Daily Archives: 1 September 2021

Thought Police

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They’re metastasizing into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a guide to “inclusive language” in order to promote “health equity” and “inclusive communication.”

For instance, their “Corrections & Detentions” section “suggests”

replacing terms such as “Inmate,” “Prisoner,” “Convict/ex-convict,” and “Criminal” with terms such as “People/persons,” “Persons in pre-trial or with charge,” “Persons on parole or probation,” or “People in immigration detention facilities.”

The problem with euphemisms, though, is that they mean precisely the same as the word they’re intended to replace. Persons on parole or probation still are criminals. That’s the status of folks on parole or probation—they’re still criminals, felons, until they complete their sentences. People in immigration detention facilities remain illegal aliens—that’s why they’re being detained.

The substitutes may soften the language in a misguided attempt to disguise or obfuscate the facts, but that’s only a temporary condition, and the frankness of the underlying meaning ultimately (and quickly) comes through. That’s why there’s a constant search for euphemisms.

The problem with government agents—the men and women who populate government agencies—being the ones pushing for euphemisms is that their push becomes mandates, and government mandates are nothing more than restrictions on free speech, limits on one of our most basic individual liberties. When government agents presume to dictate how we must term concepts, they’re dictating how we must think about them.

Even the worthies in government know that. Which is maybe why they’re making their push.

Escalating

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First (well, almost first, but the early large), President Joe Biden (D) surrendered in Afghanistan, and he did it so abjectly that he abandoned Americans (he was correct when he said through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, that he wasn’t merely “stranding” them), allies’ citizens, and Afghan partners in his desperation to meet the terrorist Taliban’s deadline.

Then Baby Kim has resumed northern Korea’s weapons grade plutonium-producing nuclear reactor—and not even troubling to conceal that effort.

Now this.

In a move that could have ramifications for the free passage of both military and commercial vessels in the South China Sea, [People’s Republic of China] authorities said on Sunday they will require a range of vessels “to report their information” when passing through what China sees as its “territorial waters,” starting from September 1.

And

[The PRC] claims under a so-called “nine dash line” on its maps most of the South China Sea’s waters, which are disputed by several other countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

And by Japan and most of the rest of the world, including—used to be, anyway—the United States.

It’ll be instructive to see how the Biden/Harris administration responds to this demonstration of contempt for their timid fecklessness. Compare their response, then, with the prior administration’s reaction to the PRC government’s declaration of an ADIZ that encompassed significant swaths of the South and East China Seas airspaces and tried to require all air traffic to check in with the PRC. (Spoiler: that administration ignored the PRC’s demand, and so did most of the rest of the world.)

It’s shaping up to be a disastrous period of American headlong retreat under this Progressive-Democrat administration.