EDITED: How do you understand the term "authoritarian"?

[woo me with science]

25. Ah, the attempt to discredit the term, "authoritarian." I predicted this OP.

I've seen this tactic in several posts lately and figured it would be used for an OP. Authoritarians don't like being called what they are, and since they can't yet prohibit words and restrict others to an approved Newspeak Dictionary, they settle for flailing at and attempting to discredit the individual words they dislike.

This tactic, used less slickly and more openly as elsewhere in this thread, is most amusing in one-to-one settings. When someone uses an accurate word to describe what you are doing or advocating, just put the word in quotation marks, add some exclamation points, and try to neutralize it by pretending it's an epithet instead of an accurate descriptor. We have all seen it here 1,000 times. A person's politics are described as Third Way, and he or she rears up in indignation, expressing shock at the "namecalling."

Well, no. "Third Way" means something. It is not an epithet, but rather descriptive shorthand for a clear and specific set of political values and policies. You can see what "Third Way" means by going to the Third Way website, where the goals and policies - liberal on the social issues unimportant to the One Percent but corporate and authoritarian on virtually everything else - are clearly delineated.

Those who embrace the policies don't want to admit it, so they try to make the term an epithet...something to be banned by a jury so that it can't be accurately applied to them on the forums. And now we are hearing the same sort of defensive attempts to discredit the word when authoritarianism is called "authoritarianism."

Of course "authoritarian" means something. Brazen defense of a government's spying on its own citizens is indisputably authoritarian.

I always picture an indignant poodle rearing up in outrage and exclaiming, "What?! You called me a DOG?!"

Orwell was right. Defending against authoritarianism *requires* defending language, because authoritarians will try to twist, discredit, or take away the words that are necessary for us to describe what is being done to us.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3165643

Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak.

'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. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. [font color=blue]It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. [/font color]
Orwell, 1984

"Doublethink"
"Thoughtcrime"
"Superlative" CPI
"Ethical" DroneStrikes
"Transparency"
"RealityBasedCommunity"