I think that the latest acceptable term is, "developmentally
disabled", and perhaps if one is so afflicted, one might not comprehend this
fact? But this is just one example of the language police at work.
Coincidentally, I started reading a book last night which is newly on BARD, but
was written by James Baldwin in 1968. He is an absolutely fantastic writer.
This is a novel, but I think it has an autobiographical side to it. At any
rate, the title of Part One is "House Nigger". Thank God they didn't edit it so
that the narrator would say, "House N Word", instead.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:58 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The War on Privacy
The word retard simply means to make slow. For example, a coal truck traveling
to the point of picking up a load of coal will travel at a certain speed. Once
it has been loaded with coal its return journey will be at a lesser speed. The
load of coal has retarded the coal truck. In the realm of psychology the term
is qualified with the word mentally to indicate a slowness of mental processes.
That is, the phrase is mentally retarded even though it is unclear that
slowness is exactly what is going on in people with the condition. Perhaps I
should say conditions plural because the causes and manifestation of the
syndrome are variable. I remember when the phrase, mentally retarded was
perfectly acceptable even though it was still being used as an insult. Most
people could tell when it was being used insultingly and when it wasn't. I
remember back when I was an advanced placement college student - that is,
attending college classes while not having yet graduated from high school - my
advanced placement group took a tour of the West Virginia Rehabilitation
Center. It was located just a short distance from the college, so we walked
there. I don't remember why, but there were very few clients or perhaps none in
evidence at the time. Maybe it was during an intersession, but I don't know. We
just toured the facilities. We were shown where prosthetic devices were fitted
and where various classes were held and so forth. We came to a room that was
dedicated to training retarded people. The tour guide, an employee of the rehab
center, used the word retarded quite freely. But then he did mention that if
the clients were present at the time he could not, of course, come in here and
say that these were a group of retarded people. I remember asking myself why
not. After all, if that is what they are then why keep it a secret from them?
In fact, there used to be a certain television commercial advertising the
American Council of Retarded citizens. I think that is the name. It featured a
man who identified himself as retarded and went on to praise retarded citizens
as reliable workers. I think that television commercial did come along well
after I had my tour though. Many years later I became a client of that rehab
center myself. By then things had changed. One did not dare utter the word
retarded. The clients who were afflicted by that particular malady were called
slow learners. Since all of us there had some kind of disability it was common
to ask a fellow client, What's your disability?
The slow learners openly admitted to being slow learners. There was one
exception that I remember. It was a woman who was obviously one of the slow
learners who insisted that she did not have a disability and that her field
counselor worked hard for her to get her into the center.
Well, I suppose it would have been pointless to have pointed out that she would
not have had a field counselor nor would have gotten into the rehab center if
she had not had some kind of disability. Nevertheless, it seemed that among the
people, clients or staff, who were not one of the slow learners there was an
understanding that one did not say anything to let them know that they were
slow learners even if they called themselves that. And that is something else I
have noticed all my life. If you have a disability there is rarely any attempt
to avoid talking about it. Personally, once I became blind it seemed like the
main topic of conversation when I met someone new was my blindness. If someone
is an amputee there seems to be no problem with at least mentioning it to the
amputee. The same goes for other disabilities too.
But there is one disability that most everyone seems to try to keep it a secret
from the people who have it that they do have it. That is mental retardation or
slow learning, whichever you are going to call it. You don't dare to mention it
within hearing of the afflicted person. I suppose that explains why the woman
who thought that she didn't have a disability could persist in thinking that.
No one had ever told her. By the way, even though I never counted it did seem
that slow learner was the very most frequent disability at that rehab center.
___
Emmett F. Fields “ Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not
exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an
attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly,
always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
” ― Emmett F. Fields
On 2/8/2021 3:28 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I have some comments on this which I wanted to make when I read
Greenwald's post. For years, I have thought that the censorship of
unpleasant words is a mistake. Several years ago, we had a debate about the
subject on this list.
I think that the word in question was, "retarded". For decades, it was
a perfectly respectable word, used to describe people with limited
intellectdual functioning. Then, it began also being used as an insult.
That was when it became a forbidden word. To me, that seems insane.
Now, apparently, it can't even be used ironically. So now, instead of
using one word to simply and easily describe a person with a specific
disability, we have to substitute a complicated phrase. I remember
when people began attempting to use complicated phrases in order to
avoid using the word, "blind". Somehow, that didn't stick, even though
people do use blindness as an insult as, "Even a blind person could
see that!". And on Democracy Now, each time they quote a racist
statement or describe something racist that the police say, they
substitute, "the N word" for the actual word. It's like if you
actually pronounce the word, it means that you are demonstrating your
hatred for black people, even though you're just reporting something
that someone else said. And if I hear one more person talk about how
college students need safe spaces, I'll vomit. At the same time that
our thoughts are being controlled and our speeched censored, our
society is becoming more and more predatory. I heard two podcasts this
morning, both describing economic entrapment of everyday people and dozens of
books about it are appearing on BARD.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 3:08 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The War on Privacy
The War on Privacy
Five years ago, official abuses of secrecy were the scandal. Today,
the scandal is you
Matt Taibbi
Feb 8
My colleague Glenn Greenwald hit the nail on the head this weekend
when he wrote about "tattletale journalism," in which media reporters
for the largest companies spend their time attacking speech, instead
of defending it. The miserable trend just reached its apex when Taylor
Lorenz - a dunce of historic proportions unleashed on the world by the
New York Times - attended an invitation-only Clubhouse chat and not
only reported that Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreesson used
the word "retarded" in a discussion about the GameStop uprising, but
published the names and faces of those who were guilty of being
present and silent during the commission of this heinous crime:
Lorenz was wrong on three counts. One, Andreesson never said the word.
Two, the person who did say the word was merely relaying that the
Reddit users betting on GameStop "call themselves the 'retard
revolution.'" Lorenz was confusing reporting on speech with actually
speaking, the same error that's led to crackdowns on videographers
like Jon Farina and Ford Fischer, punished for shooting raw footage of
people saying and doing supposedly objectionable things (a story mostly
uncovered by these same media priests).
Thirdly, WTF???? Private utterance of the word "retarded" is news? As
Greenwald points out, this would be joke behavior coming from a middle
school hall monitor. Such deviance-hunts however are now a central
concern of media reporters like Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy of CNN,
Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC, and Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose,
Sheera Frenkel, and Lorenz at the Times. Somebody, somewhere, is
saying or thinking a bad thing, and this crew seeks the rot out, with
the aim of publicly shaming those individuals.
The subtext isn't hard to decipher. These people believe bad-think,
left unaddressed, results in Donald Trump being elected. Therefore, as
Chen and Roose put it in a chat last week, it's "problematic" to
countenance platforms that allow large numbers of people to assemble
in non-monitored, "shadow" social networks, where they can spread
"misinformation" and wreak, potentially, a "ton of havoc." Countless
stories have been written on the theme of what speech should be
"allowed," as if they are the ones who should be doing the allowing.
This is how we've traveled in just two and a half years from banning
Alex Jones to calling for crackdowns on all unmonitored or
less-monitored spaces, from podcasts to the aforementioned Clubhouse
to encrypted platforms like Signal and Telegram to Parler, even to
Substack, which ludicrously is beginning to come under fire as a purveyor of
unapproved thought.
Let's stipulate, for a moment, that these people are right, that
private spaces breed fascism and bigotry, because as William Blake
wrote, we should "expect poison from standing water," making
transparency the ultimate public virtue. Let's agree that all private
spaces must have their windows thrown open, so that New York Times reporters
can sit watching for transgressions.
I disagree with this creeptastic point of view, but let's admit it,
for sake of argument.
How do we square that belief with the attitude of these "reporters"
toward Wikileaks, or Edward Snowden, or the secret budgets of the
intelligence services, or our global network of secret prisons, or our
regime of secret National Security Letter subpoenas, or any of a dozen
other areas where official or corporate secrecy has expanded? While
self-styled heroes of anti-fascism at places like the New York Times
have been outing the likes of "Jules," "Fab," and "Chloe" for the crime of
listening to the word "retard,"
the exercise of actual political power has more and more become a
black box, and nobody in these newsrooms seems to care.
These culture warriors are collectively making a clear statement:
Personal privacy is dangerous, official secrecy is not. They seek
total transparency when it comes to our personal beliefs and opinions,
and oppose it for governments or tech monopolies.
Roughly five years ago, when we first started to see the outlines of a
new union between ostensibly left-wing intellectuals with
corporate-funded neoliberal politicians in both the Democratic and
Republican parties, the arrangement seemed to make little sense. At
most, the decision by politicians like Hillary Clinton to adopt the
language of campus intersectionality in campaign rhetoric seemed like
a temporary cynical gambit, a handy little bullshit-cloud for use in
discrediting a populist challenge in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign,
whose army of "Bros"
were said to lack solutions to America's "real" problems:
Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton
We face a complex, intersectional set of challenges. We need solutions
and real plans for all of them. #DemDebate March 7th 2016
913 Retweets1,390 Likes
Years later, it's obvious the partnership was about more than
denouncing political opponents as racists, sexists, homophobes,
transphobes, or (in the case of Jeremy Corbyn) anti-Semites. The new
#Resistance politics marries aggressive interventionist foreign policy
and secret government with a strain of pseudo-leftist thinking that
despises privacy of any kind, as a hidey-hole for bigotry, sexual violence,
and "sedition."
It's a perfect cover story for propagandizing the expansion of the
surveillance state. We now take it as a given that we're surrounded at
all times by white supremacy and patriarchal oppression, which
curiously exists everywhere but inside the CIA, NSA, FBI, the banking
sector, etc. This belief system has given us a press corps that's
averted its eyes from institutional secrecy, becoming instead the
tattletale army Greenwald describes, obsessed with the sins of private
human interaction, a Junior Anti-Sex League brought to life.
Not long ago, liberal America was mortified by the revelations first
of Wikileaks, then of Snowden. A Pew survey in 2015 showed that 40
percent of the country was "somewhat" or "very" concerned that their
private communications had been violated. A third of Americans
reported changing their phone and Internet habits, and studies showed
significant drops in searches for terms like "al-Qaeda," "car bomb,"
"Taliban," "dirty bomb," and even "pandemic," as people worried they
would attract investigative attention.
There was initially a rush of public support for Snowden, just as
there had been for Chelsea Manning and even Julian Assange after
Wikileaks not only disclosed war crimes in Iraq, but began leaking
horrifying information about the behaviors of some of the world's
biggest companies - the dumping of toxic waste by Trafigura, broad tax
avoidance by Barclays and others, massive fraud in the Icelandic
banking sector during the financial collapse, etc. The people who
brought the Snowden story to light, i.e. Greenwald and documentarian
Laura Poitras, were granted the highest societal honors, with a
Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar. We even for a time saw momentum behind
bipartisan efforts to defund the national information police at the NSA.
What a difference a few years makes! In the wake of Trump's election,
the Podesta leak, the Russian interference story, Assange's
never-adjudicated sexual assault case, and other headlines, public sentiment
reversed.
Suddenly leakers are villains, and even genuine documents full of true
information are regularly christened "misinformation," if they have
the wrong political impact.
Civil liberties are now widely understood to be a canard, protecting
racists and disinformation agents, and high priests of journalism,
like Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll, are clear that free
speech has been "weaponized," especially in the form of information
that passes between individuals without the benefit of the media's
contextualizing efforts. As Greenwald notes, Coll went on TV to fret
that "our facts, our principles, our scientific method" cannot compete
with Facebook's unacceptably dangerous mission to "connect everybody in the
world."
Both Snowden and Assange are now denounced as foreign (and probably
Russian) agents, and efforts to let us know what might be going on
under the hood of governments, banks, and political parties are
decried as foreign interference, designed to destablize the country.
The Intercept, founded to publicize the Snowden material and challenge
officialdom, is often seen on the front lines in the campaign against
free speech, and it's also now forced out both Poitras and Greenwald,
who's regularly pilloried by mainstream commentators as a Trump-lover,
misogynist, and agent of Vladimir Putin.
We've seen something like this pattern before. Seymour Hersh won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing war crimes at the Vietnamese
hamlet of My Lai. Four years later, when he broke arguably a bigger
story about a "massive, illegal CIA domestic intelligence operation,"
the reaction of many colleagues was to say he'd overreached. The
Columbia Journalism Review printed a piece by Senator J. William
Fullbright saying, "I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind
of truths we most need now."
Americans, said Fulbright, needed "stability and confidence" after the
Nixon years, and the media needed to exercise "voluntary restraint."
Collectively, the press decided not to pick up that story.
Stories about the expansion of official secrecy during the Trump years
similarly did not interest mainstream news organizations much. We
stopped worrying about the illegal use of counterintelligence evidence
in domestic criminal cases, were uninterested in government assertions
that American citizens do not have the right to know if they've been
targeted for "lethal action" (I was one of just two reporters in the
courtroom for a related lawsuit, in which the plaintiff was not even
entitled to know what federal agency the government's lawyer
represented), and magically lost our animosity for Trump Attorney
General William Barr, when his Justice Department refused to allow
Twitter or any other company to reveal how many secret FISA orders they'd
received.
Instead, our fears are more usefully directed now, toward other
members of the general public. We've been trained to think of once
cherished private spaces as breeding-grounds for bigotry and
incitement. Marriage is a haven for sexual violence. Parents are
transphobes. "Relatives" are biological trivia, as exemplified by the
story of the Massachusetts teen who turned in her parents for
attending the Capitol riot, triggering an outpouring of affection from
Tweeters desperate to step into the role of her "real"
family.
Rights to assembly are suspect, because open doors invite malefactors
in, as Jimmy Kimmel noted recently when he suggested (without any
evidence) that "Russian disruptors" were among those betting up
GameStop. We can't even permit certain individuals or groups to
continue communicating just because they have large, enthusiastic
audiences willing to support such relationships, as those free
assemblies might lack the aristocratic refinement to ensure adherence to what
Coll calls "our principles."
Thus this new generation of media cops exults in the firing of people
like New York Times reporter Donald McNeil, campaigns to get Spotify
to renounce the likes of Joe Rogan, and begs corporate daddies at
Comcast and Charter Spectrum to pull commercial competitors like Fox
off the airwaves. The press is supposed to challenge power, but the
current iteration has decided instead to be a most aggressive agent of
it. And they're just getting started.