Google’s blacklist

Via 2600:

Google Instant is the latest incarnation of the search engine that fills in potential responses as you type them into the Google search bar. Some people think this is great while others feel like Google is reading their minds and are freaked out by it. We believe it’s fun for at least one reason.

Like everything these days, great care must be taken to ensure that as few people as possible are offended by anything. Google Instant is no exception. Somewhere within Google there exists a master list of “bad words” and evil concepts that Google Instant is programmed to not act upon, lest someone see something offensive in the instant results… even if that’s exactly what they typed into the search bar. We call it Google Blacklist.

Give it a try. Go to the Google home page. Type in “puppy” and see the many results that fill your screen. Now type “bitch” and admire the blank screen. In this case, the two words could mean the exact same thing. But Google Instant is erring on the side of caution, protecting the searcher from seeing something they may not want to see.

Obviously, all you have to do is hit return to get the results like you always could. However, even when your request isn’t blacklisted, you’re not getting the SAME results that you would get by hitting return. Entering “murder” into the search bar gets you suggestions of mostly band names. It’s only after you hit return that you can learn the other sinister meaning of the word. What we have here is a demonstration of how content can be filtered, controlled, and ultimately suppressed. It is indeed a good thing that Google isn’t evil.

Some of the “banned” terms I had never heard of before. (Did you know that “bastinado” refers to a torture technique involving the whipping of the feet which has been adapted into an erotic practice? If so, you’ve lead a more adventurous life than I have–though I imagine you’ve limped more.) But the overall trend is predictable; “disembowel” and “how to commit suicide” are A-okay, “vibrator” and “clitoris” are not. Mutilation and death are a-okay, but human anatomy is a no-go zone.

Neither is “lesbian” or “bisexual,” which is odd, because “gay,” “homosexual,” and even the slur “dyke” are all kosher.

The website you’ve always wanted since 2002

A database of all the Mandarin swears from Firefly.

The language of sexual assault and the tea party movement

Miranda Celeste Hale passes along  a letter-to-the-editor of the Spokane, WA regional paper, The Spokesman Review:

Obama plan defies words

When a woman says, “No”, but a man pays no heed to her wishes, it’s called rape. What is it called, when most U.S. citizens vociferously protest, “No!” and are ignored by President Obama and much of the Democratic Congress — some of whom were bribed — as they crammed the Obama health care bill down our unwilling throats? I don’t know what it’s called, other than wrong, and “Time to impeach the main perpetrator” and “Time to wipe the smirk off Nancy Pelosi’s ingenuous, smug face.”

Becky McPherson
Valley, Wash.

Hale asks that we stop saying “rape” unless we’re actually talking about rape:

Alright, let me get the obvious stuff out the way first:

1. We live in a representative democracy, not a direct democracy.
2. Besides, even if we did, “most U.S. citizens” don’t agree with this teapartier lunacy, thank goodness.
3. Bribed? How? When? By whom? Why does the newspaper print these unsubstantiated accusations from paranoid, ignorant, and unjustifiably angry fools? Seriously. It’s a ridiculous and irresponsible practice.
4. Again, calling for impeachment? “[T]he main perpetrator”? “Time to wipe the smirk off Nancy Pelosi’s ingenuous, smug face”? Why print this absurd and hateful rhetoric? How does doing so benefit the newspaper? How does it benefit public discourse? I can’t wrap my brain around it.

But, more importantly: stop using “rape” unless you’re talking about actual rape. We use “rape” to describe a specific, horrible, and violent type of sexual assault, and indiscriminately throwing it around like this lessens its impact. In other words, teapartier lady, you and your fellow wingnuts weren’t “raped” by the president or Congress. Nothing was “crammed down [your] unwilling throats.” You weren’t physically violated or assaulted. You. Weren’t. Raped. Stop misusing and abusing the word, stop claiming it as your own, and stop pretending that the passage of health care reform harms you in the same way that actual rape hurts and violates rape victims. It’s a preposterous and offensive assertion, to say the least.

Gender Inclusive Language

I am reading The Really Hard Problem* by Owen Flanagan for an philosophical independent study of sorts. The book is basically about finding meaning in a material world, and I’m not talking about Madonna’s material world, I’m talking about everything that exists is finite and material and there is no G-d and no metaphysical stuff.

Anyway, Flanagan who teaches as a James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Neurobiology at Duke University** and has been published numerous times in academia, DOES NOT USE GENDER INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE. What? This still happens? The Really Hard Problem was published in 2009, Flanagan was a young man during the beginning of the Feminist movement in the 1960’s, he should be down with the gender-inclusive language thing.

UPDATE! I jumped the gun, so to speak, when I wrote this. Flanagan uses female pronouns in his later chapters. My apologizes.

Needless to say, this really bothered me, not only being a woman but also being a minority in the field of philosophy. Women only comprise 21% of Ph.Ds in philosophy.*** I brought it up with a friend and fellow student of philosophy on a bike ride later . His opinion on the matter was that if both genders are equal and mean the same thing (he is just the masculine  3rd person just as she is the feminine 3rd person) then what does it matter if someone uses just he or just she in their writing? When it comes down to it if what gender pronoun Flanagan uses does not affect the premises of his argument. So why care?

My friend raised a good point, my only retort was that Flanagan excludes a whole people from his examples, which if you are arguing a universal point, as Flanagan is doing, looks un-universal. So, yeah my counterargument sucked and I was embarrassed. I want to know what you all think,

Does it matter if you use gender inclusive language when it comes down to it? Why or why not?

*His title is a smart-ass take on David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness” (why do we have qualitative phenomenological experience at all).

** Vom, I have major beef with the wannabe “Princeton” of the South. But that’s neither here nor there, I just wanted to get in a little ad hominem action.

***“Salary, Promotion, and Tenure Status of Minority and Women Faculty in U.S. Colleges and Universities.”National Center for Education Statistics, Statistical Analysis Report, March 2000; U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 2000–173;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:93). See also “Characteristics and Attitudes of Instructional Faculty and Staff in the Humanities.” National Center For Education Statistics, E.D. Tabs, July 1997. U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, Report # NCES 97-973;1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF-93).

Worse than Lennin, Stalin, Hitler, and Castro *combined*

So…Obama’s killed 100,000 million people in nine months? I will only admit the comparison apt if it can be proven he has.

(above) Photo from today's tea-party demonstration in Washington, DC.

I’m rather disappointed by now that I haven’t articulated more of my criticisms of the Obama administration in the months since January. If I can’t expend serious energies against the ruling powers, I don’t know what good I am. I’m also concerned about the sheer number of posts I’ve devoted to poking fun  or wringing hands at the exacerbation of the right in that same time. They are underrepresented in government. Many of the more flamboyant protestors are poor, genuinely frightened people.

But they do present obvious targets while propagating such obvious falsehoods as the president’s plans for death panels or a private army. When such manifest untruths hold such sway over public debate–when they come from the fingertips of a former governor, when they are repeated on the higest-rated cable news station–everyone ought to be concerned for the state of public debate, the circulation of democracy.

But exponentially more worthy of censure than these misinformation campaigns is the carelessness with which the terms “fascist/Nazi” and “socialist/communist” have been thrown around. A reverence for distinction compels us to note the irreconcilable tension between the two terms and those who espouse either. Moreover, it is an insult to the memories and legacies of those who lived and died under such autocratic regimes to trivialize their suffering by invoking it at the point of every policy dispute.

That so many of the tea-partiers are members of the silent generation is distressing. Here are people who lived through the Second World War, who might have seen newsreel footage of Nazi atrocities come to light for the first time; and witnessed the economic and direct violence wrecked in the name of communism. Yet so many of them tolerate sinage among their own ranks comparing their own center-left contry men to those outrages. Granted, they are entitled to outrage for policy disagreements; but we should expect them to recognize these disagreeable policies won’t be the shame of the century.

A certain other Marquette community blogger is also bad at this. He was calling left-liberals “fascists” and “Stalinists” years before Goldberg, Beck and Limbaugh made it cool. Maybe he began in righteous dismay at reprehensible comparisons on the left of Bush to Hitler. Yet even if this was his original stimulus to action, it does not excuse him for taking the low, easy road. He wollowed in the same muck as his opponents, retaliating eye for an eye, thoughtlessly-hurled “fascist” for thoughtlessly-hurled “fascist”. One would expect a greater appreciation for distinctions from a professor of political science; one would not expect him to be so quick to dilute the force of our collective memories of the staggering atrocities of 20th century totalitarianism by comparing them to campus speech codes or identity politics-driven “sensitivity training.” I dislike both speech codes and identity politics, too, as both seem to dissolve some degree of personal autonomy. Still, it is not my first instinct to implicate those who promote them with mass-murder.  

I realize as late as last week I made a joke about Massachusetts being a “Gulag”; but just because I don’t live up to my own standard does nott mean it is not one worthy of aspiring to.

I do not know what horse I ought to bet on in this healthcare debate. I don’t know if those living under single-payer systems are on the whole better off than Americans (though this is a moot point, as the current proposal will not produce such a system). I don’t know how the “healthcare reform” on the table will distort the market for the better, or whether it can possibly deliver any of what it promises.

In all frankness, I doubt it. But the United States has survived other expansions of the welfare state, and I think it is a discredit to think that this one would end our way of life forever. And it certainly won’t take us one step closer to Buchenwald or the Gulag.

Newsweek’s Kathleen Deveny on…that word

You know…that one. The one that’s the subject of the audience-participation section of Vagina Monologues?  That Shakespeare spelled out in Act II Scene V of Twelfth Night? Inga  Muscio’s declaration of independence?

Is that helpful?

There’s of course talk of “reclaiming,” an enterprise I’ve found myself increasingly skeptical of. After decades of amiable or neutral use of the word in hip-hop and other African American aesthetic endeavors, “nigger” has lost none of its strength as a pejorative. “Gay” can go either way; newscasters use it casually and without giggling, but among the youth it’s still a specific or content-free insult. “Queer” has lent itself to both a moniker of radical affirmation of gay identity, and the critical-theoretic study of homosexuality and the fluidity gender identity. At the same time, it retains such potency as an insult one hardly hears it.

The only categorically successful complete reclamation I can think of pertain to what atheists call themselves; most  I know find the words “godless” and “infidel” genuinely funny. But this case is special, because for most of the history of Western civilization, there have been no non-pejorative terms to refer to religious skeptics. The original Greek atheoi referred to a crime, not a belief system. So it’s not really a reclamation at all, but a co-opting.

I don’t think any word will ever be able to be totally reclaimed; context and intonation will continue to dictate everything.

Is it apt?

Some of you may have already come across “A Person Paper on Purity in Language,” by cognitivist academic Douglas Hofstadter.

I’ve got a question about it. In the headline. Let’s work it out.

Relevancy FAIL

Ben Zimmer has devoted 900 words of the Sunday Times exploring the use of the word “fail” as a noun and interjection on the Internet. Seriously.

Oh, snap

Barbara Boxer at a hearing with Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh on the New Orleans levees:

Moreso than any other reason, I posted this to discuss the demirits and demerits of the phrase”senatrix.” The word’s suffix carries connotations of a misunderstood and mistrusted profession, but is technically correct in the Latin from which usually masculinized stem is derived. Also, there is precedence in its use in the American canon, somewhere in the corpus of Vonnegut; I believe, but am not certain, in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian.

Standing question

I don’t identify with progressivism (though many would probably argue I am aiding and abetting some of its ends with my writings in this space). But I recognize a lot of my readers apply the term to themselves. So, here’s my question:

What do you mean when you say progress ?

Do you believe that only material progress is possible? That is, have political and technological innovations of the modernized world have placated some of our more antisocial drives, or rediverted them into something more or less constructive? Or do you disbelieve that human nature has been, is, and shall for the foreseeable future be a fixed constant? A yes-or-no question might be more convenient to answer: Can the problems of humanity–war, poverty, ideological-sectarian and ethnic strife–be solved, or only sometimes alleviated?