HARVARD THEN AND NOW: Fuzzy language to the left of us...

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2023

Clown shows to the right: Full disclosure, in the form of a confession:

Long ago and far away, there may have been a time when we wouldn't have been able to identify this latest collection of words as an example of fuzzy language.

The collection of words to which we refer appears in today's New York Times. Here's how the news report begins, with its fuzzy language highlighted:

Federal Judge Approves Georgia’s New Voting Maps

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that the Georgia legislature had complied with orders to draw voting maps that allowed Black voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, signing off on new districts created earlier this month.

The Republican-led legislature had drawn new state and congressional maps during a December special session, after a federal judge in Atlanta said the original districts created after the 2020 census violated the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

[...]

Judge Steve C. Jones of the Northern District of Georgia, who first struck down the [original] maps in late October, said that the legislature had now done enough to comply with the Voting Rights Act with its new maps, which are likely to maintain the 9-5 majority Republicans hold in the state’s congressional delegation.

“The court finds that the General Assembly fully complied with this court’s order requiring the creation of a majority-Black congressional district in the region of the state where vote dilution was found,” Judge Jones, who was nominated to his post by President Barack Obama, wrote in one of three rulings rejecting challenges to the redrawn congressional and state legislature maps.

So begins the report by King and Cochrane, fuzzy language highlighted. 

According to the Times reporters, Georgia's new legislative maps "allow Black voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice." It sounds like something you'd want to allow, but what exactly does that formulation actually mean?

The reporters make no attempt to explain. Beyond that, the term "vote dilution" appears several times in their report, in the absence of any attempt to explain what that term means.

We'll return to the question of "fuzzy language" before we're done today. First, we want to show you something we saw and heard on Wednesday night as we groaningly watched the Fox News Channel program, The Five.

The Five airs at 5 p.m. Eastern. Also, it features a shifting panel of five (5) panelists. Plainly, a lot of cleverness went into this popular program's name and construction.

As part of The Five's basic format, four (4) of the panelists take turns emitting red tribe Storyline regarding the topic under review. At some point, the panel's one (1) blue tribe panelist is allowed to try to respond.

This format could hardly be dumber. That said, what we heard on Wednesday night crossed the border of the merely dumb, venturing into the uncharted territory of the Baldly Stupid.

On the night in question, the panelist serving as moderator was Lisa Kennedy Montgomery. "Referred to mononymously as Kennedy," she's "an American libertarian political commentator, radio personality, author, and former MTV VJ." 

Or at least, so the leading authority says.

At 5:27 p.m., the former VJ kicked off the segment in question. In all honesty, you really can't get too much dumber than what you see below. 

To watch the full segment, just click here. But this is what Kennedy said at the start of the soul-draining, eight-minute pseudo-discussion:

KENNEDY (12/27/23): Democrats had a busy year declaring war on appliances in the name of green energy. But one liberal leader got a pass on her gas. 

Kamala is getting burned online—Get it?—for posting this photo of herself and the second hubby, Douglas Emhoff, cooking up some Christmas beef Wellington—sounds kinky—on a gas stove, which the regulation-obsessed Biden administration considered banning over health concerns.

And it's not just gas stoves. Biden's anti-consumer crusade is targeting four more types of appliances—including but not limited to, dishwashers, air conditioners, washing machines and furnaces. 

Had enough nanny state? I've been telling you. Well, how about Mayor Pete going after your wheels?

Actually, no. According to experts, it can't get dumber than that.

There followed a brief, misleadingly edited video of a recent appearance by Pete Buttigieg on a Fox Business Network program. (For the record, Buttigieg was treated with perfect courtesy on that particular show.)

Eventually, Kennedy threw to the rest of her panel, including the former pro wrestling heavyweight champion; the former marine whose family boasts "a colorful past as moonshiners and race car," and the 35-year-old Arizonan who, "as an adult woman with eligible ancestry, became a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution."

The four red tribe panelists proceeded to stage a meandering pseudo-discussion of every energy issue under the sun. No attempt was made to explain why anyone might be concerned about any of the three hundred topics under pseudo-review. 

Any one of those topics would have been appropriate for a real discussion. Instead, the four red tribers generated an endless stream of self-pitying nonsense—nonsense which had started with the unfounded, apparently bogus claim that the Biden administration considered banning gas stoves this year.

Finally, the torch was passed to Jessica Tarlov, the panel's one (1) blue tribe member. As is typical in these imitations of life, this exchange quickly ensued:

TARLOV: No one has mentioned why there's any conversation about getting rid of gas stoves. It's because of childhood asthma. Gas stoves are responsible for 12 percent of the childhood asthma cases in the United States—

KATIE PAVLICH: That's not true.

TARLOV: Yes, it is true. Twenty-one percent oft he cases in Illinois, 20 percent of the cases in California. It's a health and safety risk more than it's just about liberals wanting to exert maximum control over the populace that we think that we're smarter than...

The interruption was instantaneous. Only a fool would suppose that Pavlich actually knows what's "true" about this technical matter. 

That said, why did Tarlov include the statement about what liberals do and don't want to exert? She included it because the four red tribe participants—the former VJ; the former heavyweight wrestling champion; the ex-Marine with the colorful family; the former conservative blogger of the year, so named at age 23—had insisted, all though their pseudo-discussion, that liberals want to engage in such regulations because they think they're smarter than us the regular people, and because they want to control us.

Full disclosure: Everyone is smarter than the people who pump the tribal line on programs like The Five. 

(We'll offer a pass to Johnny Joey Jones, the ex-Marine with the colorful family history. Jones is unfailingly courteous, and strikes us as being completely sincere.)

At any rate, no one isn't smarter than these people are! That said. we the people will commonly lack the analytical tools with which to discern the level of clowning being performed on such "cable news" programs.

As a general matter, we the people lack such tools—and at this site, for the past twenty-five years, we've noted a certain cultural problem:

No one from our finest schools is going to dirty his or her hands by stepping forward to discuss the degrees of deception and misinformation involved in these endless gong shows. At schools like Harvard, MIT and Penn, such things simply aren't done.

It simply isn't done! Nor will the collection of billionaires, donors and corporate heirs assembled on the Harvard Corporation ever step out of their mahoganied  rooms to take note of this failure to serve.

Regarding the fuzzy language with which we began, let the word go forth:

There was a time when we ourselves might not have noticed the fact that this morning's Times report is built around fuzzy language.

In the major piece of fuzzy language, we're told that yesterday's decision in Georgia means that black voters in that state will now be "allowed an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice."

Go ahead—try to paraphrase that formulation! Try to explain what that means! 

In fairness, there was a time when we ourselves probably wouldn't have seen that as fuzzy language—but what does that fuzzy language mean? It's very had to say. Nor will any Harvard professor ever step forward in a guest essay to address any such point of concern.

To appearances, the professors are too busy inside their bubbles to offer any such service to the world. With that, we think back to our own freshman year at Harvard, and to the handful of years which have followed.

The clowning on the Fox News Channel is an existential threat to our failing nation. Harvard professors are too refined to emerge from their studies to say that.

Nor is it likely that any such professor would actually have the skills with which to perform some such service. Meanwhile, the jugglers and clowns on Harvard's governing body lack the social awareness to notice the end drawing near.

The board sits in mahoganied rooms making its "key decisions." When the president they selected showed up in Washington at the start of this month, it turned out that she didn't have the slightest idea how to speak in public. 

In fairness, neither did the other college presidents, those from MIT and Penn. Simply put:

After decades inside the bubble, the three lacked any such skill.

These are the jugglers and the clowns who are conventionally described as "highly educated." The three college presidents were beaten and cowed by the screeching lunacy of Rep. Elise Stefanik—and Harvard's own Professor Tribe couldn't run fast enough to tell the world that Stefanik had been right! 

So spoke the highly educated, at that point in time.

"You've gone to the finest schools," Bob Dylan derisively said. On Monday, the New York Times launched a sneak attack on the "highly educated" people who count their money and successfully hide inside such high-end bubbles.

By our senior year: By our junior and senior years, we'd been directed toward the admittedly incoherent work of the later Wittgenstein. 

Incoherent as that work may have been, it did offer a way to untangle the spider webs of fuzzy language and conceptual confusion afflicting high-end thought. According to Professor Horwich, his colleagues  decided that life would be easier if they simply averted their gaze.

His colleagues retreated back into the bubble. When the three college presidents showed up in D.C., you saw where such lethargy leads.

The donors and heirs sit on the board, with a pair of scholars thrown in.