The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.
When I was at university I had some humanities professors who were studying this kind of stuff. It was a lot of postmodern analysis, looking back probably critical theory. One professor pointed out that dictionaries were a very 19th century thing, the standardization of language. There is a fascinating "hidden" history in Europe of many languages being eradicated or wiped out by the central government insisting on one or a few national dialects. Reading it felt very similar to the schools that were run for indigenous people in the United States and Australia not so long ago.
In any case, my point is that some folks out there are doing research into this but it's not the kind of stuff that really gets in the headlines.
Who says we don't? We're in the middle of a culture war fight over some very old word definitions like "man" and "woman" and dictionaries absolutely have been called out for not adding new definitions, but instead changing old ones.
It's not about your "existence" any more than political debate about immigration is about my "existence." You exist, I exist. But what obligations do other people have to us? What accommodations should society and individuals make, and which do they have no need to make? What aspects of culture should change or shouldn't change? What should we teach kids in school about complex subjects? These are proper subjects of social and political debate.
Recall that this is happening against a backdrop where 90% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, support employment protections for LGBT people. Bostock is already the law of the land. So the obligations that are in dispute here aren't even basic civil rights, but instead broader social and cultural changes. People have every right to vigorously debate proposed changes in the social and cultural norms they're expected to follow.
The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up". Being an immigrant is different, nobody questions that an immigrant that themselves attests to being from country A and is now living in country B is making that up.
Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender. I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently. And even before 2020 the truth is that disputing the legitimacy of transgender people is a low salience issue for a lot of people but very activating for others (much like immigration) so the proportional impacts of what seems like an unpopular opinion is inflated.
The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
> Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender.
Bostock involved multiple consolidated cases, one of which specifically involved gender identity.
> I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently.
No, the issues have changed (see above). This is common and unsurprising. People are generally a lot more accepting of civil rights than attempts at social engineering, especially social engineering directed at children.
> The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
IDK what this response is supposed to mean exactly but I certainly have people in my life that think that being "trans" isn't "real". And as far as politics goes this is certainly also fairly common position to hear from prominent people.
"what to teach young children" certainly seems to be an issue, an issue where politicians are sheepishly pretending to do one thing while actually doing another through ambiguity. This all seems very easy to understand. It certainly reflects the idea that trans people either don't really exist or their existence is something so terrible that children can't be exposed to even the idea of their existence.
I express no opinion about whether this is a cause worth fighting for, but there is absolutely no reality in which there would not be a fight over such a breathtakingly ambitious objective.
There are basically two poles - male and female. And there is anything inbetween. Not a digital 0 or 1. More like geography.
And just because I'm living right now in some country more towards the north than the south pole I don't have to define my identity by creating new words enforcing everyone to use them. Why should I bother anyone where I'm coming from and where I'm heading? Except people maybe I see the interest to open up myself?
The most important question to me is always what's the reason behind all the need to fight?
IDK, if every time you encountered someone they referred to you by the wrong name, after being corrected every time they do so, that wouldn't affect you? I think that if someone consistently feminized my name and used feminine pronouns for me over the course of multiple interaction I would get pretty pissy, downright hostile.
In most cases, people have apologized directly and the conversation moved on. In very few cases they moved on without apologizing. In virtually no cases did they ignore my hint.
Yes, there are rude and ignorant people out there. And they will always be.
From my experience, it is manners that lead to better interaction, not syntactical changes in language. Because you can't create empathy with neologisms.
And the best way to deal with rude people - stay away from them ;-)
I'm sorry you feel that way and that it depresses you.
> I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? The "culture war" isn't as straightforward as all the parties involved would like us to believe it is.
My personal method of detection for calling someone 'he' or 'she' is whether they look more like a man or more like a woman. Even if I later learn that the person is a man and not a woman (or vice versa) I'm still going to call the man-looking person 'he' and the woman-looking person 'she'.
And this is where the problem starts - it really doesn't take much for the average female to look masculine or for the average male to look feminine (at least enough to pass as the other gender). When I address someone as a man and in response get a tantrum for being transphobic it makes me wonder why a man who identifies as a woman still wants to present as a man (and vice-versa, of course).
When someone with a neatly trimmed and cultured beard insists that you call him 'her', they're more interested in stirring up controversy than in what they self-identify as.
So, yeah, there is a Culture War of sorts, but it's between the people who want to push other people's buttons and the people who don't think that other people should be able to dress, talk, act and call themselves whatever they wish to.
You presumably aren't in either camp, so good on you.
> I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.
I do have a serious question though - we know that your gender is unimportant for most things. Some things (like the gender tickbox on hospital admittance forms) you'll need to reveal your biological sex.
What about prisons? If a transperson is convicted of a major crime and is sentenced to prison, do they go to the prison that matches their self-identified gender, or to the prison that matches their biological sex?
Once I get vaginoplasty, maybe I'd go to a women's prison, but I'm really not sure.
> ”schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having);
Anyway, it instantly reminded me of this highly upvoted discussion about a site that asked visitors to guess whether a building was a school or prison just by looking at a photograph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605867
It's easy to argue that Foucault oversells his point, but his fundamental observation is an important one: the systems of regimentation and categorization at the heart of our schools, hospitals, and prisons is not particularly different between the three, is remarkably modern, and shares the same purpose (to observe and measure us against metrics for education, rehabilitation, healing, metrics that establish normative control over our lives).
Like rain on your wedding day
A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice".
I turned this feature off.
And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong
It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited
Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument
Is something cheating when the resource you use to cheat will essentially always be 1 device away? Just call your device your cerebral prosthesis, it will always be there anyway. It’s how humanity grows and people become more effective.
If we’re to offload all of it, are we even human any more, or just shrews with calculators?
Guess who will have access to books, literature, proper writing skills and intelligible when speaking?
It just ensures social reproduction.
Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground.
The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.
Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate:
- Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong)
- Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words)
- Priming (wrong)
- Implicit association test (wrong)
There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect.
If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.
This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is.
Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-opena...
"As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>"
Or: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-wha...
"just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different"
Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias:
"Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity"
Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true.
"Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?"
That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state.
At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.
For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers).
I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are".
Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.
What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates.
If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.
Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.
Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship.
>> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America?
It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views.
The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships.
Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it.
I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world.
Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country.
So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?
My point here is that yes, obviously, they could speak their mind once they got to America because of the attitudes of society and the local governments. They hadn't been permanently altered by their former societies refusal to use certain words, or present things in certain ways. That is, the kind of "mind control" assumed by the people who try to erase certain types of language, doesn't actually alter anyone's minds. It may appear that way if they're afraid to speak out but nothing has actually changed. People's opinions aren't altered by language policing, yet, the people who do it are convinced it does.
That's why I'm sort of confused by your post. You suggest that once language is "de-nuded" then it would take "generations" for people to be able to "think again outside the constraints on communication". This a strong Sapir-Whorf take, right? It's an assertion that the language you can use controls the boundaries of what you can think. And my point is that this hypothesis has been proven wrong a very long time ago.
you replied to a comment that empirically shows people's reality can be altered by language.
So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck...
Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing.
I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum.
EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure.
[1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it.
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen
our essence of being is what's at stake here
I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.
Every communication is actively monitored by the government. Any unimproved ideas are harshly dealt with
It's funny you mention that, because even as an Atheist I realize that Christmas as it exists today is almost completely secularized and has very little to do with Jesus Christ and the religion of Christianity. If you look at the celebrations and the iconography with an outsider's perspective, the holiday seems to be about Santa Claus and presents. I don't think any other major religion has had one of its holiest holidays commercialized and secularized to such an extent.
I'm no Christian, far from it actually, but I can see the merit behind their reaction. "War" is hyperbolic but I understand how they feel. Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
The thing that MADE christmas a "high holy holiday" WAS the de-christianizing of the holiday.
Nobody really cared all that much about christmas until the lore of santa and presents gained popularity in the 1800s.
The popularity of christmas grew because of the commercialization. Everyone loves giving/receiving presents and having an excuse for a big family get together and meal. The fact that it was initially stolen from pegan holidays to celebrate the birth of jesus was tangential.
I'd suggest giving the wiki article on christmas a good read through [1]. The war on christmas is something made up to make christians mad. It's revisionist history to try and claim that "just a few years ago, christmas was all about jesus! But now it's all commercial". It hasn't been about Jesus since the 1820s. And, at that time, it was one of the less popular holidays.
Fun fact, christmas was at one point banned in england by the puritans because it was associated with drunkeness.
I’m also an atheist. But I was raised Christian, attended Christian private school for a few years, and have taken personal interest in understanding the faith and its underpinnings well past the time I lost my own faith.
It’s true that most of the religious aspects of Christmas have been diluted if not basically vanished from the holiday. But it’s far from a new truth. For most worshippers, the commercialization and secularization has been part of the holiday for at least half a century. It was Christians who either led this development or eagerly adopted it.
Among Christians who would object to that, more do not celebrate the holiday as a matter of their faith than seek to de-secularize it. This has never been part of the “War on Christmas” narrative.
That narrative has, alongside many other narratives like it, been an imagined victimization story that Christmas—in all its secularized form—is being “canceled” by things like saying “happy holidays” or merely including other religious holidays in greetings around the same time of year.
At first this was all very explicit, and probably for many a sincere reaction to feeling less centered in the universe. By the time “War on Christmas” became a phrase in any kind of common usage it had become a manipulative dog whistle to tell the people receptive to said manipulation that there’s another “attack” on them. It’s the same trajectory similar reactions to majority feelings of being less centered have been exploited for invented culture war bullshit.
This is just the inverse of how pre-secularized Christmas came to be. Christmas was never a Christian tradition, it’s always been a winter solstice celebration which was used as a (mostly subtler) cudgel to convert Pagans. If there ever was an attack on ritual celebration of Christ’s birth, it would have been that.
Moreover, Christmas isn’t and never has been the “high holy holiday” for devout Christians. That holiday is Easter, which celebrates the transition of Jesus as prophet to Christ, son of God, who died and was reborn to eternally absolve humanity of their sins. That holiday has likewise been commercialized and secularized and infused with Paganism.
But there’s no corresponding Easter War! Seems weird but… most Christians don’t (pardon) give a god damn.
It was never about the holiday. It was always about moral panic as a manipulation technique.
To me, a secular festival and significant religious event together are fabulous and enhance each other. I grew up in NYC and used to do the whole “Christmas in New York” thing. The overall atmosphere of celebration is a great way to close the year!
It must be so sad to sit around being miserable over Starbucks cups or whatever.
Think I'm being extreme? Just remember that the Bible says that Jesus was born during lambing season, which is in the Spring, so Christianity had to ignore its own texts to place it at the same time as the pagan Saturnalia festival.
They didn't feel the line was crossed when more Santa appeared more than Jesus, when Christmas trees appeared more than Nativity scenes, or when their kids couldn't wait to get up and open presents but didn't care about going to church that night. They only cared about the word "holidays", and likely only because talking heads on right-wing media decided to get them riled up about it.
It's a tempest in a teapot because getting people outraged gets them to keep tuning in.
Look at how Christianity itself is practiced by many of its adherents and compare that against the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. There is very little overlap there. Materialism is just one glaring example. The so-called followers of Christ are hardly following in his footsteps, and that is certainly not the fault of the left.
Sure, then please kindly also install the upcoming Russian version of it, which merely makes suggestions like using the "neutral" word "special operation" when you inappropriately call it an "invasion".
These will be mere suggestions, and you are free to ignore them, but you should always be aware of the "consequences" of the words you choose.
This, just like spell-checking, just makes it easier to write a document that won't make the audience quibble over diction or make negative inferences about tone.
And you're free to decline all the tracking cookies and newsletter subscriptions, you just have to navigate through 30 layers of intentionally confusing UI every time you use the feature to do so.
Honestly, this is not how it works. Nudging is a thing. No one is building a controversial feature with the expectation that people can simply disable it if they don't want to use it.
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.
This is a profound change when scaled to the society as a whole and when the way we communicate is dominated by the tools we use. Our tools are an extension of ourselves.
It's for this reason that it's a very scary direction we are going with all tools - smart phones, home automation, email software, brain-computer interface, etc - that are extensions of ourselves but agents of companies acting not on behalf of the end user but on the behalf of their own interests.
Tools that are an extension of ourselves need to be the agent only of ourselves. We, as individuals, require that to keep our own personhood.
It sound dramatic to say, but our essence of being is what's at stake here.