some kinds of hypocrisy (the law and medicine examples) are normalized
these hypocrisies are / the fact of their normalization is antimemetic (OK, I’m to some extent interpolating this one based on familiarity with Ben’s ideas, but I do think it’s both implied by the post, and relevant to why someone might think the post is interesting/important)
the usage of words like ‘crime’ and ‘lie’ departs from their denotation, to exclude normalized things
people will push back in certain predictable ways on calling normalized things ‘crimes’/‘lies’, related to the function of those words as both description and (call for) attack
“There is a clear conflict between the use of language to punish offenders, and the use of language to describe problems, and there is great need for a language that can describe problems. For instance, if I wanted to understand how to interpret statistics generated by the medical system, I would need a short, simple way to refer to any significant tendency to generate false reports. If the available simple terms were also attack words, the process would become much more complicated.”
Does it bother you that this is not what’s happening in many of the examples in the post? e.g., With “the American hospital system is built on lies.”
Does it bother you that this is not what’s happening in many of the examples in the post? e.g., With “the American hospital system is built on lies.”