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Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#491

Post by sokoloff »

Joker_vD wrote: post #488
jimbokun wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to miss the similarities with Orwell’s Newspeak. The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.

Absolutely: > Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor . The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language": > Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls…

Further: Literally everyone has limited financial resources.

If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#492

Post by SyzygistSix »

agnos wrote: post #88
scarmig wrote: post #9

The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the o…

From the article: The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that…

This what people do to distract from the fact that they don't want to give up housing as a lucrative investment if it means more housing, as that would infringe upon their lifestyle.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#493

Post by cornholio »

eru wrote: post #463
Lazare wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled"). And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another…

Of course, 'disabled' is just the euphemism you grew up with, so it feels neutral enough. The euphemism treadmill has a long history. At some point cripple used to be the neutral term for many kinds of disabled. It's long been deemed offensive. Similar with idiot or retard. Give it a few decades, and all of the 'people first language' will perhaps turn into neutral and then offensive, too. (I am writing the above dis…

The definitive resource on the euphemism treadmill, by a member of a previous generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#494

Post by vaxintar »

rayiner wrote: post #173

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u... . > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States…

People of Color

Of color black, of color brown, etc

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#495

Post by [deleted] »

blahblah1234567 wrote: post #130
scarmig wrote: post #9

The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the o…

I welcome "The semantic turn of the Left". It shows the emperor has no clothes. By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."

[deleted]

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#496

Post by belorn »

JenrHywy wrote: post #223
tastysandwich wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language. "Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out th…

> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity. I've been somewhat worried about there not b…

Sporting aspirations at the elite level is generally an illusion unless the parents are also at elite level. Last time I looked at studies, the average sport is around 75-99% determined by genetics when it comes to the top elite in those sports. World champions has to first win the genetic lottery, and then do the hard work to even have a chance to win. This is why its fairly common to see top elite sport players having parents, siblings or children that is also at similar elite level.

The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#497

Post by fleddr »

We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.

Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.

My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.

Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.

A factory of bullshit and optics driven by fear.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#499

Post by pibechorro »

lynx23 wrote: post #289

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

It is. Similarly Latinx is hated by 99.99% of latinos, yet here we are.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#500

Post by azangru »

wonderwonder wrote: post #352
lynx23 wrote: post #289

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…

> If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem.

It's a pretty big cognitive load though, to remember what everyone finds or doesn't find offensive. This is what bothers me about the recent obsession with pronouns - I have enough trouble remembering people's names; and now I am also asked to remember how to modify my grammar or lexicon when in vicinity of a given person? That's the complexity I don't want.

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