Liberals Talk A Different Language

One of the difficulties in talking to liberals is that they talk a form of Newspeak, George Orwell's propaganda language from "1984." It's all inherited from the far left which believes that the only purpose of speech is to achieve power. The right is still wedded to the quaint notion that speech is for the purpose of discourse and that the purpose of discourse is to find the truth. Silly us!

The notion that speech is for acquiring power goes back at least to the sophists of ancient Greece so we can't say it is a new notion. It has a long and illustrious career with many proponents down the years. It is the mother of all logical fallacies and all language distortions aimed at muddling the issue and confusing the listener.

An exercise that has been advanced by thinkers I respect such as G. K. Chesterton and Richard Feynman who are actually united in this thought is that if you want to analyze something, reduce it to words of one or two syllables, preferably one. It is remarkable how much clearer things become. I was reminded of this recently by listening to a rather technical talk in which exactly this had been done by Guy Steele one of the authors of the Scheme programming language which is a dialect of Lisp, the language used in many pioneering Artificial Intelligence projects. If you have some time and don't mind listening to slightly technicalese you might get a kick out of it. CLICK HERE But the point I want to make is that when liberals talk you have to translate what they say because the words don't mean the same thing that plain spoken people mean. They have a power agenda tied to their words that makes them loaded with spin. You have to learn the lingo and that can be very very sobering. Read "1984" again to get the idea. Orwell was talking about them.