The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Against Euphemisms

Posted on | December 21, 2024 | No Comments

However much you hate the creeping totalitarianism of our time, you don’t hate it enough. Let me quote this:

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. If control of language was centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them. This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.

To control language is to control thought, and the Thought Police of our time keep quite busy in preventing us from thinking clearly:

“OnlyFans model” is a euphemism, like calling a stripper an “exotic dancer.” Basically, any old-fashioned slang for sexual behavior is now prohibited as somehow harmful, so that whore is banned for the same basic reason that shemale or tranny is banned. The use of old-fashioned language implies an old-fashioned attitude, and is thus considered derogatory because (once upon a time, in Ye Olde Dark Ages) most people did not approve of the behaviors such words describe. It’s like how bums and winos got promoted to “homeless people,” while kooks and looneys became part of the “neordivergent community.” This sort of censorship, making it mandatory to employ the preferred politically-correct terminology for deviant behavior, exploits the desire of civilized people to avoid offending others — the Dictatorship of Niceness. . . .

You can read the rest of that at my Substack (and, while you’re there, please subscribe). What I resent is the manipulation of language by those who apparently think we’re too stupid to figure out that we’re being manipulated or why. Their arrogance is an insult, and the people who engage in this insulting manipulation — the Thought Police — expect to get away with it because they’re always hiding behind the human shields of their Official Victim Groups. You’re being “anti-woman” if you criticize their pro-prostitution activism, and this is just one example of how the Thought Police enforce mental conformity as “social justice.” It is not enough for them merely to make pornography legal, but they must also silence criticism, to prevent anyone from expressing disapproval of pornography. Because you might hurt somebody’s feelings is you call a whore a whore, and these hurt feelings might discourage young women from becoming whores, and we can’t allow such discouragement, can we?



 

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Category: Sex Trouble

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