jina

Posts Tagged ‘language’

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Turn to the left, turn to the Right: Get your Marxists right right right

In Uncategorized on November 15, 2008 at 7:25 pm

Okay, people. I really don’t want to go here more than once. (And I haven’t, on the blog, but I have this conversation with people.) Let’s get the record straight: Fascists and Marxists…not the same. Both, in the eyes of some people like Republican Rep. (GA) Paul Broun, evil…but in a country with our level of college education, can’t we please distinguish between types of alleged evil?

Here’s what Broun said earlier this week:

    “That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist….We can’t be lulled into complacency[...]. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

I’m not even going to touch the Hitler non/comparison. Except to say that Paul Broun apologized for calling Obama….a Marxist. But not for comparing him to Hitler.

    One day after the Athens Republican told a radio talk show that he regretted calling Obama a “Marxist,” a spokeswoman for the Athens congressman said, “We have not issued any official apology” for comparing Obama’s proposals to the tactics of Hitler and the Soviet Union.

That’s right. He did say he apologized “to anyone who took offense at that”–and the “that” was the use of the word Marxist, not the non-comparison comparison to the architect of the Holocaust. Broun’s office did issue this non-apology statement, which you can’t find anywhere on Broun’s own website—transparency in government?—but if you Google enough different things, you can find reprinted in full on the website of a Georgia NBC affiliate.

It was a beautiful week-long respite from partisan hackery we had, but it has, apparently, passed. Now the hacks are back to being partisans, and vice versa, and it’s starting to feel a lot more like my country again, where socialists, Marxists, fascists, and Democrats are all, apparently, the same. Give or take a moustache.

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On torture, from around the blogosphere

In politics on November 14, 2008 at 9:04 pm

It is a topic of distraction, in part because of the news, and in part because of my most recent piece.

Here’s an insightful look at what the bureacratization of language does to experience, from William’s Dispatches

The danger of bullshit euphemisms is that they actively obscure meaning. Common usage can’t afford to beat around the bush because most people rely on language to accurately convey concepts and observations, whereas euphemisms are intended to disfigure our understanding of reality. So when some odious Bush Administration spokesperson mouths the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of the word “torture,” the effect is to fundamentally shift our perception of what’s being done to detainees. This, of course, isn’t an organic cultural transition towards a more popular or aesthetically pleasing or powerful term of art. It’s a deliberate attempt on the part of a few bad people to prevent the public from understanding exactly what’s going on.

And there’s a great conversation about language and ethics going on at John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth.

Meanwhile, EcuProphets, an ecumenical group in New York, has a great note about the religious roots of waterboarding, laid bare by William Schweiker of the University of Chicago.

There’s more, but I’m out of time.