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Shaka, when the walls fell…
“In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”
To the outsider, such terms in such combinations will likely seem esoteric or otherwise unintelligible. Only by learning the underlying patterns of events that are considered important in the religion or ethical or political system, would one be able to comprehend what was said. The religious text thus acts as a code book. Since many religious authorities believe in the self-evident truth of their doctrines, a mere exposure to the truth in the book would tend to convert outsiders trying to learn the language. However, use of such language is not confined to religious groups.
Some Christian commentors hold that “Christianese” is incomprehensible or off-putting to outsiders, and suggest that it is possible to express all Christian truth in neutral language, with little or no use of religious words other than “God”, “Jesus” and “Bible”.
South Korean gangsters get more satisfaction from their line of work than the police, according to a survey published on Tuesday in local dailies.
According to the survey conducted among 109 jailed mobsters by the Korean Institute of Criminal Justice, 79.3 percent of gangsters said they were somewhat or very satisfied with their life in organized crime.
“This suited the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim was to make any alternative thinking (”thoughtcrime”) or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on.”
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
“Put simply, the hypothesis argues that the nature of a particular language influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different patterns of language yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language, because it acknowledges that the mechanisms of any language affect its users.”
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.
“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on.
“Although with Ascian as their mother tongue, born Ascians don’t understand plain Ascian sentences, unless they are direct quotes from governmental propaganda materials (called approved texts). So, in order to communicate, an Ascian has to know by heart thousands of these quotes (sentences) on many different topics.”
In Scientology teachings, the Tech can only be delivered to Scientologists in its original written form. The act of discussing Scientology processes in a spoken manner is called “verbal tech,” and this is believed to be a blemish upon the working of the Tech. Because the actual discussion of the Tech is not coming from Source (Hubbard himself), it is being diluted and it is no longer 100% pure. As a result, engaging in “verbal tech” is forbidden within Scientology. This disallowing of “verbal tech” prevents Scientologists from discussing or explaining the actual workings of what Scientology is and how “it works,” in any form other than the actual study of Source (namely Hubbard’s original writings).
Scientology contends that this policy of forbidding “verbal tech” is in order to keep the Tech pure and unadulterated, and to prevent students from passing on their misunderstandings of Hubbard’s instructions to others.
It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, “miniaturized, scatterable public address systems”, wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.
“The attack - dubbed keyword hijacking - is difficult to prevent because it takes advantage of a design feature of Google Adwords rather than a flaw, he added.”
The story centers on Captain Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, and Dathon of the Tamarian race, played by Paul Winfield. The Tamarian language, although “translated” by the universal translator device, is still unintelligible, because it is too deeply rooted in local metaphor to preserve information during translation. When the Tamarians realize this attempt has failed, the Tamarian captain gives the order to have Picard and himself stranded, if only for the time being, on the surface of a planet that is host to a hostile entity that disappears and reappears at will. Eventually, through the use of situational knowledge and rudimentary sign language, Picard begins to understand the semantics of the Tamarian language
“The tag being applied is ‘Keyword Hijacking’. Bots are being written to take advantage of primarily Google AdWords and the relevancy formula with that engine. These bots perform keyword searches over and over, exposing the ads, but never taking action on them. Eventually, the AdWords system makes the assumption that ’searchers’ see no value in the ad, because it’s been shown potentially thousands of times with few or no clicks.”
It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.
“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system,” it reads.
The slogan “fight the net” appears several times throughout the roadmap.
“US forces should be able to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum”.”
High-tech lynching is a term describing a period of nonstop, vicious verbal attacks directed at a particular person or group that is communicated through the mass media such as TV, radio, newspapers, periodicals, or the Internet. The term was first coined by Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, referring to the allegedly racist remarks by the Democrats in the Senate.
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language… all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.”
“The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them . . . Second, I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for expression. The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their masters’ voice; but they had made of it a new tongue, and I had no doubt, after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he wished.”
[No words in this were written by me - now do you see?]
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January 31st, 2007 at 6:14 am
Thanks for the post(s),
I’ve lately been inclined to view language not as an ultimate set of encoded neurolimitations but as a very organic/human expression which can counter in form and function any of the mechanistic power systems which might try to bend it to their will. Would-be conquerors can toss whatever they wish into the flow (cf. ‘fluent’; the flow -> fluent etymological relationship/moving water metaphor presents itself in Chinese as well), but they are invariably lost in the necessarily populist developments of ‘linguistic history’; does a word injected into a language with nefarious intent retain its power after being semantically jostled around by a generation or two of people using and misusing it for their own myriad of purposes? Could Sapir-Whorf perhaps be read as indicating a reciprocity between language and thought rather than a one-sided relationship?
Newspeak and hijacked words float like jetsam upon syntax and grammar, which I sometimes feel have far more ’significance’ than fleeting and interchangeable vocabulary. Grammar seems to assert its ‘humanity’ by presenting the illusion of being an ordered and structured system while being slippery enough to resist any attempts by rationalist linguists to adequately and exhaustively describe what that order and structure is: it is a neurotrickster, and we know what happens when a trickster squares off against the goosesteppers.
Put another way: it seems amazing to me that the finite restrictions of Chomskyian ‘universal grammar’ even at its most “textbook” still allow for infinite permutations (and not just recursive ones) - and that this entails an infinite number of ways in which the self-aware can play with their language to test their own infinite (or paradoxically infinite/limited, as they can be constructed with language) hypotheses.
I like to think of language as ritual; either as proto-ritual leading (through extension and implication) to other more involved forms or as the most refined form of ritual at our disposal. By following a series of very precise steps mandated by authorities more-or-less esoteric (the mechanisms of syntax still evading logical description), we exact immediate changes on ourselves/others/the surrounding world. Those of us who are very adept at the ritual can wield profound influence over others.
e.g., I have heard anecdotes of Salish/Wakashan potlatches wherein it is understood that ceremonial dancers will be fined hundreds of dollars by “the community” if they improperly execute their steps; how does this compare to the attitudes some people take off- and online towards “poor” grammar or misspelling?
e.g., Currently I am living in China where to learn a new word entails the memorization of a new sigil.
e.g., Conspiracy lore suggests that rituals are regularly coopted by unscrupulous power seekers - does this speak to the omnivorousness of the power-hungry or the nature of the ritual itself? What is involved in attempting to hijack a rituatl which billions of people perform flawlessly every day? Can language become so newspeak-polluted as to stagnate, lose its inherent flu(idity/ency)?
January 31st, 2007 at 9:27 am
Does the Chinese room think?
(A quick recap: legend tells of a Room in China where pilgrims bring written questions at sunset and receive wise written answers in the morning. Inside the Room is an Englishman who knows no Chinese but who is provided with an enormous set of index cards with instructions for dealing with Chinese symbols…)
A personal view:
Suppose the original Chinese room became so popular that another Englishman turned up, made an approximate copy of the card set with errors, and set up shop on another hillside. Then there were two Chinese Rooms in competition… iterate for a large number of generations, in order to evolve an optimum Chinese Room whose card set has been designed by nothing more than Darwinian selection.
If the Englishmen working the rooms have been doing their jobs, then the only selection pressure on the Rooms will have been the Chinese. Thus the Rooms will represent the collected Chinese worldview, and will be no better than a great library. In this case the Rooms cannot be said to think.
It is, however, conceivable that the Rooms may have been exposed to selection pressures other than the minds of the Chinese - i.e., some sort of interaction with the wider world. In this case, the Rooms might perhaps be able to tell the Chinese something they don’t know. Then, perhaps, the Rooms think.
January 31st, 2007 at 10:03 am
modern media manipulates the mind of the modern man much like the religions of past generations, moulding the machinations of the masses.
January 31st, 2007 at 10:05 am
and i feel that way with the i ching. i don`t understand, but somehow the answers are correct and insightful.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Is your point that human intelligence is an organising entity rather than a creative one?
That we don’t create but channel?
Or is it that all of our perceptions are not only tainted by language but are linguistically formed?
“I feel funny”
“No you don’t. Thems just words”
Also check out this presidential speeches tag cloud. Very interesting…
http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/
January 31st, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Does a sundial tell time?
Man, I’ve been wanting to check out Gene Wolfe for ages!
January 31st, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Is it? I’m not sure I in particular had any point as I didn’t actually write any of this…
Which I think may be what we’re doing here: accumulating power with new words and sub-languagisticages.
Except I think in “our” world, the way it works is that they monitor for the development of new sub-languages, wait for them to grow, and then lift out the choice users of that sub-language to translate between that and the master language. Generally these people are rewarded with money and prestige within the larger language system.
January 31st, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Last night Pres. Bush was asked by someone at ABC News what he thought about the stat that showed that people were worse off financially than before? To translate his comments into plain English he replied that people were confused because they were too worried about Iraq to notice that they had more money now than before. The reporter pressed the point and the plain English Bush response was that people could be worse off because taxes could be higher.
I work with former Federal prisoners. This is the style of speach you use with people you have enormous, intractable power over. Do it or it gets worse for you because the rules are set in stone and I’m the one with the stone. The first indication that a staff member shouldn’t be here is in the language they use towards our residents. Pres. Bush isn’t tounge tied, he’s a snake oil salesman who knows the deal will fall apart if he speaks plainly about the product.
January 31st, 2007 at 9:18 pm
Oh my God. Are you saying we’re all being trained to be traitors?
February 1st, 2007 at 12:00 am
Wonderful post with a lot to chew on. Language to me is a living organism, constantly changing form. Whether we influence it or it influences us I haven’t decided… sounds like a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
February 1st, 2007 at 5:45 am
> Does a sundial tell time?
Yes, I think so, in some sense at least. If there’s someone to read it, perhaps. That’s like the tree falling in the forest: does it make a noise if there’s no-one to hear it?
A sundial is an object rather like Stonehenge or the Rosetta stone: even though we’ve lost almost everything of the people who created them they can still tell us stuff.
My watch will /keep/ time, but how do I set it?
February 1st, 2007 at 5:57 am
http://www.hexmaster.com/goonscripts/what_time_is_it.html
February 1st, 2007 at 11:41 am
Tim,
your posts are interesting but you seem a lot less personable. You used to seem really approachable. You were approachable. Now I feel like if I ask you a question you will just answer it with a question and make me feel like a dumb-ass.
I am just a reader on your blog but this is some constructive feedback I think. It would be nice to connect with what you are going through as you make this shift or whatever.
February 1st, 2007 at 5:26 pm
do submarines swim?
do computers think?
do we, or do we do such a good job of sifting through probable responses that we fool even ourselves into thinking we are thinking?
February 1st, 2007 at 6:24 pm
hey Tim–you just independantly duplicated a paper i “wrote” for grad school in 1992, about the ethical implications of hyperlinked text (i turned it in as a big stack of note-cards with pasted bits on. no numbers for the order.)
cool.
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:12 am
submarines and computers are all ways-of-seeing
‘thinking’ requires a kind of constructive disobedience
thisself thinks most people think some of the time
‘think’ is being redefined to mean ‘what computers do’
*
think ‘beautiful freak’