I just want to discuss the phrases, and their antecedants “War on Poverty” and “Global Warming”.
In the first case, a “War on Poverty” was launched in the 1960’s, and guided by a man with the ironically appropriate first name of Sargent. It failed. If it was a war, they were thrown back at the beaches into the sea.
So what did the Left do? They changed the name. Look at Detroit today. Three decades later, if someone said they needed money to end poverty, they would be laughed out of the room. Just kidding: only conservatives would laugh, since for leftists every day is a new day, since their “reset” button never wears out.
The thesis of global warming is that the Earth–all of it–is warming. Warmth is measured with temperature. If the temperature goes up, warming is happening.
However, the people running this project launched all sorts of dire predictions back in the late 90’s about what would be happening NOW, if we didn’t act THEN. How embarassing for them that they were WRONG. That is the most correct word here.
So what did they do? Did they abandon or greatly modify their falsified hypothesis? No: they renamed it to make it less empirical. The phrase global warming implies warming. If the warming doesn’t happen, then the prediction was wrong. But how beautiful from a policy–if not scientific or moral–standpoint to be able to make “predictions” ex post facto? All you have to do is wait and see what happens, then predict it RETROACTIVELY. OF COURSE the glaciers are expanding in one place and contracting in another. OF COURSE we are having a terrible winter. OF COURSE we are at a 50 year low for global hurricane activity.
In my view, the tendency to rename things, in and of itself, normally betrays lack of clarity of thought and evidence.
In the case of the old word “social justice”, of course, many meanings CAN be implied, but this particular one seemed most egregiously wrong. As a general rule of thumb, it is the antonym of “legal justice”, as embodied in protected individual civil liberties.