{"id":66697,"date":"2024-02-02T06:36:16","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T11:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66697"},"modified":"2024-02-02T06:36:16","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T11:36:16","slug":"a-small-and-deceptive-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=66697","title":{"rendered":"A small and deceptive word"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A small and deceptive word<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In a\u00a0previous post<\/a>\u00a0I referred to two \u201chighly seductive and misunderstood words.\u201d\u00a0 I dealt with one of these\u00a0several years ago<\/a>\u00a0when considering the growing number of things that humans can do in theory but can no longer do in practice.\u00a0 This applied to highly expensive projects like sending humans to the moon or operating commercial supersonic air travel.\u00a0 But it also applies to more mundane activities like the once ubiquitous\u00a0automated car washes<\/a>.\u00a0 The point being that whenever an activist, politician or journalist uses words like \u201cought,\u201d \u201ccould,\u201d \u201cshould,\u201d and \u201ccan,\u201d what they most often mean is \u201ccan\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, in turn, implies an unacknowledged powerlessness.\u00a0 Because these antonyms are almost always preceded by another deceptive word\u2026 \u201cwe.\u201d\u00a0 People on what is broadly considered the political right, for example, will explain that \u201cwe ought\/could\/should\u2026\u201d start fracking the Bowland shale deposits in northern England and\/or start drilling the oil deposits west of Shetland and\/or hurry the development of new nuclear power stations.\u00a0 Against this, those who identify as being on the left will claim that this is unnecessary because \u201cwe can\/ought\/should\u2026\u201d accelerate the deployment of wind turbines and solar panels, electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.\u00a0 I have covered the impossibility of both proposals \u2013 broadly, that they are too energy and resource expensive compared to the energy they return to be viable in the real economy \u2013 in several previous posts.\u00a0 But what I want to explore here is just how deceptive the word \u201cwe\u201d is, since it should be patently obvious that used in these kinds of context, the word \u201cwe\u201d actually means \u201cthey\u201d \u2013 or more correctly, since nobody knows who \u201cthey\u201d are \u2013 \u201csomeone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A small and deceptive word In a\u00a0previous post\u00a0I referred to two \u201chighly seductive and misunderstood words.\u201d\u00a0 I dealt with one of these\u00a0several years ago\u00a0when considering the growing number of things that humans can do in theory but can no longer do in practice.\u00a0 This applied to highly expensive projects like sending humans to the moon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,5],"tags":[30764,31147,31360,30416],"class_list":["post-66697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","category-geopolitics","tag-agency","tag-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins","tag-we"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66698,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66697\/revisions\/66698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}