Stardate 20020624.1538

(On Screen): Porphyrogenitus posts as follows:

The other quibble I have I suppose is more of a question. The good Captain perhaps seems to practice this sensitivity when he calls the term "Islamofascist" a newspeak word. is "Islamofascist" really something bordering on bigotry? I'm not asking as a rhetorical question, but I've always thought it (like related terms such as "radical Islam" or "Islamist") are a handy way of differentiating between the bin Ladins of the world and Islam as a whole (thus, perhaps, *less* bigoted, certainly less than saying "Moslem terrorism"). Or perhaps the term is crude and clumsy.

Perhaps it's newspeak. I don't know (thus I ask), but its a shorthand way to define the distinction between Islam as a whole and the guys who are blowing people up without having to, each time one writes about such fellows, do a paragraph long on the distinction (the "sensitivity paragraph" to by flippant about it). Perhaps we've just all been sort of cowed into being so overly careful in how we criticize certain groups (leftists, where it's a form of "McCarthyite Witch Hunting" and peoples-of-color or third-world cultures, where it's racist, bigoted, and/or cultural imperialism. Again, though, this sort of careful censorship and self-censorship only applies to certain groups. You don't have to be careful about what you say America is like, for example; any sort of overblown rhetoric is not only allowed, but it's de rigur). It may be the case here that even where people are trying to use a term that is carefully selected to not include all of Islam or all Moslems, they're to be tarred with the brush of bigotry anyhow. But perhaps the word isn't the best chosen, either. If I knew myself there wouldn't be a question and I wouldn't have fixated on this small part of a large and otherwise excellent essay.

It is true that I try to avoid those terms when I write here, but it's not out of any sensitivity. I'm not avoiding those terms because I think they might offend people. I'm not too worried about offending people; my goal is to tell the truth as I know it, not to make people like me. And the single biggest benefit of the blogging format (especially when you own your own server, as I do) is that I am beholden to no-one for the content I post. I don't have to soft-pedal because someone else tells me to, or satisfy an editor who has his own agenda, or to avoid issues or points of view because advertisers are concerned that they might drive away potential readers. Instead, the only person I truly have to satisfy is myself. As long as I don't break any laws, I can put anything I want to here.

My objection to those terms is that when misused they become a substitute for thought. To take an extreme example, if you start to refer to the suicide bombers as "snuffies" then it conveys a contempt for them, and of course that's the point. But it also simplifies them, puts them in a box, and by so doing can deceive you about them. It's a summary, a way of ignoring the complexity of the issue.

Labels are conceptual boxes. Call someone a "liberal" and along with that comes all sort of preconceptions and intellectual baggage which may not actually apply. The same is true of "conservative". (Which is why I eschew both labels about myself.)

You can see this happening in the way that people have been juggling terms like "suicide bomber", "terrorist", "freedom fighter", "militant" when referring to the Palestinians responsible for the attacks on Israel. It's true that they're nouns, ways of describing things. But each of them carries connotations; it tells you not just what the author is referring to but how the author wants you to feel about them.

I consider it sneaky. I do have opinions and I do want to convince you to try to have certain attitudes. But I don't like trying to sneak them in on you with loaded terms. Rather, I try to explain overtly what I feel and convince you that I'm right.

I suppose I became disillusioned with that kind of thing when I saw leftists (note, loaded term) over the course of the last thirty years doing this kind of thing. It's happened in a lot of ways e.g. "differently abled" as a newspeak synonym for "handicapped" or "crippled", or the blah-challenged phrase which became the butt of so many jokes. Seems to me that the first use of that was "vertically challenged" as a synonym for "short" but that may instead have been among the first jokes.

I think it has been most blatant in race relations. I refer to American Negroes as "black". That's the term I learned with I was a teenager, and back then it was the politically correct term. Despite being used in the NAACP acronym, my parents taught me that "colored person" was wrong, and "nigger" was really wrong. And "Negro" was considered a little strange, sort of stilted and excessively formal.

But sometime later, race advocates decided that the proper term should be "Afro-American." Then they changed their mind and decided it needed to be "African-American" (which set off a whole sequence of other people trying to hyphenate themselves, too) and finally they settled on the more inclusive "Person of Color", which led to variations, as well, some of which got rather ludicrous like the very recent "Person of size" as a synonym for "obese". (Lileks