The assault on language in the name of “inclusivity” or sensitivity is really just about making language so imprecise that regular people can no longer speak truth.
Not a mistress, but a companion. Not a riot if it’s a mostly peaceful protest. Not illegal, just undocumented.
And if you want to get really down into the guts of the matter, please take notice that every mandated change in language is not only more muddled, but it takes LONGER to even say.
If the base outcome of the change is to obfuscate and belabor language, then it seems clear that
the people enforcing the change find the subject to be either one of much personal discomfort or just plain inconvenient to their goals, usually the latter under the shrill guise of the former.
Don’t call them illegal aliens, you bigot, these words literally hurt me!
The result, if you’re honest enough, is that not only does it take you longer to even be a part of the discourse, but you must use blunted words that quite often (dare I say almost always) carry a connotation that is more conducive to the goals of the people mandating the words!
It takes more energy to convey an idea and even if it’s dissenting, the implications are exactly what the acolytes desire anyhow!
How can we abhor adultery when to do so would be to be anti-companionship?
How can we possibly be concerned about something as benign “undocumented non-citizens”?
Why in the world would we condemn something that is MOSTLY PEACEFUL?
If Jake Tapper wakes up at 2 am and I’m sitting in his living room eating a rueben, am I there illegally? Or am I merely an undocumented building occupant?
The (absurd) argument is that people cannot be illegal. If you are trespassing, your state of being itself IS illegal.
Now some would argue that there’s a difference between privately owned property and public property. Except sovereignty is a thing, and in a democratic, free society, it is a thing in which all citizens share a stake.
The worst part of all this linguistic bullshit is that there is heavy social cost to opting out. Back in Carlin’s time, if you didn’t adopt “differently abled,” it just went over like a fart at a dinner party.
Now, if you do not play by their rules, they attempt to destroy you.
No longer are you briefly poo pooed. CNN traipses across your lawn to demand why your facebook page hosted Russian memes. Reporters bang on your door to ask why you gave $10 to Kyle Rittenhouse. They come to your homes and businesses, they shut you down and drive you out.
How can you be against adults administering “sex changes” to children when they’ve been repackaged as “gender affirmation medical care”?!
ARE YOU AGAINST GIVING TRANS KIDS MEDICAL CARE?!
The function is to toxify any form of dissent for issues that deserve serious scrutiny.
And, let’s be honest, if we kept calling these things “sex changes” as we’ve literally always called them, there would be zero political will to make them legal for children. The goal of rendering language inert is to transfer control of outcomes to a small minority of people.
And, make no goddamn mistake, that small group of people — call it a politburo or a vanguard or whatever — does not share YOUR best interests. Their chief interest is power followed closely by how to hold on to it. Destroying language is a key element of that.
Finally, sadly, this movement has in large part become a kind of religion. That was a deliberate choice. As a secular preference, your dissent is just off putting. As a religious edict, your dissent is heresy.
The distinction allows for, encourages even, wholesale ruination.
The difference explains the righteous fervor and sense of duty and obligation that underwrites the pursuit and destruction of heretics.
We've seen this before in history.
The most dangerous humans have almost always been the ones who felt a false sense righteousness.
The sense of righteousness, in this case, springs not from something eternal, universally recognized in the human condition, like virtue.
It is almost entirely a manipulation, a ruse, a calculated concoction that doesn’t stand even the most minor inspection.
Which brings us back to square one, our primary means to inspect ideas: Open discourse, free thought, unfettered language.
These are enemies of the new religion and must be hemmed, blunted or destroyed. There is no other way to maintain an unpopular and brittle world view.
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I’d be willing to bet that I’m among less than one percent of senior editors/reporters in national politics 40> who has voted for both parties.
Why does it matter?
Well because as local papers dry up, journalism increasingly stovepipes. Similar academic pipelines form similar people going to the surviving corporate media companies that all have similar interests.
The web has also divided national political media into two concentrated competing forces.
On one hand, you have the conservative commentariat. On the other, about 8-12 journalism institutions barely holding on to objectivity as wokists steadily takeover their newsrooms.
There’s no accountability when lefties publish fake shit. None.
It’s absolutely fucking nutty to me. Spend months calling lab leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory” or calling the laptop story “disinfo” ... none of it true, all of it ultra high stakes, v important. Just fake narrative after fake narrative. Dangerous for schools to open. Fake.
Trump told them to “find fraud.” Fake. Jussie Smollett. Fake. Covington. Fake. Hands up, don’t shoot. Fake. Jacob Blake was unarmed. Fake. Alfa bank. Fake. Cohen in Prague. Fake. Don Jr Wikileaks. Fake. Michael Avenatti. Holy fake. Russia dossier. Ffffffucking fake.
Do we honestly believe anything the WHO says about the origins of the Wuhan virus?
We need an independent, multinational team of scientists to investigate this lab.
Even then, China's immediate actions as the virus struck lead me to believe that any evidence has been destroyed
Going a step further, there should be a UN and Washington-led moratorium on Gain of Function research until this investigation is complete.
I read the ethics papers published during the US moratorium from 2014-2017. If there's even a shade of possibility that this research ...
... led to what we just experienced -- and there most certainly IS a possibility, even a probability -- it strikes me that we should STOP right now and re-evaluate the pursuit as a whole.
I know things were a hectic, but I find it rather shocking the ease with which the NYT invented a story about a credentialed reporter out of whole cloth and then published it.
Given how rapidly the FBI is arresting people, the NYT should take pains to get this stuff right.
For those who don't know, Sunday's @nytimes published an image of @RichieMcGinniss, referred to him as a "rioter" and said he was engaged in violent activity at the capitol.
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE.
While we’re at it, the NYT correction makes no attempt to correct the implication. Instead, they say the “right wing” reporter was somehow adjacent to the violence and property destruction.
This is sickening behavior from the paper of record. Be up front when you fuck up.
1. We know the virus came from bats. 2. We don’t know how it jumped from bats to humans, the missing link 3. We know the kind of bat it came from was hundreds of miles from where the outbreak occurred.
4 ...
We know the lab right beside the outbreak was studying how viruses evolve to jump species.
5 We know this is called gain of function research.
6 We know this research was briefly banned in the US bec it has the potential to create, yes create, highly transmissible new pathogens
7. We also know that several of the naysayers say this virus is like 95% genetically similar to viruses already present in nature.
8. But we know that many of these naysayers have a vested financial interest in preserving this research.
I’m not sure why you included us in this round up, @brianstelter ... we have not been boosting the president’s fraud allegations. Actually we’ve been doing the exact opposite. I would ask for a correction, but I’m pretty sure this is intentional dishonesty.
I’m legitimately wondering if you’ve got anything to say here, @brianstelter
This post led our coverage on the site November 9, @brianstelter, just days after the election. So, again, I’m not sure what methodology you used in your casual slander of our company. dailycaller.com/2020/11/09/mai…