Wikipedia says that “do the needful” is Indian (or South Asian) English. If Scheuer was posted to Pakistan he might have picked it up there.
Wikitionary says that it is old-fashioned British English.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_the_needful
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Thanks. Maybe he was stationed there.
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I’ve heard pretentious and bombastic American conservatives (think Victor Davis Hanson, Max Boot, Niall Ferguson) sometimes use similar constructions when justifying some shady or horrific action so that they sound like brooding ancient Greek philosophers or kings.
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Haha, nice. I would read more of these guys, but I fear contracting a mind virus.
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I’ve used the phrase because I have a lot of Indian coworkers, and it’s a handy way of saying “I don’t know what all you have to do, but please do whatever that is” to achieve whatever thing you’re talking about.
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Jeebus, I thought this must be an Onion article.
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Oh look, a fascist prick with violent wish-fulfillment fantasies and a victim complex advocating fascist violence against innocent people. Must be another day ending in “y.”
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Ferguson is a very good historian on certain topics but he has a ridiculous woody for imperialism of the “white man’s burden” variety. The other two are neoconservative shills.
I’ll bet you’re right. I can see the phrase being a holdover from the Raj that found its way to Scheuer.
It’s a perfectly good phrase in that context but the results aren’t so great when the supposedly “needful” thing is a war of choice or (in this case) murdering political opponents.
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Yes, but that’s an adjective.
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At the risk of going off-topic, might i suggest, for those who would like to armchair diagnose, this as a better metaphor than mental illness for the wrongness that is in the heads of people like the subject of this post.
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Pakistan has a long history of military coups, so I can imagine an officer saying something like “If there is chaos you can count on the army to do the needful”.
They even have a legal doctrine that doing the needful is lawful when it is the needful.
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A “mind virus” in this sense is a powerful meme (in the Dawkins sense of the term). At least that’s how I immediately read it. I don’t think @realgeek was implying any mental illness.
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I agree. I’m endorsing ‘mind virus’ as a better thing to accuse these people of having. It’s not an actual technical term and i think that '“powerful meme(s)” is closer to what happens with these political cultists.
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Ah, sorry. I misread you. Absolutely agree.
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How about ‘sickness of the soul?’
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That’s fine. I’m writing especially obtusely this morning. I apologize.
That also works for me.
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Yes, I meant not an inherent, diagnosable illness nor the nam shub, but rather the powerful meme of the sort that many experience in college when learning of some powerful new idea. I feel like a lot of Randites (Ayn Rand) have succumbed to a mind virus.
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The “mind virus” concept also easily extends to the idea that certain types of people have weaker “immune systems” than others – not not necessarily because they’re stupid but because they’re not critical thinkers and/or lack the morality and ethics to to block viruses carrying nastier payloads.
I loved Stephenson’s take on the nam shub, the word or phrase that literally re-wires the brain. It’s not too far off from what happens when someone is infected with a powerful and compelling meme.
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