JHUS Staging

Category: JH Lexicon

  • hoploamory

    hoploamory – (n.) a pathological love for weapons and weaponry at the expense of respect for other human beings or their safety

    From the Neo-Latin “hoplo-” meaning armor, weapons, or tools, derived itself from the Greek “hoplon” with the same meaning (those familiar with Greek or military history should be thinking of “hoplites” here), and the Latin “-amory” suffix meaning “to be romantically involved with or attached to,” as in “polyamory.”

    To practice hoploamory, in the intended contemporary context (which I’m allowed to define since I just invented the word, so there!), is to ignore the major trauma and damage being inflicted every day on our nation by our refusal to let go of our guns and all of the bad, half-baked, toxic ideas that surround them, and instead choose to embrace the bad, half-baked, toxic ideas.

    You’ve seen the hoploamorous in action, guaranteed. These are the folks who have to flood every comment thread after a mass shooting with NRA-sponsored banalities like “guns don’t kill people, people do!” and “the first thing the Nazis did was take the guns!” (which incidentally is demonstrably bullshit.) The people who insist that their need to wear a high-powered rifle to the local grocery store isn’t a manifestation of their abject fear of basically everything, and their own abject cowardice in facing that fear, are hoploamorous. The “last line of defense” guys in camouflage gear who apparently have never heard of an F-15? Those are hoplophiles.

    Subdef: hoplophile – (n.) one who is hoploamorous. subject to revision if I can figure out what the proper way to make -amory into the subjective singular.

    This is to be carefully distinguished from the much smaller group of firearm collectors and aficionados who appreciate the art of the engineering involved or what have you, and from those actively enlisted in the military. (The absence of “the police” on that list is intentional.) The difference between the two is precisely the same as the difference between a numismatist and a trust-fund billionaire who can never have enough money regardless of who gets hurt in the process of acquiring it.

  • The Ownership Class

    “Ownership class” is a phrase I use fairly often, and even in doing so I understand that it can be ambiguously interpreted.  For that reason, I’ve added this definition to the JH Lexicon, to be defined as follow:

    The “ownership class” is not simply filled with the people who own things; rather it refers to the very, very small group – on the order of no more than a few hundred individuals, give or take at any particular point, and depending on how you’re measuring – who control most of the world’s wealth.

    These people control everything from institutions of higher learning (and on an ever-greater scale, primary education) to the media where we get the information we’re supposed to be learning to understand in school but aren’t.  As comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out as have others, it is simply not in the interests of this small group of people to have a generally informed, educated, and engaged population.  That sort of person challenges their power and can take it away.

    So they control the information, Orwell-style, to keep us distracted from their mendacity.  Part of that is ensuring that we’re always fighting and competing amongst ourselves, often over superfluous notions like religion that have no substantive impact on the Universal Morality.

    As mentioned above, in any given context “they” could refer to as few as the half-dozen or so people who own more of the world’s wealth between them than the “bottom” half of the total human population, or it may refer to as many as a few hundred people who make the most money from and control the behaviors of the largest corporations in the world.  It is not any one ethnic group, skin color, religion, gender, or sexuality per se, although the tables have been tilted largely in favor of some people based on those considerations.  It’s about individuals, making individual decisions including the decision to influence, for selfless or selfish means, the decisions of others.

  • The “Universal Ethic” or “Universal Morality”

    I often use the phrase “universal morality” in my writing, or refer to that morality.  It’s a paraphrase of a quote by Robert Heinlein, to wit:

    All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying. – Time Enough For Love

    In the context he was writing, “racial” here doesn’t refer to “ethnic” but rather the “human race.”  While I don’t agree with everything the man wrote, his ability to distill ideas was remarkable.  Even as his work and characterizations seem more archaic and even offensive with time, that very fact is because we are finally internalizing realities that in some cases Heinlein was once very much ahead of when the rest of the world was behind.

    This basic truth, that human morality can and ultimately must boil down to “what keeps the species alive and propagating,” leads to other inevitable realities.  And it is not merely “a” basic truth but the basic truth of the human species or any other.  To whatever extent possible, both we internally as a species and all the other species to whatever extent it is possible for them, work to ensure out own perpetuation, and one of the important ways we do that is through strength in numbers.

    However, with human beings the more educated and affluent they are, the more “necessary work” can be done by fewer actual human beings, because they will continue to develop technology both for production and recreation, which means they’ve got things to do both for fun and to help ensure their ability to survive, other than reproduce.

    Over time as the species becomes better educated and more affluent, ideas like human rights, gender equality, women not having to be enslaved to their reproductive ability, humans not treated as “less than” because they own a smaller piece of the planet’s wealth or they have different skin color or shape to their facial features or texture to their hair, all become both more self-evident and more imperative to pursue to ensure the further progress, survival, and propagation of the species.

    However, the paradigms that are now beginning to seriously crumble as I write this in the early summer of 2020 rely on aspects of inequality and prejudice and privilege and entitlement to perpetuate themselves to the detriment of this universal morality, and those who are unable to or refuse to abandon them thus ultimately will be a terminal subspecies.  I don’t say they “should be eliminated” or any such provocative nonsense, and that’s important.  They are being eliminated right now, by natural occurrence often brought on as the direct consequences of their own behavior, and the longer a subset of us exist who continue to try to avoid this reality, the longer it will be until we can truly progress forward as a species in the never-ending pursuit of survival and propagation.

    Nobody’s “doing that” or enjoying the fact that it’s happening; it’s the natural consequence of us continuing to work against our own interests as well as those of the other species on this planet whose lives are critical to our own one way or another.  It will continue until we stop acting that way, because we are a threat to the universal morality not only within our own species but for every other, and those species together create a discrete system of life which also has its own collective survival and propagation as its number one universal priority on which all other activity is based at every level, and they act the same way.

    That’s where the viruses come in and even the earthquakes from fracking.  Literally we’re breaking the planet for everything, and everything including ourselves absolutely will come together, one way or the other, being it by some “natural” agent like a pandemic or disaster, or “man-made” through war or greed, to mitigate our influence on the rest of the planet to a survivable nature and level.

    Because at all levels of life human and otherwise, the one universal and fundamental morality is and must always be the survival and propagation of life.

  • Orwell’s Boot

    Orwell’s Boot (n.) – phrase describing metaphorically the end result of the mechanical functions of tyranny. 

    I’m sure someone said “Orwell’s Boot” before I did, but strangely it hasn’t come into common use, so I guess I can take credit for a formal definition (although obviously Orwell conceived it).  It’s based on this passage from 1984:

    If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

    I use this phrase to describe the acts of oppression and tyranny engaged in by dictators and other authoritarian bad actors, particularly when it involves group oppression – sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry.  Often I get the feeling from people organizing “against oppression” that rather than trying to rid the world of oppression, some folks are just waiting for their turn to be the oppressor; this was the context of formally labeling the Orwell’s Boot metaphor for reference in other conversations.

    Example sentence:  “Either you want to eliminate Orwell’s Boot, or you want to wear it.  If wearing it is your goal, you’re no better than whatever you’re fighting against.”