Saturday, December 16, 2017

Trump Admin NewSpeak Signifies Nihilism


By now you probably have read about the Trump Administration's list of banned words, a list delivered to the CDC:
Jessica Ravitz (2017, December 16). Word ban at CDC includes 'vulnerable,' 'fetus,' 'transgender'. CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-banned-words/index.html

(CNN)Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ... are now under order by the Trump administration to stop using words including "vulnerable" in 2018 budget documents, according to The Washington Post.

... policy analysts at the nation's leading public health institute were presented with the menu of seven banned words, an analyst told the paper. On the list: "diversity," "fetus," "transgender," "vulnerable," "entitlement," "science-based" and "evidence-based."

Alternative word choices reportedly were presented in some cases. For instance, in lieu of "evidence-based" or "science-based," an analyst might say, "CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes," the source said.
Banned words: fetus, vulnerable, science-based and evidence-based, entitlement, diversity, and transgender.

George Orwell's NewSpeak is probably familiar to you all. It is the contrived language of a highly authoritarian society. Control language, and you control thought.

Of course, the question of thought outside of language is highly debated. I personally subscribe to the idea that there are many ways of coding sense and that every species has a system for coding signs to derive meaning.

That said, every semiotic coding system establishes rules of intelligibility that code some types of meaning as unreason.

Codes therefore structure perception and communication, encouraging some kinds of sense-making while discouraging others.

So, let us consider the code that structures the unreason of the Trump Administration's censored words

Banned words: fetus, vulnerable, science-based and evidence-based, entitlement, diversity, and transgender.


I see two distinct codes as structuring the selection of  these banned signs.

The first code is clearly a white, patriarchal cultural code that is reflective of the reactionary right that rejects the rights and advocacy of ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural minorities and/or groups diverging from their elite cultural code.

The second code is existential nihilism and is expressed in the chain of signifiers "fetus, vulnerable, science based and evidence-based, and entitlement."


Fetuses and vulnerable represent a state of being in precarious emergence. Existence is more conditional when signified as fetal or vulnerable.

Every religion and most political codes entitle the vulnerable to succor and kindness, a kind of social entitlement coded into most every major religion in the world, expressed in signs such as the Golden Rule and Karma, to name but a few.

The Trump Administration ban essentially inverts this value orientation. Vulnerable life has no special protections. We are all, at some point, vulnerable, especially at our beginnings and endings.

This is nihilist because it rejects life. This nihilist coding belies the patriarchal code because while the patriarch is responsible for his family/tribe's security, the nihlist is free from all responsibility to shepherd life.

The censored words "evidence-based" and "science-based" are also nihilist because they reject any mooring of meaning.  

Having rejected the word of our deities demanding that we respect life, the censored words reject the alternative sign system of science that attempts to operationalize language in systematic empiricism.

The rejection of religious and science-based codes of intelligibility represent a INTENSELY NIHILISTIC CODE that the banned words.


I know most of my readers will find this concerning and are alarmed by the escalation of administrative madness.

PEACEFUL mobilizations are urgently needed to signal rejection to the unsustainable nihilism.

We are all now vulnerable.




21 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. If you are referring to most of the comments here, I agree. Instead of what once were liberals we now have ill educated Bedlamites.

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  2. This sounds more like the Obama Admin or fragments of it.

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    1. I try to avoid CNN as they either distort or misrepresent matters with such ease.

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  3. I think on further reflection and a little research that your imagination has run away with you. The Admin is eliminating words and phrases associated with political correctness. The words you mention have attained buzz word status. America has never had the really outstanding use of English that one finds even now in the UK. One hundred years ago the well educated person had Shakespeare and the King James Bible in his subconscious and so we got writers like W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, Dorthy Sayers and many others. Americans at this time are nearly illiterate and innumerate . . . That you could with help from CNN find nihilism in what is pretty simply a desire to eliminate a worn out vocabulary of course is symptomatic of the madness now present at universities and many other liberal haunts. And once liberal meant something noble.

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  4. They are turning America, and the world into a giant sprawl of nuclear extraction plants, nuclear reactors, and chemical plants. Old Willy loves Trumpo. Always talking bad about Monsanto and Chemicals . He is either psychotic or very stupid.

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  5. Think about the "science-based" and "evidence-base" true knowledge that honestly shows what nuclear radiation, radionuclide bioccumulation, and nuclear waste does to "fetuses" and biological "diversity." Two hundred species a day going extinct. Think about populations made much more "vulnerable" to cancer and disease, by living close to chemical factories, nuclear waste and nuclear reactors.
    If there were no government nuclear-corporate-chemical and homicidal polluting "entitlement" programs, to bail nuclear reactor explosions like 3 mile island, nuclear would not exist. Reactors are not held liable for poisoning , irradiating and murdering millions, because of an act of congress called, The Price-Anderson Act. The Price-Anderson Act entitlement allows nuclear waste, nuclear bomb, nuclear isotope, nuclear reactors manufacturers, to keep doing their murderous dirty-work. The price-Anderson act allows reactors to stay open that are killing us all and at risk for catastrophic mass murder on a grand scale. The Price-Anderson act is truly a monumentally- psychotic piece of entitlement legislation. The Price-Anderson and ignores and defies, any sense of rationality humans may have.
    People like willy sont give a damn about honor, truth, empathy, compassion. They are like insects that want to kill most of us. "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" - George Orwell, 1984
    Trump has banned the CDC using these words: “ “evidence-based” “science-based,"
    "vulnerable” “entitlement” “diversity” “transgender” “fetus”
    This is what the Nazis did before WW2 banned open-thinking and used propaganda, hate to murder and kill. Think about how Trump and republicans use “free speech” as an excuse to defend Nazis.

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  6. One of the big lies of nuclear, are the concepts of high level, and low level nuclear substance. Once a radionuclide enters your body, and begins irradiating cells, tissue, dna , rna, protein, blood, it is high level radiation, by any measure. Whether it is alpha, beta, or gamma. Xrays are like gamma. Thomas Edison, messed with Xray tubes a long time. He, and his head-assistant, got tumors directly caused by xrays. His assistant died of the artificially-induced, xray tumors. Edison knew about the Curries artificailly enhanced and refines-radionuclides. Edison thought that messing with any kind of nuclear radiation, or radioactive substances, is insane and psychotic.

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  7. Republican Tax Plan’s Big Giveaways To The Petroleum Industry Include Drilling The Arctic National Refuge And Undermining Renewable Energy; 64% Of Americans Oppose The Tax Plan But The Republican Congress Doesn’t Care
    https://miningawareness.wordpress.com

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  8. Trump Finally ENDED It! This Has NEVER Been Done Before
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H70tN2ndvl0

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    1. They try to to it every 8 years when they tag out with the corporate democrats , you stupid asshole. It is criminal. It makes things far worse. You are a psycho moron willy. A racist, fascist, and demented , evil fool.

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  9. Where was all this hysteria when Libya was being destroyed? Oh, that's right; Obama and Hillary did that. And the almost total obliteration of Syria? And the cooperation with Hezbollah selling drugs and buying guns? There does seem to be a kind of irrational madness in the formerly genuinely liberal Democratic party. If Trump sneezes he is spreading disease, probably tuberculosis or bubonic plague. Take care, folks.

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  10. If I were you William, I would see a doctor. You are getting dementia, from sucking in too many plutonium particles from Rocky Mountain flats, eating too much monsanto pesticides, and eating too much GMO food. Obama is gone. Hillary lost the election, Trump bombed syria and afghanistan. Is bombing yemen. Has troops in Africa. Ya know William, Fox news is not a very reputable news source. That is why they went out of business in Britain.
    A lot of medical, environmental, radiation-health, chemical-toxicity, radionuclide toxicity, drug-toxicity science issues are based on junk science because of ignorant, conmen-frauds like donald trump. Same for the evil reptillian biachi ayn rand and her psychopath, acolytes. They are a hyperbolic cargo-cult, that worships money and profits, no matter the expense. Their language and prose is so delusional, it sounds like they have not got sense, God gave a goose. Probably could not change a flat tire. A Profits and consumption world is all the vacuous, psychotic bastards know. The world is being trurned into a nuclear and chemical sewer. It is being reduced to a chemical shithole that will soon be a radioactive cinder.

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    1. If you were me . . . then William would need more than a doctor. Hopefully you are young and a student and will grow out of the madness in which you are engulfed.

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  11. Trump has declared war on Reason and Scientific Enlightenment; Promoting 1 Percent Global Fascist Military Industrial Complex Takeover, Evangelical Religion As Government

    Its interesting thta Facebook and Google got their start-up money from the CIA and MIC. Internet would not exist without government. Same for micrsoft and Diebold rigged voting machines with backdoor microsoft weaknesses. Dielbold was started by NSA spook odell. The same kinda spooks that got trump in power. Trump has been bailed out of bankrupsy 4 times by the govt. Parasites oligarchs like Bill Gates, the Kochs, zuckerman, intell, got rich off the backs of people and now want to turn america into a radioacive , chemical sewer. They are undemocratic. Dont't give a damned.
    https://www.salon.com/2011/09/27/votinghack/

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    1. Facebook, etc. stole the source code from an Ohio company that had put lots of time and effort into it; actually the Harvard president Summer just handed Zuckerberg the code which had been stolen via a patent lawyer.

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  12. I do not doubt it. Thanks William.

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  13. All TV is a shitty way to get news, now. Google censors alternative site on both sides. Ending net neutrality, will make it hard for right wing, and left anternate media sites. There is not any middle ground. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, are corporate oligarch sites. Good cop, bad cop. Bbc is suspect. NPR is corporate. Until the Republicans and corporate Democrats are out of power, their will be no democracy in America.

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    Replies
    1. Really? American democracy just elected an independent president despite the media, the FBI and DOJ, the Clinton Machine, etc. The Internet has been a big help. Democracy In America has not disappeared by any means.

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  14. Far from being a panacea, radium was deadly. One user, American socialite and athlete Eben Byers, became notorious for drinking a bottle of Radithor every day for years -- and then dying from it in 1932. The headline of a Wall Street Journal story about his death reads, "The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off."
    http://edition.cnn.com/style/article/radium-girls-radioactive-paint/index.html

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  15. Tammy

    All of Trumps damage, week, by week.
    https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/8xm5qg/the-woman-tracking-all-of-trumps-damage-week-by-week

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