red-montaigne

Orwell was commenting on this decades ago. Any government you like is a "democracy," any government you don't like is fascist or communist. "Politics and the English Language" is a masterpiece.

On the other hand, I do think an unsettling number of Americans would be totally fine ruling by authority and force, as long as the person in charge was from their own political party. So as far as that goes the label is appropriate.

I'm thinking more of a writer sitting down and struggling to choose the correct word to identify a thought. I wouldn't say they're "conveying information." At that point they don't have information. I would say rather that they're attempting to refine the raw material of the flow of their thought-consciousness by using language. You can use words to assist that refinement. (I'm doing it now, for example.) But you can also use words to divert your thought stream away from potentially uncomfortable ideas, or someone else can do that to you.

Great example of how language is a tool for thinking, but it's also a tool for not thinking. If you want to ignore or obfuscate something, you can seal it off with euphemisms and misrepresentations, kind of like putting an interface in front of an implementation. And as you pointed out, you can use this tactic to deceive not only others but also yourself.

Yeah that's one approach, you can just choose not to care. I'm sure I'm also on Linux lists and crap like that, but that doesn't mean I want to end up on a bunch of other ones. Particularly with the vehemence in American politics today, I don't want either side putting me on one of their enemies lists just because some site I signed up to check out got hacked and all of the user info got dumped. Seems easier to just check out, live my life, and try to be kind to the people in the real world around me. If I want a political discussion I'll go chat with some of my friends.

Not really. I'm in the same boat: I'm an independent who likes to get an omnivorous information diet, but I've regularly avoided looking into certain things I'm curious about because I know there will be a record of it and a bunch of data sellers providing a misleading snapshot of who I am and what I believe. What did Richelieu say? "Give me seven words spoken by an honest man and I'll find something in them to hang him?" In today's surveillance society it's intelligent to limit your footprint, which is exactly the chilling effect free speech and free society advocates are worried about. (Glenn Greenwald's "No Place to Hide" is a great read on the topic.)

Don't disagree with your points, but it's worth considering:

1. The Founding Fathers were products of their place and time. Many other countries engaged in the slave trade and employed slave labor, and women played a similar role in other societies. Racism and sexism were commonplace around the world during their time. You can reasonably argue that American slavery was uniquely cruel and long-lived if you want, although I would say that position downplays the horrors suffered by slaves under other governments.

2. The Founding Fathers, for all their faults, were clearly very poignant observers of human nature and history. They thoughtfully designed an extremely successful form of government that has inspired countries around the world to copy their model and arguably contributed to material prosperity unparalleled in history.

None of that is to discount what you're saying, but it's only one piece of the puzzle.

You explained the fundamental philosophical divide in software development today. One group sees development as a process of production. They still think of developers as people who produce code. The other group sees software development as a process of problem discovery and definition. Programming is an exploratory learning process that, at its best, refines and condenses human concepts and symbols into concrete representations automated by a computer. In my opinion the latter group will always outperform the former (barring massive resource discrepancies) because they have a more powerful theoretical grip on their activities.