The Coalition of the Swilling

The Uhurus are big here in St. Pete FL. Basically black Marxists. They are so over the top that even the local media that pander to minorities don't give these guys the time of day.

No one, and I mean no one hates whitey more than the Uhurus.

A cop killer and child rapist, but he's not a monster? How do such people contain that sort of logic in their skulls without their heads exploding?

Spider, could it partly be the media are so afraid of them? That if they reported anything even remotely "bad," they'd be retaliated against?

I wish I hadn't heard about these guys. I'm already scared by the thought of the Mexican drug-wars spilling over onto US soil.

Retread, I blame the post-modernists / post-structuralists. They've so twisted the meanings of words within the walls of Academia that people in leftist movements think they can just strip away inconvenient connotations or re-define words wholesale. I saw this happening in the Literature Departments (I was in Slavic Lit) in the early 90s, and I got the hell out of Dodge.

Here's a good example, if you can stomach it. This is actually what passes for academic discourse in many circles - we can throw a loaded word like "racist" at you, and they we tell you "it's not so bad, we didn't mean you were a Klansman, the word in fact has many meanings, and I get to pick which one it has when you object to me using it indiscriminately", when in fact the word does carry that connotation in normal discourse. The street-level Left apes it's Academic betters, and now you see that they get to define the word "monster", too.

That discussion on race I linked to really pissed me off because, like the author, I'm in an inter-racial marriage. Unlike the author, my wife studied something useful (science) and believes that words have meanings you can't change at will. I pity that woman's kid.

John, I worked in a law firm for years and so share your wife's understanding that words must have precise meanings, in order to understand what both sides to a contract are committing to, for instance. It seems in recent years that the choice of word is immediately the one that implies extreme. No one is content with good when they can skip better and go right to best. The mentality seems to be 'I win by overstating my case'.

Is that your blog you linked to? If it is, I like your books. Well, to be precise, I like the books even if it isn't your blog ;-).

Retread - no, I am not John Scalzi, and while I like his books OK, he approved of the guest author's sentiment, so I think on this issue his credibility done shit the bed.

John, that kind of language imprecision occupies a fair portion of this book.

One specific instance is the case of the rape researcher defining "rape" as any non-consentual sex. Even if it involved no violence or coercion. Even if it was consentual at the time, but the woman regretted it later. Even if the "victim" herself did not consider it rape. And so the "study" reported that 25% of all college women have been raped, and without acknowledging that the word "rape" tends to conjure up images of violence (though violent rape was a miniscule fraction of the "rapes" reported).

The monster's estate can sue the paper for libel or defamation if a newspaper or other media say he is a monster and it was not judged so in a court of law. It's not likely the estate would win in such a case, but it's much easier to put the word "alleged" in there than to fight a lawsuit.