Disposition Matrix?

In a story published in the Washington Post last week, Greg Miller discusses how US counterterrorism policies have changed over the course of the Obama administration with a specific focus on US assassination policies. Of particular interest for my purposes are the opening paragraphs of the story in which Miller writes:

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

It is this Euphemism "disposition matrix" that I wanted to draw attention to. As the article notes, this is just the fancy term that the US has come up with for the list of people that it plans to assassinate. Like all good euphemisms, "disposition matrix" was designed to hide and obscure what is really going on. The US Government is vaguely uncomfortable with broadcasting the fact that the president is randomly killing people with no oversight and no due process, so rather than actually engage in a policy that is legal and is actually consistent with the expressed values of the US, the Government instead hides behind a euphemism that completely obscures what is really occurring.

h/t to Glenn Greenwald

White people's rights group? What could that be?

Recently, the Scranton Times-Tribune published an article with the headline, "Moosic says no to white rights group celebration." The first paragraph of the article reads:

Moosic will forbid a white people's rights group from having a celebration at a borough park Saturday because its leader lied when he applied to use the park, council President Joseph Mercatili said Wednesday.

I want to focus particularity on the phrase "white people's rights group" because this is an excellent example of a Euphemism. The correct term for the group in question is "White supremacist" or "Neo-Nazi" as this article clearly demonstrates.

This, of course, raises some interesting questions about the Scranton-Times Tribune editorial choices.  Why did they select the more innocuous sounding "white people's rights group?" Were they trying to appeal to a certain segment of their readership? Are there that many racists in Pennsylvania that they thought maybe they could broaden their readership? I am really not sure, but I do find it disturbing to see people in the media fail to describe things as they actually are, and instead allow the people they cover to dictate the nature of that coverage (a problem that I will discuss at length as the presidential campaign heats-up). This is not healthy for journalism, and certainly not healthy for democracy.

h/t to Atrios

Some more thoughts on Euphemisms and Dysphemism

Just about any word can be said to have a denotation and a connotation. The denotation of a word is the object or objects to which the word refers. The connotation of the word is the emotional reaction a word elicits. In the case of euphemisms and dysphemisms one is is replacing a word with another word that has a similar denotation but a different connotation.

In my earlier post on this topic (and in the George Carlin bit included) this was presented as a bad thing; as a debasing and abusing of language. There are, however, many situations where the use of dysphemism and euphemism are appropriate. For example, when talking to someone who has just lost a loved one it seems perfectly appropriate to use a euphemism for 'death' such as 'passed away' or 'lost.' In fact, it would be rude and extremely insensitive to do otherwise. Language is a powerful and subtle tool (arguably the most powerful humans have ever created), and it can be used for much more than the simple transmission of information. It is also the primary vehicle through which we relate to and interact with one another. Just as it can be used to wound and hurt others, it can also be used to heal and uplift. As La Fontaine wrote in his Life of Aesop, language is the best and worst there is.

What I am trying to get at here is that as critical thinkers we should think deeply and sensitively about language, and we should use language to expose lies and deception where that is appropriate, but we should also use it to heal and mitigate pain where that is appropriate as well. The context here is extremely important, and as good critical thinkers we should be as sensitive to that as we are to the words themselves.

Euphemisms and Dysphemisms

Euphemisms and dysphemism are two related deceptive features of language in which one changes the impact of what one says through word choice. In the case of a euphemism, one substitutes a word that has positive emotional associations for a word that has negative or neutral emotional associations ('ethnic cleansing' for 'genocide'). A dysphemism is just the opposite; substituting  a word with negative emotional associations for a word with positive or neutral associations ('partial-birth abortion' for 'intact dilation and extraction'). Perhaps the best discussion of this topic can be found in the following video segment from the late, great George Carlin: