Doesn’t punish with prison, banishment, death etc, but it is a law needing to be passed by both houses and there exists only one person on earth to whom it can apply.

An extraordinarily small-hearted waste of time, and I would want to know the name of any Republican who in any way helps move it forward.

The Big Lie
Eli Zaretsky
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/february/the-big-lie?utm_campaign=20210216blog&utm_content=20210216blog%20CID_be5157192b1a9e7db2d77dc3b188d32c&utm_medium=email&utm_source=LRB%20email&utm_term=The%20Big%20Lie

Snow on Pine:

Likewise. There is a weak version and strong version of Sapir-Whorf:
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* The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
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I don’t see how one’s language wouldn’t have *some* influence over one’s thoughts and decisions.

For instance, microaggression wasn’t a word until a black Harvard psychiatrist, Chester Pierce, made it up in 1970. It’s gradually come into common usage. Now laws and lives are changed because of it.

You learn your mother tongue, and are raised in a particular culture, whose particular language is preoccupied with and conveys certain cultural norms, certain preferred ways of looking at the world and describing it, and which also supplies you with a very specific group of topics of primary concern, which are usually uppermost in your culture and mind, and this particular language and culture—as opposed to all other alternative languages and their cultures–shapes and constrains how and what you routinely identify, perceive, think of, and deal with; the constituents of the world, whether the world of a herdsman outside of Ulan Bator, of an Australian Bushman, a small traditional farmer in the Italian countryside, an Eskimo, a painter in Paris, or an executive in New York.

That language supplies you with a very specific toolkit or set of eyeglasses—some toolkits and sets of glasses much more effective than others–with which to encounter, identify, think of, and to deal with what you perceive as the world of things and people around you, and how it functions.

It thus seems very reasonable to believe that that particular shaping, those specific categories, and those specific constraints—that toolkit and that particular set of eye glasses–has a decisive effect on what you primarily perceive, (even on what you can perceive) and how you think about and deal with what you perceive; your habitual categories and patterns of thought, your view of the world, and how you focus on and apply the specific tools that your language supplies to deal with that world that you perceive.

Enjoy 2020 and 2021 while it lasts.

You got an audible chuckle from me with that one, Frederick. I will, of course, steal that line.