There is some magazine wash lib, crucifying themselves on this hill on the HN front page every other day. Yet there is practically no one arguing back.
Except of course on Twitter. Which apparently some large set of journalists believe reflects some significant portion of public opinion and influence.
Did you notice this section?
>Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington.
>....
>Public criticism led Stanford to abolish outright its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative—not for being ridiculous, but, the university announced, for being “broadly viewed as counter to inclusivity.”
Even if no one is arguing back, it seems like the language police are winning.
Now read that list again and see if it seems important.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006303
Re: "the edifices from which actual powers spring" -- if you want a high-paying job as a doctor, maybe you'll be best served by adopting their language guidelines. I could see the trend spreading through the general population because playing the language game becomes the best way to achieve "actual powers".
I think that far worse for democracy than woke grammarians ratioing you on Twitter, is the rise of a surveillance state which previously couldn't exist but is now totally enabled because of AI automation. Obama firmly planted mass surveillance into and "acceptable" "legal" framework. We have learned little of what this apparatus can do operationally since the Snowden leaks which were before the deep learning stuff really exploded. The Atlantic should be questioning every day the moral fiber of a supposedly open and democratic society which has a shadow supreme court and an entire secret apparatus.
What I'm willing to bet has a far greater impact on people's ability to control their employment future and therefore their own autonomy far more than the possibility of getting fired for accidentally saying "gimp" during the next inclusivity training? The breakdown of organized labor and growing inequality. The Atlantic should be railing every day about the fact that sub-living wages and make workers desperately dependant upon their employer and less able to exercise their democratic rights.
But if you write for the Atlantic, you have friends in CIA. Your kids go to daycare with the kids of several corporate VPs. You don't know anyone that cleans rooms 10 hours a day and lives in a Super 8 for lack of permanent affordable housing. Writing about those things is actually controversial. It's actually risky. So instead, you turn inward.
This country's elite media appear to me to have totally lost any grip on reality. There is some fantastical disconnect from what actually impacts people. Instead they only see and obsess about what impacts them. They have gazed so far into their own naval that they are instead playing this Alternate Reality Game, chasing phantoms and navigating mind mazes.
I’d bet there are way more people shortening their lives by mismanaging diabetes than by not having a house.
So everything is fine? DEFCON 5 is the _lowest_ threat level, it's DEFCON 1 people should worry about.[0]
At the turn of the century, the same kind of uber-libs who are so jealous of their speech today were getting anyone who even tangentially endorsed labor organization kicked out of college econ departments and black-balled. One econ professor had some good things to say of The Knights of Labor which was the most ubiquitous and one of the most moderate labor organizations in the country, The Nation called into question his economics chair. Godkin himself tried to have the man fired from Johns Hopkins. Many economists who didn't tow the classically liberal line found themselves dealing with unhappy boards of trustees.
Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new. The people claiming it is just have very little familiarity with history. And they take for granted that they have just never been on the wrong side of language norms.
Have the woke language grammar police gone too far? Probably. Does it warrant these interminable sanctimonious soap boxes from the Atlantic and their like? No.
That was addressed in the article, I think: Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above.
You reference slow, natural evolution of norms. Those happen everywhere, not just in language, but they happen organically. People change and then they change what they tolerate, how they speak etc. It's not that someone decides "people now have to speak like this, so that they then change to become like me". That's the "creating a new man" approach that lead to endless suffering under the socialists/communists, though I guess now it would be "creating a new person".
> Two wrongs obviously don't make a right. But this is not new.
"Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
That hasn't been true since the printing press and particularly the invention of the nation state.
> Everything is fine, because we've seen bad things happen before, so this isn't new, and only new things can be a problem"?
That's disingenuous. You know that if these authors were writing these articles in the spirit that these kinds of editorial limitations were a long standing problem that needed to be addressed, they wouldn't be on the front page and commented ad-nauseum. The entire selling point of this kind of article is that it is attacking some novel and dangerous schorge which menaces our very rights. They are broadly in the genre of panic-mongering.
What we consider "free speech" has existed since about the 70s. If you considered that paradigm to be free speech, in which there was virtually nothing you could say which would get you arrested but there were things you could say which could get your fired, then you must concede that what is happening now is a roughly equivalent level of free speech. If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These articles are generally written by people who just happened to live lives and held values which were highly compatible with the rules of the institutions. So they are by and large, blissfully unaware of the previously extant limitation and how they biased the discourse.
I disagree. There's not much success in the state forming its citizens, nor with the media. Take Germany for example. Germany's public broadcaster is deeply progressive on all social issues, and has a funding of €8bn per year. Most of Germany's private print media is similarly progressive. They've been pushing hard on genderized speech for years, yet the population rejects it continuously. If a primary objective isn't fulfilled with near-endless budgets, the tool seems to just not work for the task at hand.
> If you find these new limits on your speech onerous but not the old ones, then your gripe is with the flavor of the speech which might get you fired not the fact that speech exists which might get you fired.
These new speech rules are strongly being pushed, from state/quasi-state institutions (e.g. universities), are being pushed into legislation and aren't based on the population's norms (or there wouldn't be any opposition).
There's a difference between going into a room, behaving a certain way and the group rejecting your behavior, and going into a room, behaving a certain way and having one person pull a gun and forcing the group to reject you. The former is an organic group-response based on their shared values, it can change over time. The latter is what the speech-crusaders are trying to do.