Misunderstanding 1984 is extremely common. Especially amongst people who haven't read it.
If you're a global company then you should already be used to localizing products for various cultures and/or regions. Political correctness would be criticizing the North American branch for selling winter-themed products in the North American Winter months - and variations of that criticism do happen. People doing X in X country where X is normal get criticized because it is not normal in Y country despite taking place in X country where it is normal.
A small, loud, and extremely obnoxious group has mistaken speaking alongside minority groups to help advocate for them and make sure they are heard as speaking for minority groups even if it means speaking over them. They take the far extremes of everything and pretend that's the norm. It's been especially common for people without dyslexia to speak on behalf of those with dyslexia about a particular "puzzle" (Enter the Nth Word of the Nth Sentence of the Nth Paragraph to prove you've read this.) And as someone with dyslexia phrased so well: "I'm dyslexic. Not illiterate and unable to count. I don't think you realize that you come off as patronizing and condescending wanting to "dumb down" the puzzle for me. More likely I think it is because you failed to read and now feel stupid. Please don't speak for me or people like me in the future."
For some context - the "puzzle" occurs when you fail to follow directions on how to continue setup. If you read the instructions - it tells you to hold CTRL while clicking the "continue" button. If you fail to hold "CTRL" while you click it will give you a 2 minute timeout, remove the "continue" button, and provide you a message to please read all of the instructions in order to proceed or you will need to solve an obnoxious and time consuming puzzle. Failure to do so will result in the obnoxious puzzle where you must enter three randomly selected words from the setup instructions to make the "continue" button visible again. Failing to follow instructions will repeat the puzzle over-and-over until instructions are read and followed. There have been no complaints from any dyslexic users about this puzzle in the support Discord - but several complaints from people who do not have dyslexia speaking on behalf of those who do who "might" struggle with the puzzle that would never be encountered in the first place if people followed the setup instructions.
I agree completely with this, but I really do not think that this is what most "anti-woke" people are criticizing, including GP.
Newspeak is actually a very similar approach to what’s going on currently because it removes words that allows communicating ideologically problematic concepts. What’s going on with the entire blacklist/whitelist issues is based on the assumption that removing a word that describes a perceived injustice will remove that injustice from the world. It is an approach that is completely blind to the real meaning a word has taken, and tries to folk etymologically hack a different interpretation. This is why the real insulting words are never these that debated.
Both Newspeak and "rightspeak" think that language creates reality rather than the other way around
Snitching on your neighbors to the state secret police because they criticized the state is not a bottom-up movement. It is possible only when there is a coherent, centralized state agenda.
There are no woke police. There is no woke Stalin. The analogy is utterly inapplicable here.
> the real insulting words are never these that debated.
I'm curious about this, do you have some examples?
about the examples, if you would take extreme slurs against minorities, these are not used in a professional environment already so they are never these that are discussed
The words that are discussed are such that are established for a different connotation. that connotation is completely metaphorical and does not carry any real insult, yet some insist on literalizing those, or finding hidden meanings
I mean, it's also inaccurate for people in Florida, or when it's brown out etc.
> Post-Weimar Germany.
Very post. 1984 was written in 1948, notably after the fall of Nazi Germany. It was about the dangers of authoritarianism and how authoritarians can use their control of the academy and the media to increase their control on the rest of society, not the dangers of people asking their coworkers to change the name of a Git branch.
Because if I am, I'd say that you're building tools for your enemy to use. There's no reason the alt-right can't use the same tactics on LGBT teens as you'd want to use on alt-right nutjobs. There's no inherent reason why these tools can only be used on the guilty. That's why fairness in discourse is important (to me at least). Think of it as a social Geneva convention. Once you start thinking "the ends justify the means" and using saran gas you're giving the hated enemy permission to do the same.
Take a look at the playbook of the trump subreddit before they got banned as an example.. They learned most of those plays they used to dominate the front page and silence outsiders from leftists, often even using automated moderation tools that were initially created explicitly for leftist subreddits.
"We don't do that here", if it becomes a normalized part of the discourse, will be used by the hated enemy once they're powerful enough to do so effectively.
Enlightenment and free speech are the Geneva convention of discourse. I really don't think it's in anybody's best interest to erode those protection, but I suppose time will tell. Still, it feels like the left is building the social infrastructure for fascism that the right will inevitably figure out how to co-opt...
What I'm saying is that it's _not the same toolkit_ because it doesn't include state power or historical revisionism.
The problems LGBT people have (speaking about the US right now because that's where I am) are with the application of state and state-aligned media power against us, not the application of social power.
Social power is important, but it is much less likely to be deadly without state power at least tacitly supporting it.
Orwell's thoughts on Hitler don't line up with your convenient framing of his book.
I think you perhaps do not understand the text of 1984, never mind the subtext. In the novel, Newspeak is a part of intense and total historical revisionism in support of a coherent government agenda enforced by a powerful central authority, not a decentralized and gradual change in the language people use "enforced" only socially.
> Someone starts to lecture you about how referencing "winter" is non-inclusive to Southern Hemisphere readers? "We don't do that here".
This is a very interesting example. If you're a global company and you make your product, say, snow-themed globally during the Northern winter, it's simply inaccurate for Southern hemisphere users. I don't really see how that's a political correctness or language issue as much as a factual correctness issue.