• Soyweiser@awful.systems
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    11 months ago

    Newspeak

    It should be noted here that he is using Newspeak wrong. Newspeak was a simplified language in which everything was reduced to simple dichotomies. The whole pronouns thing (and the whole hidden iceberg of NB/transphobia/etc related to that) is something which newspeak would to enforce. The inability to differentiate between sex/gender/gender assigned at birth/seeing gender as a spectrum and reducing it all to man vs female is newspeak.

    He didn’t understand the book, read the additional material about newspeak, or even glance at the wikipedia page about newspeak.

    Wonder if anybody on LW even noticed. (Yes, im implicitly calling them bad nerds here). (A ctrl-f later, doesn’t seem anybody noticed. Seems nobody also noticed that we have moved to awful.systems).

      • Mike Knell@blat.at
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        11 months ago

        @gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?

    • Mike Knell@blat.at
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      11 months ago

      @Soyweiser Must be the earlier discarded version of Newspeak where instead of compressing the vocabulary to make nuance impossible to convey they did the opposite. It worked okay until a Party member was heard by a 10 year old Junior Spy describing Big Brother as “a doubleshit maxipompous arsetalker” and was last seen being beaten senseless by the Thought Police.