>>Nobody can or should stop you from thinking about reality with the model of your choice.
While I agree with you, that is very much the game that is being played here. We have competing world views and one way to help a world view dominate is to play a linguistic war. That was the point of Newspeak in 1984 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak). If you control the language such that competing ideas are instantly taboo just by the words required to describe them you can stop people from promulgating those ideas. So you gain ground without ever having to debate the new ideas.
This has happened in many countries when one religion dominated. Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit. Sadly we're regressing back to a society controlled by dogma rather than an open exchange of ideas. I suspect this is the normal state of human societies, we fluctuate between open and closed societies.
The whole point of (post-)structuralist philosophy, which informs the left-wing view on this, is that all language is already newspeak. (And since it follows that you can't choose not to play, you may as well play to win.)
> Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit.
Name a year that things were actually better. (In the 40's, before the civil rights movement? In the 80's, when queer people were still regularly oppressed and excluded from participation in society? Did ideas "win on their merit" when police beat up people in gay bars?)
>The whole point of (post-)structuralist philosophy, which informs the left-wing view on this, is that all language is already newspeak. (And since it follows that you can't choose not to play, you may as well play to win.)
Exactly that. This is the current conflict.
Things were not better in the 40s, action movies were better in the 80s :p.
Things were trending towards a more open society they had not become perfect by any stretch of the imagination. That trend, IMO, has reversed, due to the tactics involved. That is not to say some groups haven't benefited from this. There is a genuine drive to create a utopia here. However I fear the cure might be worse than the disease.
While I agree with you, that is very much the game that is being played here. We have competing world views and one way to help a world view dominate is to play a linguistic war. That was the point of Newspeak in 1984 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak). If you control the language such that competing ideas are instantly taboo just by the words required to describe them you can stop people from promulgating those ideas. So you gain ground without ever having to debate the new ideas.
This has happened in many countries when one religion dominated. Western society was starting to get to the point where it taboos were being shed and ideas could win based on their merit. Sadly we're regressing back to a society controlled by dogma rather than an open exchange of ideas. I suspect this is the normal state of human societies, we fluctuate between open and closed societies.