zeugma

Zeugma's homepage is at www.zeugmaweb.net

The following began as this post.

Muslims are Varelse

The term Varelse comes from a series of books by Orson Scott Card. It is mentioned in "Ender's Game" and expanded upon greatly in "Speaker For the Dead". According to some stuff I've read it, and the other terms described below have Norse roots, though I do not believe they align completely (for obvious reasons) with any actual word. The reason I wanted to post this here is that I think the terminology that Mr. Card has come up with is descriptive and useful.

I believe that words mean things. Sometimes the English language lacks the words to describe something that is important enough that it really should be decribed. Unlike some other cultures, we speakers of english aren't so proud that we won't borrow a phrase, or word from another language that we find to be more useful or descriptive than what we currently have in use. We'll even make up new words to describe new things or concepts that we'd previously not been exposed to. This is one of the great strengths of our native tongue. As a professional computer nerd, I see this happen all the time. Sometimes it is for the good, sometimes not. Obviously, in this case, I think the terms put forth by Mr. Card are useful, which has led me to expand upon my usage of them on Free Republic here.

In the book, Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card put forward a series of classifications for what is in the book, alien races, but is adaptable to our single planet as well.

There are four different classifications of "people". You'll need to remember that with each of these terms, they are mutual. If group A and B are Framling to each other, the A considers B to be Framling, and B considers A to be Framling.

Utlanning- A human we recognize as part of our same world and species, yet from another town or country.
Americans are generally Utlanning to each other. We relate and share more or less the same basic culture. The British would probably also be Utlanning.
Framling- A human we recognize as part of our same species, yet from another world or planet.
Most of Europe and possibly central america is more or less Framling as far as Americans are concerned. Communication and peace between Framling is possible.
Ramen- When a lifeform is considered human, but is of another species. Being able to think and behave at a human level and act civilized.
We would generally consider far eastern nations as being Ramen. Dissimilarity of history and culture between, say Japan and the United States is great. Nonetheless, peace and communication is possible because we are each Ramen to each other.
Varelse- A creature with whom communication is impossible. If such a creature is belligerent, then it is the only time when war is truly unavoidable and necessary.
This system is largely non-judgemental in that if group A and group B are Varelse, there can be no meaningful communications between each other. If they are not hostile, they can live in peace even though they cannot communicate. If one of them is hostile, then war is inevitable. Any war waged must be total war. You cannot stop until the other side has been completely annihilated, because they can't be reasoned with. They will keep coming because they see no value in you, your beliefs, your culture, or even you as a living being.
Look around the world. In every culture they exist, muslims are a violent and dangerous force. They enslave entire peoples, and destroy any remnant of foreign cultures they come into contact with. (See the Buddas blown up by the Taliban.) In India, they kill Hindus. In Bosnia, they kill Christians. In Israel, they kill Jews, of course. In the Philippines, they kill Christians, and pretty much anyone else that moves. When they don't have other people to kill, they turn on themselves and start killing each other depending upon which particular sect of Islam they happen to be a part of. More than anything else, they seem to worship death and destruction. This is not something one can just say "live and let live" to, because they just plain do not want to let you live.

Perhaps they are Ramen, and the lunatic fringe among them can be weeded out so that they may find some way to exist with. I am not entirely sure. Muslims seem to have been on this violent course for centuries now. The modern world appears to be an anathema to them, and their ideology seems, to me anyway, to be too easily twisted into a murderous one. The folks who blew up the London subway stations were British. From what I understand, they grew up there, yet their rage at those different from themselves was such that death and carnage was the only way they felt they could adequately express themselves.

I hope to G-d I'm wrong about that, because if I'm not, this next century may be even bloodier than the last, and that's saying a lot.

Zeugma is user number 4751.

I've been addicted to FR for quite a while as I guess should be obvious from the above.

I'm a professional computer nerd who has not been shackled by the Microsoft empire for decades now. My household is Linux only on 2 laptops and a desktop server. I like to hang out on the tech threads to try to point people away from the need to constantly deal with the bug/virus/worm/spyware problems that come with Windows of every flavor.

What exactly is a Zeugma? Well, there are actually two answers to that. A long time ago, I was looking for a new password. At the time, I was using a variation of dictionary words, (which is extremely bad form by the way. Don't do it.), and pulled out my 1940 Webster's Dictionary to pull a random word. The one I settled on was zeugma primarily because it was pretty obscure, i.e., you need a pretty good dictionary to even have it listed, and because I thought the definition was cool. A 'zeugma' is a type of gerund from what I understand. Here's what one dictionary has to say about it:

zeugma
use of a word to govern two or more words though appropriate to only one; "`Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave' is an example of zeugma"

The other type of zeugma is even more obscure to many. It is the name of an ancient Turkish city. Much more information about the city of zeugma can be found Here. In brief:

In the Hellenistic Era the city was called “Seleukeia of Euphrates”. The ancient city of Zeugma, originally, was founded by Selevkos Nikador, one of the generals of the Alexander the Great, in 300 B.C. At that time the city was named after the general and called “ Selevkaya Euphrates.” And the population in the city was approximately 80 000. In 64 B.C. Zeugma was conquered and ruled by Roman Empire and with this shift the name of the city was changed into Zeugma to mean “bridge-passage.”

As a side note, the first time I attempted to look up "zeugma" on the internet, the World Wide Web didn't even exist. I was able to find 3 references to it using a Veronica server (which was a Gopher search engine). Today Google returns 2,100,000 hits for the word.

Zeugma also has a home page. I've been working on it off and on for about 9 years. It actually started as two documents. One was a copy of the Constitution with an index. The other was a page since abandoned because it just became too darn much work to keep up with of links to various government websites. It got to where I could spend hours re-validating links, and I just gave up on it. Google is better anyway.

One thing of interest that I've more or less kept up with is my National Debt Page. I still update it every once in a while. I have data about the national debt going all the way back to 1792. Some of the charts are pretty eye-popping.

That's it for now. Have a great day!

Here's a PGP key if you feel like using it...