Language pollution is everywhere, these days. Words are twisted and deformed, meaningless jargon invented and spewed as if they carried some kind of intellectual weight, as if the purveyors of nonsense could simply will English to be whatever they wished it to be. Newspeak is fast becoming ubiquitous. But where Orwell wrote that Newspeak was a fixed goal, a language in which crimethink would be impossible, the truth is that SocJus language will forever shift based on the political whims of the moment.
Once gay meant happy, and then it meant homosexual, and eventually it was deemed offensive. Fat once meant overweight, then it was offensive crimethink, then fat became healthy, beautiful, and superior to those skinny women who just needed to eat more hamburgers. To some extent, flexibility in language is normal and to be expected. Languages shift and change over time, such that whatever language the Anglo-Saxons originally spoke evolved into Old English, and from there to Middle English, and so on.
But SocJus hijacks the process to create confusion. In one article, a woman lamented that she was “fart raped.” This is jumbled nonsense. These are words which make no sense when strung together. But the author wrote that men who fart in her presence are raping her, and justified it through some kind of intersectional feminist queer theory (more absurd nonsense). It’s like when the politically correct term of the month is invented for some protected class. Handicapped people are “differently abled,” whatever that means. Blacks are African Americans… except now they aren’t, they are People of Color. Tomorrow, perhaps they will be the Melanin-blessed.
Who keeps track of this jargon, anyway?
Take a look at this example:
“Racial Justice” is a made up term. It means nothing. It is an absurdity. Justice is explicitly an individual concept. Guilt or innocence is decided on an individual basis. If it is racial, it cannot be justice.
Also, an “assault” on communities of color? More absurdity. Word salad. Assault requires violence. If I punch you in the face, that is assault. Not joining some international club because of a disagreement on climate statistics and their economic impact… that cannot be assault, unless someone takes a computer running a climate model and beats you over the head with it.
This is my biggest irritation with Progressives. They pollute language with meaningless nonsense, and then expect us to have to defend ourselves against the resulting verbal diarrhea.
It’s enough to make me want to assault them in a very real and correct sense.
But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s another one:
So now, sexual regret is conflated with rape. The distinction between them lost, as this SJW attempts to redefine “rape” to be whatever she wants it to be. Perhaps if she orders a cheeseburger at McDonalds, and receives, instead, a hamburger without cheese, she was McRaped. But here’s the interesting thing, this word-bending relies upon us, that is to say non-SJWs, granting the same weight to the word “rape” that we would grant to an actual violent sexual assault. In other words, if a woman regrets having sex with a man, this man must be treated as if he attacked a woman and forcibly had sex with her.
Spectacular example of doublethink, isn’t it? The SJW holds both meanings in his mind, and selects the meaning which will most benefit him politically in any given circumstance.
This is why debating SJWs is an exercise in futility. You will never be able to agree even upon the meaning for the words you are ostensibly using to communicate. Even supposing the SJW were to grant the meaning of a word, he would change it whenever it suited him.
Here’s another example:
Exchanges like this are fascinating. Note that the SJW uses the term “genocidal traitors” to refer to those who fought for the Confederacy. He naturally takes offense when it is pointed out that slavery and genocide do not mean the same thing. Genocide sounds worse, and was thus politically useful for him to bolster his argument with fiery rhetoric. Yet these are words that do not mean the same thing. The American South certainly was guilty of perpetrating slavery. It was not guilty of committing genocide. After all, if your goal is to have productive plantations, you don’t slaughter all of your slaves.
Some paragraphs later, he tried to weasel word his definition of genocide to fit slavery, in the same manner miss fart rape tried to make passing gas a sexual crime. All of this is language pollution, the deliberate stripping of meaning from words in an effort to serve a political narrative. Notice, however, that the SJW still wants genocide to be assigned the same moral weight as the actual meaning of the word would imply. In the grand scheme of things, genocide is a heavier crime than slavery, so to make slavery seem worse, the SJW equates them. That only works so long as you allow him space in your head, that is to say if you use the proper definition in your calculations, but allow him to slide on his misuse of the term.
All of this, of course, was in an effort to equate the Confederacy with the Nazis. In the world of SJWs, everything they don’t like is defined as Hitler, Fascist, or Nazi. This is, perhaps, the most egregious violation of language pollution. Donald Trump, for instance, might be accounted as a Nazi because he did not want to commit the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement. Given that Nazis were a specific political party in Germany, one that wished for conquest and actual genocide, I fail to see any connection between Donald Trump’s stance on climate change and whatever the Nazis were doing.
But, again, while they trivially cast any person they don’t like as a Nazi, they expect us to assign the moral weight of actual Nazis to the accusation. We are supposed to be horrified and immediately purge someone the moment a finger points at a person, and someone says the dreaded word. More doublethink. SJWs are fully aware that most of the folks they accuse of being Nazis have no connection whatsoever with the ideology or the political party. But it is politically useful rhetoric.
Another example:
Here we see that though Islam is not a race, and Vox.com is fully aware of this fact, they still wish to cast opposition to the religion as racist. Again, it is politically useful for SJWs to do this. Note that you never see these SJWs claiming the opposite, that it is useful to think of Christianophobia as racism. Note further that even the word Islamophobia is an absurdity. How many of us are afraid of Islam? Opposition to Islam is subtly implied to be fear, and then this fear is then implied to be racial fear. All of this is done through language pollution.
But, as before, we are supposed to retain the correct meaning, unlike Orwell’s Newspeak, such that when Islamophobia is mentioned, we are supposed to think of those accused of it as being irrationally fearful of Islam, and basically think of them as mental cases that need treatment.
Consider this phenomenon from a mathematical perspective. If Genocide and Slavery are the same…
G = S
But if we assign Genocide as, say, a moral “badness” of 1000, and Slavery as a moral “badness” of 500, we get this:
1000 = 500
So the SJW gets to bolster his “500” to “1000” for free. His argument is automatically granted more weight because of his slippery language. He gets the difference, 500 points of credit in his favor, as a freebie in the argument. Then he can claim that Confederates were Nazis, and anybody arguing for Robert E. Lee’s statue to remain is arguing for a statue of Hitler. Anybody who flies a Confederate flag is flying a Nazi Swastika. Regardless of where you stand on the matter of Lee’s statue, this is an absurd argument, and it should be dismissed as dishonest and foul.
But it should also bring back memories of the famous saying from Nineteen Eighty-Four:
2 + 2 = 5
Humans are remarkably capable of rationalizing pretty much anything. It’s a problem all of us face by virtue of being human. But where the SJW differs is that he does this rationalization with the conscious purpose of advancing his political agenda. You or I, dear reader, may be guilty of this by accident. We may do it without realizing we are doing it. We may, on occasion, even catch ourselves doing it and fail to stop. But the SJW? He sets out from the beginning to do this. This is his purpose. It is no mistake, it is no error. It is intent.
Thus arguing with them truly is a waste of time. But if you ever find yourself in a situation where you must, look for the language pollution. It is there. It is pervasive. You will find mountains of it. The more regular folks become aware of how they’ve been led astray by this deceitful little tactic, the more angry they will become. And it will be a righteous fury, indeed.
“Gay” was deemed offensive? Really? When and by whom? I must not have received the memo.
What had been deemed offensive was the use of the word, “gay,” to mean “inappropriate” or just “messed up.” Such had been a common usage a few years ago, especially among children.
Robert Hughes (hardly a right-wing Bible thumper) in “The culture of complaint” (1992) noted the irony that the term “gay”, which in 18th-century England was a euphemism for living by prostitution (i.e. what later became ‘nancy boy’), was now the PC term for homosexual.
Said book is a gem, BTW, as an attack on PC and SJWism from a non-right wing perspective.
Interesting. I’ll have to add him to my reading list.
Not just “2+2=5”, but “doublethink” and “duckspeak” come to mind from “1984”.
Bravo! Excellently put!
Concerning the matter of “arguing” with an SJW: don’t bother. They don’t permit it. They leap from their word salad directly to denunciation. It’s demanded of them by their assumption of moral and intellectual superiority.
That makes it, as Carrol put it in Alice in Wonderland, merely a question of who is to be master. It they abided election that would be one thing. If they raise “The Resistance” when they lose, then talking is over and guns must do our talking for us.
You nailed it here. I’ve been thinking the same thing for a long time, but now I have a new term for what’s going on: language pollution.
I would invite everyone to read Thucydides on the Corcyrean Revolution. “First of all words had to lose their ordinary meanings…”
Doing this now…
This addresses this subject to some extant. I really like Fernandez, he’s somewhat of a mysterious person.
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2017/06/01/when-no-one-knows-the-answer/
“It’s important to remember that everyone has the right to revoke consent, even retroactively, and if that consent is violated, it is rape.”
Wouldn’t that be unconstitutional? Ex Post Facto and all that.
Wait, I’m sorry. I phrased that poorly. Let me try again
Wouldn’t that be fart raping the Constitution?
You win the internets for today, sir.
My own thoughts on this sort of abusive twisting of language have led to a simple way to show it for the arrogant crap it is in reality. Consider an entirely hypothetical thought experiment that carefully avoids any legally problematic implication of incitement:
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: “Are you absolutely certain that, say, opposition to the madness of climate hysteria must be directly equivalent to murdering innocents as was done by the National Socialists of Germany?”
SHOUTING CROWD OF LEFTIST VERMIN: “You’re a racist cisgendered Nazi murderer!”
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: “Ah! You’re certain. Oh, well, then — do you consider yourselves to be innocents?”
SHOUTING CROWD OF LEFTIST VERMIN: “You’re a racist cisgendered Nazi murderer!”
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: “I take it you do indeed consider yourselves to be innocents. You’ve said I must already be murdering you people. Yet there you stand, alive and shouting your arrogant crap.”
SHOUTING CROWD OF LEFTIST VERMIN: “You’re a racist cisgendered Nazi murderer!”
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: “Lord knows that you couldn’t possibly be lying. Therefore ….”
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM. BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM.
ANGRY LIBERTARIAN: “Is that better?”
FORMERLY SHOUTING CROWD OF LEFTIST VERMIN: (silence)
That would do it. They like to commit violence themselves, but it’s always a protected form of violence, with authorities who are instructed to let them burn down cities, smash storefronts, kick over garbage cans, throw things at Trump people, etc…
The moment one fights back, one is accounted the villain.
But I think this is primarily because nobody has been shot yet. Shoot one, and they’d all get the message real quick.
I would not have used the word “virtue” there. Rationalization is not virtuous. Instead I would have characterized rationalizing as a human weakness.
Words are our mind’s tools of thought. We must keep our tools in order and use them correctly else our thinking grows unclear and unreliable.
You’ve done it too; changed the commonly-accepted meaning of words. The phrase “by virtue of” simply means “due to”, or “because of” and has nothing to do with the morally-loaded word “virtue”, meaning “goodness, righteousness” et al.
It’s obvious from the context of the author’s statement that he agrees with you that “rationalization” is a “problem”, in fact he says precisely that in the second sentence, only a word before he says “by virtue of”.
No. Languages change, slowly. They evolve. That’s not a problem, because they evolve in ways that allow meanings to keep up well enough that good doesn’t become bad. The willful manipulation of languages, to pervert meanings for what turns out to be very short term political ends, always with results both wicked and evil, is very different. That way “prosperous and hardworking farmer” becomes “kulak” becomes “gulag bait” becomes a very thin corpse. That way Jew becomes untermensch becomes prisoner, becomes an industrial byproduct or something stored in the vault of a Swiss bank.
The left – and they should be put to death for linguistice matricide – never seem able to grasp this, that their idiotic attempts at achieving good through language perversion ALWAYS turn out bad.
Since reading this and comments has put me in a philosophical mood… I disagree. Rationalization is not a human weakness. It’s one of the traits that are necessary to becoming sentient at all. Being able to comprehend the abstract, imagine the future, create mind-experiments where various choices are tried, results assessed, and poor choices discarded without the need to be eaten by a tiger to find out that one should not pull his tail, the ability to hold paradoxes as true without becoming insane, all of that… all of it, the ability to lie, to create fiction, and yes, to rationalize, is an essential part of the human condition without which we would not be *intelligent*. These things are strengths. As is the ability to have all of that and *still* be able to know what is real or true and only use our powers for good.
Not to pick at nits… but if you simply raise your fist against me, THAT is assault. If you actually punch me, that is: battery.
(I am a non-attorney spokesperson… but: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com )
In the legal sense, perhaps. I’m no legal expert, but it occurs to me this might be why assault and assault & battery are two different crimes. In the common man’s tongue, however, assault constitutes a physical attack.
Easy test. If you’re hanging out with buddies at the bar, and say “that man assaulted me” they’re going to think he hit you. Not *threatened* to hit you.
You missed the obvious important point that because President Trump has now withdrawn the USA’s consent to the Paris Climate Agreement, the obvious #SJW implication is that that agreement was in fact raping the USA (if not genocide)
“If I punch you in the face, that is assault.” Um, no. That’s “battery.” “Assault” would be when you threaten to punch me in the face.
Repeated from a reply I made above:
“In the legal sense, perhaps. I’m no legal expert, but it occurs to me this might be why assault and assault & battery are two different crimes. In the common man’s tongue, however, assault constitutes a physical attack.
Easy test. If you’re hanging out with buddies at the bar, and say “that man assaulted me” they’re going to think he hit you. Not *threatened* to hit you.”
“Genocidal Traitors” really doesn’t make sense with regard to Southern slave owners who viewed their slaves as valuable property which was lost wnen any of them died. Diaires from the ante-bellum South often lament the difficulty in keeping slaves strong and healthy. Any sickness of a slave was taken seriously and all known treatments were employed in hopes of a cure. The motive may have been more financial than altruistic, but it meant that death and illness of slaves was abhorrent to the slave masters.
Exactly. It’s not in that screenshot, but elsewhere in the thread, I chimed in with “you know slavery was bad *enough*, right? You don’t have to exaggerate it.” The Antebellum South was no picnic for the slaves… but as you say, in a twisted sort of way, most slavemasters valued them, even if as property. Killing them for the lulz would have horrified plantation owners.
But the SJW sees everything through the lens of political utility, and so he felt he absolutely had to. Really weird.
Good piece, but one small correction: the term “Islamophobia” implies not just a fear of Islam, but an irrational fear. But of course it’s fully rational to fear people who really are out to get you.
“Note further that even the word Islamophobia is an absurdity. How many of us are afraid of Islam? Opposition to Islam is subtly implied to be fear, and then this fear is then implied to be racial fear. All of this is done through language pollution.”
I am afraid of Islam. So are Penn Jillette and Sarah Silverman (check their wikiquote pages).
If you will permit me, I’d like to quibble over a detail here. A “phobia” is “an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance.” (OED. I’d quote the DSM but I can’t find it online.)
The key words there are “extreme” and “irrational”. So here’s how I’d rewrite your statement: Opposition to Islam is defined as an irrational fear, a psychological defect, and then this fear is “proved” to be racial fear by obscure logic.
Sarah Silverman has since gone over to the SJW Left. Which is too bad. She used to be funny as hell.
A lot of it is the elevation of metaphor – we might say certain words are “violent” in a poetical context, as a way of emphasizing something. But for the SJW, metaphor is taken literally, words really are, somehow, violent.
Except that the SJW is exercising doublethink here. When it is useful to think of words as violence, he thinks of them this way. When he wants to think of them as not-violence, i.e. whenever he is speaking, then he chooses that definition.
Bret Weinstein, the leftist biology professor at the center of the Evergreen State bruhaha, agrees that the left is using doublethink:
“Weinstein: This also actually points to something pretty important and for anybody who travels this ground themselves, they’re going to discover this. Many of the terms that are being used have been redefined, but they haven’t been fully redefined. So one of the things that I’ve seen in several places is that a term like racist has been redefined so that the bar for being a racist is so low that you couldn’t possibly help but trip over it. But then, once you’ve tripped over it and you have accepted that you are a racist, then the stigma goes back to the original definition. So it is the dodging and weaving between the two definitions that actually does the heavy lifting.”
That is a remarkable observation, and goes hand-in-hand with exactly what I’m talking about here. Thanks for the quote!
But… But… But…. 2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2 + 2 = 6 for even larger values of 2.
Messing with the kids’ minds like that is just gay. The politically correct retards need to stop being such nancy boys.
It looks as if comment threading isn’t working properly just now for my replies. I’ll make a general remark about the entire concept of words as inherently violent. Namely, I find the arrogant, strutting crap of the leftist vermin to be exactly the same thing as direct violence against my person.
To wit, the leftist shitheads have repeatedly tried to attack the integrity of my mind, singly and in concert, which behavior undeniably constitutes an infinitely hostile series of malicious, inherently violent acts. Obviously, the next time a leftist shithead tries to buttrape my mind with the notion that A is not A, then I’d be fully justified in savagely breaking his knees with a baseball bat in self defense.
That’s not even getting into the innumerable threats and outright acts of violence that the leftist shitheads have repeatedly committed and levied against hundreds of conservatives and libertarians across the country, thus purposefully, deliberately and with malice aforethought creating a climate of fear in which the littlest threat against me by a leftist shithead can be reasonably interpreted as an immediate, deadly threat to my life and safety.
Short of the baseball bat or sterner physical measures, I wonder what might be the reaction to filing a massive civil suit against a bunch of leftist vermin for having repeatedly assaulted my person with hostile, lying crap intended to destroy my mind and to violate my constitutional right to exercise free speech without fear of murderous terror against my person. You can already see leftist judges tying themselves up in knots over trying to justify the astonishing hypocrisy of “free speech for us but not for you.”
Frankly, I think filing a $40,000,000,000 lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center and dozens of other leftist shithead organizations with deep pockets would be an excellent start. Throwing in that fat cow Rosie O’Donnell, that sniveling cunt Kathy Griffin and hundreds of other prominent leftist vermin would be icing on the cake.
Don’t hold anything back; tell us how you really feel.