The War on Language

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Re: The War on Language

Postby Marcuse » Thu Oct 18, 2018 7:31 pm

cmsellers wrote:The title is a reference to the longstanding fondness on the right for labeling things which aren't wars as "wars." IE: "War on Drugs," "War on Terror," and especially the "War on Christmas."


Prolly best to not start threads with digs at one side though really.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby cmsellers » Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:14 pm

The thread is about something which has been mostly pursued by one side, and taken to ridiculous extremes entirely by one side. TCS is not supposed to be serious business, and I do not want to try to emulate the NYTimes for fear of offending people. But even if I did, I have seen articles where newspapers try to give a neutral sounding title to a criticism of conservative behavior, and that also pisses off conservative commentators. When you consider that it's also a much punchier title than something like "Ridiculous attempts to control language for political reasons," I believe that the title is fully justified.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Tesseracts » Thu Oct 18, 2018 8:21 pm

I have always found it very annoying how the left gets blamed for political correctness and nobody points out the political correctness which is just as common on the right. “Homicide bombers” is a good example of that.

Windy wrote:I don't know what this thread is about but we should call Donald Drumpf an orange cheeto again, that did a great job of proving how intelligent and mature we are.

I don’t know who “we” is because I don’t recall that ever being popular here. This isn’t Facebook.

Marcuse wrote:
cmsellers wrote:The title is a reference to the longstanding fondness on the right for labeling things which aren't wars as "wars." IE: "War on Drugs," "War on Terror," and especially the "War on Christmas."


Prolly best to not start threads with digs at one side though really.

Why? We have discussions about similar behavior on the left. I don’t think we need to criticize the left every time we criticize the right to be fair.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby NathanLoiselle » Thu Oct 18, 2018 10:23 pm

Wait. Does this mean that I'm not allowed to make fun of those on the right but the left are open for fun making? I'm confused.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Marcuse » Thu Oct 18, 2018 11:54 pm

Sellers wrote:The thread is about something which has been mostly pursued by one side, and taken to ridiculous extremes entirely by one side.


I entirely disagree on this. Every side does this, and pretending it's only the right that does this kind of thing is worrying to me. For example, the campaign in the UK to have a second referendum on leaving the EU is being marketed as "the people's vote" as though this will make people think better of it. Lord Adonis is not right wing last time I checked. Brexit has been couched in loaded terms like "hard" and "soft" Brexit, primarily by left wing critics of Brexit in order to generate dissatisfaction with the concept. The phrase "hard Tory brexit" is thrown around the House of commons all the time. The right absolutely does it to ("take back control" etc), but it's a tool of politics that's common to every stripe. Saying only the right does this, or that only the right has taken it to extremes is in my view factually inaccurate to a startling degree.

sellers wrote:TCS is not supposed to be serious business, and I do not want to try to emulate the NYTimes for fear of offending people. But even if I did, I have seen articles where newspapers try to give a neutral sounding title to a criticism of conservative behavior, and that also pisses off conservative commentators. When you consider that it's also a much punchier title than something like "Ridiculous attempts to control language for political reasons," I believe that the title is fully justified.


See above for why I don't think this is a wholly conservative phenomenon. I wasn't suggesting that we have to have only completely neutral titles, but when I'm coming at this from the perspective that everyone does this, and you're only targeting one end of the political spectrum, I think it's worth calling that out.

Tess wrote:Why? We have discussions about similar behavior on the left. I don’t think we need to criticize the left every time we criticize the right to be fair.


When you raise something in the context of a phenomenon everyone is doing and try to claim only one group is doing it, then I think that's worth mentioning. If the thread had a more neutral tone, such as, "everyone does this but the way this group does it is proper weird" I wouldn't be questioning it. What I object to is the insistence that only the right manipulates how language is used to refer to things to alter people's perception of it.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Kate » Fri Oct 19, 2018 1:24 am

War on women. Anti-choice (anti-life, but that isn't as widely used). Cultural appropriation. Microaggressions. Mansplaining (or manspreading). Internalized misogyny. Ironically, the fairness doctrine. Are we balanced yet? I'm not entirely sure what the point of this thread is I guess beyond "political people do stupid things and use emotional language to advance agendas" and that is not really new.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby cmsellers » Fri Oct 19, 2018 2:06 am

@Marc:
I never said this was a wholly conservative phenomenon, and I was the first person in this thread to point out that when it comes to lesser extremes of politicized language, other parts of the political spectrum also do it. I am not going to engage in false equivalency to say that "everybody does this but the way the GOP does it is weirder," because that's simply not true. The whole point is that the GOP does some weird fucking stuff when it comes to language, and as far as I know it is unprecedented, at least for major parties democratic societies.

Most political propaganda is self-explanatory, these three examples are so ridiculous that the people pushing their adoption have to explain to their audience why they should use them. I challenge you to find any non-right-wing example as weird as the three I brought up. I wouldn't say that "the people's vote" and "hard Tory Brexit" are even as ridiculous as "death tax" or "Healthy Forests Initiative," but it's still roughly on that level.

This also follows on a long history of the GOP in the US issuing top-down talking points for supporters to repeat ad nauseum, something which dates back to the Reagan administration. While not entirely unprecedented—"political correctness" after all derives from communist parties doing the same thing"—it is unfair to suggest that the left and right are equally complicit in this, in the US anyways. I know that you are annoyed at how much we look at stuff through an American lens, but I think that this is a phenomenon unique to the American right which you are trying to look at through the lens of the rest of the world.

But of course this whole argument started because you took my title literally and then said that I shouldn't have titles which mock one side of an issue. The whole "War on X" formulation is not only ridiculous, but taken seriously, it leads to politicians attempting to formulate policies based on military strategies. However your responses seemed to frame doing this as essentially reasonable, but my mocking of it as unfair.

@Kate:
Whether you intended it or not, your post is highlighting a different issue that happens to be far bigger on the left than on the right. "Cultural appropriation," "microaggressions," and "manspreading" are all new concepts, but they are coached in language that describes what the left thinks they are doing quite well. While the right (especially white evangelicals) are also prone to overreacting to imaginary slights, I cannot think of an example that was so novel that it required a neologism to describe. But the terms themselves are not the issue, it is the concepts underlying them. Moreover, we have discussed all of these things already, and I don't remember anyone on TCS saying that we had to balance our discussion of these things with examples of conservatives being overly sensitive on threads about SJWs inventing new things to be offended by.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Kate » Fri Oct 19, 2018 2:48 am

I think a lot of people had a problem with the SJW absurdity thread where this came up, for that exact reason. And honestly as stupid as the term may be, I think "psychological terrorism" is pretty descriptive and evocative of exactly what he is trying to get at. The term doesn't seem uniquely problematic to me. How is this redefining terrorism any more than asking someone where they're from is redefining aggression?
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Re: The War on Language

Postby cmsellers » Fri Oct 19, 2018 4:34 am

The problem with "psychological terrorism" isn't that it redefines "terrorism," indeed it is clearly supposed to be a parallel to "psychological warfare," which doesn't redefine "warfare." The problem is that it is redundant, because the whole point of terrorism is to have a psychological impact. If she had simply described it as "terrorism," I probably wouldn't have batted an eye. It's no more ridiculous that calling it "McCarthyism," which plenty of people already did.
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Oct 20, 2018 1:47 am

I'm guessing the point of "psychological terrorism" as a phrase is not to communicate that the goal is psychological. As you say, that's inherent to terrorism: the goal is to cause terror. However, ordinarily the means of terrorism is physical violence--that is the tool used to effect said terror. In this case however, they're arguing that terrorism is being done not just for psychological ends but by psychological means, namely words and other forms of social pressure.

It's not really a "far-right" sentiment either, at least not at the moment. A big part of the rationale for ramming Kavanaugh through at all costs was that the GOP "establishment" in Washington believed Democrats were attempting to do this and they felt morally obligated not to give in to such fearmongering tactics; they just didn't have that cute term for it.

It is funny that they're co-opting a concept (emotional violence/abuse) more commonly associated with the social justice left and the overwhelmingly liberal mental health professions. But given how bifurcated American culture is becoming and the underlying similarity of people, that sort of thing is probably to be expected. It's not exactly an Einsteinian leap to notice that insults and fists are just two means to the same end: inflicting pain.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The War on Language

Postby Ladki96 » Sat Oct 20, 2018 6:38 am

A guy already said as much once :P People have always been using language to twist things to their political favour. it's a crappy thing to do, but they're not going to stop


read that essay! it's hilarious
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