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By Vic Rosenthal
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. – George Orwell, 1984
Language has power. The way we describe things is the way we think about them. Change the name and you can change the thing.
Political Correctness tells you what you are allowed to call things, how you can talk about them and, especially, what you can’t say.
PC always rears its head in discourse about race, gender, social class, or anything that can produce discriminatory attitudes.
One of its functions is to enforce the view that it is morally wrong to judge any characteristic of a person or a group inferior or superior to others in any way. So to avoid saying that a person is ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled’, the locution ‘differently-abled’ was invented.
And any word whose initial definition was neutral that has collected negative connotations over time – like ‘Negro’, ‘homosexual’, or ‘Oriental’ – becomes taboo. Words describing defects have also become forbidden, like ‘retarded’.
Continue reading, including a column by Daniel Greenfield on how Orwell's 1984 is thriving in today's society.
This sounds absurd, and it is. Consider: why do Kenyan distance runners do so well? Probably because, statistically speaking, there are genetic factors (low BMI, high lung capacity, long legs, etc.) as well as cultural factors that contribute to their performance. This doesn’t mean that any particular Kenyan will be a good runner, but it does explain why they are overrepresented among marathon winners.
The statement above violates PC ideology, although it might seem unexceptional, because it suggests that some groups are in some sense more competent than others.
If you doubt this, consider the reaction to Herrnstein and Murray’s book “The Bell Curve”, which made essentially the same point. When I once mentioned something Murray had written to a PC person, the response was that it was discredited because he “is a racist.”
PC thinking is also responsible for the insistence that armies should expend resources to make it possible for women to be combat soldiers.
There are certainly individual women who are suited to be combat soldiers, but statistically this is a small percentage of the population.
Yet PC demands that accommodations be made for this fraction. Objections to this belief are automatically invalidated because of ‘sexism’.
It is also not permissible under PC to criticize a culture or religious group, although it is still acceptable to criticize a group defined by politics or ideology.
Thus anti-Jewish remarks (“Moshe Jewed me down”) are not allowed, but anti-Zionist ones (“Zionist land thieves”) are OK. PC language supports multiculturalism and favors expression of ethnic and cultural diversity in a society. If you criticize these things, you are probably doing so in non-PC language. That’s the point.
One of the great examples of PC success was the success of the abortion-rights lobby in becoming the ‘pro-choice’ one. Who can object to free choice? It shifts the debate from being about the fetus – whether or not it is a person that has rights – to being about the woman, and her rights.
It enables the ‘pro-choice’ person to say “a woman has a right to control her own body” without the circularity of that argument – the anti-abortion person would say that there is another body involved – becoming evident. This is precisely what Orwell had in mind.
PC, since it is a limitation on speech, is in conflict with the idea of free speech.
It is enforced only informally – there are no laws yet that forbid the use of certain words or the expression of certain ideas, although possibly the Obama Administration’s guidelines that forbid officials to refer to “Islamic terrorism” come close – but compare the results of walking around using the “F-word” to those from using the “N-word” if you think that PC violations are not punished severely.
PC is often justified by a desire to avoid insult or offense. So the “N-word” is forbidden because it encapsulates the user’s hatred and contempt for its object. Lately, however, the concept of avoiding insult or offense has been expanded. For example, we have “microaggressions:”
Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” Sue describes microaggressions as generally happening below the level of awareness of well-intentioned members of the dominant culture. Microaggressions, according to Sue, are different from overt, deliberate acts of bigotry, such as the use of racist epithets, because the people perpetrating microaggressions often intend no offense and are unaware they are causing harm.
Sue describes microaggressions as including statements that repeat or affirm stereotypes about the minority group or subtly demean it, that position the dominant culture as normal and the minority one as aberrant or pathological, that express disapproval of or discomfort with the minority group, that assume all minority group members are the same, that minimize the existence of discrimination against the minority group, seek to deny the perpetrator’s own bias, or minimize real conflict between the minority group and the dominant culture.
The classic example is Joe Biden saying that Barack Obama is “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Oops. But things like “you don’t look Jewish” or “what cute hair you have” (said by a white to a black person) are also considered microaggressions.
There are two problems posed by this form of PC. One is that it is extremely difficult to avoid transgressing the rules, since what counts as a microaggression depends on the hearer.
You are required to carefully evaluate what you are about to say in connection with the race, sexual preference, life experience, degree of sensitivity, etc. (assuming that you know these things) of the person you are talking to.
The other issue is that it is defined in terms of the “dominant culture,” which suggests that the limitation on speech acts primarily on members of this culture, and not the various minorities.
It’s uncomfortably like the pernicious view that only the more powerful group in a given society can be culpable. For example, it’s argued by this logic that there can be no black racism, or that Palestinians can’t be terrorists.
The concept of microaggressions is an effective enforcement mechanism for PC ideology. It is not necessary for the ‘victim’ of a microaggression to prove that the offending statement is false, or even that it ought to be considered offensive. All that is needed to justify shutting the speaker up is that the listener be offended, something which is subjective and irrefutable.
Another new form of PC is the ‘trigger warning’. Based on the idea that some individuals are especially sensitive to certain forms of expression – examples are a former soldier with PTSD or a woman who has been a victim of rape – the trigger warning is presented so that the person can prepare or absent herself from the experience.
Trigger warnings would be applied to books, films, lectures, etc. I imagine a label on a book like a list of ingredients on a box of cereal, listing all of the possible ‘triggers’ inside.
Not only is the requirement onerous, it is impossible to know what will be a trigger for every possible person. For example, we have a friend who is deathly afraid of cats, and whenever she visits we have to lock our cats in a room that she won’t need to enter.
There are others like her. Should movies with cats in them carry a trigger warning? Here’s a serious list of possible triggers. A Dostoyevsky novel might contain 90% of these! Hemingway need not apply. And the list doesn’t include cats and dogs.
It’s just about protecting people, say the proponents. But the very choice of the things that will count as triggers (one list includes colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, etc.) is an ideological statement.
A related concept is that of a ‘safe space’ – a place where a person can avoid triggering stimuli.
One definition: “an area or forum where either a marginalized group are not supposed to face standard mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, or in which a shared political or social viewpoint is required to participate in the space.”
In other words, a place where certain kinds of speech are not tolerated. Here’s an example of a “safe space” on Facebook where Zionism, eating meat and many other things are forbidden.
The ideal of free speech, especially in the US, is powerful and hard to attack directly. But the oft-quoted exception to unfettered speech is shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. If your speech will directly injure someone, it can be prohibited.
Microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces (some campuses have “safe space officers”) are all ways of bypassing the ideal of free speech and enforcing ideological conformity in the name of safety.
PC is all about making rules about things that cannot be said, and punishing transgressions. But it is not ideologically neutral. It supports universalist, cultural relativist, and multiculturalist ideologies, and insists that a subjective sense of ‘injury’ can be the arbiter of legitimate discourse, rather than ideals of truth or logic. It provides a way to bypass the ideal of free speech and to shut down speech that is uncomfortable.
This article originally appeared here:
http://abuyehuda.com/2015/08/political-correctness-is-mind-control/
How denigrating and hating men has become politically correct speech:
FIGHTING WILDFIRES OR PREVENTING A FRENCH TRAIN MASSACRE BY A MUSLIM TERRORIST
It is men who usually do heroic acts, ready to give up their lives to save others
WHAT THE FEMINIST CULTURE REFUSES TO ADMIT WHILE THEY DENIGRATE MEN
On this page:
Read more
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2015/08/in-praise-of-heroes-fighting-wildfires.html
You shall not criticize Non-Western cultures and religions
US COLONEL SAYS SOLDIERS SHOULD IGNORE AFGHAN SOLDIERS' RAPE OF LITTLE BOYS
- Decorated Green Beret CHARLES MARTLAND involuntarily dismissed by the US Army for striking an Afghan police who had kidnapped, chained, and raped a little boy
- Raping little boys is a tradition in Afghanistan.
- Canadian soldiers reports' on this issue have been ignored by the military "for lack of evidence".
Read more
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2015/09/us-colonel-says-soldiers-should-ignore.html
AND HERE IS COLUMNIST DANIEL GREENFIELD'S TAKE ON THE SAME THEME:
A few years ago I wrote about the left's need to maintain and preserve inequality, to perpetuate its power in the form of an endless civil rights movement. And that requires endless reserves of bigotry.
The left has taken two approaches.
First, it has mined subtler forms of old bigotry. Forget racism, let's go with microaggressions. Just about anything these days can be deemed offensive and problematic. Bigotry is embedded in white privilege and therefore will never go away.
Second, discover new forms of protected identities being discriminated against. Some of these identities can be manufactured and we're rapidly heading toward a world where half the population is some of protected victim class and where intersectionality negotiates the victim value index.
But that's dry stuff. The uglier side of this is that it isn't just about power, but about destroying people. We keep seeing that again and again. It's not about rights anymore. It's about a war that ends with a destroyed and humiliated enemy. It's about the sensation of trampling that enemy.
This ugliness has always been at the core of the left. It's disguised in fake spirituality, in the rhetoric of victimization and justice, but at the end of all that rhetoric is the gulag and the prison cell.
Laughter is already going away. Think about how this piece discussed comedians being too afraid to perform on campus. This was one response to Seinfeld complaining about a laugh-free PC campus.
Of course it didn't take long before the Washington Post was accusing Schumer of helping cause the Charleston Church Massacre.
But this is what the left's comedy is supposed to look like. It's not supposed to be humorous. It's meant to have a message.
But let's talk about the left's favorite comedians. You know the Little Brothers. Guys like John Oliver, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert whose "comedy" is leftist spin with punchlines. Forget Big Brother with his mustache. You'll get a pajama boy in a suit being ironic. His video in which he "destroys" someone or something will be incessantly circulated in our crowd sourced Oceania.
The thrust of his comedy, of course, isn't humor. It's a political agenda. And the aim of that political agenda is to render the opposition contemptible. To destroy and defeat them. That's more explicit in Colbert's persona, which highlighted the underlying malice of this entire genre, but it's always there.
No laughter except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. Orwell was thinking in terms of a masculine Big Brother. What we have are pajama boys who are too passive aggressive to go the direct route, but it's all the same thing.
Science? Well we've killed that already. Tim Hunt is down. You may have landed a probe on an asteroid, but your t-shirt is sexist. We're omnipotent and we have no more need of science except as propaganda. There will always be a Neil deGrasse Tyson making up stories about how awesome he is and how stupid Republicans are. But there will be no science. Just the "consensus".
Art? Literature? The left killed those a while back. See "distinction between beauty and ugliness".
But we certainly have "the sensation of trampling on an enemy". Think about the gloating coverage of the Kim Davies arrest and the sneering "couples" lining up to celebrate not marriage, but triumph over a defeated enemy. That's the real totalitarian point of this degraded phase of the civil rights movement.
It was always the point. And it's just getting started.
We will never be equal. Indeed we will lose all our rights in that battle. But the battle will define everything. It will all be social justice, all the time. Because there will be enemies that need to be crushed.
The left will create enemies solely for the purpose of destroying them. The Red Pioneers and the Hitlerjugend of today will be encouraged to rally and destroy the enemies of the people and experience that triumph of being part of a victorious collective stamping on a human face, marching Forward! on the "right side of history" to the glorious future that never comes.
To the world in which there will be "victory after victory". The ideas to be fought "will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive." Because they will be invented in new forms. New bigotries. New civil rights dramas.
Imagine a progressive boot stamping on a human face forever. You don't have to imagine very hard.
Author: Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Source
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260029/imagine-progressive-boot-stamping-human-face-daniel-greenfield
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RELATED
How denigrating and hating men has become politically correct speech:
IN PRAISE OF HEROES
FIGHTING WILDFIRES OR PREVENTING A FRENCH TRAIN MASSACRE BY A MUSLIM TERRORIST
It is men who usually do heroic acts, ready to give up their lives to save others
WHAT THE FEMINIST CULTURE REFUSES TO ADMIT WHILE THEY DENIGRATE MEN
On this page:
- Three firefighters die to save lives and property in Washington State wildfire.
Three unarmed US marines overpower Muslim terrorist on train headed to Paris (photo on the right).
- Article debunking male privilege, and exposing how men are now being victimized
Read more
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2015/08/in-praise-of-heroes-fighting-wildfires.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You shall not criticize Non-Western cultures and religions
US COLONEL SAYS SOLDIERS SHOULD IGNORE AFGHAN SOLDIERS' RAPE OF LITTLE BOYS
- Decorated Green Beret CHARLES MARTLAND involuntarily dismissed by the US Army for striking an Afghan police who had kidnapped, chained, and raped a little boy
- Raping little boys is a tradition in Afghanistan.
- Canadian soldiers reports' on this issue have been ignored by the military "for lack of evidence".
Read more
http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2015/09/us-colonel-says-soldiers-should-ignore.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AND HERE IS COLUMNIST DANIEL GREENFIELD'S TAKE ON THE SAME THEME:
Imagine a Progressive Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever
A few years ago I wrote about the left's need to maintain and preserve inequality, to perpetuate its power in the form of an endless civil rights movement. And that requires endless reserves of bigotry.
The left has taken two approaches.
First, it has mined subtler forms of old bigotry. Forget racism, let's go with microaggressions. Just about anything these days can be deemed offensive and problematic. Bigotry is embedded in white privilege and therefore will never go away.
Second, discover new forms of protected identities being discriminated against. Some of these identities can be manufactured and we're rapidly heading toward a world where half the population is some of protected victim class and where intersectionality negotiates the victim value index.
But that's dry stuff. The uglier side of this is that it isn't just about power, but about destroying people. We keep seeing that again and again. It's not about rights anymore. It's about a war that ends with a destroyed and humiliated enemy. It's about the sensation of trampling that enemy.
This ugliness has always been at the core of the left. It's disguised in fake spirituality, in the rhetoric of victimization and justice, but at the end of all that rhetoric is the gulag and the prison cell.
"There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."Orwell captured the thinking and trajectory of it in 1984.
Laughter is already going away. Think about how this piece discussed comedians being too afraid to perform on campus. This was one response to Seinfeld complaining about a laugh-free PC campus.
It isn't so much that college students are too politically correct (whatever your definition of that concept is), it's that comedy in our progressive society today can no longer afford to be crass, or provocative for the sake of being offensive. Sexist humor and racist humor can no longer exist in comedy because these concepts are based on archaic ideals that have perpetrated injustice against minorities in the past.
Provocative humor, such as ones dealing with topics of race and gender politics, can be crass and vulgar, but underlying it must be a context that spurs social dialogue about these respective issues. There needs to be a message, a central truth behind comedy for it to work as humor.
Take Amy Schumer for example.Yes, take Amy Schumer. Please.
Of course it didn't take long before the Washington Post was accusing Schumer of helping cause the Charleston Church Massacre.
But this is what the left's comedy is supposed to look like. It's not supposed to be humorous. It's meant to have a message.
But let's talk about the left's favorite comedians. You know the Little Brothers. Guys like John Oliver, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert whose "comedy" is leftist spin with punchlines. Forget Big Brother with his mustache. You'll get a pajama boy in a suit being ironic. His video in which he "destroys" someone or something will be incessantly circulated in our crowd sourced Oceania.
The thrust of his comedy, of course, isn't humor. It's a political agenda. And the aim of that political agenda is to render the opposition contemptible. To destroy and defeat them. That's more explicit in Colbert's persona, which highlighted the underlying malice of this entire genre, but it's always there.
No laughter except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. Orwell was thinking in terms of a masculine Big Brother. What we have are pajama boys who are too passive aggressive to go the direct route, but it's all the same thing.
Science? Well we've killed that already. Tim Hunt is down. You may have landed a probe on an asteroid, but your t-shirt is sexist. We're omnipotent and we have no more need of science except as propaganda. There will always be a Neil deGrasse Tyson making up stories about how awesome he is and how stupid Republicans are. But there will be no science. Just the "consensus".
Art? Literature? The left killed those a while back. See "distinction between beauty and ugliness".
But we certainly have "the sensation of trampling on an enemy". Think about the gloating coverage of the Kim Davies arrest and the sneering "couples" lining up to celebrate not marriage, but triumph over a defeated enemy. That's the real totalitarian point of this degraded phase of the civil rights movement.
It was always the point. And it's just getting started.
"And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph.
"The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms.
"Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it." (Orwell 1984)There will never be equality. But there will always be a battle for equality. Like the Soviet battle for real Communism that was always doomed and that never existed as anything except a pretext for tyranny.
We will never be equal. Indeed we will lose all our rights in that battle. But the battle will define everything. It will all be social justice, all the time. Because there will be enemies that need to be crushed.
The left will create enemies solely for the purpose of destroying them. The Red Pioneers and the Hitlerjugend of today will be encouraged to rally and destroy the enemies of the people and experience that triumph of being part of a victorious collective stamping on a human face, marching Forward! on the "right side of history" to the glorious future that never comes.
"When you talk with college students outside of formal settings, many reveal nuanced opinions on the issues that NACA was so anxious to police. But almost all of them have internalized the code that you don’t laugh at politically incorrect statements; you complain about them. In part, this is because they are the inheritors of three decades of identity politics, which have come to be a central driver of attitudes on college campuses. But there’s more to it than that. These kids aren’t dummies; they look around their colleges and see that there are huge incentives to join the ideological bandwagon and harsh penalties for questioning the platform’s core ideas."This is where we are now. The politically correct program is the core of the left. It's become the biggest domestic threat to freedom in this country.
To the world in which there will be "victory after victory". The ideas to be fought "will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive." Because they will be invented in new forms. New bigotries. New civil rights dramas.
Imagine a progressive boot stamping on a human face forever. You don't have to imagine very hard.
Author: Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Source
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/260029/imagine-progressive-boot-stamping-human-face-daniel-greenfield
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