Don't be coy

From Fred Halliday:

I very much like the famous mistranslations of the 20th century. I particularly like the first Chinese translation of the Communist Manifesto, which was done by Chinese students in Japan from Japanese in about 1910. And instead of saying “Workers of the world, unite—you’ve nothing to lose but your chains,” it said, “Scholars of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your shame”!

The shame is not doing the work. The shame is not listening to other people. The shame is not saying what you think. The shame is running after fashions of Left or Right. The shame is wasting your time in a kind of public, theatrical pugilism of the kind which too many of my British friends in the United States seem to have fallen into.

QDN Communique: QDN is not alligned in the Halliday-Ali Cold War.

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