The funniest thing about satirical Twitter personality Titania McGrath is just how often “she” traps the unwary into thinking that her woke psychobabble is the real thing. The left today have become so unhinged from reality that they really are beyond satire.
Case in point: the socialist Victorian government’s new guidelines for not just “professionals working in the health, education and justice sectors”, but you, the bigot-in-the-street. Your woke masters have compiled a Newspeak dictionary so absurd that it reads like a piss-take. Except the joke is on us.
The modern Left, not satisfied with redefining terms such as racist, bigot and transphobe, is now targeting words that may stigmatise drug abuse, addiction and criminality.
Are you the sort of thoughtless person who calls drug addicts, er, “addicts”…? Well, wash your mouth out because that sort of hate speech will no longer be tolerated.
The same people who want you, under pain of prosecution and ostracism, to call men “women”, and biology a mere “social construct”, are now forbidding you to call junkies, piss-heads and crims out for what they are.
Because you might hurt their precious feelings.
Terms such as “drug user or drug abuser” are stigmatising, as is “suffering from addiction” and “problem use” which is to be replaced with “non-prescribed use”.
“By saying someone is a ‘sufferer’ we are implying that they’ve got a poor quality of life,” said Melinda Lucas from the Alcohol and Drug Foundation which is one of the guide’s producers.
“A lot of the commonly used terms when relating to drug use have got really negative associations that can be quite derogatory.”
Funny about that. People do tend to get a bit “derogatory” when crackwhores are giving blowies for drug money in public parks, meth-heads are running amok in the streets, and thugs yet again out on bail are violently invading homes. It’s imperative that no one makes these criminal scum feel bad about themselves, though.
The guide instructs that terms like “drug abuse” can “imply a moral failure” and so we must use terms such as “pharmaceutical misuse”…Saying someone is “clean or a former addict” implies a character judgment; instead say “person with lived experience of drug use/dependence”.
A “doctor shopper” should be called “person with multiple prescribers”. And even “dirty needle” suggests a value judgment; say “unsterile or used needle”…Terms such as “drug habit” and “alcoholic” are also out, to be replaced with “person with a dependence on drugs or alcohol”.
This particular brand of leftist lunacy isn’t unique to the Socialist Republic of Victoria, though. San Francisco might be competing with New Delhi for world capital of defecating in public, but the city czars are more concerned with sanitising its citizens’ language than sanitising its streets.
The crime-riddled city’s Board of Supervisors has approved measures to sanitise language used in the criminal justice system.
Judgmental terms such as “convict”, “felon”, and “addict” will be dropped in favour of “returning resident” or “formerly incarcerated person” and “persons with a history of substance abuse”.
A “juvenile delinquent” will be called “a young person impacted by the justice system”.
heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/rita-panahi/rita-panahi-the-official-guide-to-talking-nonsense/
Note the linguistic trickery there? In other words, the criminal is the victim and society is to blame for their bad behaviour. They didn’t break the law, yer honour, the law impacted them.
This is, of course, the whole point of the left’s deceitful language games. As Orwell wrote, language shapes thought, so to control the language is to control thought. The left’s whole game is the naked pursuit of power. Having redefined words like “Nazi”, “racist”, and “bigot” beyond anything like their actual meaning, the left is now moving in on the language of crime and justice.
It’s no mistake that the Victorian government’s Newspeak dictionary is titled, “The Power of Words”. This is not just some risible bureaucratic nonsense, this is thought control in action.