1984-Like "Seven Word Ban"

Shoshin

Just heard about the seven word ban "this".... proposed by the Trump administration for next years CDC (Centre for Disease Control) Budget and thought ...WTF Oops ....

The forbidden seven words
Vulerable
Entitlement
Diversity
Transgender
Fetus
Evidence-Based
Science-Based

(I guess I'll have to wash my mouth out ( or finger tips in this case ) after typing the forbidden seven )

Is there more to come I wonder....

Um...It reminds me of the Victorian "Unmentionables"

person

It struck me as being the conservative version of politically correct language, a concept they unendingly complain about.

karasti

It's very odd. I have a friend who is a lawyer in the health care field and she is utterly upset about it. From her point of view it is a very political attempt to shut down the ability to properly communicate important information to groups of people who need it.
They will find ways around, but it makes things much more challenging as they work with clients and will be a huge waste of time for them to have to bring current documentation up to standards.

federica

7 words I'd ban:

Braggadocious

Bigly

Fake

Trump

Soft-towels

Humble

Tan

lobster

WTF

Well not said

Real life, real leaders ... unreal ...

Jeroen

I think it just shows where the Republican party would like to take the U.S. I could say more, but it would be unskillful, unbeneficial, but true and I think it’s obvious.

karasti

It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall to know how that discussion and decision came about. Why? What exactly are they trying to accomplish, truly? Considering they are the ones ranting about freedom of speech at colleges it's always interesting to me how much they contradict themselves and see no problem with it.

Snakeskin

I think Republicans just feel sorry for Democrats and their uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. So, while Democrats work hard at the state level to dismantle gerrymandered electoral maps, Republicans, out of sympathy, work doubly hard at the national level to ensure a Democratic landslide that no Electoral College or Supreme Court could withstand.

Shoshin

The mind is quite fragile and thoughts are easily manipulated..And it would seem that unbeknown to the manipulator they too are being manipulated by the greatest Manipulator of all... their own thought mind

When the Trump administration spew out "Alternative Facts" my thoughts go to George Orwell's book 1984 "Newspeak & Doublethink"

"Although Nineteen Eighty-Four is most famous for the Party's pervasive surveillance of everyday life, this control means that the population of Oceania—all of it and including the ruling elite—could be controlled and manipulated merely through the alteration of everyday thought and language. Newspeak is the method for controlling thought through language; doublethink is the method of directly controlling thought."

"George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Ur-text for all those confronted by post truth, and it is heartening that the dystopian classic rose to the top of Amazon’s charts days after Conway urged Americans to embrace “alternative facts”. In his interrogation of Winston Smith, the Inner Party oligarch, O’Brien, warns that “reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else ….Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

Winston still objects that the party has no mastery over gravity, climate, disease or death: “O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull … There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to … You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”"