In Germany, we suffer under an annual media ritual in which a “jury” consisting of four linguists and a journalist select an “Unwort des Jahres” – an “Unword of the year” – to condemn as politically incorrect.
If there are people or organizations who are more appropriately called 'thought police' than this 'jury', I'm unaware of them. This likely means that the very phrase 'thought police' will be a strong candidate for next year's 'Unword of the Year'.
Without Transparency, There Can Be No Democracy. Having a say in self-governance cannot exist unless the people are allowed to see the actual problems.
We need a new constitution. One 100% written and controlled by the people, using collective intelligence systems to write it.
I've got a theory. People who study the humanities at university (and I am one of them) believe with complete faith that language shapes the world. Foggily, they are aware that there are people who make THINGS that shape the world (engineers, IT people,...), but to THEM (US), these are sort of blurry and not quite real. What matters to us is language because we deal in language every day, the importance of language is hammered into us at university every day. Then we leave university and keep the mindset. If we become journalists, or politicians, we pay special attention to language and believe if we police language accordingly, the world will change the way we want it to be changed. Most people like me meet reality after university, but if you manage to stay within a certain bubble of like-minded people, you can keep that mindset for decades. (People from the humanities, what do you think?) Eugyppius has taught at university, I'm sure his perspective would be very helpful here.
Long ago, when political correctness was just plunging its deep sea anglerfish teeth into culture in California, I was having a discussion with my sister (gone now) about how swearing had no charge anymore and how the only radioactive words were ethnic slurs. (I miss talking to her terribly, we once called up a University biology dept to ask if monkeys have clitorises) Soon after I ran across a Kipling poem called Song of the White Men, which was very dated, very Manifest Destiny, and colonialist, and pretty funny, which I sent to my mailing list, which included many feminists and the science film editor of the BBC. My sister, as per our discussion, decided to call Kipling the N word, only she accidentally hit reply to all. Politically correct Nagasaki ensued.
The problem with these petty officious tyrannical control freaks is that they are the linguistic equivalent of the child gender mutilators. What we need is more words, more old words, more vocabulary, ambiguous words, sonorous words, onomatopoeic words, not some prissy low IQ obsessive compulsive Cluster B attention hound, usually a woman, trying to armchair change the world with prefixes and pronouns. See the movie Arrival, which is based on a short story, which is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. What language might be capable of. These freaks are shrinking the world, dessicating it, trying to destabilize it and us. Down with them. Word for the Day:: lalochezia: the use of vulgar or foul language to relieve pain or stress lol.
Now, a ten dollar word I can use to describe myself instead of potty mouth. And you've also explained why my cursing has gotten worse in the last five years.
I agree with every word you say. Words have such a richness, they do create worlds, the more we use, the more our perspective widens - and if you try to keep language inoffensive, if you police it, you make the world smaller, more constrained, less exciting. Exactly that.
Think of John Donne - what worlds he creates through language. But he never triest to keep his use of language "safe" and within the bounds of convention, he crashes against its limits and smashes bits together that don't fit at all and BOOOM he forces our brains to comprehend ideas they haven't had or comprehended before. THIS is what we should be doing, not toeing some stupid party line of what we can say and what we can't say.
"The general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth, but also become unable to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language."
Spot on. As a holder of a B.A. in Classics, and a large part of the coursework for an M.A. in Linguistics, I must be a traitor to my class or something. ;-)
It is also called "linguistic relativity", and while it has some bearing, it has (as is the case with post-modernism, narrative discourse theory, semantics, semiotics and several other theories and fields) been thoroughly vulgarised, popularised (or pop-culture-alised perhaps) and Bowdlerized into a simplistic Fool's mirror-image if itself, for political reasons.
Again and again, people in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences come up with theories which are then turned into literal interpretations of themselves, and then into ideology and dogma.
You could say they are seeking some god or spirit via reason, or are trying to make Reason their god, only for them to create almost Lovecraftian horrors instead.
I'd add though that there are two "cures" for this:
->Coming late to academia, and doing it from a solid working-class or modern-day eq. of that is one. Instead of being in some form of school-institution from age two to twenty-five, starting work at sixteen and going into higher ed/academia when you're thirty and a parent inoculates you against the gibberish apart from pure career-ritualism.
->Going to work outside academia, and not in any civil service or otherwise state/federal-y run institution but in the real market, at least for 5-10 years.
It's the ones perpetually inside the institution(s) that are the problem. The academic eq. of third-generation billionaire kids. As we say in Sweden:
"Förvärva - ärva - fördärva"; roughly "Create - inherit - squander". Meaning the third generation, the one with no concept of the work that went into creating the family fortune, is the one squandering and ruining it. (For a real-life example, look at the Rausing family.)
the irony, is that almost all these old classics are available for free if you look for them. meanwhile people pay to watch a lot of propagandistic refuse that's currently produced.
No, sorry, I was wrong and must not have policed my own thoughts enough. I must have misremembered one of the Unwörter. You were right. We had such gems as "Tätervolk" and "Rückführungspatenschaften", though.
German. A paki is not a German. A pole is not a German. A spaniard is not a German. Nor is a chinese, a turk, a kurd or a Swede or a Negro German.
Only Germans are German.
(For those not into pop-culture, which is the cutting edge of the war on Whites, there's the "Peter Parker is Spider-Man"-meme, since Marvel's owners are Hell-bent on removing or re-writing or revising classic characters into non-white, not-male whatever instead. Same thing, but if you grow up being indoctrinated into thinking it's okay to change the race et c of characters, you'll also think it's okay to do it to real people - witness Google's AI producing negroid WaffenSS-soldiers last year.)
A spade is a spade, not a shovel.
This cannot be allowed. To erase the ethnic identity of a people is genocide.
Basically yes, but I disagree with using "negro" as an example nationalities. "Negro" is, if it can be used as a descriptor at all, a race or (biologically said) morphotype such as "Kaukasian" or "Asian". As a fact, there have been "Negro" German citizens even in the time of Emperor Wilhelm II. Furthermore, there is, presumably, no other gene poole in wider Europe as mixed up as the German one, just take a look at the coming and going of different people during the last 2000 years. Hence, German identity is preliminarily a cultural and not an ethnic thing, and such identity can be acquired.
There's been Sámi citizens of the Kingdom of Sweden since pre-Christian days. Doesn't make the Sámi Swedes - because they are not the same people, despite living under the same crown in the same nation.
By your logic, the descendents of English settlers in North America are now Native Americans.
I like to point out to my lefty friends that there are NO "Native Americans." EVERYBODY in the New World either came from somewhere else or is the descendant of people who came from somewhere else. Including the "Native Americans."
We are. That's why the antiwhites chose the term to be used to designate the American Indians exclusively. As recently as the 1960s, we who were born citizens of this country were obviously natives, and America was our native country. By that simple semantic trick, our rulers transformed us into mere squatters without stake or rights.
Curiously, it doesn't seem to extend to Americans of Spanish or Portuguese or some mixed South American ancestry. Only to those with European forebears.
Except for one certain ethnicity that migrated to America from Europe. I'm not hearing much call for that group to move back to Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and thereabouts.
Coincidence, perhaps.
Too bad Leif Eriksson didn't succeed in establishing Viking colonies?
Yep. Amazing seafarers and fighters the Vikings surely were. But I guess the limiting factor, even for them, was distance and logistics - even their original Greenland colony failed eventually, if I recall. If they had managed to establish themselves in North America, it would certainly have added an exciting new wrinkle.
'Indigenous' and 'decolonization' should be Unwords. Nobody, at least in America, is indigenous. Most Americans' ancestors got here before mine, who arrived during the final Scotch-Irish wave. But everybody came from somewhere else, whether they walked across a frozen icepack, stepped off a galleon and planted the flag, or sailed over in chains, or in steerage.
Leif Eriksson reached Vinland centuries before either the Incas or Mexica established their empires. The latter didn't even reach what became Tenochtitlan until probably a century after Erik the Red's Saga had already been written down. Spaniards colonized today's New Mexico about the same time the Apaches and Navajos arrived from the Great White North.
And the 'indigenous' colonists brutalized their predecessors, for centuries, every bit as horribly as the Europeans did - just not as efficiently.
That other tribe you mentioned, the one that the decolonizers always let off the hook ... As your countrywoman Greta might exclaim, 'How dare you!' How dare you suggest they came from Eastern Europe, or indeed ANYWHERE other than the land God promised them 3,000 years ago? What's weird is, they reclaimed (I think their jargon is 'redeemed') that old property; they've undertaken some dramatic remodeling and pest-control measures; but they balk - likely with good reason - at moving out of OUR house.
They're ringleaders of our foreign-policy establishment's catastrophic Russia policy, too, as I'm sure you've noticed. Still pissed at being confined to the Pale of Settlement I suppose. Their weird obsession with Putin seems to go right down to the grassroots.
Key phrase for all the anti-European (and offspring cultures) hatred:
"... just not as efficiently."
That's what they hate us for. We're better than anyone at anything we care to do.
Better at social organisation. Better at order. Better at justice, rights, privileges, philosophy, reform. Better at industry. Logistics.
Better at war. Magnitudes better at war.
Look at Africa. If we accept that humans developed there, why were there no advanced civilisations there, given the enormous bounty of natural resources and the advantage of no Winter?
And why did Europeans develop more and faster between Hastings and Columbus landing in the New World than did any Levantine, Asian or African people during ten times that timespan?
That's why they hate us. They know what we can do, if we have the Will.
Nein! Strange, but just as the latest science in genetics is enabling the identification of a person's birthplace within a few miles, we get the "Race is a social construct" crap. A very important series of experiments was done a few years ago, where subjects were asked to guess the genetic ancestry of people solely by their photographs. When matched against DNA results, the photo IDs were accurate well over 90% of the time.
It's a commonplace to observe that in the 'social sciences' the fact that widely-held stereotypes are generally true is one of the oldest and best-established conclusions.
Yet, as with everything and always, Leftism is a rejection of all reality.
Trofim Lysenko's place as the patron saint of Leftist science remains secure.
No society can long endure where large numbers of Leftists are allowed -- they are congenital society-killers.
Well, on a personal note, I AM German, sometimes more than I would like to be. But I can trace back my ancestry about 8 generations, and it is a pretty good mixture of many nationalities
As long as we're talking about European Peoples, the differences not great -- a Swede and a Greek are much more like each other than a Swede and a Japanese. Systematics always involves a distinction between 'splitters' and 'lumpers' -- a matter of opinion, not fact. The winners are the ones whose classification provides the most useful information. One thing's for damn sure, and that's the view that there are no significant differences among all human populations yields zero useful information whatsoever. But then, rejection of reality is the defining characteristic of all Leftists.
I agree, particularly with your view on leftists. They need the human born in a "blank slate" state that can be formed/educated into the ideologically correctly thinking and acting member of their society. Regrettably, genetic diversity leads to diversity in personalities and hence not everybody is conditioned so easily, if at all. And that is, in my opinion, the main reason why all leftist systems turn into totalitarian regimes sooner or later. Because "if people do not follow our good and superior intentions voluntarily, we have to force them".
And regarding racial/ethnic differences: Yes it may be annoying to some white folks that Asians and Ashenazi Jews are more intelligent on average, but that is reality....
I am not German, but an Irish-American who lived and worked in Germany for an entire year, well before the barbarian invasions. I LOVED Germany, the German people and the language.
Non-Germans can never, in my eyes, be considered anything more than "Turkish-Germans" or "African-Germans."
I dearly hope true Germans will love and appreciate their heritage enough to preserve it for posterity.
That's citizenship, not people. Czechs under Austria-Hungary were still Czechs. (Or "tjeck" as we spell it.) And vice-versa. A lot of Germans were at times Polish, Lithuanian or Swedish subjects. But they were still Germans.
Look at Sweden: in the early 1500s the borderlands between Sweden and Denmark became permanently Swedish territory. Despite that, and despite us being sibling-cultures, it took until the 1800s for complete and total assimilation to take place. 300 years despite being so similar, and we are to believe a turk moving to Germany will become a German within the same generation, which is what the "afraid to be called racist"-crowd argues as per Thomas Brey's initial response to me.
I think we may be saying the same thing. The Sudeten Germans were citizens of Czechloslovakia. There were Germans left behind new borders in Poland. Just as there were Ukrainians in Poland, etc.
I would improve your last sentence to read: "To erase the ethnic identity of indigenous people is genocide", and and that that goes for ALL indigenous people, including Europeans and Asians.
Apart from confusing citizenship, residence or residency, and nationality (and ethnicity, culture, race), the further confusion caused by using terms as European or Asian except when referring to geographical location is a huge part of the problem and has helped to remove almost completely from the public consciousness (pardon the term, it's a bit outdated and "von Oben" but it's useful shorthand) the fact that all the factors and definitions playing into all this can be zoomed in or out.
Look at Turkey. From my angle and point of observation, all turks seem much the same and I'd be hard-pressed to differentiate in a meaningful way between turks, kurds and Armenians (note: spell check doesn't want to capitalise turk or kurd, only Armenian - how curious). Doesn't mean they're the same. Nor are all kurds the same.
One can, especially in rural areas, zoom in to such a fine level of detail that two villages within walking distance from each other have noticeable differences in speech-patterns, dialects, clothing et cetera despite the people in them being the same one.
And if I'm not mis-remembering, the erasure of a people's ethic identity is among the criteria for genocide used by the UN (but don't take that as gospel, it's been years now since I kept up with formal stuff).
Anyone who uses unwords shall be unpersoned. Herr Constanze shall rule as chancellor of the karentocracy. We need our own awards show to teach normies how these words are weaponized for The Narrative.
Silly man -- OF COURSE the police are permitted to handle contraband, since they are Official Government Persons™. Just don't you dare try to do the same.
> Later, it came to be used more seriously by those who asked why migrants require special designations (like “people of migrant background”) and why ethnic Germans should not be the ones singled out by marked and specific terminology
It's funny to look in different contexts and see who gets the 'default' designation and who gets the 'special' designation. It tends to change over time, as the political and cultural connotations of 'special' shift.
My favourite example of this is when feminists flip their shit at people saying "man" instead of "person". Because the obvious etymology of these words.
In the beginning, we had a word, 'man', which meant person.
Then we came up with a special word, 'woman', meaning 'female person', because women are special and get special treatment.
Then, the women got mad that they would still be referred to as 'man', even though _we are all 'man'_, and the definition of man shifted in response to only mean "male human".
At the same time, they also got mad that men get special treatment even though they were, indirectly, the ones demanding it!
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This is the same thing that powers the euphemism treadmill, in general. The "euphemism treadmill", for those unfamiliar with this term, is the idea that the meaning of words shifts over time such that totally acceptable words in the past are now offensive. Like how my grandma calls Asians "orientals". This is considered incredibly racist, but when my grandma was young, this was the neutral, acceptable term. Or how in Canada, I call the natives "natives" because when I was a kid, "indian" was the racist term and "native" was the 'correct' term. But now "native" is the racist term, and I don't even know what the 'correct' term is.
The funny thing about this is that with the euphemism treadmill there's another angle. Basically, there is a group that behaves badly in some way, for some definition of 'bad'. This causes the totally neutral word describing this group to (correctly) gain negative connotations and implications. Then, the bougie white saviours notice and freak out, and they insist that the word itself is offensive, and you must use some other word that doesn't have those connotations instead. But of course, since those connotations are caused by reality, the new word acquires the same connotations, forcing the neurotic wypipo to do this over and over again, in cycles.
"and I don't even know what the 'correct' term is."
First Nations... unless you want to include the Eskimos, and then it's Aboriginals.
When I was a child in the USA, "colored people" was the most polite term. Now it's considered incredibly racist. The National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is perennially unavailable for comment.
I still don't know what's wrong with Oriental... but it's ironic that the most politically correct language nowadays is also the most offensively race-conscious:
If it's "First Nations" then does that mean "Indigenous" is offensive now? I thought "indigenous" was the correct word at the moment.
Ironically, I have a handful of native American friends and so one day I asked them what they want to be called. "Just call us Indians, we don't give a fuck and we kind of think it's funny that white people were too dumb to know where they were back then"
I think the distinction is that indigenous is just a vanilla adjective, too vague to actually identify anybody identifiable unless further modified. Animals and trees and I think even rocks are also indigenous.
He then went on to mock my visa issues because the Native treaties predate both Canada and the US, and so if you're a native American you do not need a work visa or a green card to just move to the US. They just have to let you in :(
But just when you think it couldn't get stupider... of course it does:
"The university instructs readers to “not hyphenate racial ethnicities”, stating that referring to someone as “Chinese-American,” for example, is “non inclusive,” while referring to someone as “Chinese American” is “positive and affirming.”
the main goal is to be able to tell you how to speak and put you on the defensive. That's why blacks change their preferred description every decade or so.
Interestingly, the majority of people associated with "ethnic" groups prefer terms that are deemed racist by our insane purple-haired (mostly white-skinned) overlords. "African Americans" prefer the term "black" by a wide margin. "Native Americans" prefer "indians" many times over. But ya know, Karen.
> In 2024, the term biodeutsch was increasingly used in public and social discourse and especially in social media, to classify, evaluate and discriminate against people on the basis of supposedly biological criteria of origin … The term biodeutsch constructs a racist, biological form of nationality. Originally used ironically as a satirical term … for several years now a very thoughtless and unreflective, non-satirical and literally intended use has been observed for biodeutsch. In this way, ‘being German’ is justified via an appeal to nature for the purpose of demarcating and devaluing Germans with a migration background.
In keeping with the theme of a comment I left the other day, I wish I could speak to this voting council and ask them a simple question. Well, a handful of them, but the gist of it is a combination of a few things:
1) What does "German" mean to you
(Expected answer, something that reduces to "has the right to live in Germany and be seen as equal under their laws)
2) What is "German Culture"
(Expected answer, some trite pablum about DEI)
3) "Well, that's obviously not true, because DEI didn't exist 50 years ago but Germany did, so, what I'm asking is, what consistent patterns over time have historically been present in Germany such that if you pointed to them, people would generally recognize them as German"
(Expected answer: evasion or other non-answer)
4) Ok, well, it would be ridiculous to deny that that is a thing, so moving on. If I want to refer to that specific subset of the idea of "German", how do I do that in a way that is not racist?
I shouldn't have to explain this here, but, the idea is: There are _obvious_ cultural, ethnic, and biological differences between Biogermans (what I would call "ethnic Germans") and migrants. They speak different languages, they listen to different music, they eat different foods, etc. It is fundamentally reasonable, in some contexts, to want to draw a distinction between these two groups of people. Historically, we would do this by referring to their _nationality_, which is their broad cultural group (eg 'ethnicity' might be 'Thuringian' and 'nationality' would be 'German'). Under this norm, we would refer to migrant Germans by the identity of where they came from, +/- that nationalities do not map one to one with countries (eg you would not refer to the nationality of a Kurd as "Turk", you would call it "Kurd").
They are now saying that drawing this distinction in this way is racist because it implies that the Kurd migrant is not "German". And, in a legalistic country sense, the migrant _is_ German. But in a cultural ethnic nationality sense, he is not, and he never will be, and he would probably be super offended at a suggestion that he should or will someday be, seeing it as a slap in the face of his own ethnic background.
So the question is simply: When I want to draw a distinction between these two cultural groups, which any reasonable person would agree are distinct, what words am I supposed to use?
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Incidentally, this is why I refer to myself as German even though I barely speak German, and I have never been to Germany, and my closest German family member is 1500 miles away. Because 'Canadian' isn't a nationality. It's a paper-thin, artificially constructed, stereotype-laden 'culture' that only exists on CBC comedy shows. There is no real deep common culture shared by all Canadians that they identify with above their own background. And my ethnic background is German (well, Mennonite, but nobody knows what those are). I grew up observing holidays in German cultural style, I ate German food, I sung hymns at church in German (actually, Plautdietsch) even though I didn't know what it meant.
My citizenship is Canadian. My legal 'nationality' in the German authorities sense is American. My actual nationality (which I would call ethnicity to avoid confusion) is German. And my self-identified cultural group is (or at least was) "Internet-American"
My grandma also called Asians “orientals” - which simply means from the East. My Oriental husband was not bothered by it. His grandma called me “adoga” - which literally translates as “big nose”; that’s what they called Caucasians back in the day. But she said it with such affection, how could I be mad? There is only a certain subset of people who embody the unholy matrimony of right-wing authoritarianism with a left-wing savior complex to lead these language crusades.
Is it not a defining characteristic of the totalitarian mindset that control of language, the ability to re-define words, is an imperative in their never ending quest for power?
Mr. Orwell, in his famous instruction manual, devoted many chapters to illustrations of technique, with many fine examples.
Let's hope the biodeutsche get their act together soon. I was in Berlin last weekend after not being there for a decade. Walking near Charlottenburg S-Bahn station I was amazed to see how much crap was lying around quite how dirty the place was. Mattresses on the floor in the middle of the street that kind of thing. Took a quick ride to Zoologischer Garten and was confronted by a Mad Max-esque scene as I ate my Currywurst. Non-biodeutsch homeless schlepping around without shoes in the frigid cold, mumbling to themselves. Only a few metres away is the memorial to the 2016 terrorist next to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche.
When I studied there it was never exactly a paradise in terms of cleanliness and order, but the general grime and filth that has taken over is impossible not to observe (unless you're a stupid wokeist, then for you each needle and human turd on the floor is a merely another symbol of society's progress!)
To quote Julius Ruechel: "A few pathetic losers have learned to weaponize empathy as a political strategy".
I used to believe the claim that politics, and all power structures, would be better if women were in charge. Now that women have taken their deserved place in those structures, and in some cases even dominate them (e.g. academia, with all its administrative staff), I have to reluctantly admit that things have only gotten worse. Weaponized empathy is one of the end results, and it's bad for us all, both the supposedly weak and trampled, and the supposedly powerful. The only ones that benefit are the one's identified in Ruechel's quote.
We get lots of reports in the UK about "British" citizens who are nothing of the sort. They might have a British passport but that's the only thing that ties them to the country.
Next year, I suggest "cis-gender" be unworded as an affront to all normal male or female persons.
I'm not sure what the problem is with "cis-gender." It's just the opposite of "trans-gender," and implies that the person's neurological gender is on the same side as their biological sex, which is a good thing.
There are lots of ways of being normal, and it can help to specify which kind of normality is in question. We can have normal vision, normal hearing, normal health, normal weight, etc., etc. When the trans issue comes up, it can be helpful to specify "cisgender" as the foil to "transgender."
But you are right: cisgender is the normal, healthy, gender-identity state that any sensible person either is or would rather be.
No, it's not. I'm not sure we can even define "mentally ill"; that term is mostly psychobabble that is meant to deny the person's mental competence and moral responsibility. If you do accept the term, then there are probably hundreds of ways of being "mentally ill," most of which have nothing to do with the transgender case.
Wrong. If you are a man who thinks he can "transition" to become a woman (and vice versa) you are indeed mentally ill, because such a thing is physically impossible.
The problem with it is that implies buy-in to the cult of “gender identity”. Most of us totally reject the concept and therefore reject the term. We are either male or female as determined biologically and no more accept as meaningful the idea of a man “identifying” as a woman than “identifying” as a dog. It’s a denial of reality. There is no such thing as “neurological gender”, just a range of behaviour patterns which either sex can exhibit (eg the wearing of dresses) but which may be customarily more associated with one sex than the other. It is just another facet of personality.
I don't see that accepting the term "cis-gender" implies buy-in to any cult. Does accepting "heterosexual" imply buy-in to a cult of "sexual orientation"?
As for the concept of "gender identity," I agree that the term is not ideal. In general, people do not "identify" as dogs, or as other non-human animals. To talk of someone "identifying" as the opposite sex puts the cart before the horse. The core fact here is that some people have an intense, life-long craving to be of the opposite sex, and that condition is what I understand as "transgender." People who have no such craving, and who are quite satisfied with being the sex they are, are "cisgender," which is the normal and appropriate state.
However, I completely disagree with you on your claim that there is no such thing as neurological gender. That would imply that there is no neurological basis for masculine or feminine personality, and that people just perform objectified "behaviour patterns" customarily associated with one sex or the other for no determined reason.
I think it is far more explanatory to suppose that masculine and feminine behavior patterns result primarily from masculine or feminine neurological organization of the brain, and that that too is a normal characteristic of sex. Being transgendered then is simply an intersex condition in which a critical portion of the brain that governs self and sex develops in the way that is normal and appropriate for the opposite sex rather than what is right for the person's own sex. Recognizing the subjective experience of transgendered people does not imply that we should worship at their feet and cater to their most extreme possible demands.
Sexual orientation is not a cult; it is reality. Hence we have words that describe it.
Gender identity (the belief in a “gendered soul”) is a cult and using its language implicitly buys into it. By refusing to use the language all sane people make clear their total and utter rejection of it. I am a male and that’s the end of it. Let’s hope that the return of Trump to the White House marks the start of the elimination of the cult from all walks of life and certainly removes any recognition of it in law.
"Gender identity," if you will, is reality, just as "sexual orientation" is. Neither is a cult. Both terms have been invented recently, and terms for "transgender" probably are older historically than terms for "homosexual."
I share your hope that the return of President Trump to the White House will restore some sanity in the elimination of biological males from women's sports, in ending this obsession over pronouns and "misgendering," and in stopping the practice of rubbing the noses of public school children in LGBT+ and other woke ideology. I am not in favor of denying the reality of the transgender condition as a biological fact that a few people live with.
cis-gender is unnecessary. Gender is a social construct theorizing about stereotypical social roles and behaviors of the two sexes in a culture. Biological sex (also called gender) is determined at fertilization. There's no such thing as trans-gender in mammals, as none has ever switched genders. There are males, females, people who dress like they are the other gender, and eunuchs. Eunuchs are still male.
When you say there is no such thing as trans-gender in mammals, I think you mean that mammals do not spontaneously change sex, as some fish do. That is certainly true, but individual humans or other mammals are sometimes intersex in their nature, having a biological mixture of both male and female traits. Arguing whether an intersex individual as a whole is "male" or "female" is moot; all you're doing is picking some particular trait of sexual distinction and extrapolating their category from that.
The assertion that some biological category like gender or race is a "social construct" is generally a neo-marxist or feminist polemic intended to dissolve the category by denying it. Saying that gender is a social construct means that boys can be feminine and girls masculine as easily as the other way around, depending on what they are taught. The thrust is to support social engineering schemes to equalize men and women by teaching them to have the same, neutral, behavioral character that will make them interchangeable.
I don't follow your argument. Heterosexual and homosexual are one valid way of dividing the pie. Cisgender and transgender are another.
I'll emphasize that transgender does not necessarily imply transsexual, which is when a transgendered person tries to transition physically and/or socially to the opposite sex. I would count transgendered people as "trans people," whether or not they try to transition.
"Homosexual" means being attracted to people of one's own sex, and "heterosexual" means being attracted to people of the opposite sex. "Transgender" means wanting to be of the opposite sex, and "cisgender" means wanting to be of the sex one was born as. This is not man vs. woman. Either a man or a woman can be either heterosexual or homosexual, and either cisgender or transgender.
In Greek, "homo" means 'same,' and "hetero" means 'different.' In Latin, "trans" means 'across' or 'on the other side,' and "cis" means 'on this side.' These are all relatively new coinages, and they are all well-defined. Nobody is being "othered" by being called cisgender, which is the normal and proper state to which probably over 99% of the population belongs.
If these linguists and journalist are self-appointed arbiters of “correct speak” then surely everyone can safely ignore them. They only gain legitimacy if Germans take notice of them.
Trump, LePenn, some AfD leader, Farange, need to speak up about all this linguistic BS, calling it out for the infantile idiocy it is, then refuse to recognize any outlet or journo using it, giving permission to everyone else to tell speakers of this BS to just STFU.
Lol, I love it when a propaganda word or phrase gets turned around and used against the blue-haired leftist harridans. Trump did it masterfully with "fake news".
If there are people or organizations who are more appropriately called 'thought police' than this 'jury', I'm unaware of them. This likely means that the very phrase 'thought police' will be a strong candidate for next year's 'Unword of the Year'.
It's all distractions to cover up (conceal) incompetency in order to ruthlessly subvert agency of the citizens.
Incompetency at critical mass is indistinguishable from treachery.
They want to be the unmoved-mover, free of external agency. Exactly the opposite of what power/government should be.
“Incompetency at critical mass is indistinguishable from treachery. “
This exactly. Reminds me of the current state of California.
basically it's sabotage
Sabotage that had been normalized. I guess that’s the goal.
they always seem to have an angle on how to personally monetize this sabotage though, which makes me think the incompetence isn't the whole story.
Leftists are always busy enriching themselves. It is not incompetence, but moral inversion resulting from elitist pride.
Redundant. Already was in 2021.
In the words of the immortal Charlie Brown, "Good grief.".
Without Transparency, There Can Be No Democracy. Having a say in self-governance cannot exist unless the people are allowed to see the actual problems.
We need a new constitution. One 100% written and controlled by the people, using collective intelligence systems to write it.
Would you agree to this?
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/without-transparency-there-can-be
We HAD "thought police" already.
You have to be joking. Unreal.
Make Southpark fiction again
I've got a theory. People who study the humanities at university (and I am one of them) believe with complete faith that language shapes the world. Foggily, they are aware that there are people who make THINGS that shape the world (engineers, IT people,...), but to THEM (US), these are sort of blurry and not quite real. What matters to us is language because we deal in language every day, the importance of language is hammered into us at university every day. Then we leave university and keep the mindset. If we become journalists, or politicians, we pay special attention to language and believe if we police language accordingly, the world will change the way we want it to be changed. Most people like me meet reality after university, but if you manage to stay within a certain bubble of like-minded people, you can keep that mindset for decades. (People from the humanities, what do you think?) Eugyppius has taught at university, I'm sure his perspective would be very helpful here.
Long ago, when political correctness was just plunging its deep sea anglerfish teeth into culture in California, I was having a discussion with my sister (gone now) about how swearing had no charge anymore and how the only radioactive words were ethnic slurs. (I miss talking to her terribly, we once called up a University biology dept to ask if monkeys have clitorises) Soon after I ran across a Kipling poem called Song of the White Men, which was very dated, very Manifest Destiny, and colonialist, and pretty funny, which I sent to my mailing list, which included many feminists and the science film editor of the BBC. My sister, as per our discussion, decided to call Kipling the N word, only she accidentally hit reply to all. Politically correct Nagasaki ensued.
The problem with these petty officious tyrannical control freaks is that they are the linguistic equivalent of the child gender mutilators. What we need is more words, more old words, more vocabulary, ambiguous words, sonorous words, onomatopoeic words, not some prissy low IQ obsessive compulsive Cluster B attention hound, usually a woman, trying to armchair change the world with prefixes and pronouns. See the movie Arrival, which is based on a short story, which is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. What language might be capable of. These freaks are shrinking the world, dessicating it, trying to destabilize it and us. Down with them. Word for the Day:: lalochezia: the use of vulgar or foul language to relieve pain or stress lol.
Now, a ten dollar word I can use to describe myself instead of potty mouth. And you've also explained why my cursing has gotten worse in the last five years.
It's such a relief to call arseholes arseholes.
I agree with every word you say. Words have such a richness, they do create worlds, the more we use, the more our perspective widens - and if you try to keep language inoffensive, if you police it, you make the world smaller, more constrained, less exciting. Exactly that.
Think of John Donne - what worlds he creates through language. But he never triest to keep his use of language "safe" and within the bounds of convention, he crashes against its limits and smashes bits together that don't fit at all and BOOOM he forces our brains to comprehend ideas they haven't had or comprehended before. THIS is what we should be doing, not toeing some stupid party line of what we can say and what we can't say.
I'm very sorry about your sister.
Lovely post, Cynthia. Thank you. I would give you ten more hearts if I could.
Well don't leave me hanging! What's the answer to the monkey thing?
Spot on.
I think we're here:
"The general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth, but also become unable to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language."
- Joseph Piper
We most definitely are here. I worry about my grandchildren. So much time on their devices….
Spot on. As a holder of a B.A. in Classics, and a large part of the coursework for an M.A. in Linguistics, I must be a traitor to my class or something. ;-)
I think there must be more of us, but most may be too scared to speak up.
Mind you, I am not working in academia (hence the not ever finished MA.)
But that's how it was educated, that's where I was heading.
It actually has a name -- the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis -- and it has validity. This is the Newspeak that Orwell popularized.
Thank you, somehow it never crossed my path but makes a lot of sense, I must look into it.
It is also called "linguistic relativity", and while it has some bearing, it has (as is the case with post-modernism, narrative discourse theory, semantics, semiotics and several other theories and fields) been thoroughly vulgarised, popularised (or pop-culture-alised perhaps) and Bowdlerized into a simplistic Fool's mirror-image if itself, for political reasons.
Again and again, people in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences come up with theories which are then turned into literal interpretations of themselves, and then into ideology and dogma.
You could say they are seeking some god or spirit via reason, or are trying to make Reason their god, only for them to create almost Lovecraftian horrors instead.
You're not wrong.
I'd add though that there are two "cures" for this:
->Coming late to academia, and doing it from a solid working-class or modern-day eq. of that is one. Instead of being in some form of school-institution from age two to twenty-five, starting work at sixteen and going into higher ed/academia when you're thirty and a parent inoculates you against the gibberish apart from pure career-ritualism.
->Going to work outside academia, and not in any civil service or otherwise state/federal-y run institution but in the real market, at least for 5-10 years.
It's the ones perpetually inside the institution(s) that are the problem. The academic eq. of third-generation billionaire kids. As we say in Sweden:
"Förvärva - ärva - fördärva"; roughly "Create - inherit - squander". Meaning the third generation, the one with no concept of the work that went into creating the family fortune, is the one squandering and ruining it. (For a real-life example, look at the Rausing family.)
We need Archie…and Fred Sanford. If only.
they were the best! i miss those days.
Watching a rerun is like taking a big drink of water in the desert. We laugh out loud.
the irony, is that almost all these old classics are available for free if you look for them. meanwhile people pay to watch a lot of propagandistic refuse that's currently produced.
Ok, I missed that. Clearly I wasn't policing my own thoughts quite enough.
No, sorry, I was wrong and must not have policed my own thoughts enough. I must have misremembered one of the Unwörter. You were right. We had such gems as "Tätervolk" and "Rückführungspatenschaften", though.
German. A paki is not a German. A pole is not a German. A spaniard is not a German. Nor is a chinese, a turk, a kurd or a Swede or a Negro German.
Only Germans are German.
(For those not into pop-culture, which is the cutting edge of the war on Whites, there's the "Peter Parker is Spider-Man"-meme, since Marvel's owners are Hell-bent on removing or re-writing or revising classic characters into non-white, not-male whatever instead. Same thing, but if you grow up being indoctrinated into thinking it's okay to change the race et c of characters, you'll also think it's okay to do it to real people - witness Google's AI producing negroid WaffenSS-soldiers last year.)
A spade is a spade, not a shovel.
This cannot be allowed. To erase the ethnic identity of a people is genocide.
Basically yes, but I disagree with using "negro" as an example nationalities. "Negro" is, if it can be used as a descriptor at all, a race or (biologically said) morphotype such as "Kaukasian" or "Asian". As a fact, there have been "Negro" German citizens even in the time of Emperor Wilhelm II. Furthermore, there is, presumably, no other gene poole in wider Europe as mixed up as the German one, just take a look at the coming and going of different people during the last 2000 years. Hence, German identity is preliminarily a cultural and not an ethnic thing, and such identity can be acquired.
So what?
There's been Sámi citizens of the Kingdom of Sweden since pre-Christian days. Doesn't make the Sámi Swedes - because they are not the same people, despite living under the same crown in the same nation.
By your logic, the descendents of English settlers in North America are now Native Americans.
You mean like Elizabeth Warren?
Nah mate. She was left behind on Earth by an alien expedition that didn't want her.
Nevertheless, she persisted ...
lulz
She is a wannabee, she has what, 1%, my DNA says I have 3%, I outrank her.
For
The
Win!
I like to point out to my lefty friends that there are NO "Native Americans." EVERYBODY in the New World either came from somewhere else or is the descendant of people who came from somewhere else. Including the "Native Americans."
Bottomline: If you can't occupy and defend it, it's not yours.
I guess one could now argue that most everyone came from either Africa, or as thinking is now changing Asia. So, most of us are "passport somethings."
The "mountains of Ararat" according to Genesis 8:4
Right, 5000 years ago, and the items dated millions of years ago were just placed there by Lucifer. I've heard that story before.
We are. That's why the antiwhites chose the term to be used to designate the American Indians exclusively. As recently as the 1960s, we who were born citizens of this country were obviously natives, and America was our native country. By that simple semantic trick, our rulers transformed us into mere squatters without stake or rights.
Curiously, it doesn't seem to extend to Americans of Spanish or Portuguese or some mixed South American ancestry. Only to those with European forebears.
Except for one certain ethnicity that migrated to America from Europe. I'm not hearing much call for that group to move back to Russia, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland and thereabouts.
Coincidence, perhaps.
Too bad Leif Eriksson didn't succeed in establishing Viking colonies?
Yep. Amazing seafarers and fighters the Vikings surely were. But I guess the limiting factor, even for them, was distance and logistics - even their original Greenland colony failed eventually, if I recall. If they had managed to establish themselves in North America, it would certainly have added an exciting new wrinkle.
'Indigenous' and 'decolonization' should be Unwords. Nobody, at least in America, is indigenous. Most Americans' ancestors got here before mine, who arrived during the final Scotch-Irish wave. But everybody came from somewhere else, whether they walked across a frozen icepack, stepped off a galleon and planted the flag, or sailed over in chains, or in steerage.
Leif Eriksson reached Vinland centuries before either the Incas or Mexica established their empires. The latter didn't even reach what became Tenochtitlan until probably a century after Erik the Red's Saga had already been written down. Spaniards colonized today's New Mexico about the same time the Apaches and Navajos arrived from the Great White North.
And the 'indigenous' colonists brutalized their predecessors, for centuries, every bit as horribly as the Europeans did - just not as efficiently.
That other tribe you mentioned, the one that the decolonizers always let off the hook ... As your countrywoman Greta might exclaim, 'How dare you!' How dare you suggest they came from Eastern Europe, or indeed ANYWHERE other than the land God promised them 3,000 years ago? What's weird is, they reclaimed (I think their jargon is 'redeemed') that old property; they've undertaken some dramatic remodeling and pest-control measures; but they balk - likely with good reason - at moving out of OUR house.
They're ringleaders of our foreign-policy establishment's catastrophic Russia policy, too, as I'm sure you've noticed. Still pissed at being confined to the Pale of Settlement I suppose. Their weird obsession with Putin seems to go right down to the grassroots.
Key phrase for all the anti-European (and offspring cultures) hatred:
"... just not as efficiently."
That's what they hate us for. We're better than anyone at anything we care to do.
Better at social organisation. Better at order. Better at justice, rights, privileges, philosophy, reform. Better at industry. Logistics.
Better at war. Magnitudes better at war.
Look at Africa. If we accept that humans developed there, why were there no advanced civilisations there, given the enormous bounty of natural resources and the advantage of no Winter?
And why did Europeans develop more and faster between Hastings and Columbus landing in the New World than did any Levantine, Asian or African people during ten times that timespan?
That's why they hate us. They know what we can do, if we have the Will.
The Iberian peninsula isn't in Europe?
I've got Viking DNA on my British grandmothers' side. Whoops! :)
Damn right! I was born here, and my family's been here for 400 years. I'm nothing if not native American.
Nein! Strange, but just as the latest science in genetics is enabling the identification of a person's birthplace within a few miles, we get the "Race is a social construct" crap. A very important series of experiments was done a few years ago, where subjects were asked to guess the genetic ancestry of people solely by their photographs. When matched against DNA results, the photo IDs were accurate well over 90% of the time.
It's a commonplace to observe that in the 'social sciences' the fact that widely-held stereotypes are generally true is one of the oldest and best-established conclusions.
Yet, as with everything and always, Leftism is a rejection of all reality.
Trofim Lysenko's place as the patron saint of Leftist science remains secure.
No society can long endure where large numbers of Leftists are allowed -- they are congenital society-killers.
Well, on a personal note, I AM German, sometimes more than I would like to be. But I can trace back my ancestry about 8 generations, and it is a pretty good mixture of many nationalities
As long as we're talking about European Peoples, the differences not great -- a Swede and a Greek are much more like each other than a Swede and a Japanese. Systematics always involves a distinction between 'splitters' and 'lumpers' -- a matter of opinion, not fact. The winners are the ones whose classification provides the most useful information. One thing's for damn sure, and that's the view that there are no significant differences among all human populations yields zero useful information whatsoever. But then, rejection of reality is the defining characteristic of all Leftists.
I agree, particularly with your view on leftists. They need the human born in a "blank slate" state that can be formed/educated into the ideologically correctly thinking and acting member of their society. Regrettably, genetic diversity leads to diversity in personalities and hence not everybody is conditioned so easily, if at all. And that is, in my opinion, the main reason why all leftist systems turn into totalitarian regimes sooner or later. Because "if people do not follow our good and superior intentions voluntarily, we have to force them".
And regarding racial/ethnic differences: Yes it may be annoying to some white folks that Asians and Ashenazi Jews are more intelligent on average, but that is reality....
I could not agree more, Rikard.
I am not German, but an Irish-American who lived and worked in Germany for an entire year, well before the barbarian invasions. I LOVED Germany, the German people and the language.
Non-Germans can never, in my eyes, be considered anything more than "Turkish-Germans" or "African-Germans."
I dearly hope true Germans will love and appreciate their heritage enough to preserve it for posterity.
Mostly agree, except at various times a lot of Poles were Germans, like post WWI.
That's citizenship, not people. Czechs under Austria-Hungary were still Czechs. (Or "tjeck" as we spell it.) And vice-versa. A lot of Germans were at times Polish, Lithuanian or Swedish subjects. But they were still Germans.
Look at Sweden: in the early 1500s the borderlands between Sweden and Denmark became permanently Swedish territory. Despite that, and despite us being sibling-cultures, it took until the 1800s for complete and total assimilation to take place. 300 years despite being so similar, and we are to believe a turk moving to Germany will become a German within the same generation, which is what the "afraid to be called racist"-crowd argues as per Thomas Brey's initial response to me.
I think we may be saying the same thing. The Sudeten Germans were citizens of Czechloslovakia. There were Germans left behind new borders in Poland. Just as there were Ukrainians in Poland, etc.
You could say the same for the Czechs, etc.
Sorry, that battle was lost in May, 1945.
I would improve your last sentence to read: "To erase the ethnic identity of indigenous people is genocide", and and that that goes for ALL indigenous people, including Europeans and Asians.
Yes, that was the intent.
Ramble:
Apart from confusing citizenship, residence or residency, and nationality (and ethnicity, culture, race), the further confusion caused by using terms as European or Asian except when referring to geographical location is a huge part of the problem and has helped to remove almost completely from the public consciousness (pardon the term, it's a bit outdated and "von Oben" but it's useful shorthand) the fact that all the factors and definitions playing into all this can be zoomed in or out.
Look at Turkey. From my angle and point of observation, all turks seem much the same and I'd be hard-pressed to differentiate in a meaningful way between turks, kurds and Armenians (note: spell check doesn't want to capitalise turk or kurd, only Armenian - how curious). Doesn't mean they're the same. Nor are all kurds the same.
One can, especially in rural areas, zoom in to such a fine level of detail that two villages within walking distance from each other have noticeable differences in speech-patterns, dialects, clothing et cetera despite the people in them being the same one.
And if I'm not mis-remembering, the erasure of a people's ethic identity is among the criteria for genocide used by the UN (but don't take that as gospel, it's been years now since I kept up with formal stuff).
Agree. Forced association is death. Redefinition of terms is death.
And meditation between groups/culture IMPROVES when we hold tightly to this maxim.
Anyone who uses unwords shall be unpersoned. Herr Constanze shall rule as chancellor of the karentocracy. We need our own awards show to teach normies how these words are weaponized for The Narrative.
If a word has been 'unworded', why are they allowed to say it?
Silly man -- OF COURSE the police are permitted to handle contraband, since they are Official Government Persons™. Just don't you dare try to do the same.
Quit promoting Karen Shepherd!
Germany is a very unserious country
Like everything else, Germans are very serious about being unserious.
Serious as a Holocaust, if you ask me.
Right. That's exactly how it happens.
Say it isn’t so!
> Later, it came to be used more seriously by those who asked why migrants require special designations (like “people of migrant background”) and why ethnic Germans should not be the ones singled out by marked and specific terminology
It's funny to look in different contexts and see who gets the 'default' designation and who gets the 'special' designation. It tends to change over time, as the political and cultural connotations of 'special' shift.
My favourite example of this is when feminists flip their shit at people saying "man" instead of "person". Because the obvious etymology of these words.
In the beginning, we had a word, 'man', which meant person.
Then we came up with a special word, 'woman', meaning 'female person', because women are special and get special treatment.
Then, the women got mad that they would still be referred to as 'man', even though _we are all 'man'_, and the definition of man shifted in response to only mean "male human".
At the same time, they also got mad that men get special treatment even though they were, indirectly, the ones demanding it!
----
This is the same thing that powers the euphemism treadmill, in general. The "euphemism treadmill", for those unfamiliar with this term, is the idea that the meaning of words shifts over time such that totally acceptable words in the past are now offensive. Like how my grandma calls Asians "orientals". This is considered incredibly racist, but when my grandma was young, this was the neutral, acceptable term. Or how in Canada, I call the natives "natives" because when I was a kid, "indian" was the racist term and "native" was the 'correct' term. But now "native" is the racist term, and I don't even know what the 'correct' term is.
The funny thing about this is that with the euphemism treadmill there's another angle. Basically, there is a group that behaves badly in some way, for some definition of 'bad'. This causes the totally neutral word describing this group to (correctly) gain negative connotations and implications. Then, the bougie white saviours notice and freak out, and they insist that the word itself is offensive, and you must use some other word that doesn't have those connotations instead. But of course, since those connotations are caused by reality, the new word acquires the same connotations, forcing the neurotic wypipo to do this over and over again, in cycles.
really good comment
Yes and it’s incredibly clear and wonderfully sardonic
"and I don't even know what the 'correct' term is."
First Nations... unless you want to include the Eskimos, and then it's Aboriginals.
When I was a child in the USA, "colored people" was the most polite term. Now it's considered incredibly racist. The National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is perennially unavailable for comment.
I still don't know what's wrong with Oriental... but it's ironic that the most politically correct language nowadays is also the most offensively race-conscious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI5qQAUWVc
If it's "First Nations" then does that mean "Indigenous" is offensive now? I thought "indigenous" was the correct word at the moment.
Ironically, I have a handful of native American friends and so one day I asked them what they want to be called. "Just call us Indians, we don't give a fuck and we kind of think it's funny that white people were too dumb to know where they were back then"
I think the distinction is that indigenous is just a vanilla adjective, too vague to actually identify anybody identifiable unless further modified. Animals and trees and I think even rocks are also indigenous.
I love this… and I have had the same question for a long time.
He then went on to mock my visa issues because the Native treaties predate both Canada and the US, and so if you're a native American you do not need a work visa or a green card to just move to the US. They just have to let you in :(
colored people is racist, but people of color is respected (almost reverential). Make it make sense.
But just when you think it couldn't get stupider... of course it does:
"The university instructs readers to “not hyphenate racial ethnicities”, stating that referring to someone as “Chinese-American,” for example, is “non inclusive,” while referring to someone as “Chinese American” is “positive and affirming.”
https://www.campusreform.org/article/cal-state-east-bay-woke-language-guide-warns-not-use-non-inclusive-terms-like-civilized-illegal-alien-native-/27243
--H3nry (the 3 is silent, you racist)
the main goal is to be able to tell you how to speak and put you on the defensive. That's why blacks change their preferred description every decade or so.
There's an Indian casino very prominently placed along the I-5 freeway in Tacoma, Washington, USA.
The sign in front, visible to thousands of commuters every hour of every day, proudly proclaims "Emerald Queen Casino -- Puyallup TRIBE of INDIANS".
Interestingly, the majority of people associated with "ethnic" groups prefer terms that are deemed racist by our insane purple-haired (mostly white-skinned) overlords. "African Americans" prefer the term "black" by a wide margin. "Native Americans" prefer "indians" many times over. But ya know, Karen.
Relatedly
> In 2024, the term biodeutsch was increasingly used in public and social discourse and especially in social media, to classify, evaluate and discriminate against people on the basis of supposedly biological criteria of origin … The term biodeutsch constructs a racist, biological form of nationality. Originally used ironically as a satirical term … for several years now a very thoughtless and unreflective, non-satirical and literally intended use has been observed for biodeutsch. In this way, ‘being German’ is justified via an appeal to nature for the purpose of demarcating and devaluing Germans with a migration background.
In keeping with the theme of a comment I left the other day, I wish I could speak to this voting council and ask them a simple question. Well, a handful of them, but the gist of it is a combination of a few things:
1) What does "German" mean to you
(Expected answer, something that reduces to "has the right to live in Germany and be seen as equal under their laws)
2) What is "German Culture"
(Expected answer, some trite pablum about DEI)
3) "Well, that's obviously not true, because DEI didn't exist 50 years ago but Germany did, so, what I'm asking is, what consistent patterns over time have historically been present in Germany such that if you pointed to them, people would generally recognize them as German"
(Expected answer: evasion or other non-answer)
4) Ok, well, it would be ridiculous to deny that that is a thing, so moving on. If I want to refer to that specific subset of the idea of "German", how do I do that in a way that is not racist?
I shouldn't have to explain this here, but, the idea is: There are _obvious_ cultural, ethnic, and biological differences between Biogermans (what I would call "ethnic Germans") and migrants. They speak different languages, they listen to different music, they eat different foods, etc. It is fundamentally reasonable, in some contexts, to want to draw a distinction between these two groups of people. Historically, we would do this by referring to their _nationality_, which is their broad cultural group (eg 'ethnicity' might be 'Thuringian' and 'nationality' would be 'German'). Under this norm, we would refer to migrant Germans by the identity of where they came from, +/- that nationalities do not map one to one with countries (eg you would not refer to the nationality of a Kurd as "Turk", you would call it "Kurd").
They are now saying that drawing this distinction in this way is racist because it implies that the Kurd migrant is not "German". And, in a legalistic country sense, the migrant _is_ German. But in a cultural ethnic nationality sense, he is not, and he never will be, and he would probably be super offended at a suggestion that he should or will someday be, seeing it as a slap in the face of his own ethnic background.
So the question is simply: When I want to draw a distinction between these two cultural groups, which any reasonable person would agree are distinct, what words am I supposed to use?
----
Incidentally, this is why I refer to myself as German even though I barely speak German, and I have never been to Germany, and my closest German family member is 1500 miles away. Because 'Canadian' isn't a nationality. It's a paper-thin, artificially constructed, stereotype-laden 'culture' that only exists on CBC comedy shows. There is no real deep common culture shared by all Canadians that they identify with above their own background. And my ethnic background is German (well, Mennonite, but nobody knows what those are). I grew up observing holidays in German cultural style, I ate German food, I sung hymns at church in German (actually, Plautdietsch) even though I didn't know what it meant.
My citizenship is Canadian. My legal 'nationality' in the German authorities sense is American. My actual nationality (which I would call ethnicity to avoid confusion) is German. And my self-identified cultural group is (or at least was) "Internet-American"
My grandma also called Asians “orientals” - which simply means from the East. My Oriental husband was not bothered by it. His grandma called me “adoga” - which literally translates as “big nose”; that’s what they called Caucasians back in the day. But she said it with such affection, how could I be mad? There is only a certain subset of people who embody the unholy matrimony of right-wing authoritarianism with a left-wing savior complex to lead these language crusades.
You can bury the word but not the concept.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was not supposed to be an instruction manual
Yeah… but it seems more like a roadmap now… since 2020.
Rebranding doesn't work, when it's the same shitty product.
For a lot of people, it works quite well. Sad!
Is it not a defining characteristic of the totalitarian mindset that control of language, the ability to re-define words, is an imperative in their never ending quest for power?
Mr. Orwell, in his famous instruction manual, devoted many chapters to illustrations of technique, with many fine examples.
Let's hope the biodeutsche get their act together soon. I was in Berlin last weekend after not being there for a decade. Walking near Charlottenburg S-Bahn station I was amazed to see how much crap was lying around quite how dirty the place was. Mattresses on the floor in the middle of the street that kind of thing. Took a quick ride to Zoologischer Garten and was confronted by a Mad Max-esque scene as I ate my Currywurst. Non-biodeutsch homeless schlepping around without shoes in the frigid cold, mumbling to themselves. Only a few metres away is the memorial to the 2016 terrorist next to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche.
When I studied there it was never exactly a paradise in terms of cleanliness and order, but the general grime and filth that has taken over is impossible not to observe (unless you're a stupid wokeist, then for you each needle and human turd on the floor is a merely another symbol of society's progress!)
Sounds like what I understand has happened in San Francisco.
I was last there in May of ‘91. I still remember the Currywurst with great fondness, though I suppose much else would be unrecognizable now.
are you sure that turd wasn't just a dropped currywurst? they are very similar
To quote Julius Ruechel: "A few pathetic losers have learned to weaponize empathy as a political strategy".
I used to believe the claim that politics, and all power structures, would be better if women were in charge. Now that women have taken their deserved place in those structures, and in some cases even dominate them (e.g. academia, with all its administrative staff), I have to reluctantly admit that things have only gotten worse. Weaponized empathy is one of the end results, and it's bad for us all, both the supposedly weak and trampled, and the supposedly powerful. The only ones that benefit are the one's identified in Ruechel's quote.
"Suicidal Empathy": P.V. Hanson
We get lots of reports in the UK about "British" citizens who are nothing of the sort. They might have a British passport but that's the only thing that ties them to the country.
Next year, I suggest "cis-gender" be unworded as an affront to all normal male or female persons.
I am totally in agreement. Since the rainbow flag has taken over, I’m wondering where the hetero flag is??
The hetero flag is the white flag because they have surrendered.
I'm not sure what the problem is with "cis-gender." It's just the opposite of "trans-gender," and implies that the person's neurological gender is on the same side as their biological sex, which is a good thing.
What word beyond "normal" does one need to describe the state of being normal?
There are lots of ways of being normal, and it can help to specify which kind of normality is in question. We can have normal vision, normal hearing, normal health, normal weight, etc., etc. When the trans issue comes up, it can be helpful to specify "cisgender" as the foil to "transgender."
But you are right: cisgender is the normal, healthy, gender-identity state that any sensible person either is or would rather be.
Transgender is another way of stating that one is mentally ill.
No, it's not. I'm not sure we can even define "mentally ill"; that term is mostly psychobabble that is meant to deny the person's mental competence and moral responsibility. If you do accept the term, then there are probably hundreds of ways of being "mentally ill," most of which have nothing to do with the transgender case.
Wrong. If you are a man who thinks he can "transition" to become a woman (and vice versa) you are indeed mentally ill, because such a thing is physically impossible.
The problem with it is that implies buy-in to the cult of “gender identity”. Most of us totally reject the concept and therefore reject the term. We are either male or female as determined biologically and no more accept as meaningful the idea of a man “identifying” as a woman than “identifying” as a dog. It’s a denial of reality. There is no such thing as “neurological gender”, just a range of behaviour patterns which either sex can exhibit (eg the wearing of dresses) but which may be customarily more associated with one sex than the other. It is just another facet of personality.
I don't see that accepting the term "cis-gender" implies buy-in to any cult. Does accepting "heterosexual" imply buy-in to a cult of "sexual orientation"?
As for the concept of "gender identity," I agree that the term is not ideal. In general, people do not "identify" as dogs, or as other non-human animals. To talk of someone "identifying" as the opposite sex puts the cart before the horse. The core fact here is that some people have an intense, life-long craving to be of the opposite sex, and that condition is what I understand as "transgender." People who have no such craving, and who are quite satisfied with being the sex they are, are "cisgender," which is the normal and appropriate state.
However, I completely disagree with you on your claim that there is no such thing as neurological gender. That would imply that there is no neurological basis for masculine or feminine personality, and that people just perform objectified "behaviour patterns" customarily associated with one sex or the other for no determined reason.
I think it is far more explanatory to suppose that masculine and feminine behavior patterns result primarily from masculine or feminine neurological organization of the brain, and that that too is a normal characteristic of sex. Being transgendered then is simply an intersex condition in which a critical portion of the brain that governs self and sex develops in the way that is normal and appropriate for the opposite sex rather than what is right for the person's own sex. Recognizing the subjective experience of transgendered people does not imply that we should worship at their feet and cater to their most extreme possible demands.
Sexual orientation is not a cult; it is reality. Hence we have words that describe it.
Gender identity (the belief in a “gendered soul”) is a cult and using its language implicitly buys into it. By refusing to use the language all sane people make clear their total and utter rejection of it. I am a male and that’s the end of it. Let’s hope that the return of Trump to the White House marks the start of the elimination of the cult from all walks of life and certainly removes any recognition of it in law.
"Gender identity," if you will, is reality, just as "sexual orientation" is. Neither is a cult. Both terms have been invented recently, and terms for "transgender" probably are older historically than terms for "homosexual."
I share your hope that the return of President Trump to the White House will restore some sanity in the elimination of biological males from women's sports, in ending this obsession over pronouns and "misgendering," and in stopping the practice of rubbing the noses of public school children in LGBT+ and other woke ideology. I am not in favor of denying the reality of the transgender condition as a biological fact that a few people live with.
cis-gender is unnecessary. Gender is a social construct theorizing about stereotypical social roles and behaviors of the two sexes in a culture. Biological sex (also called gender) is determined at fertilization. There's no such thing as trans-gender in mammals, as none has ever switched genders. There are males, females, people who dress like they are the other gender, and eunuchs. Eunuchs are still male.
When you say there is no such thing as trans-gender in mammals, I think you mean that mammals do not spontaneously change sex, as some fish do. That is certainly true, but individual humans or other mammals are sometimes intersex in their nature, having a biological mixture of both male and female traits. Arguing whether an intersex individual as a whole is "male" or "female" is moot; all you're doing is picking some particular trait of sexual distinction and extrapolating their category from that.
The assertion that some biological category like gender or race is a "social construct" is generally a neo-marxist or feminist polemic intended to dissolve the category by denying it. Saying that gender is a social construct means that boys can be feminine and girls masculine as easily as the other way around, depending on what they are taught. The thrust is to support social engineering schemes to equalize men and women by teaching them to have the same, neutral, behavioral character that will make them interchangeable.
Because it “others” people who are already men or women. Both those words have existing definitions, and cis is not needed.
I don't see how it "others" them. Would you say that "heterosexual" in contrast to "homosexual" others people who are attracted to the opposite sex?
Heterosexual and homosexual already have well-known definitions. They are different from each other.
Adding cis seeks to somehow makes simple man/woman to include trans people.
I don't follow your argument. Heterosexual and homosexual are one valid way of dividing the pie. Cisgender and transgender are another.
I'll emphasize that transgender does not necessarily imply transsexual, which is when a transgendered person tries to transition physically and/or socially to the opposite sex. I would count transgendered people as "trans people," whether or not they try to transition.
"Homosexual" means being attracted to people of one's own sex, and "heterosexual" means being attracted to people of the opposite sex. "Transgender" means wanting to be of the opposite sex, and "cisgender" means wanting to be of the sex one was born as. This is not man vs. woman. Either a man or a woman can be either heterosexual or homosexual, and either cisgender or transgender.
In Greek, "homo" means 'same,' and "hetero" means 'different.' In Latin, "trans" means 'across' or 'on the other side,' and "cis" means 'on this side.' These are all relatively new coinages, and they are all well-defined. Nobody is being "othered" by being called cisgender, which is the normal and proper state to which probably over 99% of the population belongs.
If these linguists and journalist are self-appointed arbiters of “correct speak” then surely everyone can safely ignore them. They only gain legitimacy if Germans take notice of them.
Exactly!! Let them turn to dust.
They are useful because they tell us which words are hurting them the most.
Trump, LePenn, some AfD leader, Farange, need to speak up about all this linguistic BS, calling it out for the infantile idiocy it is, then refuse to recognize any outlet or journo using it, giving permission to everyone else to tell speakers of this BS to just STFU.
Again… this makes sense. I am never going to speak anything but truth… in whatever words I choose.
If biodeutsch is unallowed then is it time to bring back Volksdeutsch? =)
Yeah, that get their panties in a bunch.
lol yes
I keep trying to ban the word "marriage" from my house. I think it would free my soul and help me lose 100 pounds at the same time.
My wife just laughs and tells me to stop dreaming.
"As with many deeply retarded conventions . . . "
I love that when you poked at the German critters for their "unwords," your stick was an English unword.
> The Unwordians argue that the term biodeutsch has become “discriminatory”
It is indeed discriminatory, as is any word that is useful: that's why they hate it.
Lol, I love it when a propaganda word or phrase gets turned around and used against the blue-haired leftist harridans. Trump did it masterfully with "fake news".