The article claims it was a “mistake” to knowingly make a false statement. I stopped reading immediately at that. This propaganda is disgusting, I used to respect Nature.
Saying it was a mistake elides responsibility and glosses over alternatives. How would you have articulated it, and would you have responded differently?
“I had proposed a design two years ago for this. I’m happy to share those documents and explain why, this approach should still be viable. Good luck implementing it!
I am not available for the project unfortunately.”
“It’s a beautiful thing the destruction of words…
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
The title makes this article appear like some modern bit of political correctness, but if you check it out I think this policy is basically calling out lazy journalists who defaulted to describing conflicts as something like "ethnic tension" instead of trying to investigate and figure out the complex land dispute or other nuanced issue that caused a fight.
The thing that people should be asking here is if journalists can't be bothered to get matters of life and death correct, what else are they wrong about?
Indeed. One could even draw an analogy between lazy journalists who use a word like "ethnic" as a shortcut for describing the actual situation and lazy forum commenters who just toss a labored 1984 quote out instead of explaining why this instance of language modification is bad while other instances of language modification (such as the neologism "troon," a word that already had a meaning but that meaning has been redefined in common usage) are acceptable.
1984 is great because it bifurcates most responses in a revealing way: there are people who understand it as a cautionary tale against something that hasn't happened, and people who understand its many wonderful metaphors as representing recurring themes in human politics. So many of the phrases the former crowd likes to trot out would tickle Syme to death: people come up with their own NewSpeak in the form of thought-terminating cliches to opt out of reason entirely.
edit to bring it back to the topic: "ethnic" as a catch-all is actually a brilliant example of what NewSpeak is a metaphor for.
That’s what the source article is saying, but I think they’re wrong. It would be very misleading to describe something like the Bosnian War solely in terms of the political conflict about post-Yugoslav governance; a critical factor, without which the story makes no sense, is the genuine hatred between Serbs and Bosniaks that was common at the time. Srebrenica didn’t happen because a chain of escalation made it inevitable, or because some war objective put the victims tragically in the way, it happened because the Army of Republika Srpska did not think the victims’ lives were particularly important.
It is not the point of the article that actual conflicts between ethnicities should be reframed as something other than what they are; it's that their journalists have to describe the animus between Serbs and Bosniaks directly, and not roll the whole thing up into "an ethnic conflict". They're not avoiding the concept of ethnicity, just the generalizing, overly-broad (for their purposes) term.
But it's often not right to describe the animus "directly", if that's understood to mean (as they describe in the article) uncritically reporting what the people involved say about the conflict. The Troubles are the best English-language example, because there are piles and piles of primary source material with inflammatory and incompatible claims about the nature of the conflict. Was it religious, or racial, or linguistic, or geographic? All of the above and none, depending on who you ask. In fact, you'll note that "the Troubles" as a term is a response to the same issue - it would be extraordinarily unhelpful if news organizations felt obligated to choose between calling the conflict "IRA terrorism" or "British colonial aggression", even though basically every participant believed one of those two terms to be more accurate and precise.
I guess to some degree it does depend on what their purposes are, because there's value in understanding what average people in the area are thinking. But it's hard to imagine a news organization that never needs to mention a conflict without taking a position on it, and easy to imagine an organization which silently glosses over the issue because they assume there's a right side and trust the sympathetic voices they're talking to are on it.
There is also bias when constructing a subjective big picture. Bias is more important in journalism. Perhaps editors should weigh language like this and edit publications since that is their job. It would be better to ban the word ethnicity but allow exceptions when the journalist feels it is needed and can justify it.
The holocaust wasn’t an ethnic cleansing it was a genocide.
“Ethnic Cleansing” is when you force the ethnic Germans out of Kaliningrad (née Königsberg) and replace them with ethnic Russians. Genocide is when you round up the undesirables and systematically murder them.
My sincere advice is go learn a thing or two before commenting on topics like this again.
> instead of trying to investigate and figure out the complex land dispute or other nuanced issue that caused a fight.
Because the original cause is often irrelevant. A random spat about land might be what sparks conflict, but ethnic tension is what fuels it and keeps it going. And yes, "ethnic" is a complex word, mixing issues of religion, culture, language, ancestry, "tribe"-level social organization and whatnot. Guess what, these things get mixed up
all the time anyway, and having a single word to describe the resulting mess is highly useful. The world is complex. Deal with it.
The point is saying ethnic is ambiguous in this context. So using it fails to specify what’s actually going on.
Would you be fine if someone described the troubles in Northern Ireland as ethnic tension, or knowing more about what happened would you use some other description?
Because it wasn’t purely ethnic in nature with Protestants and Catholics on both sides of the conflict. Trying to summarize it as ethic conflict was therefore also also incorrect. Which why using ethic tensions is so often misleading, it seems appropriate in many situations when it really isn’t.
No, "vaguely accurate" is a way of avoiding labels which are more precise and wrong. It's better to describe a disputed large quantity with the vague but accurate label of "millions" than choose a random scholar of unknown quality's estimate to 3 s.f as the correct figure.
It's better to summarise the Troubles in Northern Ireland vaguely accurately as "ethnic tensions" than precisely wrongly as a religious war between two schools of Christianity.
Saying gas is about 4$ right now is vaguely accurate, of course it’s also wrong. Consider the phrase “not even vaguely accurate” means it’s not just wrong it’s very wrong.
Being vaguely accurate on a history test may give partial credit, but the news should to be held to a higher standard.
I’d like to deal with it. My preferred way to deal with this complexity is to have an information diet that includes sincere attempts to capture this complexity, by reporting what is specifically happening with “ethnic tensions” in Ukraine, or the US, or Xinjiang. These are very different processes that are illuminated through details like, for instance, a “random spat” about land. It sounds like these folks are on the same page.
I can see why an organization that does international journalism would taboo “ethnic tension” on the presumption that there is a lot more to be said in order to capture the events and processed they are reporting on.
"The ethnic tension increased. People fought because of ethnic tension. The ethnic tension led to conflict that killed people. The US President denounced the ethnic tension."
Look mom, I'm a journalist now. PayPal me, New York Times.
On the contrary, having multiple levels of description is a key tool in dealing with complexity. You can always provide more information about the actual mix of overlapping causes pertaining to any given case, but that should come after a broader description is provided to frame the overall context.
The article explicitly says that the word "ethnic" isn't bad, just inappropriate for the coverage that they're doing. If you thought Orwell was saying that it was OK to use the wrong word to describe something, you've wildly misunderstood him.
> So I asked dozens of Bosnians in Utica and in Bosnia to explain what sparked that war. They described generational memories of violence that had happened long ago—conflict between their forefathers and the forefathers of their neighbors. They talked about why their country was split along religious lines even though people there shared the same ancestry. They remembered the years before the civil war began, when minor slights among people who were once friends were whipped into serious grievances by nationalists on both sides.
Sounds to me like “ethnic tension” is the _right term_ to use and they’re avoiding using it because of political correctness
"even though people there shared the same ancestry"
It's right there. They are not different ethnicities. They are different religions. The whole point of this is to avoid intellectual laziness and there you go proving their point.
Yeah I blame the clickbait title. This is a style guide and “banning” the word ethnic makes complete sense after reading the argument. I’ve even felt similar when hearing the word. It’s an ambiguous filler word used when you don’t know how to describe something. I’m glad to see a news institution recognize this and raise the bar for their own writing quality.
The article says the word isn't "inherently evil". The author argues in a well-meaning way that every usage of the word 'ethnic' would instead be better served by another word. The style guide says "Don't use it". -- It seems fair to say the article is calling it a bad word.
Just because a word is a crutch for bad reporting doesn't make the word intrinsically bad, just the wrong tool for the kind of reporting they're doing.
They're saying that certain categorical terms are going to be replaced with more descriptive explanations, so as to avoid relying on connotations. As always, the question is, which terms will get this treatment.
I'm sure I could be reading too much into this, but I can't help but view this editorializing under the light of the current post-modern deconstructionist wave overtaking many parts of society, journalism especially. I imagine someone shocked to discover that readers out here have a mental category for conflicts they don't follow very closely, because its contours fit their priors about constantly quarreling people. This person understands that categorization as a moral outrage, especially if the Right People (read: anyone suffering "oppression") are doing the quarrelling, and sets about to correct it and make sure nobody is able to use this evil mental category again.
Maybe this wasn't an "ethnic" conflict, but maybe it's not AP's job to tell me which conflicts to slot into my "those people are fighting again" category and which to pay renewed attention to?
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but it seems that you've interpreted my interpretation of the words in the article as being isolated from the context of the article, which it isn't.
I didn't think I needed to so comprehensively elaborate on such a simple point, but for the avoidance of doubt: the article implies the word is bad for the purposes of informative and accurate journalism.
I think this article is exactly the opposite of what you're criticizing. The author is saying that the phrase "ethnic tensions" was virtually always used as a lazy shorthand for "people are mad at each other for some reasons we're not sure about". They are arguing for using the full richness of the English language to describe more precisely the reason for conflict, not trying to ban a particular idea by being the word. In my opinion, Orwell would probably agree with this principle.
You're not 4 paragraphs through "Politics and the English Language" before:
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision
Categorizing this policy as an Orwellian "destruction of words", when simply reading the piece makes it clear that the intent is greater accuracy, is analogous to the laziness of throwing everything into the "ethnic tensions" bucket.
Ah, but this is the first step in Orwellian destruction of words.
At this point, unless they violate this rule, no one in the press will accuse Putin of ethnic cleansing.
Instead, we get complicated, varied, descriptions of individual events (“they bombed a school”, “a rocket hit a maternity ward”). Each could be discounted as one off accidents instead of a systematic campaign.
You made my day with this comment. Thank you for capturing so succinctly what I've often found troubling about certain appeals to Orwell — the application of Orwell to further disinformation.
Yes. In 2020 a virus was released in Wuhan, and was weaponized by the host country shutting down domestic flights while allowing infected to fly internationally.
Historically this led to a pretty crazy couple of years and we’re still seeing a lot of disruption from it.
It’s not good for the US to be funding bioweapon research within hostile countries or on the border of hostile countries.
If I get arrested for stealing a bunch of money from my neighbor and manage to put it into my local bank before I do, my bank might be justifiably concerned that I won't be able to make my mortgage after the police seize my stolen goods.
Is it any more unfair that Russia can't access those reserves than that foreigners can't access their Russian assets?
As long as things are frozen, they are in the hands of whoever has physical custody. If things remain as they are then the whole world has given their Russian financial assets back to Russia for free, haven't they?
Russia is huge, they should have lots of things within their borders. Plus, those borders are expanding!
Freezing is where your assets are still yours in name, but is unable to spend it. There may be conditions where it is unfrozen.
Usurping is when they no longer belong to you, and there's no recourse. I would be wary of normalising usurping assets by western Govts, rather than merely just freezing.
i would be against usurpment - freezing is the most that should be allowed. Otherwise, it's too easy to justify theft, and next time it might not be some despotic dictator, but citizens.
This post is dumb and the author is trolling. The discussion about energy usage took place at length over 10s of forum pages in 2021.
To the author: you should be ashamed of yourself for not mentioning or acknowledging the well formed reasons and longform discussions of the early bitcoin community. You also seem to be unaware of their point.
Guess everybody knows what’s going on in your 10’s of forum pages lol. What are you referring to and what’s the substantive argument against the idea that “proof of work is uniquely incentivized to always maximize energy consumption by design?” As someone who lives under a rock and has not read
a single one of these aforementioned forum pages, would love some clarity.
