George Carlin's "Soft Language" (2019)
thoughtco.com
thoughtco.com
* Toilet paper -> bathroom tissue --- sure, a softening of the language.
* Sneakers -> running shoes --- not a softening; sneakers aren't the same as running shoes, and "sneaker" was a regionalism (it's "gym shoe" where I grew up).
* False teeth -> dental appliance --- a softening, though a welcome one in this case.
* Medicine -> medication --- a softening (a nominalization of a denominalization, at that!). Down with medication!
* Information -> directory assistance --- arguably, this is a hardening, since directory assistance carries more meaning and carries it more precisely.
* The dump -> landfill --- a dump is not a landfill. The word changed because we stopped building open-air unchecked dumps and started building regulated landfills with groundwater protection and load checking.
* Car crash -> automobile accident --- a softening, though he's getting some mileage out of switching "car" to "automobile" (I can hear his voice very clearly in my head dancing over the syllables in "auto-mo-beeel") and the real language is "car accident".
* Partly cloudy -> partly sunny --- I think he made this up.
* Motels -> motor lodges --- This is a softening, but it didn't take; look up "Econo Lodge", and it's a motel, not a motor lodge (Choice Hotels will call it a "hotel" though).
* House trailer -> mobile home --- A softening; by the end of his life, he'd have been able to use "manufactured home" here instead to drive the point further home.
* Used car -> previously owned transportation --- A softening, a good example of one, but again notice that he's smuggled the word "transportation" in to make it more zippy. "Certified pre-owned" is a much funnier term (imagine the shape his eyeballs would take while noting the "certified" here). I miss Carlin!
* Room service -> guest room dining --- A softening, and also: why?
* Constipation -> occasional irregularity --- A softening, if you will, and again he's made it artificially softer with the "occasional".
Re: “car crash”, crash is the correct “real language”. The use of “accident” implies a lack of responsibility and that car crashes cannot be prevented or reduced. That isn’t true. Many studies show that crashes can be reduced via better engineering, road design, etc.
Calling it an accident definitely seems like softening the language.
https://dmv.vermont.gov/enforcement-and-safety/laws/crashes/...
Here in NZ car accident is much more natural to say than car crash.
Although even that has subtleties.
"I got in to a car accident" would be the normal turn of phrase, but if remove the "car" and the "I" then crash becomes more likely: "There was a crash on State Highway 1".
In normal use, "accident" just means it's unintentional.
People talk about preventing accidents all the time.
It may turn out to be an accident, it may turn out to be an intentional act. It may turn out to be unclear or irrelevant which it is. But what is known initially (and often all that is ever resolved) is that it is a collision.
They're very rarely if ever "accidents"
1a: an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance Their meeting was an accident.
1b: lack of intention or necessity : chance They met by accident rather than by design.
2a: an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance
Car accidents match one or all of these definitions.
"Accident" is actually softening language -- it diminishes the agency of the driver, and the designer of the road. "Traffic collision" describes what happened, and does not presume that nobody is to blame.
The "car" part of "car accident" is also softening: nobody is "hit by a car", they are hit by a motorist.
Note to that it will be the cyclist that will hit the old lady, never the bicycle. The bicycle, even though as old as the car, has resisted this fetishization. It's really curious, which objects cast the spell, and which don't.
I think the distinction, to the extent it exists, might have a lot to do with what constitutes the majority of mass. If you get hit by an 18 pound bike with a 160 pound rider, you really got hit more by the rider than the bike. But if you get hit by a 3000 pound car with a 160 pound driver, you definitely got hit more by the car than the driver.
However, depending on ideological viewpoint, it might be tempting to read more into the language.
This is why it is a great "soft" word because of the inherently fuzzy meaning.
Almost always in a "car accident" one or both parties, often along with the DOT, fucked up and need to do better. You shouldn't use language that allows it to be viewed as totally unforeseeable.
And I'd argue that there's circular logic at play since the dictionary definition is based on the problematic usage.
> In 1997, George L. Reagle, the Associate Administrator for Motor Carriers of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wrote a letter stating that "A crash is not an accident", emphasizing that the Department's Research and Special Programs Administration, the Federal Highway Administration, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had all declared that "accident" should be avoided in their published writings and media communications.[15] In 2016, the Associated Press updated its style guide to recommend that journalists use "crash, collision, or other terms" rather than "accident" unless culpability is proven. The AP also recommends avoiding "accident" when negligence is proven or claimed because the term "can be read as exonerating the person responsible."[16] In 2021, the American Automobile Association (AAA) passed a resolution to replace "car accident" with "car crash" in their vocabulary.[17] In 2022, the traffic management company INRIX announced that "accident" would be removed from their lexicon.[18]
> The Maryland Department of Transportation's Highway Safety Office emphasizes that "crashes are no accident", saying that "Using the word accident suggests that an incident was unavoidable, but many roadway crashes can be attributed to human error."[19] The Michigan Department of Transportation states that "accident" should be dropped in favor of "crash", saying that "Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by inattentive drivers and driver behavior. They are NOT accidents."[16] In line with their Vision Zero commitments, the Portland Bureau of Transportation recommends using "crash" rather than "accident".[20]
"Crash" is a wider term.
If someone deliberately drives into a building, that is not an accident. It is still a crash.
Do you also say plane accident instead of plane crash?
There are innumerable articles on the topic. I pointed you to some. Here's a couple more:
BMJ bans “accidents” - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1120417/
> For many years safety officials and public health authorities have discouraged use of the word “accident” when it refers to injuries or the events that produce them. An accident is often understood to be unpredictable—a chance occurrence or an “act of God”—and therefore unavoidable. However, most injuries and their precipitating events are predictable and preventable.1–3 That is why the BMJ has decided to ban the word accident.
Motor Vehicle Crash Versus Accident: A Change in Terminology is Necessary - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A:101626013022...
> We assert that motor vehicle crash should replace motor vehicle accident in the clinical and research lexicon of traumatologists. Crash encompasses a wider range of potential causes for vehicular crashes than does the term accident. A majority of fatal crashes are caused by intoxicated, speeding, distracted, or careless drivers and, therefore, are not accidents. Most importantly, characterizing crashes as accidents, when a driver was intoxicated or negligent, may impede the recovery of crash victims by preventing them from assigning blame and working through the emotions related to their trauma.
When a crash is really an accident: A concept analysis - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654670/
> The debate over using the word accident has encouraged some groups to adopt the word crash, while other groups retain using accident. This article addresses the inconsistent and interchangeable use of the terms accident and crash. ... Although there is evidence that the use of the word accident should be maintained when the event could not have reasonably been prevented, the theoretical framework highlights this will likely perpetuate the conceptual confusion. The recommendation is to: 1) identify the mechanism of injury, 2) identify event as intentional vs. non-intentional, and 3) identify event as preventable vs. non-preventable.
There is certainly disagreement, but to call it "fucking crazy" and attributing the viewpoint as limited to car haters suggests you haven't read any of the background, so are not participating in the conversation.
> A majority of fatal crashes are caused by intoxicated, speeding, distracted, or careless drivers and, therefore, are not accidents. Most importantly, characterizing crashes as accidents, when a driver was intoxicated or negligent, may impede the recovery of crash victims by preventing them from assigning blame and working through the emotions related to their trauma.
These people not understanding what the word accident means is not my problem. If it was not on purpose I don't care if it was "riding on the hood" levels of negligence, the thing that makes it an accident is the intent so all crashes where the driver did not mean to do it would also qualify by the rules of the English language. Crucially, negligence can be, and in fact practically always is, a proximal cause to any accident. Consider, when was the last accident (not car accident, just spilling tea or something) you had that couldn't have been avoided with sufficient protections in place?
Pretty ironic to spout politically motivated redefinitions of the word accident while complaining about astroturfing the terminology surrounding car crashes/accidents.
Before you respond, if you intend to at all, I really need to know, do you understand and agree with what I'm saying? That by the definition of the word accident which I shared up-thread that almost all car crashes are accidents according to that meaning? Because if we can't agree on what words mean when we both have access to the definition, we have no hope of achieving communication.
I think the extra layer adds a shade of meaning here. Medication is something you take because a health professional wants to medicate you with it. Medicine is just anything that might make you better. That's why we still talk about "natural medicine" or "alternative medicine" rather than "alternative medication".
So in semantic terms this is actually an instance of strengthening. All medication is medicine but not necessarily vice versa. It probably just reflects the overall uptick in people taking pills prescribed by their doctors rather than Daffy's Elixir.
Here's a 1928 advertisement on colored bathroom tissue, which you can see is toilet paper - https://archive.org/details/sim_house-garden_1928-05_53_5/pa...
And then "tiny home"
It's not. Accident is actually the older term. Cars have had accidents since their inception. Using the "crash" sound to refer to the accident itself didn't catch on until the 1940s (might be a war thing, I'm not sure).
Manufactured home can also be a far cry from what the house trailer is.
CPO is really a used car with a higher price for all intents and purposes. It got inspected, that is all. Not refurbished.
Not even close. CPOs are usually lease turn-ins or another trade-in with relatively low mileage for its age, but we're still usually talking about 2-3 years old with 30k or so miles. It's basically "used with an extended factory warranty".
At some point, that was no longer acceptable. The correct term to use became "invalid".
So it was better to say "that person is invalid" than "that person is handicapped".
He also makes a similar argument for "retarded".
"Idiot", "moron", and "imbecile" used to be medical terms.
yeah, that exact thing happened with the word "special"
Then they'll say "but you know what I mean". That's the point, exactly.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-...
What do you know? The biggest thing I noticed after “retard” fell out of favour is more specific insults like “autist” became more prevalent and I’d say this rotation of the euphemism treadmill has only made stigma worse for certain groups because “retard” was used as such a catch-all that the stigma of it didn’t really seem to stick to people much.
As for banning slurs from Reddit, irrespective of slurs should be banned for the good of those being slurred, they cause derails and are magnets for reports.
The online disabled community has been completely poisoned by it sadly.
See for instance https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F31029
suicide -> "unalive" homeless -> "unhoused"
I absolutely hate these terms.
“…you have to be asleep to believe it…”
Soft language is alway to the benefit of the speaker, to assuage guilt or obfuscate intent.
It's always to the detriment of the listener.
Not always.
If the listener has a functioning brain, he can quickly infer the kind of weasel the speaker is simply for stooping down to using that type of language.
I think the correct term is "reassessment of human resources" or "restructuring", it is a bit like guy who steals your car at gunpoint in SF but is kind enough to ask you your preferred pronoun.
I believe the correct term for this is "reallocation."
I'd like to be considered a "force" while I'm still working there. Capes as swag would be cool, too.
In my value system change and improvement are worth the sting in the short term, but often that is prevented by soft language.
Eg I’ve seen developers/ managers / teams come out on the other side of a “blameless” postmortem without realizing they fucked something up.
- Laying direct blame on someone may lead them to trying to hide problems to avoid the pain/shame in the future.
- Related - everyone makes honest mistakes. Creating and environment where people feel ok admitting to these is a lot more ideal than the alternative.
- Teams should be encouraged to take collective ownership, such that if someone who works with xyzelement sees them failing to prioritize, they need to do something about it, even if it's just raising a concern early in the project with those who need to hear said concern.
That all said, sometimes people do need direct feedback (in private), especially when they are struggling in general with their job.
We might ask, "what's up with this apparent language-wrapped majority?"
The reason is because people use it for whatever agenda fits. It's a Rorschach.
Cons see these quotes and think it's applicable to "PC culture" and think George Carlin would tell kids to toughen up.
Libs see these quotes and think it's applicable to "truthiness" and the post-truth world the alt-right spins.
Truth is, George Carlin died in 2008. He missed the entire Obama years and the Trump era. We have no idea what he would've said or thought about the evolution of culture, of cancel culture, of Trump, of trans rights, on Ukraine.
Learn from the man what you want, but don't try to find quotes from 2001 and go "Hey wow look, it almost looks like he's talking about <blank>" here.
The fact that people from various political backgrounds find resonance in Carlin's words isn't a point against their current applicability. Rather, it underscores the universality of the issues he tackled- whether "PC culture" or "post-truth" narratives, we're still talking about the manipulation and policing of language and thought.
Moreover, the idea that we can't know what Carlin would have said about today's issues is beside the point. The value in revisiting his observations isn't in speculating about what Carlin would have said about XYZ today, but in applying his insights as a lens through which to examine our own time.
Take the classic "shell shock" bit. Carlin defines it at "a condition in combat that occurs when a soldier is completely stressed out and is on the verge of a nervous collapse." However, that is not the WWI definition. Quoting https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2... :
"The term “shell shock” evolved in an attempt to describe cases that arose in the context of exploding ordnance but where enduring symptoms could not be linked to the presence of an obvious organic lesion."
The problem was, from the same link, "many shell-shocked soldiers had been nowhere near an explosion but had identical symptoms to those who had. ... when it had become clear that many cases of shell shock were not directly related to a head injury, military medical authorities attempted to restrict use of the diagnosis. Servicemen invalided from the front were given a preliminary label of “not yet diagnosed, nervous,” and those who failed to recover but had no visible cerebral injury were then classified as “neurasthenic.” Disputes over the etiology and management of shell shock served to inhibit further the design of an effective protocol."
This should be very familiar to those who remember the PTSD debate in the post-Vietnam era.
So when Carlin say "I’ll bet if they had still been calling it 'shell shock,' some of those Vietnam veterans might have received the attention they needed.", I don't really think that's true.
We can even read of some of the attention received by WWI victims of shell shock, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock :
"Some men with shell shock were put on trial, and even executed, for military crimes including desertion and cowardice.[16] While it was recognised that the stresses of war could cause men to break down, a lasting episode was likely to be seen as symptomatic of an underlying lack of character ... The continued pressure to avoid medical recognition of shell shock meant that it was not, in itself, considered an admissible defence. Although some doctors or medics did take procedure to try to cure soldiers' shell shock, it was first done in a brutal way. ... a patient who had, over the course of 9 months, been subjected unsuccessfully to numerous treatments for his mutism; these included strong application of electricity to his throat, lit cigarette ends applied to the tip of his tongue, and "hot plates" placed in the back of his mouth"
PTSD is a larger category which would include shell shock, but also includes (as the VA point out at https://www.research.va.gov/topics/ptsd.cfm) military sexual trauma, which wouldn't be classified as "shell shock" but has similar symptoms and treatments.
I came here to say the same thing. The historical record does not support Carlin's claim that straightforward language would have resulted in better social support for traumatized veterans. WWI veterans were treated terribly. I guess the real test is to re-introduce "shell shock" into our vocabulary and see if there's a correlation in improved veteran support.
Here it Texas, it's still Partly Cloudy, probably because we get more than enough sun.
I'm not sure I buy this one.
So fun.
Someone replied in good faith to OP and asked how we should express negative thoughts. OPs answer was basically that we shouldn't.
I find that kind of thought very off putting and minorly disturbing. An important part of the human experience is being able to express when someone else has screwed you over; to do so using flowery over the top hyperbole is the catharsis we need to live good lives.
(For those that haven’t read the classic Nineteen-eighty-four book by Eric Arthur Blair (pen name: George Orwell) one of the core themes of the story is how the ruling party controlled language, calling it “newspeak”, in order to remove the ability to express certain thoughts or opinions, most notably those that could be used to incite revolution or allow you to express discontent.)
When asked they'll retort "why yes, we are a mind control cult. We teach you how to control your mind."
...but that isn't what I meant.
Controlling the language. It's a big thing.
And that's underselling how big it is. Language is the API to our brains.
That's at least half the point Orwell's 1984 makes.
But we also have this thing called Science. Where a firsthand encounter with nonlinguistic reality is considered key. And Science has proven its power over and over.
And you'd think that would impress people. Even if you lay the forms and products of our modern scientific culture aside. Just that philosophy. The supremacy of observation. You'd think it would lead to a momentary pause in the babble.
But no.
I found her points about it intriguing and worthy of contemplation. If I was going to join a cult then that might be the one to join ;-).
Of course there's a significant difference between a belief system and a group that practices that belief under a charismatic and dogmatic leader....
My point is not that conservatives use more double-speak/newspeak then progressives, rather my point is that this is used and applied across the political spectrum, and even in the military ("enhanced interrogation", "collateral damage") and corporations ("restructuring", "cost engineering").
“Stop killing kids” sounds much more impactful than “establish rules of engagement to minimize collateral damage”. Language matters.
Similarly: Does the worker without a job care whether they were fired, laid off, or affected by a reduction in force? Probably not. But “affected by a reduction in force” sure makes it easier for leadership to press the button.
Or what do you call it when you are deliberately targeting some civilians (factory workers perhaps) but you know they share their homes with children? Do all of the civilians killed count as deliberate, or only some portion of them?
Also, how do you determine intent? Suppose the official paperwork says "we're going to target this residential neighborhood because they have military-relevant cottage industry blended in with the population", but the men actually carrying out these orders are saying and thinking "burn them all, this is payback." Do you go by the intents stated on official records, or do the intents and feelings not committed to official records change the matter? It's the kind of thing that ends up getting debated by historians for decades.
> It's not deliberate, which is the question that matters.
I don't agree that deliberate or not deliberate is all that matters or the end of the discussion. In criminal law if you do something that could reasonably be expected to kill somebody without really desiring that outcome, you might still be guilty or murder or at least manslaughter. For instance if you drive your motorcycle at 200 MPH and crash into a family killing them, the fact that you lacked a specific desire to kill those people counts for something but it's not the end of the discussion.
> "[targeting the civilian workforce] isn't a thing."
You've obviously read my comment as commentary on the Israel/Palestine situation. Actually the incident I had in mind when I was writing that comment was the firebombing of Tokyo. If you go through official US documents about that, you'll find the justification that Tokyo had extensive cottage/light industry mixed in with their residential neighborhoods. Destroying that industry and workforce was in fact one of the official intents for firebombing Tokyo. However many of the bomber crews (who were all men, but I'm generally not one for gender-inclusive terminology anyway so you're not catching me in some hypocrisy here, lmao) were likely motivated by revenge for Pearl Harbor / etc and celebrated the civilian death toll. Not all of them I'm sure, but certainly some of them.
Anyway, I'm not here to pass judgement on whether the firebombing of Tokyo was or wasn't a war-crime, or whether or not the US was deliberately trying to kill Japanese kids. It has been debated for decades and that's precisely my point. It's not cut and dry, it's a matter that looks differently to different people who are looking back at it from different perspectives. It defies neat objective categorization, which is why counting 'civilian casualties' in one big lump, not differentiating by intent, is a useful thing to do.
I think criminally negligent manslaughter would be analogous to collateral victims in war, and murder would be the intended victims. As your analogy correctly implies, neither option absolves the perpetrator of responsibility, which is what I think motivates many of the objections to 'collateral damage' in this thread - an erroneous belief that the term implies no guilt.
George Carlins "soft language" specifically spells out an example; shell-shock, battle fatigue -> Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I think making a term so long that it becomes an acronym is definitely part of this.
The most up-to-the-minute example I can think of is "CSAM" which removes all pain of the victims. For those not in the know "kiddie porn" as it was once known was rebranded to "child rape images", then "child abuse images" now finally "child sexual abuse images" which is now so long that it is oft abbreviated CSAM.
You are right though, there's a lot of newspeak, my (least) favourite example is "pro-life" which is a glorious bit of double-think.
I’ve always thought that this was a bad example of the euphemism treadmill, because each step is clearly an attempt to be more general than the last. The name makes it clear that this isn’t just a disorder you’ll find in soldiers at constant fear of being shelled at any moment (shell shock); nor even of soldiers who’ve seen the horrors of battle generally (battle fatigue); but rather that anyone who has been through any kind of chronic, fearful stress under the constant expectation that some traumatizing event might happen at any moment, is liable to end up experiencing these symptoms.
Or, to put it more viscerally: doctors would be wary of diagnosing a victim of domestic abuse with “shell shock.” But “PTSD” — not just as a symptom profile, but also as a name for that symptom profile, and a set of social connotations around that name — clearly fits.
> CSAM
This is actually an example of a completely different effect: it’s a cultural shibboleth. Police want to use automatic word filters to discover and surface conversations between pedophiles, while not triggering those filters with their own conversations about the pedophiles’ activities. So they have invented a word that is equivalent to the generic term in meaning, but part of “policing language.” (And, as a special trick, it’s a term with no potential for a treadmill effect, as pedophiles would be loath to use a term that frames them as perpetrators of abuse.)
In some ways it's a natural consequence of broadening the scope of something. Is the loss of impact because of the language, or because it now applies to a lot more situations which we imagine is expressed in different ways (whether that's largely true or not)?
Shell shock likely didn't conjure the idea of a person going through a harrowing experience as much as a soldier going through constant shelling for weeks. The first encompasses the other, but the second one is much more explicit and conjures specific thoughts that we can latch on to when we try to imagine the experience.
Battle fatigue also paints a somewhat specific picture, even if more broad than shell shock. We can imagine what types of things caused this, even if our imagination probably only covered a subset of the actual causes. Those things it does conjure are bad though, so the idea is very impactful.
PTSD, which more accurately encompasses a lot more situations, not all of them (or maybe even the majority of them) related to war, also leaves us without as much information to use to form an emotional response to as we imagine what it was they went through. Was it the horrors of war? Was it assault by a stranger as a civilian? Was it physical abuse by someone you know? Was it long term mental abuse? We know it was bad, to affect the sufferer, but it's harder to form a real emotional response, I think, when the cause is ambiguous.
So, is the problem the language, or is the language just a side-effect of the increased scope of the term, and the problem is actually the increased scope?
"CSAM" is useful because it is so drained of any colour. It makes it much less likely that emotions get triggered because it gets discussed as an abstract thing instead of something related to children.
There are several good reasons for this, one of which is that poorly-thought-out child pornography laws have beem used to charge and convict children for taking photos of their own bodies. Explicitly defining the prohibited material as "child sexual abuse images" puts a stop to that when it's obvious that no abuse or exploitation occurred.
And of course we use PTSD instead of "battle fatigue" because it affects many millions of people who have never been near a battle.
These are not good examples.
Except that his account is ahistorical ... and the term post-traumatic stress disorder actually captures what the issue is. Neither shell-shock nor battle fatigue are good descriptors.
And yet such behavior happens right here on this very site. Why do you tolerate it?
My last day on Mastodon was the day a few people ganged up on me quite aggressively for not putting Alt text in an image.
Tolerance isn’t acceptance. It’s letting things you don’t like exist without making a big fuss over it. You can dislike certain speech patterns without having to go on a crusade against them.
I mean, I've literally never even thought about it so it surprised me that such a high number of respondents would have chosen that. Which I guess is kind of the point. There is an idea that ignorance is bad, but once you have been informed then non-compliance is treated as intentionally malicious. That is, if you know why you ought to add an alt-text and yet you refuse to do so then you are deemed to be complicit in the oppression of those who require alt text to enjoy the Internet.
It is a subtle reframing from "being polite and courteous is good" to "non-compliance is evil".
It also reminds me of a lot of behavior I see in tech spaces. One that comes to mind is the notorious dog-piling on the maintainer of Actix-web framework by well-meaning Rust evangelists who were upset by his use of unsafe language features. Another I recall is when a company had a mix of open source libraries (MIT license) and some other kind of business license in the same repo. They were being harassed for mentioning the product was open source in their marketing.
What is interesting to me is that some people will see some of these examples as justifiable harassment while they will see others as crossing a line. It is just a sad fact that the mechanism to get people to adhere to social norms is often through bullying and shame.
Also, if 99% say "never" and that sounds too high, what about "Would you ever send an image without alt text to a blind person?" Does it make sense to post a message when you know a significant number of people are physically incapable of interpreting it?
Of course there is a bit of every variety. There’s certainly polite people asking nicely and sensitive people seeing it as harassment. And there’s certainly people who see something they don’t agree with and just move along.
Why dont you post everything in the top 10 most used languages if you want to be nice?
Both extremes are the same. It's like love and hate. You shall not have freedoms is the point.
Fascism refers to specific political beliefs including totalitarianism plus some form of cultural supremacy (typically racism, but it can also be religious or nationalistic), rigid hierarchy, and might-makes-right morals. Not all totalitarian regimes are fascist, and the behavior you're describing is neither hierarchical nor racist, so I don't think it's fascist in any way.
And I'm not saying this to simply be pedantic. Fascism is scary and powerful because of the specific combination of those ideas, especially the militaristic efficiency of fascist organizations. PC/woke mobs are not scary in the same ways, and need different precautions.
They have the cultural supremacy part, like a non theistic religion where adherence to the tenets are required or you'll be excused. Those weird and creepy struggle sessions. Not to mention it is one side of the ongoing culture war.
They have the rigid hierarchy known as the progressive stack that ranks people on their immutable characteristics rather than their individual merits.
The might makes right comes from the antifa groups who ”by any means necessary” violently attack those who do not adhere to the tenets of the strange religion. As well as the control from the institutions such as universities where in faculty or students that don't adhere to the tenets are abused until they leave or are fired outright.
So it's pretty close right? I'm sure there are a few other tenets of fascism that you left out for brevity which would preclude the woke/PC mob from the facist label but it's interesting and scary how close they come.
I'm just glad they're not good with weapons, except for the Jon Brown Gun Club, for whom the addition of weapons seem to have a slightly deradicalizing effect
When I say rigid hierarchy, I mean an actual hierarchical organization where there are leaders giving orders and those below them executing and giving orders of their own down the hierarchy. There is nothing of the kind in woke spaces, they are in fact infamously sectarian and often spontaneously turn on yesterday's leaders for group think. So this box is also not checked.
Might makes right refers to the explicit belief that as long as I can physically force some result, it was rightful and beyond reproach for me to have done so ("I conquered this land so I have proved I am stronger than you so I deserve it more than you"). Antifa may believe that punching nazis is justified, but they believe it is justified because of the evils of nazism, not because violence is self-justifying. Similarly, wielding organizational power against an individual accused of wrongthink is not an example of might makes right, at least not as long as the wrongthink isn't entirely arbitrarily invented for each individual. An example from actual fascist organizations sometimes is culling "weak" members by hazing rituals, where emotional or physical violence is intentionally inflicted simply to see if the subject can withstand it (this also helps in building the rigid hierarchies I mentioned above, as it tends to eliminate people who can't accept arbitrary orders). Again, this box remains un ticked.
So no, I don't think any woke mobs I've heard about resemble fascist organizations. Which, again, is not to say they are good. Just because you're not a fascist doesn't mean you're a force for good in the world, it's entirely possible to be malevolent and dangerous without being fascistic.
However, I'm not sure why this contradicts my point. Those people are simply wrong in their use of the word. Unless you believe that Mastodon woke lefties are representative of the broader American English zeitgeist, I doubt you could say that the language has changed such the term fascist just means evil.
A year ago I would have thought those people some weird online-only fringe. But not after travels around the USA for a couple of months last year, followed by time spent in Baja and interacting with Americans who came down there. So many young Americans are very concerned with pronouns and their proper usage, and the attitudes of early-millennium activist movements like Antifa seem to have made inroads into the wider culture. Of course, American society is polarized and there is a whole other camp.
I suspect that “fascism” is increasingly a popular slur even for Americans who aren’t so terminally online, and because a word’s meaning is popularly determined by its usage, that means that it’s pointless to complain that they are “using it wrong”.
If you're right that it's becoming such, than I would agree it's simply changing its meaning, I'm not a presciptivist.
However, from my experience, which is limited to online content, I've only seen accusations of fascism being used by left-wing speakers against right-wing (or perceived right-wing) adversaries.
So, my theory is that the term actually retains most of its original meaning even by those throwing it around willy-nilly. It is then not a wrong use of the term nor a novel use, but in fact a sign of increasingly extreme language. That is, people who call you fascist for not caring whether you add alt text to an image aren't using fascist to mean generic bad person, they actually intend to compare your actions to Hitler.
It's similar to how "socialist" is used by right-wing pundits. When they call a boss who raises employee wages "socialist", they are not using that as a generic insult, they explicitly mean to compare that boss with Stalin or Chavez or other such boogeymen.
I think it's all a sign of increasingly more extreme discourse. I would actually be much happier to find out that you are in fact right and fascist is just a more generic insult now.
It's not comparable to any of those of course, but it wasn't exactly acceptance either. These 'third genders' were a method of othering those who didn't conform to strict gender roles, typically effeminate men. It would be like if we had just three gender categories today of 'man', 'woman' and 'faggot'. Not really a societal situation to aspire to in my view, we'd be better off ridding ourselves of constrictive gender roles and be more accepting of e.g. men who enjoy wearing dresses and makeup while still understanding that they are of course men.
However, there is an issue suggesting adding an automated scold in the Mastodon client (and Megalodon already has such a scold, plus a (!) of shame on images without alt text) https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/13894
I have yet to find an actual vision-impaired person complaining about missing alt text. I'm sure there is one somewhere, but it mostly seems to be a phenomenon on Mastodon for a few people to use as a cudgel to feel superior.
What was your sample size?
Next week: "Of course I can understand black folk's problems - there are quite a few living in my city.
That said, my actual position is that inconveniencing every single person who posts an image on a microblogging service by forcing them to write a description of it on the off-chance that a tiny percentage of the population who are visually impaired will want to read it is a net evil. It will, in the short term, antagonize people who just want to post something quickly and get on with life, and in the long term drive lower engagement on the platform as it raises the amount of effort required. It's a waste of potentially a massive amount of tiny slices of a nonrenewable resource: human life time.
What should happen, instead, is that the tech wizards developing the microblogging software use computer vision and language models to provide on-demand transcription of any arbitrary image. If anyone should understand that, it's the audience here.
Either way, that person was also explicitly saying that they don't want mandatory alt-text, that they believe an option users can toggle on their own account to be reminded about alt-text is better, so I don't think they would qualify as "complaining about missing alt-text".
I don't know what the screen reader does, presumably tells them there is an image there. I assume they want the option to remove the post all together.
One of Mastodon’s top daily posts a couple of days ago was a blind user expressing his gratitude for the culture of forced alt text.
And there he is
Why was it important for you not to include it?
Sounds like it was pretty important to not include it.
Someone who believes strongly in this may see every instance of me not adding alt text as a slight or as me being obstinate. They may start demanding I go back and add alt text to all my posts retroactively. I may very well refuse to do so, since, in this thought experiment, I don't think it's important enough to spend my time on it. They may get aggressive at this time, since their values are so different from mine.
For a more contrived example, if I told you it's important to me not to see people's shoes in pictures, would you entirely stop posting pictures like that? If you sometimes forgot, and I later asked you to crop all the pictures where you did, would you start doing it just because it's important to me?
I should note I have no idea if this is how things happened for GP. For all I know, they could be making up the whole thing. I'm just trying to point out how someone who is indifferent to X may end up in conflict with someone who is strongly for X.
Letting them be first class citizens is a laudable aim. I’m probably overly aware of it because I used to work at a school for VI students and I saw their frustration as they used their screen readers to find unlabelled images.
I don’t condone people being arseholes about it. But a bit of nagging to remind people is perfectly acceptable, think. You want to keep it the norm on the system.
It doesn’t need to be an essay. Just ‘a cute cat’ is better than nothing.
In my view it’s common courtesy to a group of people who already have it tough, not a ‘I don’t like shoes’ personal whim.
The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
No it's not, not at all. Is "blocklist" a list of file system blocks? Bitcoin or other crypro blocks?
As someone who speaks English as a second language, the first time I read "whitelist/blacklist", I simply looked them up in a translation dictionary and immediately understood what they mean. Those are actual words with definitions spanning centuries.
>The software community loves to complain about this stuff like the change from master to main branch but I always get the sense that people just liked to complain rather than any meaningful objection.
Yes we love to complain, but there were many meaningful objections that were ignored. There was a reddit outage that occurred due to the madness around "inclusive language" and removing the word "master": https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_brok...
Those changes (as wells as master->main) did trigger an initial "get off my lawn" reaction for me, but it's not entirely unreasonable and is no big deal to actually act on.
The pastime is finding people who don’t agree with your orthodoxy and ganging up on them. It can be race, ability, political affiliation, whatever.
America is a country that demands conformance.
pg touches on this in his famous What You Can’t Say essay.
Ensuring that people think that some "other" body of people are against them (right, left, woke, trumpists etc) is a strong tactic to keep people putting there energy into fighting each other and not making a big deal about the people in control of things like the media or government- which we're all too tired to fight and sort of quietly accept.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it's basically well known and nobody really cares it seems, we're too easily baited. (including myself here).
I saw it really obviously recently when the overtone window shifted in the UK and the majority of people became pretty poor pretty quickly; and how the media started going crazy trying to stoke a culture war where people were simply too poor and too tired to put blame anywhere else than the ruling political party.
Which lead to the ruling political party trying to stoke the culture war and a milquetoast response from the audience. Here's the reaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQsGRwNzs-o
No, it sounds like a conspiracy theory because it is. It has nothing to do with some shady cabal of elites ("the ruling class"). It's just American culture.
Sure, some people are radicalised, but a large part of that radicalisation is a reaction to a perceived equal radicalisation on the $otherSide.
You'll notice that people get divided on things that just "become political" out of nowhere.
Wearing a mask for a really recent example, there was a very small window of time before any politician or media outlet said anything other than "we don't know everything" about the pandemic. In that time window it was pretty clear that most people just do what is needed.
You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align though, so as much as you paint it as a "shadowy elite" it's probably just a few people who know that they need to stoke a culture war and a lot of people who will get rich off of outrage bait and creating a cultural moat that makes them the voice of a cultural "side" are more opportunistic and don't particularly care all that much about furthering a particular agenda.
If you actually have time to have a conversation with someone you deeply disagree with you tend to find out pretty quickly that there's a seriously large amount in common and it's the distance to each other culturally that causes a larger rift than anything innate.
Some say taping aquarium rocks to your cables improves the sound, some say it’s rubbish, let’s have a discussion and if you are really so sure about your ideas I’m sure you can refute the idea right? Let’s have a debate!
(And now just continue refuting it every day for the rest of your life…)
https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm
https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina17.htm
https://i.imgur.com/296fTdq.jpg
Effectively that’s outlawing the opinion of “no that’s dumb, you’re dumb for suggesting that”, which is unfortunately rather a necessary one, science doesn’t work if everyone has to treat the idea that the moon is cheese with equal weight. At some point you can believe whatever you want but the scientific discourse doesn’t have to include you, and people don’t grow if they’re not told their opinions are wrong and objectively incorrect from time to time. The moon is not made of cheese and unless you got a real good reason then you’re dumb for suggesting it, and you’re worsening the discourse for all of us too by even entertaining it. Discourse does not benefit from entertaining facially outlandish ideas without some evidentiary backing etc just “for the sake of discussion”.
At some level, enforced politeness and forced equality-of-merit for all opinions is a thought-terminating cliche and becomes destructive to discourse. It’s a little bizarre how people love having legislated “truth in the middle” outcomes to discourse. The truth often is objectively not in the middle and it worsens the discourse to pretend it is.
(Same for the way this forum treats hanlon’s razor tbh. 99% of the time when people invoke it, it’s a handwave to excuse some pretty conveniently malice or self-interest. That’s effectively using it as a thought-terminating cliche. Any time profit or PR spokespeople are involved you should never invoke it, because malice is indistinguishable from profit-seeking in most circumstances etc.)
The same is true of certain openly callous and cruel perspectives etc. It’s not just factual perspectives that can be destructive and noxious if tolerated as though they held rigor and merit, and extreme indifference etc is just as toxic as wishing harm directly etc. Just because you don’t care about litter, or masking during a pandemic, or climate change, doesn’t mean the rest of society isn’t going to set expectations etc, and “I guess you’ll have to die then” is not exactly sympathetic, but it’s uncouth to point out the callousness here. And that is, itself, an editorial lean towards the legitimacy and integrity of such positions. You’re treating “I don’t want to die” with the same weight as “I guess you’ll have to die for me”, and tutting when people get upset about it.
History lesson: no, WWI veterans didn't get the attention they needed. This is wistful conservatism wrapped in a shroud of comedy. Don't mistake it for truth or wisdom. The treatment of Vietnam veterans was not a departure from the standard practice of wars predating it. The depth of their trauma was a departure, and that was the eye-opener that primed us to take PTSD seriously in the aftermath of the wars of the 21st century.
Now, PTSD (a four-syllable, jargon-free, hyphen-free term, if we're counting) has received greater attention than it did in the previous century of wars. It's recognized to effect more than just soldiers (which "shell shock" doesn't really cover), and progress is being made on a variety of treatments. George Carlin is funny, but that doesn't make him right.
> Some men with shell shock were put on trial, and even executed, for military crimes including desertion and cowardice.[16] While it was recognised that the stresses of war could cause men to break down, a lasting episode was likely to be seen as symptomatic of an underlying lack of character.[17] For instance, in his testimony to the post-war Royal Commission examining shell shock, Lord Gort said that shell shock was a weakness and was not found in "good" units.[17] The continued pressure to avoid medical recognition of shell shock meant that it was not, in itself, considered an admissible defence. Although some doctors or medics did take procedure to try to cure soldiers' shell shock, it was first done in a brutal way. Doctors would provide electric shock to soldiers in hopes that it would shock them back to their normal, heroic, pre-war self. While illustrating cases of mutism in his book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, therapist Lewis Yealland describes a patient who had, over the course of 9 months, been subjected unsuccessfully to numerous treatments for his mutism; these included strong application of electricity to his throat, lit cigarette ends applied to the tip of his tongue, and "hot plates" placed in the back of his mouth.[18]
To expand on this, in Vietnam, individual soldiers were rotated in and out based on time in country, in WWII, units rotated as a unit, with replacements added during the rotation.
The fact that it took weeks or months to repatriate people back to CONUS after WWII, gave time for people to process their experiences with their brother in arms.
The way my grandfather talked about WWII was different than other folks I've heard talk about wars after. My grandfather was at peace about it within himself in a way I haven't seen since. The things he saw and had to do were no doubt just as horrific.
But for me as a reader of history, it's blindly obvious - in particular with the strategy used to treat PTSD, which is functionally group therapy with over vets with similar experiences.
IDK if Shay's book qualifies as "professional literature", but he was certainly a professional (VA psychiatrist), and I have the impression it was fairly influential.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Achilles-Vietnam-Combat-Undoing-Chara...
edit: Oh, lol. Perhaps you meant "because he's dead." Whoosh!
Why do you write like this? What's wrong with just saying "I think it's funny"?
I write how I talk: analytical to a fault.
> What's wrong with just saying "I think it's funny"?
Slapstick is "just" funny. Carlin's comedy isn't that simple. His style was to make a reasoned argument with a goal of making you laugh, making you think, and persuading you to adopt his worldview. He wasn't just funny, and sometimes he wasn't even funny. And that's the case here: a joke that wasn't funny, despite its well-constructed comedic narrative.
In the quote I highlighted at the top of the thread, I found myself unable to suspend my disbelief enough to laugh. I have a lot of respect for the construction of his joke, but having grown up around vietnam veterans who were raised by WWII veterans, the joke fails to be funny. It's actually sad, that he was fighting progress on mental health care, and convincing others to do the same.
Where does Carlin say that WWI veterans did the proper attention? He said with the name shell shock maybe Vietnam veterans would have, because 50 years the same name for the same problem without proper treatment could have get the publics attention
>This is wistful conservatism wrapped in a shroud of comedy.
That is your interpretation and not necessarily the truth, especially since Carlin can hardly be called a conservative
What an interesting response. I did not call him a conservative, did I? I said that he was performing a conservative bit.
From my understanding the top down terms enforced by language police at universities, public schools and corporations invariably end up becoming joke over time. The bottom up terms which were created by bullies, incels, sluts, car mechanics, bartenders continue to stick around and improve the language for the better.
Initially it is hard to determine which one is which. LGBTQ for example appears to be a bottoms up term that gained popularity and will be around for a long time. LGBTQIA2S++-- is likely going to end up as a joke. "Preferred Pronounce" another nonsense promoted by the bloat at corporate HRs (diversity departments) too in my opinion would end up as material for stand up comics down the line. There are more modern bottoms up terms like Incel, NPC etc. will stick around for a long time just like YOLO, FOMO etc have become pretty mainstream.
The better care our soldiers get is a result of medical field advancement, better economy and has very little to do with the terminology.
Budweiser is not the first nor the last for overdoing the Woke Inc. drama. (Note that Woke itself is a fleeting bottoms up term). Large businesses course correct pretty well.
I get the impression that combat vets of WWI were no less traumatized, but society didn't talk about it and preferred to talk about heroism, duty, honor, etc. Traumatized soldiers were counter to the prevailing narrative, seen as an embarrassment that people didn't want to think about.
It is useful and not limited to Americans, that's why people do it. Much more people would have been vegans or they would be much more indifferent to violence if every pack of meat had a QR code to a video showing the life and processing of that particular animal.
It's also not just softening that's practiced but hardening too. We dehumanise people all the time if we want to suppress them or kill them institutionally.
We humans like to live in an idealised reality, a fiction where we are just and don't practice cruelty, our parent's don't have sex, people have roles(social roles, gender roles, political roles etc) and they always act in a way to honour that.
The reality is much more different of course, we kill animals at scale we call terrorist or another dirty word those who we have institutional violent conflicts with and exterminate them, our parents have sex just like anyone else, mothers/fathers/leaders/police/ceo's are human too and they have human desires and human faults.
Then there's cultural movements trying to bring these things closer to reality or push them into a new virtual reality. The sex revolution in the west that the eastern world never had for example creates huge divide between lifestyle and family structures between westerners and easterners(it's not that easterner are backward, it's simply another path they took). The more devout muslims practice ceremonial animal sacrifice which often happens on the streets with kids around, so they tend to have different relationship with the animal killing(no, they are cruelty or anything like that, it's just different).
IMHO, it's nothing special to Americans but Americans tend to have control over the pop culture because the USA is the dominant culture of the last century. Also, Americans are masters of marketing and they choose their words very intentionally(like the discussion over abortions are framed like "pro choice" and "pro life", which can be very confusing for non-americans).
I think more people would be pushing for animal welfare and proper slaughtering/raising conditions if this was done, even if they still ate meat.
And GP's example shows that seeing the animals being killed doesn't mean people will stop eating meat.
"the more devout muslims practice ceremonial animal sacrifice which often happens on the streets with kids around, so they tend to have different relationship with the animal killing(no, they are cruelty or anything like that, it's just different)"
In the same vein, my grandparents' village was still very rural when I spent my holidays there as a kid, and the other local children would grow up surrounded by cows, sheep, chickens, and other farm animals. They'd see them be slaughtered and cooked. I can't remember a single one of them turning vegetarian. And it should be noted that the adults wouldn't tolerate any kind of cruelty or abuse towards the animals. Hell, you could even get into trouble for being too loud at night next to a barn where cattle were sleeping.
I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but I’m looking forward for lab produced meet where no cows are involved.
Plus, the children used to play with the goats and sheep while they were still small. I'm not very familiar with the cows (my grandparents didn't have any), but I know that goats also tend to be fairly smart, curious and quite playful. As a kid it's fairly easy to develop some attachment to them, especially since there isn't that big of a size difference (a cow can be intimidating to a child because of its size).
Why does animal welfare matter if at the end they will end up as food anyway? Not trolling, I legitimately want to understand.
From my point of view, livestock is just food, that happens to be in a temporary living state, before being ultimately eaten. As an end consumer, I don't see how this would change anything – besides potentially pushing up the price. I just want to pick up the meat at the store for the best possible price.
Nothing temporary ever matters. Human life can only matter if there's something permanent about it. If there isn't, nothing ever matters. None. Nil.
Yes, I'm talking about religion. That pesky thing which folks on HN tend to look down in disgust. The idea of accountability with permanent, eternal consequences. Acts carrying on to another life which won't ever end.
(Not talking about the dumb Christian idea "You are already forgiven no matter what because someone is killed 2 millenia ago!" here.)
Who said so? Your gut feelings?
Even though I'm an atheist, this is quite an ignorant take on Christian beliefs. In Christianity, Jesus' death only cleansed people of Original Sin. That is, people who died before Jesus were already doomed, regardless of how they lived their life, because they were all tainted by their forefather Adam's sin.
Jesus is supposed to have forgiven humanity for this sin, and allowed each person to be judged for their own actions in life, not be condemned a priori because of the actions of their ancestor.
Separately from this singular event, God forgives anyone who commits even the most heinous acts as long as they later come to truly regret those acts and spend the rest of their lives atoning for them. This is obviously a necessary component to any moral system as, without such a belief, the rational thing to do after committing a sin that condemns you to hell would be to continue sinning even more, since nothing worse can happen to you.
Of course, none of these religious inventions are necessary for leading and believing in a moral life. Most people are moral simply because that is the right thing to do, not because they fear some big bad punishing them if they are not.
Two more points of consideration:
> people who died before Jesus were already doomed, regardless of how they lived their life
This is actually not the Christian belief, but only that those who died before Jesus could not enter into heaven until Jesus' death and resurrection (because even they were saved by Jesus sanctifying passion). The term you're unaware of is "The Harrowing Of Hell".
> people are moral ... because that is the right thing to do
That's actually the point of Christian belief too - imperfect contrition (fear of punishment) is a _starting_ point. The goal is perfect contrition, desire to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do (for love of God).
Heavily stressing animal's makes the meat taste worse ends up all gamey.
People need food. If they don’t happen to know where it comes from they would figure it out with a quickness if it ever became necessary for them to learn.
Biologically we are carnivores but factory farming is leaving evidence for modern society to determine whether or not it's okay and it definitely gives me pause. People care. I think maybe you're just not caring.
Why do you write this? I don't control the food policy of the world and I wasn't arguing that people should be vegans.
Why people provide unsolicited arguments for eating meat? Why just don't you order a burger instead so we can stay on topic? I don't care who eats what.
Most modern people knows that meat comes from killed animals.
> Activist are using videos of production lines to promote their agenda.
The reason we don't like to watch that is the same reason we don't want to watch people take a shit, it isn't that we feel shitting is morally wrong its just not something we want to watch because it is gross.
During those thousands of years where humans personally slaughtered animals, they often built complete philosophies around their relationship to those animals. Those philosophies are way, way more complex and personally involved than the modern grocery shopping experience, obviously.
Is this really true? People who kill animals for a living doesn't have any emotions about it, watching them do it is like watching them cut a tomato.
There's a reason big-ag farmers are afraid people will see videos showing their operations. So afraid that they pay off politicians to ban such video recording.
But why would they be more disturbing than watching a person slaughtering and cutting up an animal? You didn't answer the question, you just said that one was disturbing, not why one was more disturbing than the other.
Anyway my theory for the distinction is 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter and 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species.
If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation of how much meat to eat and how to handle that animal while it’s alive. As someone else mentioned, this isn’t some crazy avant garde hypothesis: this is exactly why mass meat producers don’t want people filming their operations.
The prior argument that “people always killed animals!” is irrelevant. They certainly did not kill animals the way we do today and again, this is evidenced in the belief systems that emerged during times where people couldn’t afford to be hundreds of miles removed from the production of their food.
You brought this up, not me.
> 1) the scale of suffering is obviously far far greater than family-scale slaughter
Not if every family has to slaughter their own meat, the scale is the same just distributed so you don't see it.
> 2) the way in which we do factory farming reflects poorly on us as a species
This isn't inherent to factory farming though, just the ways it is done in some places. And this goes for family farming as well, some families would put animals in small cages and not take care of them to save money and because they are lazy. If you filmed them and their animals I don't think people would feel any different.
Uhhh no, the scale certainly wouldn’t be the same. An average American eats more than a hundred animals per year. You can’t seriously think people would be consuming at that rate, or could even afford to consume at that rate, without factory farming.
> some families [abuse their animals]… people wouldn’t feel any different
We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Most of that are chickens. Have you seen a family farm where people eat their chickens? They just take one and behead it, killing it takes no effort and is just a part of preparing the food no different than peeling the vegetables. Killing a chicken a day per family is very little work.
> We literally put people in jail for abusing their animals, so yes, they actually do feel differently about it.
Those laws also applies to factory farms, unless you do worse than them you are fine.
Only the hyper-industrialized meat producers get even close to that.
It is economically not viable for every American family to produce and kill their own 2lb of (currently, on average) consumed meat per day. That is why we have factory farming and why it dominates our food supply: economies of scale. The lack of these economies is why you objectively and in actual fact do not see the same scale of meat consumption in less industrialized food systems.
It has nothing to do with whether it’s physically or psychologically possible to kill x chickens per day.
> "your kids’ reaction"
Maybe this should be "my reaction as a kid", since you don't know that person's kids.
> "The emotions one feels"
Should be "the emotions I feel"
> "If people had to see their livestock suffer, they would make a different calculation"
Should probably be "seeing it changed how I feel".
People are more than the sum of our experiences, two people raised in the same environment with the same kind of experiences can have completely divergent values. Therefore it's wrong to assume that people would share your values if they had your experiences. In the case of meat eating particularly this should be obvious; the reality is that most people exposed to the industry, either for the first time as adults or as kids, don't turn vegetarian.
I’m putting my bet on what those experiments would show, which is people’s consumption patterns would be adversely impacted by more in-depth knowledge of the food supply chain.
This is also where meat producers place their bets and why they fight tooth and nail against transparency within their industry.
Those videos turned my stomach, and almost everyone I know who has watched them admits the same. My friends and I all still eat meat, but no question that might change if we had to watch those videos on how our mass produced cheap meat products are made.
You aren't comparing like for like, most people who kill animals doesn't perform a ritual, they just kill it.
Also you can't compare a video trying to show something in a positive light "ritual killing" vs a video trying to show something in a negative light. If they showed you a video about a slaughter that went wrong, the animal is crying as the slaughterer ends it, blood everywhere, then people would feel very bad as well. Or if they showed you a slaughterer joking about as he was slaughtering animals, you probably would feel more as well. Those things are the reality of traditional killing, I don't see how it is any better than a machine doing it. The end result is the same.
The main difference is that we no longer need to train a lot of people to be killing machines like we did before.
Go look up B.F. Skinner and Operant Conditioning (His book Walden 2 is a semi-fictional work that provides a pretty good approximation to the game that's afoot). I'm sure I'll get shot down for presenting a conspiracy, but once you open your eyes to Operant Conditioning, considering the possibility that power hungry groups haven't been using it is kind of like trying to imagine a world where people chose not to use the internet. The only difference is that applied behavioural psychology is more dangerous and powerful than the internet.
This game is happening quite pervasively and a lot of smart people have been coercively brainwashed into being passive if not active players in this process. There are of course a litany of justifications used by those that do the brainwashing.
It will seem farfetched until it's not.
... of making me have empathy with sentient beings suffering? Joke's on them, I already had that.
Showing people where their meat comes isn’t going to reduce the demand in my opinion. I personally believe people should know where their food comes from as it reduces waste and garners introspection about our role in the planet and ecosystem.
I’m Greek American and lamb on the spit is a cultural tradition on Easter. As a kid, it was very weird for my American friends to pick food directly off of a carcass but so many told me over the years it was an unforgettable experience. My uncle once took me to the farm in Georgia where he got the lamb, handed me a large knife and asked me to slit its throat, I was 13 at the time. I couldn’t do it, I cried and watched him do it. I will never forget that. To this day I have a profound love and appreciation of animals, especially lambs. I still eat them. The two ideas for me are not conflicted to me. The only thing I abhor when it comes to meat is wastefulness.
OP said “more people would be vegan” which I think is strictly true. Everyone? No. Would a lot of people reduce their meat consumption from the currently obscene 150+ animals per year (average American)? Probably.
I probably eat a thousand anchovies a year alone.
But anyway yes, most of the specific individuals animals killed are chickens and water creatures of various types.
Here's a pretty good analysis based on USDA data. Prediction: "Seafood don't count! for handwavehandwave reasons!"
What you are missing is the industrial process we put together in the last 70 years to produce more meat; cheaper and faster.
Those are weird, and inhuman.
Those technics make most people uncomfortable. If not, the amount of antibiotics we have to pump into the animal to keep them healthy will hirk another slice of the public.
A data point here is the % of depression in slaughter house worker. Those are the one that are exposed for real.
Not a wet meat market worker, not a fancy butcher.
I don't think it turned many people off milk and cheese. Actually the grossest field trip we ever went on was to a potato chip factory, the stink of rotten potatoes was overwhelming. They never took us to a pig or chicken farm though, I've been to a few at other times and those would have beat the chip factory easily. A lot of people who grow up around cows say they appreciate the small (I do, to an extent) but I've never heard anybody say that about pigs or chickens.
But showing people factory farms, I think, is less likely to make people become vegans than it is to make people agitate for more humane forms of slaughter.
But I should admit my bias here: I am not a vegetarian (although I don't eat a great deal of meat either) and so I'm not upset that animals are killed for food. But I get very worked up about animals being tortured whether they're ending up as food or not, so I'm ascribing to "most people" what I feel myself, which is always a bit questionable.
Bring your family to the one where they crush the male chick on a conveyor belt next time. ( chick culling, you can find video online and watch it before the omelet dinner )
Or just a good ol’ bunch of pigs understanding very well what’s gonna happen and try to escape. It’s kinda cute.
Or you could discuss why a cow produce milk. That it needs to had deliver a calf recently. And how impregnate the cow ( it’s a “rape rack” device ) and then finish by the cow following the calves in despair over cookie and milk.
— A butcher is not a industrial meat factory.
The latter are the issue.
But.
In those thousand of years, was the meat produced the same way?
What type of antibiotics alternative were our elders using to prevent sickness in large groups of animals? Did they raised them squeezed next to each other without moving for their all life?
Where our forefathers feeding a purée of the dead one to the next generation to boost their immune system?
Did they had to pasteurize the milk, not for enhanced shelf life but mostly because sanitary condition are so poor that other wise you found particles of shit in it?
I could go on. But I think the comment you responding to as a fair point. Real; 2023 technic of meat/eggs/milk production are horrifying. we don’t know how the sausage is made.
I’m not vegetarian. I’ve kill and skinned large mammals ( goats .. not that fancy but well ) but I avoid industrial meat as much as possible.
Those are meat factory with advance industrial processes. I do thing folks would be concern for their own health and kinda disgusted if it was displayed more transparently.
And tadam. You don’t need antibiotics.
It’s the filthy condition we produce our meat into that require that.
And those technics are not mandatory to produce that much meat. This is needed to producing at a certain price, on a schedule.
it’s not really about starving to death anymore. But rather cranking the profit margin a bit higher.
I have a simple question: Do you think industrial meat factory are needed to feed us comfortably and affordably.
And by us I mean humanity. Not the US, not the west. All of us on this rock.
So, before anyone decides we need to implement some “small change” the burden is on them to prove that it won’t kill everyone. The burden is not on me to prove that the thing that’s currently feeding us all is the only conceivable way to do it.
If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it. If it really is better and more profitable I’m sure the industry will be happy to adopt it.
Of course the debate over the need for industrial meat farming is ongoing, and it involves complex trade-offs between efficiency, ethics, and environmental sustainability.
The latter is the kicker for me. I do care that we're building horror slaughterhouses for animals. But honestly not that much. I could live with that. What irks me it that it does not seems sustainable on the long run.
On a personal level I don't eat much meat. Like a handful of time a month? Mostly when I'm out. I don't buy meat when grocery shopping. And when I do eat meat I either :
- kill the beat myself and then skin it. That happen less than once a year so it's anecdotal.
- Or it's hippie dippie meat raised close to where I live. You know, "pasture", "grass-fed" and all that shit.
I do use milk that is probably produce in detrimental ways to the cows and the environment. Maybe a gallon/month? To cook. I would love a better plug for milk.
I produce my own eggs, I'm blessed by a large yard and their is no city code. I think I could raise pigs nobody would care?
But that's just me. At least I'm kinda opt-out of industrial meat? Still standing! But agreed: I'm a rich guy in a rich country, with too much time on my hands.
--
To your point:
I can't find any data on the percentage of industrial meat in the US diet, compared to "hippie-dippie" meat. It's probably a staggering 90 to 10%. But I would love to find that data. So, agreed. It looks scary to mess with that.
That being said: I do think the way we were growing meat until ww2 is a decent way to do it. And that having less meat around would be just fine. I get my protein from mostly plants. Yes it takes place to grow that too. But pigs, beef and chicken needs similar plants to be feed as well.
But correct. I can't prove that, it's anecdotal. And I know nothing about those subject for real :)
--
> If you think you have a more humane technique that will produce meat just as efficiently, by all means, open a farm and use it.
Introducing Temple Grandin! She did it so much better than I could ever do. I'm a software guy, I can barely keep up with a food garden :)
Grandin produced lot of work geared toward exactly that,from within the industrial meat complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin She deserve some recognition. She proved that you can be less of a dick to your meat and actually have better yield
Her work is not theoretical, she consulted for Hormel, Cargill and Tyson. Those 3 might represent like, idk, 80% of meat production in the US? They were happy to adopt her recommendation.
--
But the above is animal welfare. Again, I would be OK with immense suffering of tons of animals. ( really) I guess I'm not an emphat!
What I'm not ok in my personal book, is the risk that those concentration bring us. For our health, germ-wise, land-use wise, and all that jazz! It seems wise to tame it down. Eat more lentils, chickpeas and soy. That's all I'm saying.
Says you, and without a hint of rationale to justify a highly questionable claim.
I hope you also aren’t buying consumer electronics because then you are literally putting animals ahead of humans.
Or is that too inconvenient for you and you actually like the cognitive dissonance after all
That's not the point. Or maybe it is, maybe the meat eaters culture war is based on the idea of the virtue of eating meat and they get very angry when someone points out that actual animals are being killed, like cut with a knife then let to bleed out then seperated into pieces and shipped to the consumers in a package that doesn't look like an animal that was minding its own business a few days ago?
I don't go a day without eating meat but I don't get angry at vegans. Can you explain why are you so aggressive towards me? Is it maybe because, as George Carlin says, you don't want to face the reality of eating meat and I annoyed you by mentioning the source of meat?
Why is it so hard to enjoy the pieces of a cow raised and killed(by sticking a knife in its throat, then hung upside down to bleed out) in industrial settings?
Maybe the reason for this is the same as the soft language Carlin criticises?
Maybe the soft language is a great human invention that lets us kill animal for meat, kill people for land and still feel good about it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
It was written way back when, but there is even a short section that deals with, ironically, animal rights, that then progresses to plant rights, and does some extrapolating on outcomes when these tendencies are scaled to the extreme, while being set in an environment that, for the time, takes some really scathing shots at the mores of the day which I can't honestly say haven't resurged back into relevance in my lifetime.
I don't generally like just telling people to go read things, (nowadays it can feel like giving someone a "free puppy"). But something tells me it may speak to you, if you're willing to embark on the journey.
The argument is entirely emotional. Another person can say "I like killing animals for their meat because eating animal meat makes me feel good" and it will be equally valid, because neither are any valid, both arguments are entirely subjective. In fact all the people in all of history were pretty much enjoying killing other living beings with sharp tools, then let them to bleed out, then dice, slice, heat and eat them. Someone can even go on to say "I like the industrial cruel killing methods technological society employs because they allow me to eat meat for cheaper." It is equally valid as saying "Oh poor animals don't kill them!"
I personally believe in Islam and thus believe animals are specifically created for humankind to benefit, thus it's both moral and fulfilling a purpose to kill and eat them. My faith also says that an animal must be killed in the traditional least-cruel way by a human, for it to be halal (permissible) to be eaten.
Also there is no "meat eaters culture war", but vegas sure try to spark a war. Vegas used to try sell the health benefits of vegan life style, but that has been disproven so many times that now they (or you?) only have the moral angle to work with.
You can try to twist this as much as you like, but the fact remains that (so far) no vegan product has been able to compete with meat in taste or texture. I simply do not care where the food comes from. Even if factory farming was outlawed today it would just mean I would pay more for my meat or if I had to slaughter it myself I would need to learn that skill, I am not going to give up on delicious meat products just because you can't sleep at night.
There are so many other greater injustices in the world that caring about factory farming makes you kind of an asshole. But if you can show me a meat substitute that tastes and feels like meat in my mouth then I will switch to vegan in a heartbeat, because then your moral argument actually makes sense.
I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but this is hardly the solution. I don't think people are against killing of animals, we have been doing this since man was born. What we are against is modern industrial animal farming.
e.g.
- "energy exploration" to refer to oil drilling
- "climate change" instead of global warming
My understanding is that he used focus groups watching video of politicians. As the politician would speak, the watchers would use dials to live rate how they felt about the words being used. In essence, he would A/B test how "soft" the language was and then pass that information on to political groups to help shape narratives etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology
Why use 'anthropogenic climate change' which a regular person won't know the meaning of instead of 'human-caused climate change' or something.
It is increased variability in temperatures. It is extreme droughts and extreme floods (which occurred in Pakistan last year). It is extreme tropical storms. It is historical levels of forest fires (such as what we saw in Canada this year). Etc etc. All of these things are cause for concern.
Climate change is a much more accurate term than global warming, even if climate deniers use it to their ends. The opposite effect also occurs. People in Canada will joke, "oh global warming is great, maybe it will warm up here a bit." But talk about forest fires and it is much harder for them to disregard the concerns.
Again, this is splitting hairs by pointing to secondary effects and saying "it's more than one thing" when the root cause is singular.
Worth a read:
> Frank Luntz, whose polling revealed that 'death tax' sparked voter resentment in a way that 'inheritance tax' and 'estate tax' couldn't match. After all, who wouldn't be opposed to a 'tax on death'? - Joshua Green, The American Prospect
In Britain, the term has been 'death duty' colloquially for decades, with 'inheritance tax' and 'capital transfer tax' both having been formal names. Yet, I haven't seen a particularly preference for the term being associated with an political ideology. Generally, the British public and their representatives just use whatever term is 'in'. Does this make British politicians less shrewd, make them more respectable, or simply make Luntz's research an American edge case?
Still, we now have Chapelle, who is building similiar legacy and potentially Bill Burr one day.
Absolute agreement on the philosopher/jester vibes.
1. initially safe,sanitized corporate friendly jokes 2. some commercial success 3. ? 4. jokes increasingly become a social commentary and are less and less 'friendly'
I am too lazy to dig it up now, but youtube has multiple interviews that go over that stage of his life.
"I Love Lucy" was the first TV show to say "Pregnant". "Bewitched" filmed Samantha wearing almost see through evening wear but television was such grainy low resolution analog broadcast that the audience was unaware. The remastered DVD's make that more obvious now. There are many other lines that in hind sight seem odd now. Benny Hill crossed a few lines and managed to get nudity allowed on TV when it was otherwise forbidden.
Trying to start his career with The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television would have clearly been a ... non-starter.
This is just the punchline without the setup.
Try new cheese-tits! Bet you can't eat just one"
R.I.P. George
What is this thing about some groups being "off limits" while others are fetishized and babied?
There's no longer anything "brave" in making a joke about a "safe group" to joke about.
In today's day and age since trans is the new sacred cow amongst certain crowds in the Western world, it seems natural that that would be the subject of jokes.
I personally love Louie C.K, he is really at showing our social boundaries, pushing us to the limits, the weirdness of them, without trying to push a narrative on how other people are just stupid.
For example Slavoj Zizek has a whole book dedicated to cataloguing his (often "politically incorrect") jokes. Link here: https://meydanehonar.com/Panel/Uploads/6/3/7/8d1a8c61-47d2-4...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wissen#German
From Middle High German and Old High German wizzan, from Proto-West Germanic witan, from Proto-Germanic witaną, from Proto-Indo-European wóyde (“to see, to know”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Witz#Etymology
From Middle High German witz, from Old High German wizzi, from Proto-West Germanic witi, from Proto-Germanic witją from Proto-Indo-European weyd- (“see, know”).
Cognate to English wit, archaic Dutch wit, akin to Old Saxon giwit.
So they share the same concepts ('to see, to know') but not the same roots! Very closely related though.
> Root stative of the root *weyd-.
:)
His cynicism was beautiful, but he seemed to dropped using humor to deliver it toward the end.
In my opinion, George Carlin sometimes had some kernel of good observation at the heart of his bits, that he made worse and less correct the more he pontificated on it. And a lot of his observations are the kind of "common sense" folk wisdom that falls apart on closer inspection.
I just happen to think he forced a lot of people to think. This one of those things some of his contemporaries tried and failed to do ( not for the lack of trying, it is hard to care after certain point ).
"""Baseball is different from any other sport, very different. For instance, in most sports you score points or goals; in baseball you score runs. In most sports the ball, or object, is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defensive team puts the ball in play, and only the defense is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball if an offensive player touches the ball intentionally, he's out; sometimes unintentionally, he's out. ...
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!"""
Which I figure is something he would be proud of.
He will be sorely missed in the coming decades. Not by people who knew his work, but by the empty space he leaves.
TBH what I notice more of these days is geopolitical terms that mean the exact same thing, but one has a negative and one has a positive connotation:
Regime VS Government
Separatist VS Independent
Irredentist VS Unifying
Coup VS Ousting
Terrorist VS Armed Wing
Political VS Democratic
Rioter VS Protester
Every prominent surface is plastered with advertising, even the zamboni. Everything is sponsored, "Holloway motors Power Play!", "TEP half time puck toss".
For instance, I have heard statements like "things aren't the same as they used to be". If I ask what isn't the same as it used to be, I receive vague responses that repeat what was previously said, rather than give clarity. Now, when I catch myself using similar phrases, I pause and ask myself, "what am I really trying to say?" Sometimes I find myself not actually intending to say anything - just something. This practice challenges me to think, rather than to parrot mindless responses that tell others nothing about what I am thinking at all. [1]: https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/composition/orwell.htm
It’s also called linguistic relativity, and critical theory, literary theory, and postmodernism all have roots in it. The idea is that if you believe hard enough, for example a duck can actually be a goose depending on what “lens” you see it though
Obviously, this is ridiculous. But this has invaded our culture like a cancer and is responsible for the proliferation of PC language in the last few years.
"Shell shock is a word that originated during World War I to describe the type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that many soldiers experienced during the war, before PTSD was officially recognized."
Who cares?
...which is a soft way to say "wrong" or "evil"
I don't think we want to describe sexual assault victims as having "shell shock". Even a soldier could get "shell shock" without encountering any shells. The language got softer not because we're all a bunch of softies but because we noticed a general pattern and generalized the name to match.
Either is possible, but I think you are wrong about Carlin being wrong. Language defines the quality of our conversations. If we can't be honest with it, some nuance will be lost.
It may help to think of it as a range.
It is sort of schrodinger stragety - you make claims and if someone strongly argues back, it was joke. If there is no strong pushback, we pretend it was serious.
I agree "shell shock" wouldn't suffice but you could just change his word to "past-shock" or something, and notice how different that feels than an 8-syllable medical phrase.
I do think putting big fancy words on things implies a fake level of understanding, takes the word away from everyday users, and has other real effects.
There are certainly times when shell shock makes no sense but I find PTSD dehumanizing especially since no one actually says post traumatic stress disorder.
Maybe if we didn't change what it was, it would've been a bit more difficult to send people to wars where they can get 'shellshocked' instead of 'experiencing PTSD'.
We can look to the post-WWI era 'Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into "Shell-shock"' to see how in 1922 they viewed "shell shock" as a congenital or upbringing failing. From https://archive.org/details/b3217777x/page/96/mode/2up?q=con...
> Authorities are agreed that, in the majority of cases of war neurosis, there already existed a congenital or acquired predisposition to pathological reaction in the individual concerned, and that this constitutional characteristic was of vast importance.
We can see how many viewed it as simple lack of morale:
> Major Adie tritely expressed himself in stating that there was only one word worth mentioning, and that was “ Morale.’’ If you keep up the morale there will be no “ shell-shock.’’ The medical officer should know his. men, and can prevent the vast majority of nervous cases—mild “ shell-shock ’’—from becoming ‘‘shell-shocks’’ by retaining them at the front, or by giving them a little rest at the front. As long as they were living with soldiers, and in the atmosphere of the front line, the tendency was to recover. They were to be looked on merely as physically exhausted. - https://archive.org/details/b3217777x/page/158/mode/2up?q=mo...
> He agreed with the regimental opinion that a large number of ‘‘shell shock’’ cases in a battalion may be taken as a sign of poor morale. - https://archive.org/details/b3217777x/page/16/mode/2up?q=mor...
Then there's the difficulty of figuring out if someone is suffering from shell shock or is a coward - the latter being punishable by death:
> Asked whether he had any experience of cases of men charged with certain military offences, such as desertion, in which the plea of "shell shock" was put forward, the doctor said he saw many such cases. As Neurologist of the 4th Army, all cases which put in a plea of "shell shock" as an excuse for desertion were sent to him for medical examination and report, and he was always asked to give evidence in courts-martial on these cases. He confessed it was an extremely difficult and distasteful task, and he very soon came to the conclusion that it was almost impossible for the Medical Officer to make a decisive statement ... - https://archive.org/details/b3217777x/page/42/mode/2up?q=exc...
Or if someone is shirking duties by claiming shell shock:
> "Shell-shock" became recognized as a handy excuse, and, indeed, a suggestion also to the many who were ready to avail themselves of any subterfuge to escape from the terrors of the front. - https://archive.org/details/b3217777x/page/140/mode/2up?q=ex...
As a result, the British government decided "that quasi-medical words like ’shell-shock’ should never be used, that the whole question of psychoneuroses should be both recognized and played down, and that no pensions should be paid." (quoting https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0957154x9901004... ).
The term "shell shock" was not used in WWII. From the last source, "’Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous)’ (NYDN) or ’Exhaustion’ being the commonest. The troops had a variety of terms, notably ’Bomb Happy’ or ‘Windy’."
So no, it wouldn't have been more difficult. It was viewed as a moral or congenital failure of the solider to carry out his service.
Toilet paper became bathroom tissue because some people think toilets are gross.
Shellshock became battle fatigue so that people aren't discouraged from going to war; "they're just tired". It became post-traumatic stress disorder to make it both clinical, and to put it on the person having it - YOU have a disorder after a traumatic event.
Modern day example, people self-censor to avoid getting downranked, censoring words like "sex" into "s*x", "kill" into "unalive", "suicide" to "sewer slide", etc.
The book 1984 takes it to its extremes, where the language has changed to control the discourse and masses.
All these people trying to make their language more soft and welcoming are ignoring the fact that the world is supposed to suck, kindness is a modern invention, and frankly we can all see that it was a mistake.
I recommend you curse at everyone around constantly to make them harder and stronger, they'll certainly thank you for your service eventually, once they too are strong like you.
Pardon? When was this era?
"Toilet paper" was embarrassing in the late 1800s when it became available in the US. Quoting https://www.heatandplumb.com/blog/history-of-toilet-paper :
"The next significant American innovation came in 1890, when brothers Clarence and E. Irvin Scott marketed the first toilet paper roll. They found more success than Gayetty thanks to negotiating trade deals with several hotels and local shops, Despite the steady income they generated, the brothers struggled to sell their toilet paper to the wider population; many Americans were too embarrassed to purchase it in public."
Or from https://community.oerproject.com/b/blog/posts/a-splinter-fre... :
"But many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were reluctant to talk openly about poop. They were often too embarrassed to walk out of a store carrying an armful of toilet paper. People would instead order something like “wrapping paper” with a wink and a nod to the shopkeeper. But marketers eventually found a way to fix this problem. Have you ever wondered why so many TP brands have pictures of baby animals or baby humans on them? They used to have images of beautiful women on the packages. Advertisers wanted to emphasize softness and to avoid talking about the fact that these were rolls of paper designed to remove excrement from the human body."
You can see one way marketers worked to calm this embarrassment in a 1922 advertisement:
easy to ask for - easy to get
Ask for Northern Tissue. You don't
even have to say toilet paper. You
will get the most thoroughly safe,
pure, salutary product, fine and soft,
yet firm, 650 sheets to the roll, and
surprisingly low in price.
AND YOU CAN GET IT WITH-
OUT EMBARRASSMENT. SIMPLY
Ask for
Northern Tissue
at any of these stores
Here's a quote from a 1947 short story at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... :
Jolan's wife came from the house and to the gate, a child in her
arms. "Here, Lora" she called in a loud voice. "You'll need this. It's
going to be all day." She handed Lora a small roll of toilet paper, a
precious article here. She spoke without modesty, for in a house with-
out windows if one blushed at such things one would bleed away into
blushes.
The idea that "toilet paper" was something improper existed until at least the 1950s. Here's a 1958 use from https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin36losa/page/n127/m... :
One of the entries — the winning one has not yet been
chosen — is written entirely on Seppi paper (it's so
crude to say toilet paper) cutely bound with a feminine
pink ribbon.
When and why did ass-wiping paper become toilet paper?
'the economically disadvantaged' occupy 'substandard housing' in the 'inner cities.'
compared to
"Poor people live in slums"
works better for politicians. They haven't improved the situation, just swept it under the rug that is Oxford Dictionary.
Terrorist or freedom fighter?
Uncomfortable truth or hate speech?
etc.
One does not re-translate what is said to one, into some universal, neutral idea.
So, you then have to wonder, are your thoughts actually your own? Are they based on what you yourself have perceived or on what has been provided to you? And who is it that is doing the provisioning? Have they got your best interests at heart? Do you have other people's best interests at heart when you say things to them? Do you only speak truth, or do you echo provided opinions? Etc.
Quite surprising the read:
> Who cares?
Surely everyone cares about having a valid understanding of reality?
Here's another example from George: calling a "rape victim" "involuntary sperm recipient". He said it in jest then but I'd believe that some committee might design such change into language of documents like police reports in order not to "offend" and spare the case worker from uncomfortable truths or some bs like that while completely neutralizing the pain and suffering of the victim.
Soft language is a long game. It's not something which effects are apparent in a year or two or even ten but decades down the line and things like that always begin in innocuous and innocent sounding targets. Like bathroom tissue.
Language is the water. We are the frog.
"These poor people have been bullshitted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition, somehow you'll change the condition"
Another one is "adulting" which is literally just taking responsibility for one's own life/actions post-adolescence.
Yes, we have a responsibility to do those things. But there's no harm IMO in acknowledging that they feel like drudgery and bullshit a lot of the time.
Nosy neighbor became A Karen.
Being a trans ally/educator became groomer in some conservative circles.
Liberal became libtard.
In the past weeks, most modifiers used to discuss Israel/Palestine have intensified, not softened. (Wasn't there some Israeli official who used the term "subhuman" on Twitter?)
Mask became chin diaper!
Military/militia wannabes became Meal Team Six / Gravy Seal
Interpersonal conflicts, political debates, and misunderstandings have become accusations of gaslighting-- i.e., two people accusing each other of attempting to brainwash the other
I'd even argue that useful idiot becoming NPC is a change to something more extreme. (The idiot is implied to be unwitting/naive while the NPC is implied to lack agency.)
And finally, stochastic terrorism. There's no precedent for this term AFAICT. And thanks to the vague definition and pretentious borrowing of a term from statistics it is virtually guaranteed to be overused and misunderstood in political discussions, fueling disrespect, anger, outrage, and preventing sober, productive reflection.
There must be thousands of these, fueled mostly by social media.
As for soft language-- since anxiety/depression levels have gone through the roof over the past two decades, there's been a trend of soft language becoming reified and relegated to ASMR videos. As a strong and vocal supported of narrowing the dynamic range of mainstream audio, I whole-heartedly support and endorse this trend.