Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse
comments:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
called "The Principles of Newspeak" that coins the word.
The slogan "My Body My Choice" has some of this character. It rolls off the tongue and stops thought. There is no nuance: the rights of the mother are inalienable. Opponents will talk about the inalienable rights of the fetus. There is no room for compromise but setting some temporal point in the pregnancy is a compromise like Solomon's that makes sense to the disengaged but gives no satisfaction to people who see it as moral issue. [1]
Note that this phrase turned out to be content-free and perfectly portable when it got picked up by anti-vaccine activists.
"Illegal Alien" is a masterpiece of language engineering that stands on its own for effectiveness. I mean, we all follow laws that we don't agree with or live with the threat of arrest and imprisonment if we don't. It's easy to see somebody breaking the law and not getting caught as a threat to the legitimacy of the system. "Undocumented Migrant" has been introduced as an alternative but it just doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and since it is not so entrenched it comes across more as language engineering.
(Practically as opposed to morally: Americans would rather work at Burger King rather than get a few more $ per hour to get up early for difficult and dirty work which might have you toiling in the hot or the cold. An American would see a farmhand job at a dairy farm as a dead end job. A Mexican is an experienced ag worker who might want to save up money to buy his own farm. Which one does the dairy farmer want to have handling his cows?)
My son bristles at "healthcare" as a word consistently used for abortion and transgender medicine to the point where he shows microexpressions when reading discussions about access to healthcare in general.
This poster burns me up
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/741405157385448245/
in that teaching small children the alleged difference between two words will make a difference in the very difficult problems that (say) black [2] people have in America trivializes those problems. It trains them to become the kind of people who will trade memes online as opposed to facing those problems. In the meantime I'
You can read x articles a day; your system ingests y articles a day.
x=y is perfect but requires close-to-perfect balance (if x=0.9y to 1.1y maybe you can adjust your reading habit to your your feed)
if x>y then your system isn't showing you enough, if y<x you are going to miss things you subscribe to based on some arbitrary or random characteristic.
With an algorithmic feed of some kind you choose to read x items a day, your system shows you the best x items a day out of y based on some set of criteria and constraints.
These things are common sense but seemingly nonsensical to a lot of people. For instance our impoverished rights-based discourse (see [1]) about "free speech" presupposes that 100% of people can read 100% of what everybody else posts, realistically platforms can only show people some fraction of what gets posted so one thing is going to get more visibility and other things get less and that's a choice -- it could be random but it's still a choice. (As Rush would put it, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice")
I think the discussion is so impoverished that we never hear that an algorithm could choose to do anything other than maximize profits for a platform, when in fact that is just one thing an algorithm could do out of countless options.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rights-Talk-Impoverishment-Political-...