22 Oct 2019

Doublespeak

Orwellian doublespeak has become the norm for politicians and big business. The tools of semantics leave us scratching our heads when someone says something and then claims not to have said it, or to have said something different, or to have meant something different. Pragmatics takes the nonsense in it's stride and asks the same question: what is the author of the speech act trying to do.

Sowing confusion amongst your enemies using disinformation is a classic military tactic. It undermines the ability of the enemy to understand your true intent and leaves them expending time, energy, and resources sifting through your utterances looking for the truth.

The use of disinformation and propaganda in warfare is not new. The routine overt use of them in domestic politics is. This tells us that the elite are on a war footing. And we, the people, are their enemy.

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Keep is seemly & on-topic. Thanks.