Words Fail: Woke World Demands A Re-Write
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare
For those keeping score, the 1960 Olympics have fallen victim to Woke revisionism. The Winter Games held in Squaw Valley, California, are known to be known as the Winter Games held in Palisades Tahoe, California.
Why? Because neurotic white Wokesters who take it upon themselves to feel guilt for people they’ve never met nor wish to have as neighbours see squaw as a vile remnant of their settler past that needs expunging. Like Washington Redskins or Edmonton Eskimos, names that never produced a shiver of dread from the vast majority of native people, Squaw Valley is now a burnt ember of racism.
Why would the cosseted upper class even bother with such esoteric stuff? Don’t they have better things to do? Most average people are baffled by this scouring of language and pulverizing of pronouns. They just shrug and hope it’s all part of a virtuous urge among bureaucrats/ scientists that will pass in time. Don’t count on it.
Last week the U.S. Centre for Disease Control— the people largely responsible for the utter chaos in viral healthcare— took time from its pressing labours to offer Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities. Because, when you think immunity and vaccine, the first thing that comes to mind is “Language in communication products should reflect and speak to the needs of people in the audience of focus.”
For example. “Instead of this…
Inmate
Prisoner
Convict/ex-convict
Offender
Criminal
Parolee
Detainee
Try this…
People/persons who are incarcerated or detained (often used for shorter jail stays or youth in detention facilities)
Partner/child of an incarcerated person
Persons in pre-trial or with charge
People who were formerly incarcerated
Persons on parole or probation
Non-US citizens (or immigrants) in immigration detention facilities
People in immigration detention facilities
Got that? Then there’s:
Drug-users/addicts/drug abusers
Alcoholics/abusers
Persons taking/prescribed medication assisted treatment (MAT)
Persons who relapsed
Smokers
Try this…
Persons who use drugs/people who inject drugs
Persons with substance use disorder
Persons with alcohol use disorder
Persons in recovery from substance use/alcohol disorder
Persons taking/prescribed medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD)
Persons who returned to use
People who smoke
As Orwell noted, one of the first things totalitarians do to gain control is to pervert language till it is unrecognizable to the average person. Like a devalued currency a devalued language signifies nothing. Hence, “Freedom is slavery. War is Peace. etc.” Before long people give up on trying to express truth and submit to the etymological tyranny.
It is the same with the historical record. When one wishes to control the present you distort the past. As John Daniel Davidson observed in National Review when writing about the toppling of U.S. Confederate statues and symbols,
“For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we’ve seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future.
That’s why Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.”
So it has become in Canada, now, with the defenestration of traditional Canadian history in orgiastic destructions of landmarks. It has been percolating for some time. Even as the Soviet Bloc crumbled in 1991, neo-Marxists were invading the provincial school systems to obliterate the traditional narratives taught to children about their history.
Identity politics and grievance narratives replaced the accepted script of Canada’s history and values. So founders of the nation such as John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson and Henry Dundas were suddenly demons, purged in the revision. In the words of Shakespeare, the good they did in creating a democratic pluralist society was forgotten. Their bones were rattled for sins against 21st-century grievance groups such as BLM, indigenous radicals and gender fanatics.
Having captured education these hipper-than-thous moved on to subdue the culture industry, the government and, most recently, the corporate world. These same revisionists still give a pass to their feminist and socialist idols, however. The eugenics practiced by early suffragettes such as The Famous Five and the Democrats harbouring of the KKK for a century mysteriously disappear in the movement to expunge contrary messaging.
Crucially they have flipped MLK’s script on equality. Led by Barack Obama, they no longer speak of equality of opportunity. That ship has sailed. Now their pole star is equality of outcome, the destruction of market capitalism and the supremacy of the state in deciding who gets what. Under the new Marxists merit-based promotion is racist; only equal sharing of benefits works.
But it’s easy for them to believe this. As conservative critic Ben Shapiro notes, “The most ardent Marxists in America are all celebrity-class beneficiaries of the vast wealth generated by American capitalism, and its most ardent opponents are all refugees from communist hellholes. Marxism is a privilege of the rich who never have to experience it.”
As we wrote in our last column, nowhere is the need to reinvent language and history more important than in the climate change hustle. The climate past is a messy business, so the breathless greenies have spent much of the past generation tidying up the temperature records to get them in line with the conclusion that the globe is about to be incinerated.
The 10-year legal battle between writer Mark Steyn and researcher Michael Mann over the fictitious “hockey stick graph” of temperatures from the past thousand years is a perfect example of how strenuously the academics behind climate Armegeddon will fight to amend the past. There is still no indication when the case will be settled in DC court.
One thing is certain. A re-election of the Trudeau government with the NDP in the side car will only hasten more whitewashing of the past in service of a Great Reset of the world economy. Words fail.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Identity politics and grievance narratives replaced the accepted script of Canada’s history and values. So founders of the nation such as John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson and Henry Dundas were suddenly demons, purged in the revision. In the words of Shakespeare, the good they did in creating a democratic pluralist society was forgotten. Their bones were rattled for sins against 21st-century grievance groups such as BLM, indigenous radicals and gender fanatics.
Having captured education these hipper-than-thous moved on to subdue the culture industry, the government and, most recently, the corporate world. These same revisionists still give a pass to their feminist and socialist idols, however. The eugenics practiced by early suffragettes such as The Famous Five and the Democrats harbouring of the KKK for a century mysteriously disappear in the movement to expunge contrary messaging.
Crucially they have flipped MLK’s script on equality. Led by Barack Obama, they no longer speak of equality of opportunity. That ship has sailed. Now their pole star is equality of outcome, the destruction of market capitalism and the supremacy of the state in deciding who gets what. Under the new Marxists merit-based promotion is racist; only equal sharing of benefits works.
But it’s easy for them to believe this. As conservative critic Ben Shapiro notes, “The most ardent Marxists in America are all celebrity-class beneficiaries of the vast wealth generated by American capitalism, and its most ardent opponents are all refugees from communist hellholes. Marxism is a privilege of the rich who never have to experience it.”
As we wrote in our last column, nowhere is the need to reinvent language and history more important than in the climate change hustle. The climate past is a messy business, so the breathless greenies have spent much of the past generation tidying up the temperature records to get them in line with the conclusion that the globe is about to be incinerated.
The 10-year legal battle between writer Mark Steyn and researcher Michael Mann over the fictitious “hockey stick graph” of temperatures from the past thousand years is a perfect example of how strenuously the academics behind climate Armegeddon will fight to amend the past. There is still no indication when the case will be settled.
One thing is certain. A re-election of the Trudeau government with the NDP in the side car will only hasten more whitewashing of the past in service of a Great Reset of the world economy. Words fail.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Having captured education these hipper-than-thous moved on to subdue the culture industry, the government and, most recently, the corporate world. These same revisionists still give a pass to their feminist and socialist idols, however. The eugenics practiced by early suffragettes such as The Famous Five and the Democrats harbouring of the KKK for a century mysteriously disappear in the movement to expunge contrary messaging.
Crucially they have flipped MLK’s script on equality. Led by Barack Obama, they no longer speak of equality of opportunity. That ship has sailed. Now their pole star is equality of outcome, the destruction of market capitalism and the supremacy of the state in deciding who gets what. Under the new Marxists merit-based promotion is racist; only equal sharing of benefits works.
But it’s easy for them to believe this. As conservative critic Ben Shapiro notes, “The most ardent Marxists in America are all celebrity-class beneficiaries of the vast wealth generated by American capitalism, and its most ardent opponents are all refugees from communist hellholes. Marxism is a privilege of the rich who never have to experience it.”
As we wrote in our last column, nowhere is the need to reinvent language and history more important than in the climate change hustle. The climate past is a messy business, so the breathless greenies have spent much of the past generation tidying up the temperature records to get them in line with the conclusion that the globe is about to be incinerated.
The 10-year legal battle between writer Mark Steyn and researcher Michael Mann over the fictitious “hockey stick graph” of temperatures from the past thousand years is a perfect example of how strenuously the academics behind climate Armegeddon will fight to amend the past. There is still no indication when the case will be settled.
One thing is certain. A re-election of the Trudeau government with the NDP in the side car will only hasten more whitewashing of the past in service of a Great Reset of the world economy. Words fail.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
So it has become in Canada, now, with the defenestration of traditional Canadian history in orgiastic destructions of landmarks. It has been percolating for some time. Even as the Soviet Bloc crumbled in 1991, neo-Marxists were invading the provincial school systems to obliterate the traditional narratives taught to children about their history.
Identity politics and grievance narratives replaced the accepted script of Canada’s history and values. So founders of the nation such as John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson and Henry Dundas were suddenly demons, purged in the revision. In the words of Shakespeare, the good they did in creating a democratic pluralist society was forgotten. Their bones were rattled for sins against 21st-century grievance groups such as BLM, indigenous radicals and gender fanatics.
Having captured education these hipper-than-thous moved on to subdue the culture industry, the government and, most recently, the corporate world. These same revisionists still give a pass to their feminist and socialist idols, however. The eugenics practiced by early suffragettes such as The Famous Five and the Democrats harbouring of the KKK for a century mysteriously disappear in the movement to expunge contrary messaging.
Crucially they have flipped MLK’s script on equality. Led by Barack Obama, they no longer speak of equality of opportunity. That ship has sailed. Now their pole star is equality of outcome, the destruction of market capitalism and the supremacy of the state in deciding who gets what. Under the new Marxists merit-based promotion is racist; only equal sharing of benefits works.
But it’s easy for them to believe this. As conservative critic Ben Shapiro notes, “The most ardent Marxists in America are all celebrity-class beneficiaries of the vast wealth generated by American capitalism, and its most ardent opponents are all refugees from communist hellholes. Marxism is a privilege of the rich who never have to experience it.”
As we wrote in our last column, nowhere is the need to reinvent language and history more important than in the climate change hustle. The climate past is a messy business, so the breathless greenies have spent much of the past generation tidying up the temperature records to get them in line with the conclusion that the globe is about to be incinerated.
The 10-year legal battle between writer Mark Steyn and researcher Michael Mann over the fictitious “hockey stick graph” of temperatures from the past thousand years is a perfect example of how strenuously the academics behind climate Armegeddon will fight to amend the past. There is still no indication when the case will be settled.
One thing is certain. A re-election of the Trudeau government with the NDP in the side car will only hasten more whitewashing of the past in service of a Great Reset of the world economy. Words fail.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Having captured education these hipper-than-thous moved on to subdue the culture industry, the government and, most recently, the corporate world. These same revisionists still give a pass to their feminist and socialist idols, however. The eugenics practiced by early suffragettes such as The Famous Five and the Democrats harbouring of the KKK for a century mysteriously disappear in the movement to expunge contrary messaging.
Crucially they have flipped MLK’s script on equality. Led by Barack Obama, they no longer speak of equality of opportunity. That ship has sailed. Now their pole star is equality of outcome, the destruction of market capitalism and the supremacy of the state in deciding who gets what. Under the new Marxists merit-based promotion is racist; only equal sharing of benefits works.
But it’s easy for them to believe this. As conservative critic Ben Shapiro notes, “The most ardent Marxists in America are all celebrity-class beneficiaries of the vast wealth generated by American capitalism, and its most ardent opponents are all refugees from communist hellholes. Marxism is a privilege of the rich who never have to experience it.”
As we wrote in our last column, nowhere is the need to reinvent language and history more important than in the climate change hustle. The climate past is a messy business, so the breathless greenies have spent much of the past generation tidying up the temperature records to get them in line with the conclusion that the globe is about to be incinerated.
The 10-year legal battle between writer Mark Steyn and researcher Michael Mann over the fictitious “hockey stick graph” of temperatures from the past thousand years is a perfect example of how strenuously the academics behind climate Armegeddon will fight to amend the past. There is still no indication when the case will be settled.
One thing is certain. A re-election of the Trudeau government with the NDP in the side car will only hasten more whitewashing of the past in service of a Great Reset of the world economy. Words fail.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx