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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I was sent this tweet which claims that the majority of Republicans voted against an offer to spend billions in border protection. This goes against my understanding of the GOP. Am I missing some context that would explain this?

Raskin's never particularly straightforward, but I think it's a reference to the FY23 omnibus, which passed the House with only 9 Republican votes. But if so, that's kinda important context to leave out, since the Border funding was a tiny portion of the overall bill.

All around a confusing trick. How are Democrats supposed to feel about Republicans’ supposedly being offered border money on a silver platter?

Contemporaneously? The leftist side complained that Border Patrol/ICE funding was a sign of Biden's political compromise with evil, while the progressive/liberal side framed it as necessary funding for humane asylum processing. Which... uh, in turn reflects a lot of why a lot of Republicans didn't think it was offered honestly.

the budget request gears much of that funding toward “effectively managing irregular migration along the Southwest border”

Someone deserves an award for coining "irregular migration." It can be effortlessly slipped in as a synonym for "illegal immigration" while completely inverting the meaning and intent. Word games really are power's best servant.

It makes sense, though: no human being is illegal, but I have heard plenty of people describe themselves as being "irregular", at least for a while.

Isn't normative used like a pejorative in the spaces that consider "no human being is illegal" a meaningful argument? we're like one step further on the euphemism treadmill from people who think this way being unable to differentiate between people who are legally permitted to be in a country from those who are not. As cliché as it is this is perhaps the closest thing to newspeak I've ever seen, not just brightening up concepts with pleasant euphemism but attempting to obliterate entire concepts via planned semantic drift.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Orwell wasn't so much prophesising as parodying existing trends in politics.

I also recommend The Politically Incorrect Dictionary (1992) which is dated but hilarious.

I was just reading today the report South Korea submitted to UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and appearantly this offical UN body:

The Committee advised the government to review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future (Para. 8-d CERD/C/KOR/17-19).

With Paragraph 8-d of CERD/C/KOR/17-19 stating :

Review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the use of the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future.

And Paragraph 7 of the same document:

The Committee is further concerned about the use of derogatory terms such as “illegal immigrants” used in official documents to refer to migrants residing in the State party without a valid permit, noting that such terms exacerbate negative perceptions of and discrimination towards these migrants (arts. 2, 4 and 7).

So this crusade against the phrase "illegal immigrants" isn't confined to NGOs and organizations founded with purpose of partisan advocacy.

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