JohnHenry.US

Tag: euphemism

  • Five Bad Arguments That People Use All The Time

    There’s a lot of bad argumentation on the internet, that’s no secret.  More ways have been invented to insult your mother in the last ten years than ever previously existed, thanks to the social media.

    You find a lot of arguments and bickering, and that too is a tired observation.  What’s not so tired, though, is noting the overuse, misuse, and fallacy of some “points” that come up time and time again.

    It’s time to rid ourselves of these five “arguments.”  Generally speaking, they serve little to no positive purpose, except as an attempt by the person making these arguments to establish dominance in the conversation.

    You don’t want to be that person.

    So here’s five clichéd non-arguments that you can eliminate from your linguistic repertoire, and in so doing, you’ve done a little bit to make the world a little less stupid.  Thanks for that.

    (A note:  attentive readers may think this article looks familiar; it’s a re-work of a piece I originally posted back in 2013.)

    5. “Name calling means you lose”

    Nonsense.  If I think you’re a jerk and I say so, nothing has been “lost” except perhaps the comfortable, criticism free bubble in which you live.

    Of course, that rebuttal is no less oversimplified than the original assertion.  The reality – as so often happens – is that this is a case-by-case situation.  If you think you’re making some profound political statement by referring to the president as “Barry” or always including his middle name when you talk about him, or if your discourse regularly includes words like “libtards” or “repukes,” then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t really have anything to say.

    On the other hand, if you are espousing/promoting a hateful, ignorant ideology, it does not make the slightest difference to the (in)validity of that ideology if I point out that it’s hateful and ignorant.  It doesn’t add validity to your ideology if I tell you that you’re a greedy, selfish asshole for promoting it.  Jeffery Dahmer does not suddenly become a martyr because I say he’s a dick.  This is silly schoolyard nonsense that adds nothing to the conversation except a clear statement that the person making this assertion is desperately trying to control it.

    4. “You Mentioned Hitler; You Lose”

    Also, with all due respect to Mike Godwin, not nearly as iron-clad a conversation stopper as people like to think.  While it’s certainly true that buzzwords like “nazi,” “communist,” “socialist,” and others are often employed as ad hominem attacks with no real bearing on the subject at hand (and often a manifest ignorance as to what those words actually mean), it’s also entirely reasonable to point out when someone is making a suggestion or drawing a parallel that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazi ideology.  For instance, some idiot bigot on some forum or the other that I was recently reading made a remark to the effect that homosexuals should be imprisoned and subject to any and all manner of “examination” to determine what “went wrong.”  Besides the obvious logical flaw (who says anything “went wrong?”), in reality this statement reminded me strongly of Dr. Mengele’s horrific human experimentation during the Nazi years which included gross violations of the rights and dignity of thousands of gays, Jews, Roma, and even included invasive and in some cases fatal research on twins.

    I made a remark mentioning Mengele, and suddenly it’s all about how I “lost.”  I didn’t “lose” anything, nor was I trying to “win” anything.  I was trying to draw the writer’s attention to the nature of what they were defending, and to make the larger point that this sort of passive-aggressive enabling is exactly how oppression is empowered.  What enabled Mengele wasn’t some secret and obscure distortion of his psyche, although there were plenty of psychological issues there.  But what allowed him to get away with it simply an extension of the same crap you hear every day:  the deliberate dehumanization of various groups of people.

    You see it constantly – consider how we refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” for instance.  They’re not people anymore, certainly not living breathing human beings with dreams and hopes and aspirations and a rich and complex emotional life, because if they were then those of us who choose to regard them as sub-human might have to actually stop acting like assholes.

    Mr. Trump, being what he is, has not only encouraged this way of thinking but given those who engage in it a false sense of social approval and acceptance, which is why it’s become so prevalent in the last three years (and it wasn’t exactly uncommon before that).

    To some extent, any such grouping or pigeonholing is an exercise in the same behavior.  Reducing everyone to “libtards” or “teabaggers” is rooted in the same place.  This expression is pernicious and devious and nearly ubiquitous; consider how so many of these labels are used to depersonalize individuals and hold them accountable for the imagined misdeeds of their imagined co-conspirators.  Consider how words like “thug,” “urban,” or “ghetto” are all commonly used euphemisms in mainstream media for “black,” particularly “poor young black men.”  Consider the phrase “migrant laborer.”  I promise you, even if you can’t admit it to yourself, that when you read that phrase the picture that came into your head was of a Mexican – not a “Latino,” a “Mexican.”  And now when I say “This is Joe, he’s a migrant laborer,” there’s a whole set of attributes that goes with that phrase, which you have now just imparted to Joe.  You even have a picture in your head, right now, of what Joe probably looks like…and you and I both know that Joe looks like a guy with dark skin, black hair, probably a little short, probably not dressed in expensive clothes, probably not driving a new car.

    Joe looks like that because that’s what you’ve been trained to think a “migrant laborer” looks like.  You were trained that way because someone, somewhere decided it was to their advantage that you think that way.  Someone decided Joe would be a lot easier to oppress if you could be made to forget that Joe is a human being who loves his wife and kids and has insecurities and worry and gastrointestinal distress and runny noses and enjoys a good joke.  If you can forget about Joe and just deal with “migrant laborer,” then Joe isn’t a fellow human anymore; he’s a usurper and a thief driving around the country in a low-rider with 85 of his cousins in the trunk.  Rather than a person, he’s a racist stereotype.

    This behavior wasn’t invented by Mengele; he just used it as an excuse to go a couple of horrific steps further.  After all, these are “not really people,” so there’s no ethical qualms about experimenting on them, right?  See also:  The Tuskeegee Experiments,  Calmette-Guerin (experimental testing of a TB vaccine on infants of First Nations tribes in Canada, which actually happened prior to Mengele’s ascension in the Nazi party), or the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, among many others.  (The latest, this Florida man who didn’t understand why he was being arrested for killing a guy who came to his door, telling police he didn’t see what the problem was because he’d “only shot a n—-r.”  See?  Not a person anymore – an archetype, a symbol, an icon, a representative member of a predefined sub-human class.)

    While it’s important to avoid casual comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s also important to remember that one of the biggest things which allowed the Holocaust to happen is that people by and large refused to call out oppressive actions and attitudes.  One of the ways this was enabled was by depersonalizing the victims.  They are “only Jews,” they are “only homosexuals,” they are “only midgets,” they are “only twins,” they are “only gypsies (Romani),” they are “only [anything but Aryan],” so why should the ethics which apply to human experimentation, apply to these groups which are obviously not human?  VERY dangerous road to toddle down, it’s a slippery slope from step one.

    3. You’re Intolerant Because You Dislike My Intolerance, Therefore You Lose

    Another classic bit of nonsense from the peanut gallery.  My refusal to put up with you being a stupid bigot does not mean I’m “intolerant,” it means I refuse to put up with stupid bigots.  I also refuse to put up with axe murderers, but that doesn’t make me “intolerant.”  It makes me somewhat less likely to fall victim to an axe murderer.

    This is a favorite refuge of stupid bigots who are desperately clinging to the idea that their stupid bigotry is not actively, visibly dying out in our lifetimes; that being a bigot is still something people can do and expect to live without consequences for it.

    You can try all you want to pretend that’s the same thing as “refusing to put up with blacks” or “refusing to put up with homosexuals” or whatever your thing is, but in the end this line of argument leaves out two things:

    1. You choose to be a bigoted prick.  You weren’t born that way.  For any adult to behave or believe in such a manner, as an adult or even a reasonably intelligent older child you have to make a decision to ignore all of the facts and logic and reason which clearly suggest that bigotry is stupid.
    2. Nobody is hurting you by being gay or black or whatever.

    As my friend Pope Snarky pointed out so succinctly, tolerating intolerance is not itself an act of tolerance; it is an act of passive-aggressive intolerance.  It’s the behavior of the bigot who has enough ego to worry that being a bigot will have negative social repercussions, but not enough actual character to stop being a bigot.  So, with their hands “tied” by public perception, they have to sit back and live vicariously through the stupid bigots who are ridiculous and delusional enough to think that their behavior is acceptable anywhere outside of their circle of bigoted friends.

    2.  I Don’t Like The Source, Therefore The Information Is Wrong, Therefore You Lose

    I’ve burned myself on this one several times.  A few years ago, one of those half-ass “liberal” “news” sites ran an article about the gathering of several fairly unhinged individuals to basically take over a small Pennsylvania town where a very unhinged individual – who happens to be the Chief of Police – was faced with a 30-day suspension for being a stupid douchebag.  Instead of taking it like a person of honor and maybe even getting the hint that his cro-magnon chest-thumping is not appropriate or acceptable behavior for a nine year old child (let alone for a man charged with the duty of protecting a small town), he doubled down and did even stupider, more insane things until he got his ass fired.

    My mistake was that I initially blew the story off because I knew the source was garbage clickbait that tended to lie a lot in their headlines.

    Turns out that, aside from the predictably salacious, hysterical headline, the clickbaiters had the gist of the story right – that a bunch of yobbos with guns had shown up in this small Pennsylvania town for the express purpose of terrorizing both citizens and local government into backing down.

    I blew it, because I looked at the source first.

    This isn’t to say that you should believe everything you read.  It’s not to say that when someone quotes a “News of the World” or “New York Post” or “Washington Times” article that you should assume that person is well-informed about media quality or that the story itself isn’t either made up from whole cloth or grossly distorted from one core fact.

    However, if I’d taken a second to check the story out I would have seen that (as usual) this particular site was just rehashing reports from actual news organizations, and saved myself the embarrassment of having to publicly admit that I blew it.  So before you jump to point out that this paper or that one is junk, remember this one key reality:

    The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards’ affair.

    Obviously that doesn’t mean that I should stop thinking of “breaking news” in the context of many sites as more like “broken news,” but it does mean that I should check out legitimate information sources before assuming that any story – even a Fox News Exclusive – is entirely wrong.

    1.  Taking Offense At My Offensiveness Is Violating My Rights!

    There’s a little aphorism that floats around in various forms and guises, which basically says that if I’m offended about something, then it’s my choice to be offended and what I’m really doing is acting like a cheap bully that’s trying to control the conversation.

    So next time someone claims that you’re some kind of terrible person for being offended at their racial or gender or sexuality stereotypes, and you ought to stop being a bully and trying to tell them what they can and cannot say, just find an offensive joke that you know they’ll take personally and for them to get offended…and then use their own argument against them.  “What, now you’re going to try to tell me what I can and can’t say?  How dare you!  What are you, some kind of nanny-state liberal treehugger who wants to tell me what I’m allowed to think is funny?  You’re just choosing to be offended because you want to dictate what I can and cannot say, it’s not me that’s offensive, it’s that you are choosing to take offense so you can bully me into silence.”

    If they can’t figure out that their reasoning is entirely invalid after that, you’re either dealing with a complete idiot, or with a troll who doesn’t actually care about making a meritorious argument.  In either case, they can safely be dismissed and you need no longer waste time trying to have an intelligent conversation with them.

    Bonus Round: You Lose!

    This, the careful reader will note, is the common fallacy to all of these arguments.  The phrase “you lose” and the attitude that lies beneath it are clear indicators that the person making the argument isn’t really trying to engage in a discussion at all; they’re trying to engage in a competition.  They don’t want to learn, they want to “win,” which is of course entirely pointless in any genuine exchange of ideas.  If you’re getting involved in a discussion to “win” something, you’re turning it into a battle, instead of a conversation.  The only way to truly win that game is to not play it in the first place.

  • Doublespeak

     

    Say One Thing, Mean Another

    Original image by Jordan L'Hôte licensed under CC-SA-BY 3.0 via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1984JLH2.jpg

    This started out being a “classic” repost and by the time I got done fixing the twenty-year-old writing, it was a new article.  The original article has been reposted as originally written in late 2001/2002, at this link. Doublespeak (2001)

    Doublespeak is the art and subterfuge of using language to misdirect, misinform, or flat-out lie.  It often involves logical fallacy, intentional appeals to emotion over fact, and other crimes against critical thought.  It can take the form of euphemism, “soft” language, the use of words and phrasing that have a high emotional valence but low informational content to appeal to the baser instincts rather than the intellect.

    As a huge fan of artists like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, the use of language and euphemism is simultaneously fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious to me.  The contortions people will go through to avoid acknowledging a simple reality are just insane.

    A great example of this came up in my personal life while this article was in draft:  apparently it’s now fashionable to refer to yourself as “sober” if you’ve used “hard” (physically addictive) drugs in the past (e.g. opioids, amphetamines and methamphetamines, cocaine) but now you only smoke pot.

    This is, of course, absolutely silly; a self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous word game played by addicts (and I am one so please spare me the complaints about your value judgements relating to that word) so they can pretend their addiction is somehow “different” from the addiction that has social stigma attached.  You’re not sober if you’re high – that’s not even an observation, it’s a tautology.  No amount of self-serving wordplay will change that – and in the context of addiction, it’s potentially fatal bit of self-deceit, due to the nature of addiction and what it does to the thought processes of the addict.

    This underscores just one of the reasons doublespeak is so insidious and harmful; it helps people maintain self-destructive lies.  What amazes me is people craft these excuses for their spin and jive, and they’re all self-serving bovine excrement. “I don’t want to be stigmatized as an addict; so I just stigmatize everyone else who’s an addict and then reject that label for myself because I’m better than those people I’m unfairly stigmatizing in the very process of complaining about being unfairly stigmatized.”  And we’ve become so corrupted in our thinking that people don’t even hear themselves when they say this stuff.

    Fundamental Dishonesty

    Doublespeak is destructive in that it is essentially dishonest.  It can be, and often has been, used as a tool of manipulation by governments and other leaders and officials to attempt to avoid consequences of egregiously terrible actions by making them sound less terrible.  It is this particular aspect of doublespeak that will consume most of the rest of this article.

    Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards.  They describe the award as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.”

    Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, both from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional material provided by the NCTE website.

    Without further ado, I present you with some shining examples of doublespeak.

    President George Herbert Walker Bush – When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.” Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.” He “deployed forces.” He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.”  Never once did we “invade.”

    During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.” After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”

    In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.

    After the first US-Iraq War in 1990 (as Bill Hicks pointed out so eloquently, even referring to this event as a “war” is an exercise in doublespeak), Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.” Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

    President George W. Bush – Ol’ Gee Dubya’s presence on the awards list should come as no surprise.  Indeed, I predicted it in the original (2002) version of this article:

    Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly. Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.

    Bush II ended up winning twice by himself, and once with his entire cabinet.  Among the linguistic felonies NCTE selected:

    • In 2003, NCTE’s award centered around the heavy euphemism employed in the search for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (which, at the time of this writing 17 years later, still haven’t been found).  Use of phrasing like “a growing fleet of…aerial vehicles” and the assertion that “Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” were complete fabrications, with these and many others intended to suggest that we actually knew the weapons were there but hadn’t found them yet, when the functional reality was that all we knew is that we had sold Iraq various materiel that could be used to create weapons, but never had any evidence they had done so.
      • I will bolster NCTE’s award citation by pointing out that one of the most egregious uses of doublespeak in the contest of the second Iraq War was Bush II’s repeated reference to Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” “a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people,” and so forth, but never once mentioned that not only did we sell them all of the gear and intelligence they used for those attacks, it was Bush’s own Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, who demanded Iraq be removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations so we could sell that materiel to them, back in 1983 when he was acting as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan.
      • Worth noting: to this day, most people either don’t know that we sold Hussein “dual-use material” including anthrax, botulism, tetanus, and c. perfringens, or they think it’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theory in spite of the reality that everything we know about it comes directly from US Senate Committee reports.
    • Bush’s 2006 award was given in recognition of his September 15, 2005 speech regarding Hurricane Katrina, in which he made lovely, flowery remarks about poverty and racial discrimination and how we needed to ‘confront this poverty” and “rise above the legacy of inequality…” a week after he signed an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding from Katrina to pay less than the prevailing wage, suspending a sixty-four year old law to do it.

    But wait, there’s more!

    More Examples

    I don’t want to get into the underhanded and dishonest game of simply re-writing press releases and calling it original work; you can view the historical list of winners of the Doublespeak Award at the NCTE website.

    There are, of course, plenty of examples that haven’t won awards.

    President Bill Clinton – Many readers here should be able to remember Clinton’s most egregious assaults on critical thinking fairly well. His most famous, of course, came during the Lewisnki scandal, during which Clinton (and his wife, Hillary) engaged in some of the most comical linguistic calisthenics ever recorded.  Clinton’s initial position was that he was entirely innocent of wrongdoing, going so far as to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski” during a press briefing prior to the 1998 State of the Union address. It subsequently came to light, however, that Clinton was deliberately misleading.  He later testified that his intent was to use the definition of “sexual relations” laid out in the investigation documents, which were worded in such a way that, by the letter of the given definition, simply receiving oral sex was not “sexual relations” because Clinton didn’t touch any sexual part of Lewinski’s body, and the definition given during the impeachment investigation required that touch to qualify as “sexual relations.”

    Several months later, Clinton finally admitted that “we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” but this was only after a series of grammatical distortions that confounds description.  Aside from the core deceit, other “highlights” of this episode include Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring…” interview, and the infamous exchange described in the Starr Report where Clinton’s prevaricative response to a question about whether a lie had been told went as follows:

    QUESTION: “Your—that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”

    CLINTON: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means. If is means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.

    No matter your definition of “is,” it’s safe to say that the above is a prime example of doublespeak.

    President Jimmy Carter – In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.”  Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.” Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction. He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.” In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.

    Lest we think this is only about Presidents, let us turn our attention to the Judicial Branch and the 1991 US Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

    In 1991’s case of Harmelin v. Michigan, the Supremes heard a case in which the defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.

    The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is. Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”

    The court also offered an early preview of the current kerfluffle at the southern US border and the endless game-playing about refugees seeking asylum.

    In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.” In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, was attacked by masked guerrillas wielding automatic weapons in his home.  The guerrillas demanded that Elias-Zacarias fight with them against the Guatemalan government.

    Rather than fight, Zacarias fled to the US to seek political asylum, but was denied. He appealed, and eventually the case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerrillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.”  Justice Scalia never got around to explaining how refusing to fight with rebel guerrillas against his government isn’t a political opinion.

    US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” Read that again:  state-sanctioned killing of human beings is “our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

    Yep.

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