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Thursday, April 08, 2010

The ubiquity of bullshit; how language lies.

The Heart of the Matter: Advertising Bullshit:
"There's so much bullshit, we don't even notice it anymore. Every movie, no matter how trivial, is a Major Motion Picture. Every business plan ever written boasts a World Class Management Team; every alliance is a Strategic Alliance. Toys r Us calls its customers 'guests.' Blockbuster Video advertises movies Available Now For Preorder. Domestic prisons are called Correctional Facilities (are the prisoners 'correctees'?). A detainee, on the other hand, is a prisoner we're holding indefinitely without charge, trial, or conviction (I'm waiting for the government to take its cue from Toys r Us and perform an Orwellian upgrade -- referring to detainees as guests, instead). What others do with such people, we call a gulag; here, we have only detention centers. Nasty countries assassinate; we engage in sanitary Targeted Killings. Establishment is our word for what we call an oligarchy when it happens in Russia. Only dictatorships have show trials and kangaroo courts; we employ military commissions. Where others have tribes, we have factions. And of course we don't torture, preferring enhanced interrogation, instead. Soon we will have dissidents. What will we call them?"

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