Abuse of Language

I have many opinions on politics, but one of my firmest principles is that language should not be abused.  You may be aware of George Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," in which he argued that people use language to obscure political realities more than to clarify them.  I can't speak for his day, but it is certainly common now, when you commonly hear "speech" equated with "violence" and violence (by the correct side) equated with legitimate protest.

This morning, I was eating breakfast in a hotel and I saw a segment on CNN about the Capitol "insurrectionists" on January 6th.  (I can't find an article that uses that word in the headline as the news story did, but there are many articles on CNN that make liberal use of that word, e.g. this one.)  CNN has put a lot of effort into maximizing the potential danger from the riot that day, but I don't think any amount of rationalizing would equate what happened to an attempted insurrection.  There may conceivably have been people participating who actually wanted an insurrection, but was happened was clearly an excited crowd in which some members got carried away and entered the Capitol (without any resistance from security, from what I hear, so basically without violence, although some violence did occur).  You would think if anyone seriously wanted to attempt an insurrection, they would have done something like kidnap a member of Congress or attempt to enter the legislative chambers and make demands.  Instead, some people stole some souvenirs.  If this was an attempted insurrection, it was the lamest attempt ever.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science and Philosophy, Part I: Hume and Popper

I've been listening to a lecture series on philosophy recently, and, even though I haven't gotten past the Greeks yet, it has reminded me of a number of issues that trouble me about science. I want to take the opportunity to express my concerns here. Along the way, I will probably oversimplify philosophy a great deal -- not on purpose, but rather because I have only a simplistic understanding of it. I welcome responses to clear up my misconceptions. One of my issues with science is the famous idea of Karl Popper that it can never establish positive claims, only falsify wrong ones. The history of this goes back to David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptic. He shook up the philosophical world by claiming that science could never prove anything through induction -- that is, drawing conclusions about physical laws based on observations. The classic illustration is the sun's rising. Even though the sun has risen every day for our whole lives, and for countless human l...
Read more

Country Music

I noticed a long time ago that there isn't much difference between the sound of country music and rock music nowadays. If I'm surfing my radio and I come to a station playing jazz, classical, or rap, I recognize it right away; but if I come to a country or rock station, I often can't tell which it is until the song is half over. Country songs often have screaming guitars that would fit equally well in a hard rock song, and only a minority have a recognizably country instrument such as a fiddle or a banjo. All the same, no one could listen to a country music station for more than a few minutes without realizing that it is definitely not a rock station. What are the differences? There are some stylistic differences. Country songs are more likely to have a boogey beat or certain western-sounding bass lines. They also tend to be more formulaic: if you can't predict how a country song ends, you probably don't listen to much country music. But those things aren...
Read more

My privileged life

I have just read the article Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level , and the comments, and the follow-up and its comments.  The author claims that straight white males (SWM, for short) don't like being told they are "privileged," so he is going to try to explain their advantages in terms they understand.  He then very condescendingly compares their lives to playing a game on the easiest difficulty level, whereas people in other categories have it harder, and black lesbians are playing on the hardest level of all. I understand that this is a metaphor, or an analogy.  I understand that it is not supposed to be a perfect model of reality.  There are, however, several reasons why I think it is a very poor and misleading metaphor. First of all, using the gaming-difficulty metaphor implies that SWMs have an easy life.  No one plays at the easiest level unless he is a total noob, and only college students with lots of time on their hands play at the hard...
Read more