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Comment by hoopd | Hacker News Reader

I can't read enough of the first link to comment, the second one makes me think "you said what to your students??" But then again, that was 1995 and cases like that are part of how language like that became unofficially outlawed, not just for teachers but for everybody.

When a principal gets fired for calmly saying he agrees with Interpretation A of events it's clear that he's being fired for having the wrong belief system. The fear is we're not just removing words from our lexicon but attempting to eradicate entire belief systems. The problem with that is who gets to decide what the right belief system is?

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Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs).

In the 1800s, you could talk in public straight-up about how black people are naturally suited to not having the rights to life, liberty, and property. That belief system is all but gone today. And that does not strike me as a great loss. Historically, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice: I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.

>Er, as I understand it, the reason to remove racial slurs from our lexicon is not because the words are bad in themselves, that the phonemes are opprobrious, but because we're attempting to eradicate the belief systems implied by those words (or at least disempower those who hold those beliefs).

This is true, but why is it just for a majority to censor belief systems out of existence. Your example is obviously extreme, but what about something like censoring a religion out of existence?

>I have not really found belief systems in history that are unspeakable today that I think would actually be cool.

Do you not think that would be a natural side effect of the people in charge of censoring things also applying their censorship powers to history?

Take communism for example. It is quite conceivable that people hating the general idea will heavily conflate the idea with the poor implementations when writing history. Then people studying it in the future will wonder why anyone in their right mind would have ever wanted anything to do with communism.

This should be getting much harder with the Internet and the easy storage of information, but it's likely to have been quite prolific throughout history. Especially when governments wanted to make sure a belief system that was a threat to its existence never rose up again.

So, the arc of history seems to have been bending towards justice because that's the way the arc of history was intended to be written.

I dunno. As a schoolchild in a conservative region of the Southern US just after the end of the Cold War, I distinctly remember thinking that communism was actually a pretty cool idea, and just had some bad implementors. There are real people in the hacker community who advocate the restoration of the monarchy, the elimination of democracy, and the return of certain races to slavery, which naturally suits them. In Christian theological discourse, it's not uncommon to see people accuse certain liberal theologians of first-millennium heresies. Unless there are other actually unspeakable things that were popular in the past, I don't think there's any evidence that we're writing ideas out of existence, just exerting social pressure to keep known-bad ideas from being retried again without learning the lessons of history. This (naturally) involves knowing what those ideas are.

Basically, given empirical evidence that a certain approach is actually having good effects for the world, and a complete lack of empirical evidence that it's having bad effects of the world, I think it's somewhat misplaced to worry about potential bad effects, unless we can come up with a way to maintain the good effects.

I agree that the point of removing words is to change the way people think. (Orwell once wrote a popular book on the topic.)

It takes some pointed questioning to get people to go from "we're banning words" to "we're banning racism" and finally to "we're banning thoughts that we don't like." The last statement is where the problem becomes evident. We give our government the right to kill but in theory they don't have the power to act against a religion, group or philosophy. On the other hand we have this nebulous, almost rogue entity we let wield this power and somehow it's almost beyond critique.

I agree there are situations where giving a group the power to shape discourse and language might be a reasonable thing to do. I don't believe in giving a group that power and letting them use it to make questioning or critiquing themselves impossible. That's exactly what the social justice movement's doing when anybody who disagrees with them is cast as sexist, racist, bigot, ignorant, etc.

As hueving notes, history is written by the winners. Even Howard Zinn spoke of how hopelessly biased history will always be. He who controls the past controls the future, and all that. Part of why I don't like the social justice movement is I think their version of history is self-serving to the point of being inaccurate.

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