vehicles; the planners taking stock as to how best to cope with grim circumstances. The New York […]
The post Metaphors of Belligerence: Wars by and against Nature first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder & political prisoner, epitomizes what the rules-based order means in the lexicon of US empire. In fits of, what might well be termed, masochism, some of us now-and-then tune in to the legacy media. When doing so, one is likely to hear western-aligned politicians rhetorize ad nauseam about the linguistically vogue […]
The post What is the Rules-Based Order? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
President Zelensky has just been named by Time magazine “politician of the year 2022”. It is not to have realized his coup de force of July, in favor of the war. He had all the political parties that opposed him banned; assassinated the personalities who resisted him; controlled all the media, written, audiovisual and internet; […]
The post Volodymyr Zelensky and Ethnopolitics first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Perhaps one of the most amazing phenomena of the 20th and now 21st century is not Anglo-American empire, understood as military and economic power. Far more remarkable is the fact that in the scope of some two hundred years the English-speaking world; i.e., the British Empire and the American Empire, have produced a cultural and […]
The post Transformation of Political Language (Part 2) first appeared on Dissident Voice.
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum. “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee. – Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 27, 1871 Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues. As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy […]
Why they don't call it like it is.
The post Cold, Technical Language first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Who comes up with all these pithy sayings?
The post Aphorisms first appeared on Dissident Voice.
In his famous book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell eloquently penned how elitists would render words to mean their opposite: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”
The post Names as Contradictions first appeared on Dissident Voice.
