Daily Archives: September 2, 2021

Such a deliberate use of words can diffuse a tense situation and lead to more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Unfortunately, as we mature and understand words better, the use of words can lead to more conflict if the words themselves are transformed into weapons. How many times have you heard someone say that it is not what you said but how you said it? The delivery and interpretation of words can change their meanings dramatically.

Words matter, but the meanings of those words matter even more.

Mastering the many meanings of words is critical to understanding others, especially in the world of politics. It is within political discourse where we find the most significant use of wordsmithing. Here is where people are constantly jockeying for ideological position in their attempts to find a clear path to victory.

In the generation before this one, the phrase political correctness was originally meant to signify that someone was sensitive to language and actions that were racist, sexist, or homophobic. If you were being politically correct, you were trying to use labels that made people feel better about themselves, reduce discrimination, and promote equity. The change from firemen, policemen, and mailmen to firefighters, police officers, and mail carriers, for example, was considered a politically correct adaptation to the fact that many more personnel in fire, police, and postal departments were women.

While seemingly harmless and even positive, the meaning of the phrase political correctness was soon changed to a pejorative term by people who opposed this process of sensitivity. They relabeled the concept as "PC." This new meaning claimed that a PC person was someone who wasted their time trying not to offend anyone by watching every word they said. It is claimed that PC people are part of the cancel culture because they want to change the longstanding behavior of others through the excessive, constant, and annoying manipulation of our language.

This partisan evolution of the phrase political correctness demonstrates how the meaning of words can be changed to, in effect, weaponize them as tools against those who originated them.

Today, this same weaponization process has been applied to the concept of woke.

Originally, woke was a concept that came out of African American communities in the United States during the 1930s. It was a term used to help people become more aware of racial prejudice and discrimination that affected African Americans. Folks were encouraged to stay woke, or aware, of such disparities and to fight to change them.

In the last few years, though, woke has been used by many political groups fighting for equality. This broadening of the term has been quite expansive. Calls to stay woke can now be found at protests involving LGBTQ+ issues, womens rights, immigrant rights, environmental protection, economic inequality, funding for the arts, and many other social-justice issues.

The basic meaning of woke has become more of a general awareness of all forms of prejudice and discrimination and the need to defeat them.

The opponents of woke took this expanded meaning and twisted it to apply to anyone who they feel hates America and has declared war on our culture. They claim that woke activists push their identity politics so forcefully that they are destroying the unity of our nation. They demonize well-intending woke by saying they have no respect for tradition and that they wish to wipe out our collective history.

As adults, we have learned to use our words. Unfortunately, we have also learned to misuse other peoples words. When we weaponize words that were intended to do good, we undermine the goodness of those respective movements.

It is time to grow up as a society. We need to stop attacking those promoting social justice because we have become frustrated and fearful of change. We need to diffuse the current tense situation in our society by taking our clever word-power abilities and using them to promote more self-awareness, understanding, and positive change.

Dave Berger of Plymouth, Minnesota, is a retired sociology professor who taught for nearly three decades at Inver Hills Community College. He also is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.

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Local View: Stop weaponizing 'woke,' other words of adversaries - Duluth News Tribune

By Donald B. Smith

Like most Americans I have been watching the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan with horror and dismay. Last Thursdays suicide bombings outside Kabul airport, which killed 13 U.S. servicemembers as well as killing and wounding scores of Afghan civilians, was a tragic and meaningless act of violence. It may also be a harbinger of future such attacks.

After 20 years of success in keeping terrorists at bay and thwartingattacks against our American homeland, we now leave Kabul in control of the very people who gave Osama bin Laden safe haven. This debacle will make America less safe for a generation or more, just as defeat in Vietnam did.

The American people only support putting our sons and daughters into harms way if U.S. national security is truly threatened. This was certainly the case in the wake of the horrific September 11, 2001, attacks.

However, many Americans grew weary of 20 years of commitment in Afghanistan and believed it was time to bring all the troops home. This was understandable, but the alternative should not be allowing Afghanistan to again become a breeding, training and staging ground for international terrorist groups who hate the United States, our values and way of life.

Unfortunately, our political leadership placed politics over our national security and the safety of the American people. Not only was the decision completely to withdraw from Afghanistan flawed, but the way this withdrawal or more properly retreat has been executed has become an international embarrassment.

We made mistakes that were unworthy of a global superpower. For example, announcing the withdrawal with a date certain that was not condition-based. Or not coordinating the pullout with our coalition partners. Or giving up our major military airbase at Bagram early in the withdrawal instead of as the final move, thus denying our forces and those of our Afghan allies the air support necessary to stave off the Taliban advance.

Furthermore, we abandoned Bagram Air Base in the dead of nighton July 6 without any prior coordination with our NATO allies or the Afghan commander, thereby undermining the confidence of the Afghan forces in American support.

The message from the White House to the free Afghans was clear and deadly: you are on your own. The government in Kabul was told plainly not to expect any of the air, materiel or intelligence support their forces had always depended on from the U.S. and NATO. Facing the brutal reality of being abandoned by their patrons, is it any wonder the Afghan troops collapsed in front of the determined and well-supported Taliban? We now face a humiliatingdefeat that has diminished U.S. credibility and threatened global stability.

It did not have to be this way. Even sustaining a minimal commitment would have bolstered Afghan morale, kept the Taliban guessing and ensured stability in Afghanistan as it has for two decades.

The irony is that even before the White House set the withdrawal deadline the United States had mostly already pulled back from Afghanistan. Since 2018 our missionunder the leadership of General Scott Miller transitioned to an air support, training, logisticsand leadership role with limited U.S. troops. We reduced American forces in Afghanistanto 2,500 troops, and many military leaders believed this would have been enough to maintain the status quo. There were also more than 10,000 NATO and allied troops from 38 nations supporting the effort. Despite disparaging comments from President Biden, the Afghan military was doing the bulk of the frontline fighting and taking almost all of the casualties.

The 2,500 support troops in Afghanistan allowed us to maintain our intelligence capabilities, have an embassy on the ground and secured access to Bagram Air Base. This modest deployment of troops had a more direct impact on our national security and the safety of the American people than the current 39,000 troops in Japan, 35,000 troops in Germany, 24,000 troops in South Korea, 6,300 troops in Kuwait and 5,500 troops in Bahrain, just to name some.And before the Kabul airport bombings the United States had not had a combat death in Afghanistan since February 2020.

But now we are faced with a meltdown reminiscent of the endgame in Saigon 46 years ago. Make no mistake, this is not a military defeat but a political calamity, just like in Vietnam. And now Afghan War veterans will experience the same deep frustration we Vietnam vets felt, that after decisively defeating an enemy on the battlefield, politicians have squandered our victory.

The more than 2,400 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan deserve better. As a nation, we must finally learn this hard lesson and never again let politics drive our national and homeland security strategy.

As we watch a third rate, ragtag military force dictate the terms of our withdrawal and force a weak president to adhere to their chosen timeline, we must pledge that we will return to a policy of Peace Through Strength including all the elements of national power, whether economic,diplomatic, military or intelligence. And we must also restore the power of moral leadership not hampered by progressive notions of political correctness unconnected to national security.

We cannot afford to allow defeat in Afghanistan to return our country to the hollow forces of the 1970s. This tragedy should inspire a new commitment to build the best equipped, best trained, and very importantly, the best-led military in the world. And never to let politicians throw away another military victory again.

Retired Brigadier General Donald B. Smith is a veteran of the Vietnam War and is former sheriff of Putnam County.

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Learning the Hard Lessons of Vietnam Once Again in Afghanistan - The Examiner News

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a guide last week for "Inclusive Communication," cautioning against using words like prisoner, smoker, illegal immigrant, disabled or homeless, which the agency says could imply blame or stigma.

The guide's opening line says, "We must confront the systems and policies that have resulted in the generational injustice that has given rise to health inequities." The CDC is now about fighting injustice, not disease.

The agency says instead of gender-specific pronouns like him or her, use "they," even when referring to one person. And talk about "parents" or "expectant parents" instead of mothers or fathers.

After making the hundreds of language changes the CDC recommends, who has time to defeat COVID-19?

CDC'S 'INCLUSIVE' LANGUAGE GUIDE DISCOURAGES SAYING 'ALCOHOLIC,' 'SMOKER,' 'UNINSURED,' 'ELDERLY'

The CDC's got mission confusion. With parts of the U.S. considering more COVID lockdowns, Americans don't need language lessons on political correctness. They need scientific information on how to reduce the risk of being infected by this virus indoors. That's key to reopening workplaces and returning to normal.

Numerous new technologies are said to destroy airborne viruses, including ionization, dry hydrogen peroxide, far UV light and others. But school administrators and office building managers don't have a clue which ones actually work. They're flying blind.

The CDC's thousands of scientists could provide guidance. Not that they should endorse specific brands, but they can assess competing technologies. The CDC flatly refuses. Instead, it cautions against using them because they lack "an established body of peer-reviewed evidence."

What planet is the CDC on? Peer-reviewed evidence can take years. Here's the process: An academic journal sends a submitted article to scientists around the world for review and suggested changes. Once that input is received and the article is approved, the wait goes on because many of these journals only publish four times a year.

TEXAS SCHOOL SYSTEM CLOSES AFTER 2 TEACHERS DIE OF COVID-19

Glacial slowness doesn't work in a pandemic. That's why former President Donald Trump designed Operation Warp Speed for vaccines. The CDC's timetable isn't warp speed. It's warped. The CDC's tacit premise that yesterday's technology is good enough will doom us to failure.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told the Washington Post last week that the CDC has the wrong mentality to respond to a crisis. "Their mind set is we should polish it, vet it, peer-review it."

The result is the CDC offering 50-year-old information: Open windows, space desks apart and use HEPA filters where possible. HEPA filters were devised for gas masks during World War II, and commercialized for buildings in the 1950s.

Tried and true methods are not necessarily wrong. But the public deserves the latest science, too.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, giant employers like Apple and Amazon again are delaying reopening workplaces. They need help. Only 33% of U.S. office workers are back, according to Kastle Systems. New York City is far worse off, with only 22% back. That kills retail stores, coffee shops and restaurants that serve workers.

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If it were possible to get back to normal without technological breakthroughs, it would have happened already. Eric Adams, the city's likely next mayor, needs scientific information on how to reduce aerosolized COVID-19 virus in transportation hubs, public buildings, offices and schools.

Citing the importance of speed in a pandemic, Gottlieb has been urging the FDA to establish a fast-track way of determining what works and what doesn't. The CDC should be doing the same using its own scientists.

As for schools, the medical journal Lancet's COVID task force has chastised the CDC for focusing on masking and social distancing instead of air quality.

A CDC study of 169 Georgia K-5 schools found COVID cases were reduced more by improving air quality than any other intervention. Mandating masks for students produced no statistically significant improvement.

A Kaiser Health News headline in June read: "More than 100 Missouri Schools Have Bought 'Often Unproven' Air Cleaning Technology." The words "often unproven" come from CDC guidance. If school districts are rushing in desperation to buy equipment without enough information, blame the CDC, not the school administrators.

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A spokesperson for the company that sold ionization equipment to Missouri schools explained that peer-reviewed research on its equipment doesn't exist yet. That is why CDC scientists should get to work assessing new technologies themselves instead of writing speech manuals.

If the CDC wants to be politically correct, it can call its new air quality guidance "Indoor Environmentalism." That almost sounds green.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM BETSY McCAUGHEY

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Betsy McCaughey: The CDC is now focused on fighting injustice, not disease. How will it beat COVID? - Fox News

Our day and age seems to involve one contentious topic after another, including pandemic protocols, social justice responses, and political correctness. Adding to the chaos is the ability of anyone and everyone to add their own voice and opinion, each trying to be heard and each claiming to be correct.

Amid this war of words, whom do we trust? Even more importantly, why do we trust them?

New research from Crucial Learning (formerly VitalSmarts), a leader in corporate learning and development, sheds light on trust today and how individuals, groups, and organizations can maintain or regain confidence in their words and actions.

When asked what has happened to their trust in different groups over the past year, 41 percent of the 1,374 surveyed stated their trust in family members increased a lot or some, the highest of any other group. Friends came in second at 36 percent, and co-workers landed in third at 31 percent.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a whopping 77 percent responded that their trust decreased a lot or some in their national political leaders. Sixty-three percent said it decreased in their local political leaders, and an additional 44 percent claimed the same for their employer.

How have political and corporate leaders lost so much trust? Top answers from respondents included:

All three of the above-mentioned traits have a common themewhat we say can quickly damage our trustworthiness, which requires action to regain trust.

Trust has two components: motivation and ability, said Joseph Grenny, leading researcher at Crucial Learning and coauthor of Crucial Conversations. Without pure motives and practicing what you preach, gaining and keeping trust is impossible. But when motives, words and actions are aligned, a mutual understanding and confidence is formed and relationships flourish.

How can leaders develop this mutual understanding and confidence and cultivate trust between themselves and their employees? To do so, respondents in our survey emphasized that these behaviors were most important:

Conflict in society is nothing new. In fact, healthy disagreement is vital to organizations and communities. Its how we discuss issues that matter and practice what we preach.

So, stop living in suspicion and build trust! Here are four tips to get you started:

1. Show regard to interests beyond your own. Acting selfishly breeds distrust. Conversely, when we invite all viewpoints and strive to find a mutual purpose, trust follows.

2. Be consistent in messaging and behavior. Nothing kills trust faster than being a hypocrite. Ask any politician who issued pandemic guidelines and was then caught breaking those same guidelines. Our words must match our actions.

3. Invite collaboration. When we treat others as friends to work with rather than enemies to subdue, trust is built even when opinions or beliefs differ.

4. Keep commitments. To gain trust, we must not only speak; we also must act. The extra effort involved in backing up our words with our deeds shows our dedication.

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How to Build Trust in an Untrustworthy World - ATD

by Slavoj Zizek

Theres a surprising similarity between the Talibans stance on protecting women from their soldiers aggressiveness and the politically correct vision on the protection of women from sexual assaults causing delayed traumas.

The Taliban has suddenly changed its stance toward women in public and working places. Their spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, said at a news conference on Tuesday that working women should stay at home for their own safety, undermining the Taliban's efforts to convince international observers that the group would be more tolerant toward women than when they were in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001.

Mujahid added that the guidance would be temporary, and would allow the Taliban to find ways to ensure that women are not treated in a disrespectful way or God forbid, hurt. He also said that the measure was necessary as the Taliban's soldiers keep changing and are not trained. This is why, he said, the new Afghan government asked women to take time off from work until the situation gets back to a normal order and women related procedures are in place, then they can return to their jobs once it's announced.

The predictable Western reaction to this statement was that we now see how false and hypocritical the Taliban's assurance that womens rights to education and work will be respected: now they are showing their true colors...

But the reality is more complex.

We dont need direct accusations of lies and hypocrisy to understand the shift in the Talibans position.

The soft attitude toward rape in Muslim countries is based on the premise that a man who raped a woman was secretly seduced (provoked) by her into doing it. Such a reading of male rape as the result of a woman's provocation is often reported by the media.

Here we stumble upon what I take the risk to call the ideological unconscious: an ideological edifice implies and relies on a set of claims which are necessary for its functioning, but which should not be stated publicly.

Back in 2006, Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali, Australias most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal when he compared women not wearing a scarf to raw meat. Reportedly, his comment was made shortly after a group of Muslim men were jailed for gang rape in Sydney.

If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the streetand the cats come and eat it whose fault is it the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem, he said.

The explosively-scandalous nature of this comparison distracted attention from another, much more surprising, premise underlying al-Hilalis argument: if women are held responsible for the sexual conduct of men, does this not imply that men are totally helpless when faced with what they perceive as a sexual provocation, that they are simply unable to resist it, that they are totally enslaved to their sexual hunger, precisely like a cat when it sees raw meat?

In contrast to this presumption of the complete lack of male responsibility for their own sexual conduct, the emphasis on public female eroticism in the West relies on the premise that men are capable of sexual restraint, that they are not blind slaves to their sexual drives.

In a debate years ago, an Australian Muslim woman emphatically claimed that Islam is the most feminist of all religions. Now we can understand why: Islam at least in its fundamentalist version is obsessed with the idea of protecting women. But protecting them from what? From aggressive men? Beneath this public justification it is easy to discover its (mostly) hidden truth: not from men the true fear is that a woman might enjoy being sexually mistreated and used by men. Beneath the desire to protect and control women, there is thus lurking a much more ambiguous mixture of panicky fear and of the deep distrust of the moral composure of men themselves.

Is all this simply a remainder of the oppressive Muslim tradition?

Reading about life in Kabul these days one should take a minute to look at some of the images from Afghanistans capital in the 60s and 70s that are easy to find on the internet. We see young women there walking around in miniskirts, modern record stores, dancing clubs, university halls full of women, etc. Yes, there were conservative Muslim communities in the countryside, but they peacefully coexisted with other religions and with elements of contemporary secular culture. There is no direct continuity between this past and the Taliban: precisely in what appears as its most archaic features (very narrow interpretation of Sharia, using state power to prohibit modern secular life like playing music in public), the Taliban is a product of modernity, a reaction to the enforced modernization of Afghanistan first by the Soviet and then by the Western occupations.

The ultimate proof of this secret link between the Taliban and modernity is the surprising similarity between the militant groups stance on protecting women from male aggressiveness and the politically correct vision of women threatened by male aggressiveness which can cause life-long delayed traumas even if it wasnt directly experienced as traumatic. This vision elevates sexual experience into the ultimate trauma, talking about sexual assault survivors who hide their trauma even from themselves. How, then, can such a brutal act as rape be unacknowledged, i.e., not experienced as what it is?

It happens when, during a sexual encounter, deep down I knew that what had happened had felt violating, degrading and not what I signed up for Yet it took me a whole decade to realise what had really happened: I had been sexually assaulted.

Why did it take such a long time, till the rise of #MeToo movement, to get it was a sexual assault? My limited understanding of consent and sexual violence at that time, and my overall sexual inexperience, meant I believed I was to blame for what had happened, that perhaps I just didnt know how sex usually is. Only when, more than a decade later, a therapist said thats trauma, hearing these words gave me permission to feel the weight of what I had endured at 19, to understand why anxiety lurked close to the surface of my body. A voice inside my head finally said: That was sexual assault. At 33, I know that now. So it can take years sometimes decades for some survivors to realise or accept that their experience amounts to sexual assault or rape.

Such things definitely happen: it is easy to imagine a young woman who feels uneasy and abused in sex, but dismisses this experience as the result of her naive notion of what sex is under the influence of prevailing ideology, she decides to endure her suffering. So we should not denounce the idea that a trauma can be recognized a decade later as a ridiculous PC retroactive projection. When new higher standards of what womens rights and freedoms become the norm, we have the full right to read past events through this new frame. One should absolutely reject false historicism here, the idea that, in previous eras, oppression of women, racism and slavery were considered normal and we should not judge them by todays standards.

There are nonetheless some further observations to be added here.

First, the case described above is not a case of repression in the strict Freudian sense: it is a fully conscious feeling of disgust and humiliation kept at bay because of (male chauvinist) social values. So what would or could be really repressed and traumatic here? The most obvious answer is: the exact opposite, i.e., the true trauma was that the woman secretly enjoyed being mistreated, and was absolutely not ready to admit it. Her being disgusted and feeling humiliated was already fake, a cover destined to obfuscate this disavowed enjoyment, a fact much more traumatic than her mistreatment by the sexual partner. To avoid a misunderstanding: this in no way implies that the mans mishandling was justified (since the woman enjoyed it, so she got what she wanted) quite the opposite. We all have secret dirty fantasies, and perhaps the most humiliating experience is to get what we secretly dream about brutally imposed from outside. This is why an extreme example a woman who secretly dreams about being raped will be much more traumatized when raped in reality than a strong autonomous woman.

These paradoxes already indicate the way emancipation should take place. Men should not be portrayed as brutal oppressors but as weak beings whose macho exterior covers up their frailty and impotence. And women should learn to treat men like that. A strong man is the only true feminist he doesnt need to oppress women in order to assert himself.

Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. Hes a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.

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Can the Taliban have anything in common with 'political correctness'? - Sri Lanka Guardian

In recent years, the classic TV shows that remain in heavy syndication to this day have undergone a reevaluation. Stereotypes or certain language that may have been seen as acceptable decades ago has been flagged or removed; even several episodes of The Muppet Show were recently slapped with a disclaimer on Disney+, warning viewers that they include negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.

In many cases, the disclaimers are warranted; its important to acknowledge that comedy and, truthfully, society as a whole evolves over time and what was once considered funny is now recognized as offensive. But the latest example of this trend has taken it too far. Comedy Central has reportedly pulled the Diversity Day episode of The Office from its airwaves, skipping it over in a recent start-to-finish marathon of the series.

Its true that Diversity Day, which originally aired on March 29, 2005, includes a lot of stereotypes and other cringey, insensitive material. But as anyone who has actually seen the episode can tell you, the whole point is to poke fun at those stereotypes and offensive behavior and the way corporate America clumsily tries to tackle them without taking a hard look at their own biases. In the episode, Michael Scott (Steve Carell) forces the employees at Dunder Mifflin to attend a diversity seminar. And while his intentions are good sort of he winds up playing into all the ugly stereotypes hes trying to combat, reciting a snippet of a Chris Rock stand-up routine that no white person should feel comfortable reciting and doing an exaggerated Indian accent at one point that prompts Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) to slap him and walk out.

That slap, along with the dozens of uncomfortable glances to the camera from the other Dunder Mifflin employees, should clue us in to the fact that the show is not endorsing Michaels behavior. Were clearly supposed to be laughing at him and how clueless he is, not with him. As Bobby Burack of The Outkick recently pointed out, The brilliance of comedy is that it not only makes us laugh but its powerful. Diversity Day doesnt promote racism. Instead, it mocks the wrong-mindedness of racism.

Context is important, and to pull any episode of television that contains racism without any consideration to how that racism is presented is foolish. We cant pretend that we live in a world completely devoid of racists (or sexists, or homophobes), and to completely erase any material that reminds us of them only brushes it under the rug. We need to tackle these ugly beliefs head-on, but we cant do that without shining a light on them. Diversity Day shouldnt be lumped in with other examples of casual racism when its a thoughtful critique of said casual racism.

Of course, Comedy Centrals decision to pull the episode has led to many cries of cancel culture and political correctness run amok. And while the networks choice to pull the episode is, in fact, a silly one, its important to note that theres a difference between facing consequences for your actions (like say, if someone in real life were to lose their job for making some of the same racially insensitive jokes that Michael Scott did) and falling victim to PC culture. If anything, Diversity Day advocates for more political correctness in the workplace all the more reason that yanking it makes no sense whatsoever.

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There's Absolutely No Reason to Pull the "Diversity Day" Episode of "The Office" Off the Air - InsideHook