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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Isn't normative used like a pejorative in the spaces that consider "no human being is illegal" a meaningful argument? we're like one step further on the euphemism treadmill from people who think this way being unable to differentiate between people who are legally permitted to be in a country from those who are not. As cliché as it is this is perhaps the closest thing to newspeak I've ever seen, not just brightening up concepts with pleasant euphemism but attempting to obliterate entire concepts via planned semantic drift.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Orwell wasn't so much prophesising as parodying existing trends in politics.

I also recommend The Politically Incorrect Dictionary (1992) which is dated but hilarious.

I was just reading today the report South Korea submitted to UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and appearantly this offical UN body:

The Committee advised the government to review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future (Para. 8-d CERD/C/KOR/17-19).

With Paragraph 8-d of CERD/C/KOR/17-19 stating :

Review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the use of the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future.

And Paragraph 7 of the same document:

The Committee is further concerned about the use of derogatory terms such as “illegal immigrants” used in official documents to refer to migrants residing in the State party without a valid permit, noting that such terms exacerbate negative perceptions of and discrimination towards these migrants (arts. 2, 4 and 7).

So this crusade against the phrase "illegal immigrants" isn't confined to NGOs and organizations founded with purpose of partisan advocacy.

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