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This weekly thread will focus on words, their import, and their use / misuse.
With respect to the late, great George Carlin.
Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):
- How do you feel about political (or forced) movement of language? For example, pro-life and pro-choice being two sides of the same issue because nobody wants to identify as "anti-"anything.
- What are some words that are nebulous, but everyone “knows” the meaning of?
- Are there any manipulated words that annoy you?
- Do you find any common patterns with how words are used by various groups?
Great analysis, especially on the word bigot, which is indeed massively overused in contemporary discourse. Brings to mind that old adage “whenever you point a finger at someone, there’s three fingers pointing back to you”.
As for fascist, this seems to be a blanket term people like to apply to any circumstance in which a set of rules prevents them from simply living in the moment and doing whatever they feel like, regardless of whether these rules are strictly exclusionary or not. As you point out correctly, actual fascists not only have strict rules about what is acceptable and what isn’t, but they’ll enforce them rigorously and rarely if ever give you a second chance to cross them. With a fascist, any mistake is an immediate death penalty. In that sense, it also applies to communists (see lemmy.ml moderation for a good example of this).
To give a counterexample of this, a lot of leftists like to call the police fascist because they can and will lock you up if they find you doing something they don’t approve of. This might appear to fit the above definition on the surface, but it ignores the fact that they are still bound by the law and have to make their case before a judge if they want to keep you behind bars for longer than 48 hours (or whatever the state-mandated maximum lockup time is). If they cannot convince the judge that you should receive further punishment, they HAVE to let you go, whether they want to or not. While there are certainly edge cases in which this CAN result in fascism (such as the police officer and judge being cousins), it is generally the result of corruption and not the norm.