palordrolap

You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.

They put you somewhere that you have no communication with the outside world. Now what?

He was an imminent threat to comfortable and familiar ways of life of the rich. Had he not been a threat to them and their interests, we would not have gone to war with him.

Likewise anyone else on the current world stage who is obnoxious, outrageous, egregious or other adjectives of that ilk.

Sure, he was also a threat to the comfort and happiness of people other than the rich, and hey, the fact that fascism is legitimately terrible is an excellent propaganda point, but that only made it easier to recruit those less well-off to go fight the battles of the rich.

And then there’s that a significant part of the reason people outside of Germany hated him is because he was foreign. Nothing more, nothing less. Pick any country, and if he’d been one of their own instead, the haters would have liked him just fine and would have been “Roman saluting” just like the Germans did.

(Yes, I know he was an Austrian accepted by Germans. Call that the exception that proves the rule. Countries further away couldn’t care less. He was still foreign to them.)

Are you absolutely sure you want to tell a man with a fragile ego and an entire country’s armed and police services at his beck and call, to, of all things, go choke on broken glass?

How do you see this going?

I don’t know what message will get through to the man and change his course of action, but that ain’t it.

Hey, OP, they’re wrong. Not the wrongest they could have been, but it is indeed a word. A quick check with any online dictionary will confirm that.

It might be considered poor style to use it in educated language, where “most wrong”, “most incorrect” or “most false” might be better choices, which is probably the context they were thinking of, but it’s definitely a word and people do use it.

I think it’s more like an uncanny valley phenomenon. Or it could be that humans are largely neotenous and other primates haven’t developed that trait, so they remind us of old, or diseased members of our own species at a unconscious level.

Or it could be both. Strange hairy men that live in the woods? Avoidance response activated.

Objectively wrong for your part of the world maybe.

I guess my part of the world probably doesn’t have a word for the distinction because here it can mean either.

Either that or it’s a case of common parlance versus learned parlance, like, for the sake of any example, when people say “theory” but mean “hypothesis” and in learned parlance “theory” has a different meaning.

Right verb or wrong verb, it doesn’t really invalidate the point I was making. If all you do is stand by the barbecue, put things in it and flip the food occasionally while everything else magically happens around you, you’re only doing the fun bit.

What is the right word for indirect heat cooking anyway? “Smoking” in that context doesn’t necessarily imply making it hot for close-to-immediate consumption, and “cooking” seems far too general.

Likewise, “barbecuing” could mean grilling, so that’s too general as well.

At least one of the levels is practicality: The acts of buying and/or preparing every other food, condiment and implement that will be used for the barbecue, then cleaning everything up afterwards without implicitly relying on anyone else.

The grilling might be the fun bit, but there’s a lot else either side.

You don’t just hand someone a grilled meat patty, however beautifully it’s cooked and seasoned. The required bun has to come from somewhere. So did that plate. Maybe there’s butter on the bun. Maybe there’s salad. Maybe the meat needed marinating, etc.