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Stephen Pinker quotes that exact passage in _The Better Angels of our Nature_. He rebuts: > Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a ph
by oxymoron 10y ago
Stephen Pinker quotes that exact passage in _The Better Angels of our Nature_. He rebuts:
> Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complained about the euphemisms emanating from revolutionary France:
> "The whole compass of the language is tried to find sinonimies and circumlocutions for massacres and murder. They are never called by their common name. Massacre is sometimes called _agitation_, sometimes _effervescence_, sometimes _excess_; sometimes _too continued an excercise of a revokutionary power_.
- wangchow 10y agoReminds me of the "nuisance abatement vehicles" used for controlling riots
- meffie 10y agoI have the sudden urge to run a game of Paranoia.
- dllthomas 10y agoYOU ARE IN ERROR. NO ONE IS SCREAMING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
- stinkytaco 10y agoWow, I had forgotten that game. I don't think I ever played it, but the rule books were awesome.
- pjc50 10y ago"Collateral damage" "Regime change"
- judah 10y agoSome modern examples: capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion. All involve killing a human being, but euphemisms are used to soften the reality.
- tomgp 10y agowhether abortion involves killing a human being is a matter of some debate
- judah 10y agoAnd there was once a matter of debate whether blacks in the US counted as full human beings. If there's brain activity and a beating heart, there's really no scientific basis for saying an unborn human isn't a human being. This goes back to Orwell's essay. We use euphemisms to soften brutal realities. A war monger may say we're simply bombing "savages", and an abortionist may say we're simply culling a "clump of cells."
- DougWebb 10y agoThere's a question of viability that I think matters. An unborn human starts as a clump of cells, develops a brain and heart but is still not viable on its own, and then if all goes well it becomes viable by the time it is born. It's human all the way through, but different people draw the line on abortion in different places along the path to viability. Slaves were always completely viable. Bringing them up in a discussion about abortion is a strawman argument. If you use viability as a guideline, you do bring into the debate people who were viable, but who through disease or accident are no longer viable. Should they be 'abort-able'? I think if the rules around abortion were flexible enough to apply to these people as well, they'd probably be solid enough to satisfy almost everyone's moral and legal sensibilities.
- stinkytaco 10y agoI may regret posting this since it's getting far off the topic of language, but the discussion is an interesting one. I don't think the line is drawn on the viability spectrum. A baby isn't viable until a month before it comes out of the womb, and that's a stretch. So I don't think this is a matter of people disagreeing with what constitutes viable because there really can't be any debate about that. I would argue that "potentiality" is a better term here. The arguments, at their core, revolve around the fact that you have two living things who's interests may not be aligned. It's a question of who's interests will be favored. Now, you can feel what you want about this, I don't want to get into a policy argument, but let's not dance around the issue, abortion is about the conflict between two abhorrent options.