I recently learned something new. Normally, learning something new is a good thing, but the implications of this one are infuriating. As most know, the Woke Left has its own lexicon, and more acronyms than the Department of Defense. It also is constantly trotting out new language, new terms, new short-hand, and new acronyms. Eavesdrop on a woke-klatch, whether it be live or on social media, and you’ll hear a steady stream of this insider terminology.
Normally, I find the over-reliance on jargon both amusing and informative as to the speaker (and not in a good way. See: Argument By Gibberish). Overdone, it’s both preening and deflective, serving to change the terms and focus of a debate. However, the new revelation absolutely floored me.
“MAP” has been added to the Left’s lexicon.
Know what it means in Woketopistan?
Are you ready for this?
Sitting down?
Got a hold of something?
…
“Minor-Attracted Person”
Yes, indeed, they’ve created a new term for pedophiles.
WHY!?!?!?!?
I was immediately reminded of George Carlin’s iconic bit about the softening of language, where “shell shock” was replaced by “battle fatigue, and then “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He opened the bit with:
You can’t be afraid of words that speak the truth. Even if it’s an unpleasant truth.
American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse.
Carlin would be having a field day tearing down the social justice lexicon were he still with us.
What message are we to take away from the replacement of “pedophile” with “Minor Attracted Person?” After all, there has to be a reason for substituting one for the other, and given the pretty universal (and wholly correct) abhorrence of pedophilia, we can only surmise that this substitution is intended to blunt that abhorrence.
The pedophiles are certainly interested in this euphemizing, and have been working on acceptance of “MAP” for a while now, even going so far as to push a #mappositivity hash tag and try to piggyback themselves onto the LGBTQ movement. The latter, properly, want nothing to do with the pedos.
A bit of digging offered some more insight. An organization called the Global Prevention Project,” whose aim appears to be offering assistance to those with this predilection in controlling it and not acting on it, nevertheless uses the term while asserting it’s “NOT an attempt to ‘rebrand’ or ‘polish’ pedophiles.” While the aim of reducing the propensity of those with this mental illness to act on it is indeed laudable and those who feel such urgings should seek as much outside assistance as they need to resist acting on them, we are back at Carlin’s “unpleasant truth” observation. Explaining away the re-wording doesn’t diminish its perniciousness.
The SJ movement’s language games aren’t merely about enhancing the speed and accuracy of idea exchange, as is often the case with technical jargon. Nor are they solely about softening unpleasant ideas, though that’s often a substantial component. They serve another end: to inform other members of the discussion group that a person is one of them (Michael Malice refers to this as “in-group signaling”), is versed not only in the language but also the narratives, and that there will be nothing but agreement on issues and viewpoints that are debated, disputed, and disagreed on in broader society. They notify others of an idea “safe space” and serve the same purpose as the Freemasons’ secret handshakes and gestures: as proof of membership in that society.
The language games also intersect with another SJ tactic: the sorting of individuals into “political baskets.” Identity politics is always about groups, never about individuals. In fact, the individual is of no use, either as a person or as a philosophical concept, except in service to the group. This is why the Left reserves its greatest hatred for those individuals who are “traitors” to their identity or identities. The Left presumes ownership of all the identity groups it deems “oppressed,” so an “oppressed” individual’s voice and vote exist to serve the Left’s agenda. When it fails to honor that social contract, it deserves silencing and worse.
Another relatively recent revelation: “AAPI.”
As in “Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.” To the Left, all those who trace ethnic origin to that region of the world get collected in a single basket. No matter that there is massive historical enmity between Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. No matter that there are massive cultural differences between Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Maori, Samoans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Malaysians, Indonesians, North Koreans, South Koreans, Laotians, Mongolians, Burmese, Nepalese, Sri Lankans, Taiwanese, etc. Collecting them all in one basket accrues statistical significance for the Left’s purposes, and designating AAPI as an oppressed class comes with a presumptive declaration that this belongs to the Left. There’s power in numbers, and if “AAPI” can be forged into a monolithic bloc, no matter the internal differences and conflicts, no matter that the members of this group don’t even call themselves AAPI, it serves the Left’s power lust.
This parallels the Central/South American angle. Having run a restaurant for two decades in a highly diverse area, and having employed people of dozens of nationalities/ethnicites, I became quite familiar with the fact that those the rich white social justice types would gather into a single basket dubbed “latino” get rather upset if misidentified. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Chileans, Argentinians, etc, may all speak the same language (dialects aside) and generally share a religion and historical ethnic background, but they do not appreciate being mistaken for each other (to the point of significant insult at times). Yet, for social justice purposes, the single basket makes for better utility.
The baskets work both ways, of course. Tossing someone into an “undesirable” basket is a shame game. The most famous, of course, is Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
If you supported Trump’s candidacy the first time, you were declared “guilty-by-association” because racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamaphobes supported Trump. Note, by the way, that this basket served to tell us that there weren’t any racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, or Islamaphobes who were Democrats or voted for Clinton, as if the Dems’ traditional base of blue collar and union workers was wholly devoid of any sort of bias or bigotry.
Some baskets are used to dehumanize entire groups of people. Take note of some of the Left’s rhetoric in the wake of the Derek Chauvin episode. They don’t single out bad individuals in the police force, they decree that cops en toto are bad and racist with blanket generalizations. Call them out on it and they’ll deny it, of course, but the libertarians’ message of “make it easier to fire bad cops and things will get better” is of no interest to the Defund The Police movement. This instance can, of course, be traced to OPM – the defunders have plans for that money – but it’s an easier sell (see again, “guilt by association”) to portray them as racist and therefore to be shunned and minimized.
It bears repeating that these language and basket games are about reducing the individual to nothing more than a check-mark. Your thoughts, opinions, and actions only matter when they serve your basket’s goals – goals decided for your basket by people who know better. Those thoughts, opinions, and actions, when they don’t serve the narrative, are heresy or apostasy, and will be treated as the Inquisitors did.
You, as an individual, do not matter.
Even if you’re in one of their favored baskets.
This is the key to understanding the views and philosophies of today’s Progressive-Left, or whatever they call themselves in the moment. It isn’t a new way of thinking. In fact, it is shockingly similar to the Bolsheviks of 1930s Russia. As Mark Twain didn’t say, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” The Marxists of last century sought to tear down free societies by exploiting and wedging class/economic differences. The Neo-Marxists (though they’ll never accept the label) that we’re dealing with here and now are seeking to tear down this society by exploiting and wedging “identity” differences. They started with race, added sex, converted sex to gender, invented the basket game, and keep coming up with more and more baskets in order to divide us.
There’s no reasoning them out of their views by any normal appeal to liberty, since liberty is at its core about the individual. The only effective counter is to simply refuse participation in their game (an exhortation I’ve made many times here. Eschew their language rules in favor of your own. Trust yourself to know what’s actually offensive, and reject their endless updates (seriously – Brandeis University just declared “picnic” to be offensive) to the rule book. And, when you deal with them, remember their contempt for your individuality. Sun Tzu taught us to “know your enemy,” and enemies they are. There is no room in their philosophy for our liberties, both those explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights and those implicit and inherent as free-thinking individuals.
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“American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it.”
George Carlin was a comedian, not a prophet. As he got older he became less and less amusing, and more and more of a ranter — rather like Lenny Bruce. The issue does not spring from “American English,” nor does it lie collectively with “Americans.” Blaming America, per se, is merely a bugaboo of Carlin’s — one that doubtless (speaking of “in-group signalling”) played well to his audiences.
Orwell is a far more accurate and more informed source. He wrote, “Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something … [in an] inflated style … [which] itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…”