Jan 23, 2007

homage to Orwellonia

Now that "framing" and "bullshit" and "truthiness" are part of the lexicon, here comes "unspeak," the latest Orwell homage ripoff. Enter Steven Poole, as described by Slate's Jack Shafer:
He assails the Tories in England who spoke of "bogus asylum seekers" because the phrase destroys any presumption of sincerity, and served as code for "simple racism." When governments speak of a tragedy, they imply that the bloody results of their work were unforeseen—as if visited upon man by the gods—and nobody can be blamed. Surgical strike conveys the benevolent practice of medicine, ridding a target of its disease. Collateral damage redefines the death of innocents as injury. Smart weapons posit the opposite of dumb weapons that kill indiscriminately. Daisy cutter sanitizes the killing power of the daisy-cutter bomb. Weapons of mass destruction, which earlier referred to the horrific mechanized tools of warfare being stockpiled in the 1930s, now applies to biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons when possessed by nonstate actors or regimes in disfavor.
Haven't we heard this before?

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