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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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This strikes me as a gross overreaction. The "massacre" label is commonly applied to such non-lethal events, and has been for decades. Eg the Saturday Night Massacre. No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.

True, but what really happened? A bunch of eight/ten/who knows how many journos got suspended for two days, then it was back to business as usual. The journos in question cooked up a slogan to describe the awful tribulation visited upon them by not being able to tweet for two whole days - presumably because nobody reads them anywhere else and certainly not in the papers they work for, so if they're not on Twitter, they're invisible?

That being the case, are they really important enough that we should care? if Joe Massacred On Thursday gets fired from his journalism job on the Snow Plough Report and loses his Twitter account that goes with the job, then we won't hear from him any more than if Musk suspended him.

Or how about when the media does it to one of their own? Is that different?

I wouldn't call the Watergate dismissals a massacre either, and I would much prefer to use the word "massacre" to mean killing rather than broadening and overloading its meaning, which would make it less useful (i.e. you would learn less about the world from hearing the word "massacre"). In any case the severity of what Elon Musk did is in no way, shape, or form equivalent to what Richard Nixon did. For starters, Nixon didn't un-dismiss the special prosecutor afterwards, and what Musk did isn't illegal.

No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.

I mean... I did. And that's not how it works. If I didn't know anything about Watergate and you told me something called a "Saturday Night Massacre" happened, I would assume that Nixon killed someone or something like that. This is what I mean when I say that overloading the meaning of a word makes it less useful, because if I accept that "massacre" could mean not killing, then if I didn't know anything about the Chiquola Hill Massacre I would wonder if it was just people getting fired or people getting killed.

It is, of course, a metaphor, and a very common one that, in ordinarily parlance, simply not meant to imply equivalence to an actual killing.

And, yes, what Musk did is not equivalent to what Nixon did. But I didn't say it was. I said that taking people to task for the very ordinary use of a very common metaphor "strikes me as a gross overreaction." But now I see that perhaps it is the result of ignorance, rather than hysteria.

Yeah, agreed. When someone says "massacre" I take that to mean that not just someone, but many people were killed. People using the word in another context are using the word wrong.

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