Tag: language

Six Easy Ways To Avoid Facebook Jail
Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.

It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.

There’s some stuff I’m not going to cover here – if you’re posting crappy spam fake t-shirt ads or lonely-hearts scams and things like that, you know what you’re doing and I’m not trying to help you anyway. Also, this is just about Facebook. Different platforms have different standards and rules. Like I used to tell my daughter, the four most important letters in the English language are “RTFM,” so make sure you RTFM if you’re not sure about something.

Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.

Disinformation, Misinformation, and “Fake News”

Disinfo on Facebook has always been a problem and in some ways always will be. The reality of the world is that there is no possible way Facebook can hire enough human beings to read every flagged or reported message and spend even five minutes carefully assessing it. However, there are some pretty common things that scammers and traffic maggots love doing that are a fast and easy way to get thrown off the network.

Super important: If you are running a page or group and something posted there gets a fact check overlay put on it, DELETE THE POST IMMEDIATELY, DO NOT LET IT JUST SIT THERE WITH THE FACT CHECK ON IT.

This is what caused the big Obama page to get taken down; we had an admin who would occasionally post questionably sourced information and particularly memes, and they’d get fact-checked. What we didn’t realize is that every time that happened and the rest of the admins let it stay up (because we were all trying to not step on each other’s stuff and like most people we figured better to leave it out there so people could see the fact check), it was another red flag in the algorithm…and they accumulate. They don’t go away. So after a decade of that, we got shut down, and while the source of the problem was definitely a single admin, from FB’s point of view it was the problem of all the admins because nobody removed the stuff. A decade-plus of work and 200,000+ readers gone overnight, and no way to get ’em back ever.
- Fake celebrity death reports – this is way too common, still. Not a day goes by when I don’t see some jerk posting about Simon Cowell or whoever’s likely to draw traffic dying tragically in the hospital. Aside from my feelings on the matter there are tons of people who just can’t resist sharing this kind of stuff because they see it and go OH MY GOODNESS SIMON COWELL WAS KILLED BY A MOSQUITO BITE ON HIS TAINT! I HAVE TO TELL ALL MY FRIENDS WHO LOVE X-FACTOR! Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T do this. ANY time you see a celebrity death report, even if it looks like it’s coming from a legitimate source, check the news first. Until you see it on trusted outlets – regardless of your political biases – don’t believe it and don’t share it. (Bonus points: check your local network television station website! They’ll usually have stories like this covered within a few minutes of the story being officially and reliably confirmed.)
- False medical/health information – regrettably Facebook has become less aggressive about nuking stuff like telling people to drink horse dewormer to treat viral infections, but the most egregious stuff will still be flagged. It’s not just about stuff like Covid though, and it’s not just about “what’s in the news right now.” NaturalNews.Com and the odious con man who owns them, Dr. Joseph Mercola, finally got thrown off the platform for constantly pushing bad health information so he could sell useless supplements to the naive and credulous, and FB’s tolerance for this sort of scam has become very, very low. Just like above, that means a whole lot of folks are risking the loss of their accounts for sharing this kind of information because they don’t know any better. Those unfortunates are created by people like Mercola, but that’s not going to save them from getting banned or ultimately booted off the network if they share this kind of (completely wrong and dangerous and utterly scamtastic) content.
- Fake missing animal or missing people reports – this is a more insidious form of disinformation that’s currently rising in popularity. The way this works is the scammer will post a message to a ton of regional pages and groups about a missing animal, which induces just about everybody to go “awwwww” and share the post. Then when the scammer sees one going viral, they change the post to something different and very much not what you thought you were sharing. This can range from scam sales and malware links to odious political stuff like white supremacist or neo-Nazi content. Be sure you check out any information like this very carefully before sharing it; if it’s not sourced from a law enforcement agency or known journalism source, it’s probably fake and you shouldn’t touch it.
As a general rule, if you can’t find the information on a major news site or in a peer-reviewed journal article, don’t trust it until you can. Important caveat: sites like PubMed are often mistaken for reliable sources, but they’re just source aggregators and not all the journals they aggregate from are reliable. If you’re not sure, don’t share!

Bullying & Violence

Look, there’s no polite reason to say this and no reason to say it politely – if trying to intimidate people with threats is your jam, you don’t belong online at all. You’re not fit to operate in public until you grow up. Nobody’s impressed with your empty claims about how much you can bench or how many guns you own or how you’re gonna kick someone’s ass if they don’t stop posting entirely legit news stories about Donald Trump being a criminal scam artist. Frankly, I don’t expect anyone who would do this to even find this article, but if you do…stop that crap.

For people whose entire personality isn’t a giant obvious attempt to hide their cowardice and low self-esteem behind a bunch of aggression, though, there are still risks. For instance, I got a pre-emptive warning the other day for a comment I was about to make that had some wordplay on “punch” – I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something on the level of “people like this make me feel punchtastic.” In that case I was offered the chance to delete the comment before they sanctioned the account, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that, and there’s no indication it left a lasting sanction on my account because I did in fact delete the comment immediately.

A few years back, though, I had a guy not far from me tell me straight up he was going to shoot me, skin me, and eat me. I reported the comment. He wasn’t sanctioned…but when I posted a screenshot of his threat, I got banned! So just avoid that kind of language if possible, especially if it’s in any way suggestive of a threat or of inciting other people. Stuff like “burn it all down” is likely to get you banned. (There are weak spots; I ran across a neo-Nazi a few weeks ago whose bio said straight up “shoot all communists” and that seems to have escaped FB’s notice until it was reported.)

While it’s a much milder form of this kind of talk, you also want to avoid telling people to “f–k off” and things like that. You’ll get banned. Trust me. Even aggressive but not “dirty” language like “shut up and sit down” will draw a ban if you aren’t extremely artful about it.

And stop “hey-babying” in the comments. “You’re so beautiful, please send me a friend request” isn’t fooling anyone – you’re a horndog with boundary issues and that’s just not cool, in public or in private.

Sexually explicit material

There are two very broad categories here. Let’s knock out the easy one first, and this goes out to the men: nobody wants to see your penis unless they ask you to see it, and if they do don’t show it to them on Facebook even in a private message. I can’t believe I have to say that out loud, but my female friends assure me that this is still a near-daily problem. STOP IT. If someone wants to see your junk they’ll ask you to see it. If they do, don’t show it to them on Facebook.

The second category is a bit tougher, and that’s the stuff that can reasonably be described as “artistic depictions.” FB is more relaxed than some about this – if you throw a giant emoji over your crotch in a photo, you’re usually safe so long as the subject is clearly an adult. There’s been a ton of controversy over artistic depictions, and that’s softened up a bit; I’ve seen painting or statues with full frontal nudity that weren’t taken down, and pictures involving life-like prosthetic penises as well, but then others get yanked. Best to avoid. They’ve also softened up on photos of breastfeeding, which was a big controversy a few years back; these days the rule of thumb seems to be that if you can’t see a nipple or any part of the areola, you’re okay.

Note well: depictions of sex acts, no matter how “artistically” rendered, still seem to be completely off-limits even if you cover the naughty bits. Ditto any references to minors, “family relations,” or sexual violence in any context but straight reporting of news or clinical discussion of issues is likely to get you banned (although to my eternal confusion, running around calling everyone a “groomer” or “pedophile” seems to be just fine with Zuck &Co).

Privacy Violations & Over-Networking

Ever notice how people will post a screen cap of a facebook comment and edit out the name and user icon of the commenter? That’s because Facebook considers posting those, especially when you’re criticizing or making fun of the comment, as intimidation; they treat it like you’re trying to get your readers to go mob-harass the poster. To be on the safe side, if you’re going to do the thing where you screencap your trolls and post their more entertaining BS, black out their identity. Oddly this doesn’t seem to apply to original posts, only to comments and inbox messages.

Doxxing people is bannable, even if they have their information fully visible on their page. Don’t. It’s an intimidation tactic and will be sanctioned.

“Over-networking” is when you add too many friends, follow too many pages, or send too many invites or friend requests in a short period of time. This behavior is almost always driven by commercial interest – trying to grow an audience by high-volume contact-making rather than by creating quality content and

Stupid Spam Tricks & “Dirty Words”

I’ve made occasional remarks for years about the tactic of “munging” words that are problematic – “adult” language, or words like “Covid” or “vaccine.” Those people who do things like t.hi.s and or talk about “yt ppl” instead of “white people” think they’re being clever? They’re not. They’re buffoons who think they’re smart, and here’s the funny part – Facebooks algorithm won’t punish you for saying “Covid,” but if you say c.o.vi.d they absolutely will because that’s a clear sign you’re deliberately trying to avoid/trick the algo, and that’s a clear display of intent to post content you think is a violation and get away with it. That makes you a troublemaker who’s intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules, and that gets the algo’s negative attention even if you’re not actually breaking them.

You’re not gonna get banned for simply naming an identity group in discussion. You say something like “all white people are murderers,” then yeah. That’s not because you said “white people,” it’s because that’s bigoted as hell and bigotry is not allowed. Same with Black people or any other ethnic group, LBGT folks, etc. You’re not getting banned for using a neutral and inoffensive label for a group, you’re getting banned for what you say about that group, because what you said about that group was prejudiced/discriminatory/bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic. You’re not getting banned for “talking about” vaccines, you’re getting banned because what you’re saying can kill people, ya jerk. Maybe take a look at that instead of thinking you’re c.l.ev.e.r.ly f00ling the algo.

You really won’t get banned for saying the “seven dirty words” in and of themselves (the two of those words that describe actions – “cs” and “mf” – are riskier). If you feel the need to mask those words to avoid jarring your audience, just use the classic asterisk substitution for that f***ing s**t. James Fell’s entire gimmick is “sweary history,” and he doesn’t make anything. It’s not the words themselves, it’s how you use them. If you say “that Rage Against The Machine concert was f***ing awesome” they don’t care. If you say “you’re a f***ing jerk and you need to f**k off,” they will – even if you mask it, because now you’re being aggressive. I drew a thirty-day ban once for posting 8 letters and a symbol to a troll: “STFU & GTFO.” It’s the tone and intent of the words, not the words themselves, unless the words themselves are slurs. Always mask those if you’re discussing them, and never use them as slurs.

Wheaton’s Law

Nearly all of this stuff really does just come down to not being a jerk, and avoiding the risk of looking like you’re being a jerk. Nobody wants to read hate speech and swaggering threats and sexist creepiness and transphobic stupidity. There are behaviors I’ve very intentionally left out of this article that will definitely get you banned, because frankly if you’re the kind of person who does/says those kinds of things you’re a dick, you don’t need to be part of a community until you can get your act together, and I’m not going to help you avoid being treated the way your behavior and attitude clearly justify.

Facebook’s highest priority is creating a space where people feel reasonably safe, free from intimidation and aggression and bigotry, and allowed to be their authentic selves, while giving maximum possible latitude for robust discussion, even of controversial subjects. They’re not perfect by any means, and sometimes they just plain blow it, but if you’re honest with yourselves and do our genuine best to honor Wheaton’s Law, you’re probably not going to find yourself unable to participate in Facebook.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find this information useful! Please remember to share it with all your friends so they don’t get banned!
September 18, 2023
Five Bad Arguments That People Use All The Time
There’s a lot of bad argumentation on the internet, that’s no secret. More ways have been invented to insult your mother in the last ten years than ever previously existed, thanks to the social media.

You find a lot of arguments and bickering, and that too is a tired observation. What’s not so tired, though, is noting the overuse, misuse, and fallacy of some “points” that come up time and time again.

It’s time to rid ourselves of these five “arguments.” Generally speaking, they serve little to no positive purpose, except as an attempt by the person making these arguments to establish dominance in the conversation.

You don’t want to be that person.

So here’s five clichéd non-arguments that you can eliminate from your linguistic repertoire, and in so doing, you’ve done a little bit to make the world a little less stupid. Thanks for that.

(A note: attentive readers may think this article looks familiar; it’s a re-work of a piece I originally posted back in 2013.)

5. “Name calling means you lose”

Nonsense. If I think you’re a jerk and I say so, nothing has been “lost” except perhaps the comfortable, criticism free bubble in which you live.

Of course, that rebuttal is no less oversimplified than the original assertion. The reality – as so often happens – is that this is a case-by-case situation. If you think you’re making some profound political statement by referring to the president as “Barry” or always including his middle name when you talk about him, or if your discourse regularly includes words like “libtards” or “repukes,” then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t really have anything to say.

On the other hand, if you are espousing/promoting a hateful, ignorant ideology, it does not make the slightest difference to the (in)validity of that ideology if I point out that it’s hateful and ignorant. It doesn’t add validity to your ideology if I tell you that you’re a greedy, selfish asshole for promoting it. Jeffery Dahmer does not suddenly become a martyr because I say he’s a dick. This is silly schoolyard nonsense that adds nothing to the conversation except a clear statement that the person making this assertion is desperately trying to control it.

4. “You Mentioned Hitler; You Lose”

Also, with all due respect to Mike Godwin, not nearly as iron-clad a conversation stopper as people like to think. While it’s certainly true that buzzwords like “nazi,” “communist,” “socialist,” and others are often employed as ad hominem attacks with no real bearing on the subject at hand (and often a manifest ignorance as to what those words actually mean), it’s also entirely reasonable to point out when someone is making a suggestion or drawing a parallel that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazi ideology. For instance, some idiot bigot on some forum or the other that I was recently reading made a remark to the effect that homosexuals should be imprisoned and subject to any and all manner of “examination” to determine what “went wrong.” Besides the obvious logical flaw (who says anything “went wrong?”), in reality this statement reminded me strongly of Dr. Mengele’s horrific human experimentation during the Nazi years which included gross violations of the rights and dignity of thousands of gays, Jews, Roma, and even included invasive and in some cases fatal research on twins.

I made a remark mentioning Mengele, and suddenly it’s all about how I “lost.” I didn’t “lose” anything, nor was I trying to “win” anything. I was trying to draw the writer’s attention to the nature of what they were defending, and to make the larger point that this sort of passive-aggressive enabling is exactly how oppression is empowered. What enabled Mengele wasn’t some secret and obscure distortion of his psyche, although there were plenty of psychological issues there. But what allowed him to get away with it simply an extension of the same crap you hear every day: the deliberate dehumanization of various groups of people.

You see it constantly – consider how we refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” for instance. They’re not people anymore, certainly not living breathing human beings with dreams and hopes and aspirations and a rich and complex emotional life, because if they were then those of us who choose to regard them as sub-human might have to actually stop acting like assholes.

Mr. Trump, being what he is, has not only encouraged this way of thinking but given those who engage in it a false sense of social approval and acceptance, which is why it’s become so prevalent in the last three years (and it wasn’t exactly uncommon before that).

To some extent, any such grouping or pigeonholing is an exercise in the same behavior. Reducing everyone to “libtards” or “teabaggers” is rooted in the same place. This expression is pernicious and devious and nearly ubiquitous; consider how so many of these labels are used to depersonalize individuals and hold them accountable for the imagined misdeeds of their imagined co-conspirators. Consider how words like “thug,” “urban,” or “ghetto” are all commonly used euphemisms in mainstream media for “black,” particularly “poor young black men.” Consider the phrase “migrant laborer.” I promise you, even if you can’t admit it to yourself, that when you read that phrase the picture that came into your head was of a Mexican – not a “Latino,” a “Mexican.” And now when I say “This is Joe, he’s a migrant laborer,” there’s a whole set of attributes that goes with that phrase, which you have now just imparted to Joe. You even have a picture in your head, right now, of what Joe probably looks like…and you and I both know that Joe looks like a guy with dark skin, black hair, probably a little short, probably not dressed in expensive clothes, probably not driving a new car.

Joe looks like that because that’s what you’ve been trained to think a “migrant laborer” looks like. You were trained that way because someone, somewhere decided it was to their advantage that you think that way. Someone decided Joe would be a lot easier to oppress if you could be made to forget that Joe is a human being who loves his wife and kids and has insecurities and worry and gastrointestinal distress and runny noses and enjoys a good joke. If you can forget about Joe and just deal with “migrant laborer,” then Joe isn’t a fellow human anymore; he’s a usurper and a thief driving around the country in a low-rider with 85 of his cousins in the trunk. Rather than a person, he’s a racist stereotype.

This behavior wasn’t invented by Mengele; he just used it as an excuse to go a couple of horrific steps further. After all, these are “not really people,” so there’s no ethical qualms about experimenting on them, right? See also: The Tuskeegee Experiments, Calmette-Guerin (experimental testing of a TB vaccine on infants of First Nations tribes in Canada, which actually happened prior to Mengele’s ascension in the Nazi party), or the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, among many others. (The latest, this Florida man who didn’t understand why he was being arrested for killing a guy who came to his door, telling police he didn’t see what the problem was because he’d “only shot a n—-r.” See? Not a person anymore – an archetype, a symbol, an icon, a representative member of a predefined sub-human class.)

While it’s important to avoid casual comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s also important to remember that one of the biggest things which allowed the Holocaust to happen is that people by and large refused to call out oppressive actions and attitudes. One of the ways this was enabled was by depersonalizing the victims. They are “only Jews,” they are “only homosexuals,” they are “only midgets,” they are “only twins,” they are “only gypsies (Romani),” they are “only [anything but Aryan],” so why should the ethics which apply to human experimentation, apply to these groups which are obviously not human? VERY dangerous road to toddle down, it’s a slippery slope from step one.

3. You’re Intolerant Because You Dislike My Intolerance, Therefore You Lose

Another classic bit of nonsense from the peanut gallery. My refusal to put up with you being a stupid bigot does not mean I’m “intolerant,” it means I refuse to put up with stupid bigots. I also refuse to put up with axe murderers, but that doesn’t make me “intolerant.” It makes me somewhat less likely to fall victim to an axe murderer.

This is a favorite refuge of stupid bigots who are desperately clinging to the idea that their stupid bigotry is not actively, visibly dying out in our lifetimes; that being a bigot is still something people can do and expect to live without consequences for it.

You can try all you want to pretend that’s the same thing as “refusing to put up with blacks” or “refusing to put up with homosexuals” or whatever your thing is, but in the end this line of argument leaves out two things:
1. You choose to be a bigoted prick. You weren’t born that way. For any adult to behave or believe in such a manner, as an adult or even a reasonably intelligent older child you have to make a decision to ignore all of the facts and logic and reason which clearly suggest that bigotry is stupid.
2. Nobody is hurting you by being gay or black or whatever.
As my friend Pope Snarky pointed out so succinctly, tolerating intolerance is not itself an act of tolerance; it is an act of passive-aggressive intolerance. It’s the behavior of the bigot who has enough ego to worry that being a bigot will have negative social repercussions, but not enough actual character to stop being a bigot. So, with their hands “tied” by public perception, they have to sit back and live vicariously through the stupid bigots who are ridiculous and delusional enough to think that their behavior is acceptable anywhere outside of their circle of bigoted friends.

2. I Don’t Like The Source, Therefore The Information Is Wrong, Therefore You Lose

I’ve burned myself on this one several times. A few years ago, one of those half-ass “liberal” “news” sites ran an article about the gathering of several fairly unhinged individuals to basically take over a small Pennsylvania town where a very unhinged individual – who happens to be the Chief of Police – was faced with a 30-day suspension for being a stupid douchebag. Instead of taking it like a person of honor and maybe even getting the hint that his cro-magnon chest-thumping is not appropriate or acceptable behavior for a nine year old child (let alone for a man charged with the duty of protecting a small town), he doubled down and did even stupider, more insane things until he got his ass fired.

My mistake was that I initially blew the story off because I knew the source was garbage clickbait that tended to lie a lot in their headlines.

Turns out that, aside from the predictably salacious, hysterical headline, the clickbaiters had the gist of the story right – that a bunch of yobbos with guns had shown up in this small Pennsylvania town for the express purpose of terrorizing both citizens and local government into backing down.

I blew it, because I looked at the source first.

This isn’t to say that you should believe everything you read. It’s not to say that when someone quotes a “News of the World” or “New York Post” or “Washington Times” article that you should assume that person is well-informed about media quality or that the story itself isn’t either made up from whole cloth or grossly distorted from one core fact.

However, if I’d taken a second to check the story out I would have seen that (as usual) this particular site was just rehashing reports from actual news organizations, and saved myself the embarrassment of having to publicly admit that I blew it. So before you jump to point out that this paper or that one is junk, remember this one key reality:

The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards’ affair.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that I should stop thinking of “breaking news” in the context of many sites as more like “broken news,” but it does mean that I should check out legitimate information sources before assuming that any story – even a Fox News Exclusive – is entirely wrong.

1. Taking Offense At My Offensiveness Is Violating My Rights!

There’s a little aphorism that floats around in various forms and guises, which basically says that if I’m offended about something, then it’s my choice to be offended and what I’m really doing is acting like a cheap bully that’s trying to control the conversation.

So next time someone claims that you’re some kind of terrible person for being offended at their racial or gender or sexuality stereotypes, and you ought to stop being a bully and trying to tell them what they can and cannot say, just find an offensive joke that you know they’ll take personally and for them to get offended…and then use their own argument against them. “What, now you’re going to try to tell me what I can and can’t say? How dare you! What are you, some kind of nanny-state liberal treehugger who wants to tell me what I’m allowed to think is funny? You’re just choosing to be offended because you want to dictate what I can and cannot say, it’s not me that’s offensive, it’s that you are choosing to take offense so you can bully me into silence.”

If they can’t figure out that their reasoning is entirely invalid after that, you’re either dealing with a complete idiot, or with a troll who doesn’t actually care about making a meritorious argument. In either case, they can safely be dismissed and you need no longer waste time trying to have an intelligent conversation with them.

Bonus Round: You Lose!

This, the careful reader will note, is the common fallacy to all of these arguments. The phrase “you lose” and the attitude that lies beneath it are clear indicators that the person making the argument isn’t really trying to engage in a discussion at all; they’re trying to engage in a competition. They don’t want to learn, they want to “win,” which is of course entirely pointless in any genuine exchange of ideas. If you’re getting involved in a discussion to “win” something, you’re turning it into a battle, instead of a conversation. The only way to truly win that game is to not play it in the first place.
June 16, 2020
The John Henry Show S1E021 – Free-For-All Friday #4

Usually on FFAF I try to stay away from the political and social stuff and stick to more personal, light-hearted, and not-the-news stuff, but this week there’s just no avoiding the discussion. I’m afraid I got a little passionate on this one, so there’s more NSFW language than usual; I’ve taken the step of self-censoring to avoid dropping any f-bombs on you if you’re listening with the kids around. Video archive at https://youtu.be/R4rYgAJNW0Y

March 14, 2020
Doublespeak
Say One Thing, Mean Another

This started out being a “classic” repost and by the time I got done fixing the twenty-year-old writing, it was a new article. The original article has been reposted as originally written in late 2001/2002, at this link. Doublespeak (2001)

Doublespeak is the art and subterfuge of using language to misdirect, misinform, or flat-out lie. It often involves logical fallacy, intentional appeals to emotion over fact, and other crimes against critical thought. It can take the form of euphemism, “soft” language, the use of words and phrasing that have a high emotional valence but low informational content to appeal to the baser instincts rather than the intellect.

As a huge fan of artists like George Carlin and Bill Hicks, the use of language and euphemism is simultaneously fascinating, horrifying, and hilarious to me. The contortions people will go through to avoid acknowledging a simple reality are just insane.

A great example of this came up in my personal life while this article was in draft: apparently it’s now fashionable to refer to yourself as “sober” if you’ve used “hard” (physically addictive) drugs in the past (e.g. opioids, amphetamines and methamphetamines, cocaine) but now you only smoke pot.

This is, of course, absolutely silly; a self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, and disingenuous word game played by addicts (and I am one so please spare me the complaints about your value judgements relating to that word) so they can pretend their addiction is somehow “different” from the addiction that has social stigma attached. You’re not sober if you’re high – that’s not even an observation, it’s a tautology. No amount of self-serving wordplay will change that – and in the context of addiction, it’s potentially fatal bit of self-deceit, due to the nature of addiction and what it does to the thought processes of the addict.

This underscores just one of the reasons doublespeak is so insidious and harmful; it helps people maintain self-destructive lies. What amazes me is people craft these excuses for their spin and jive, and they’re all self-serving bovine excrement. “I don’t want to be stigmatized as an addict; so I just stigmatize everyone else who’s an addict and then reject that label for myself because I’m better than those people I’m unfairly stigmatizing in the very process of complaining about being unfairly stigmatized.” And we’ve become so corrupted in our thinking that people don’t even hear themselves when they say this stuff.

Fundamental Dishonesty

Doublespeak is destructive in that it is essentially dishonest. It can be, and often has been, used as a tool of manipulation by governments and other leaders and officials to attempt to avoid consequences of egregiously terrible actions by making them sound less terrible. It is this particular aspect of doublespeak that will consume most of the rest of this article.

Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards. They describe the award as “an ironic tribute to public speakers who have perpetuated language that is grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-centered.”

Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, both from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional material provided by the NCTE website.

Without further ado, I present you with some shining examples of doublespeak.

President George Herbert Walker Bush – When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.” Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.” He “deployed forces.” He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.” Never once did we “invade.”

During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.” After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”

In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.

After the first US-Iraq War in 1990 (as Bill Hicks pointed out so eloquently, even referring to this event as a “war” is an exercise in doublespeak), Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.” Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

President George W. Bush – Ol’ Gee Dubya’s presence on the awards list should come as no surprise. Indeed, I predicted it in the original (2002) version of this article:

Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly. Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.

Bush II ended up winning twice by himself, and once with his entire cabinet. Among the linguistic felonies NCTE selected:
- In 2003, NCTE’s award centered around the heavy euphemism employed in the search for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction (which, at the time of this writing 17 years later, still haven’t been found). Use of phrasing like “a growing fleet of…aerial vehicles” and the assertion that “Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised” were complete fabrications, with these and many others intended to suggest that we actually knew the weapons were there but hadn’t found them yet, when the functional reality was that all we knew is that we had sold Iraq various materiel that could be used to create weapons, but never had any evidence they had done so.
  - I will bolster NCTE’s award citation by pointing out that one of the most egregious uses of doublespeak in the contest of the second Iraq War was Bush II’s repeated reference to Saddam Hussein “gassing his own people,” “a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people,” and so forth, but never once mentioned that not only did we sell them all of the gear and intelligence they used for those attacks, it was Bush’s own Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, who demanded Iraq be removed from the State Department’s list of terror sponsoring nations so we could sell that materiel to them, back in 1983 when he was acting as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Ronald Reagan.
  - Worth noting: to this day, most people either don’t know that we sold Hussein “dual-use material” including anthrax, botulism, tetanus, and c. perfringens, or they think it’s a wild-eyed conspiracy theory in spite of the reality that everything we know about it comes directly from US Senate Committee reports.
- Bush’s 2006 award was given in recognition of his September 15, 2005 speech regarding Hurricane Katrina, in which he made lovely, flowery remarks about poverty and racial discrimination and how we needed to ‘confront this poverty” and “rise above the legacy of inequality…” a week after he signed an executive order allowing federal contractors rebuilding from Katrina to pay less than the prevailing wage, suspending a sixty-four year old law to do it.
But wait, there’s more!

More Examples

I don’t want to get into the underhanded and dishonest game of simply re-writing press releases and calling it original work; you can view the historical list of winners of the Doublespeak Award at the NCTE website.

There are, of course, plenty of examples that haven’t won awards.

President Bill Clinton – Many readers here should be able to remember Clinton’s most egregious assaults on critical thinking fairly well. His most famous, of course, came during the Lewisnki scandal, during which Clinton (and his wife, Hillary) engaged in some of the most comical linguistic calisthenics ever recorded. Clinton’s initial position was that he was entirely innocent of wrongdoing, going so far as to say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski” during a press briefing prior to the 1998 State of the Union address. It subsequently came to light, however, that Clinton was deliberately misleading. He later testified that his intent was to use the definition of “sexual relations” laid out in the investigation documents, which were worded in such a way that, by the letter of the given definition, simply receiving oral sex was not “sexual relations” because Clinton didn’t touch any sexual part of Lewinski’s body, and the definition given during the impeachment investigation required that touch to qualify as “sexual relations.”

Several months later, Clinton finally admitted that “we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” but this was only after a series of grammatical distortions that confounds description. Aside from the core deceit, other “highlights” of this episode include Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring…” interview, and the infamous exchange described in the Starr Report where Clinton’s prevaricative response to a question about whether a lie had been told went as follows:

QUESTION: “Your—that statement is a completely false statement. Whether or not Mr. Bennett knew of your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form with President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?”

CLINTON: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word is means. If is means is, and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means, there is none, that was a completely true statement.

No matter your definition of “is,” it’s safe to say that the above is a prime example of doublespeak.

President Jimmy Carter – In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.” Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.” Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction. He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.” In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.

Lest we think this is only about Presidents, let us turn our attention to the Judicial Branch and the 1991 US Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

In 1991’s case of Harmelin v. Michigan, the Supremes heard a case in which the defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.

The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is. Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”

The court also offered an early preview of the current kerfluffle at the southern US border and the endless game-playing about refugees seeking asylum.

In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.” In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, was attacked by masked guerrillas wielding automatic weapons in his home. The guerrillas demanded that Elias-Zacarias fight with them against the Guatemalan government.

Rather than fight, Zacarias fled to the US to seek political asylum, but was denied. He appealed, and eventually the case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerrillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.” Justice Scalia never got around to explaining how refusing to fight with rebel guerrillas against his government isn’t a political opinion.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.” Read that again: state-sanctioned killing of human beings is “our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Yep.

Pages: 1 2
February 11, 2020