I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.
Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques.
I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
What you write is true but it is also a bit dishonest. You are culling the questionable ideas being signaled out of your explanation. Really no different from MAGA folks who claim Trump is playing 4D chess or people who defended Hans Reiser because he wrote a really great filesystem. People don't tend to believe things that they don't want to be true (even if they are). Specifically, the fact that people who use this jargon actively oppose meritocracy (and thus aren't actually liberals) but instead want a demographically based quota system for all jobs and positions. This is why they abuse statistics and reasoning so badly in their analysis.
If these people weren't able to influence local governmental policies, then it would be fine to leave out the details. However, they are and so leaving out the bad parts of the policies they push is just dishonest and why the other side's propaganda is working so well right now. The biggest problem with that is that it makes politics more extreme (in both directions) and this is generally bad for the rest of us. So next time, don't leave out the actual practical effects of this type of politics and its messaging.
There's a chance this comment is what the user would have described as an incoherent but outright attack.
The user was claiming they didn't really understand the terminology but seemed to be trying their best when asked of another user to elucidate. You led with calling them dishonest.
You then said they were functionally MAGA and brought up some presumably racist German dude that I suspect few of us know about. You then had a diatribe on some view that had never been brought up in this thread and are now somehow discussing local governmental policies and propaganda.
I have no clue what I just read or how it connects to the post they made. I've tried to read in best effort but as best I can tell you maybe responded to the wrong person.
> to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
These are separate things. If he's interpreting it as an outright attack, he _is_ hearing it correctly. But incoherence would imply he's _not_ hearing the coded language in it's true meaning.
> The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is described as: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’
Trump is taking a lesson from Putin. Social media makes this extra easy, as you can bury criticism with a hoard of what-aboutism-bots, redirected arguments, and straight up BS.
Yes I too have seen the 2022 Perun video where an Australian Youtuber gives a lesson on Russian linguisics, but I'm not certain he's right.
English also has more than one words for lies - lies, falsehoods, fibs, bs, prevarication.
Yeah sometimes we know stuff is a load of crap at work, but we gotta humour the process. Maybe it's 10x as bad in Russia. But I've seen little independent evidence those words Perun used mean completely different things, I think he's just accidently exhaggerating a possible bit of nuance.
My first language is Russian. I’m not young, so I remember a bit of the Soviet era and many of the paper books I read as a child. I perceive lozh and vranyo as nearly synonymous, depending on the context. The only difference I notice is that vranyo can occur without ill intent, while lozh is told deliberately to deceive.
Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.