When the end result is the same, the perpetrator hardly matters.

Oh right the point was that Winston was wrong and newspeak and twisting the truth was actually good.

Took one post to go from "it doesn't exist" to "yeah it does exist and it's good".

Yeah, this isn't exactly Orwellianism, and it's not like professional writing isn't constrained and somewhat confusing to begin with. If they want to try have codified ways to not make Twitter mad, why not.

Something occurs to me when reading most comments. The main concern in my opinion isn't voiced (or I missed it).

Changing old books to match todays standard of correctness means we yearn for a world where ideas are shown to exist and be present far earlier... which means we will show some of today's struggle as "old news" or "already addressed". Changing a book for instance to make it more acceteptive toward LGBT+ means that the issues they faced wasn't that broad and evident.

We should keep older books as they are BECAUSE they can be insensitive. It also should shock us to read some parts, some can be boycotted, but in no way should we change a discourse to match other standards.

I was literally having this conversation with my wife at dinner tonight.

It's becoming double plus ungood.

She provided some really good examples and all I could think of is how tech filters are causing people to use words like "unalive". Seriously, we're building the future dystopians that were written as fiction (and warnings) decades ago.

Internalized misogyny is honestly the most hilarious concept of modern times. Not only are men responsible for all the woes of the world, anytime a woman does something wrong it's only because they have been brainwashed by men. Zero agency.

I think the issue isn't language policing in itself, but more that we don't do anything but that. Black-white wealth gap hasn't improved since the 60s, but we have phased out most slurs, at least in polite conversation, and we have better representation in movies and whatnot. Language should be a stepping stone to real change, not the goal in itself.

Welcome to corporate, we are all office everywhere now

According to the etymology at ttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill Steven Pinker coined the term in 1994. With my emphasis

>1994 April 5, Steven Pinker, “The Game of the Name”, in The New York Times‎[1], ISSN 0362-4331, page A21:
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The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name. (We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when names for minorities stay put.)

Good, one!

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Oh, it is absolutely toxic positivity to ban all words that may possibly be construed as hurtful, mean, ugly, or uncharitable in any way regardless of how important they are/were to the telling of our history and most important stories. And controlling the language of literature, social media, news media publications, live broadcasts, entertainment, and especially textbooks is blatantly ridiculous. There is a misplaced desire in many people to make some kind of self-serving statement to underline the fact that they are a "good" person and a kind person, above all other things. To feed a need for a sort of sham moral superiority. A need to not have any single person or animal ever suffer regardless of the overall realistic picture or natural progression of events in the world. The overwhelmingly naïve point of view that erasure of "mean" language can change the world for the better is inane, childish, unintelligent, moronic, and potentially quite destructive. This behavior IS toxic, and I see it everywhere. For example, I may criticize a post on a food presentation, or a room redesign, or a sewing project, or a video production, posted on reddit subs that are pretty much invitations for honest critique. And I am not ugly or mean, just honest. I get hit like a tornado for being "mean" and "negative." People tell me I should just move on if I don't like something, saying that something less than blind positivity is unwelcome. I will not live like that, nor accept that behavior without a counter-stance.

Except amongst the leftist intelligentsia who insist that it be used and if you don’t you are a racist and sexist and probably a neo-Nazi.

This is so perfectly phrased, especially 3-4. I’ve thought the same thing.

Could you explain why you would call this toxic positivity? It’s not a concretely defined term so obviously it might just be that we have different ideas of the term but I wouldn’t really classify this kind of censorship as toxic positivity so I’m genuinely curious why you would.

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I wrote as much in three essays five years ago but not a single person I shared them with agreed with me. Goes to show how unaware we are of our real reasons for holding the opinions which we have.

Yea, it's been a very long time since I've last re-read them. The slam poem "an angry letter to JK Rowling from Cho Chang" is my primary source for the critique. Which, maybe in Harry Potter is passable but looking at it from the perspective of western writers writing Asian characters is a bit different.

I also think in the grand scheme of her digging her heels into transphobia and aligning herself with right-wingers to that end, who generally are very racist, it's hard to uncouple.

But I agree, it's certainly good food for thought!

An interesting avenue to explore, for sure.

On the one hand: narratively, Cho serves primarily an avenue to create a complex romantic entanglement for Harry. In Book 4, her being involved with someone objectively pretty great forces Harry to contend with unfair, jealous dislike of a decent guy; in Book 5, the fallout and trauma that his death inflicts on her creates a wrinkle that put an ironic twist on things. None of this narrative purpose leans even a little bit on Cho being Asian, and the narrative never plays up her being so (her physical description is exclusively in realm of "black hair" and "freckles" and - especially - "good looking"). Indeed, Cho could be any other race, save for her name - a trend that extends to all of the few PoC (Patil twins) in the books. This lack of leaning into racial caricature when it comes to other PoC could lead one to giving her the benefit of the doubt: Cho being Asian is incidental to her role in the narrative and therefore any associations with "Pining Oriental Beauty" are unfortunate coincidence born (as so many in the books and especially their expanded universe are) of ignorance of those tropes in the first place. Rowling is many things, but she's rarely (never?) been actively racist, even in terms of narrative stereotype; I don't think it's unbelievable that she just didn't think of the optics.

On the other hand, given the rather distinct lack of PoC in the books at all (IIRC, the only other explicit ones *are the Patil twins*, and I think also a minor Slytherin?), one could argue that Cho being even passively Asian is enough to raise eyebrows. Why is this character, of all of them, explicitly PoC? Maybe balanced out by the totally benign Patils, but food for thought, nonetheless.

Since this is the Atlantic, a periodical whose editorial writing has largely devolved to a that of a youtube comment thread with better punctuation, I’m just going to guess they are complaining about political correctness and the typical whiny cancel culture faux-victimhood.

And I’m gonna further guess they’re ignoring or downplaying that Connecticut is literally trying to ban the word Latinx.

There is close to zero acceptance of Latinx

To nullify the classist effects you would have to let people speak the way they want to and then we are back to square one.

You said orgs, I asked orgs. You said Reddit.

You are complaining that subreddits that have moderation ban certain words. Subs have mods who moderate/create/curate a sub which you accept to follow when you join. If you wanna say the N word so badly and not be censored, go to 4chan or something