language

Stigma and a non-reciprocal special privilege /  by Nathan Jones

“The claim for individual toleration cannot extend to cancelling other people’s right to judge as they will what a given individual does. Much of the modern demand for individualism—including John Stuart Mill’s ‘On Liberty’—is a plea for exemption from social feedback from those negatively judging individual behaviour. Such an exemption is especially inconsistent when it emanates from those actively criticizing the rest of society. However democratic the language in which it is phrased, it is not a demand for equal rights, or a general freedom, but for a non-reciprocal special privilege.”
— Thomas Sowell in Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

Under threat of sanction with “hate speech” laws, we are constantly admonished by the anointed to remove the “stigma” (formerly, and more appropriately, called shame) associated with behaviours that in the recent past would have been considered unnatural and abhorrent. Instead, we are told to “normalize” them. But this requirement for toleration runs only in one direction. In trenchant fashion typical of his genius, Sowell cuts through misdirection and bullshittery with clear insight and plain language.

When Knowledgeable Men Talk /  by Nathan Jones

“When knowledgeable men talk, they no longer talk of substances and accidents, of being and spirit, of virtue and vice, of sin and salvation, of deities and demons. Instead, we have a vocabulary filled with nebulous quantities of things that have every appearance of precise calibration, and decorated with vaguely mechanistic-mathematical terms like “parameters,” “structures,” “variables,” “inputs and outputs,” “correlations,” “inventories,” “maximizations,” and “optimizations.” The terminology derives from involuted statistical procedures and methodological mysteries to which only graduate education gives access. The more such language and numerology one packs into a document, the more “objective” the document becomes–which normally means the less morally abrasive to the sources that have subsidized the research or to any sources that might conceivably subsidize one’s research at any time in the future. The vocabulary and the methodology mask the root ethical assumptions of policy or neatly transcribe them into a depersonalized rhetoric which provides a gloss of military or political necessity. To think and to talk in such terms becomes the sure sign of being a certified realist, a “hard research” man. Thus to bomb more hell out of a tiny Asian country in one year than was bombed out of Europe in the whole Second World War becomes “escalation.” Threatening to burn and blast to death several million civilians in an enemy country is called “deterrence.” Turing a city into radioactive rubble is called “taking out” a city. A concentration camp (already a euphemism for a political prison) becomes a “strategic hamlet.” A comparison of the slaughter on both sides in a war is called a “kill ratio.” Totalling up the corpses is called a “body count.” Running the blacks out of town is called “urban renewal.” Discovering ingenious new ways to bilk the public is called “market research.” Outflanking the discontent of employees is called “personnel management.” Wherever possible, hideous realities are referred to by cryptic initials and formula-like phrases: ICBM, CBR, mega-deaths, or “operation” this, “operation” that. On the other hand, one can be certain that where more colourful, emotive terms are used–”the war on poverty,” “the war for the hearts and minds of men,” “the race for space,” “the New Frontier,” “the Great Society”–the matters referred to exist only as propagandistic fictions or pure distraction.”
— Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1969)