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Why Political Correctness is the Opposite of Orwell's Newspeak

Yesterday I fired off a Twitter thread about Orwell and political correctness. It was my good fortune that the author Dorian Lynskey (author of a ‘biography’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four) chose to retweet it, which meant a few other people did too. I thought I might as well set out the thread here, as a service to those of you who still prefer an artisanal blog post over commodified, disposable tweets.

I see people are discussing George Orwell with regards to ‘political correctness’ and ‘wokeness’ which they regard as ‘Newspeak.’ I think that’s a mistaken analogy. #

First, political correctness (and it’s modern iteration, wokeness) are, first and foremost, pejorative labels for inconvenient political ideas. There are far more people who claim to be “anti PC” or “not woke” than there are people who positively claim either label. #
 Continue reading “Why Political Correctness is the Opposite of Orwell's Newspeak”

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Shamima Begum: Two Minutes Hate

The development of the Shamima Begum story, and the discourse around it, has been fascinating and depressing.
Last week I posted the argument for why I thought she should be brought back to the UK to face British justice. Since then, in a rare foray into the jungle, I’ve posted similar arguments in various Facebook comments sections. In response, people have posted the most vile things, entirely unaware of the irony of doing so. Continue reading “Shamima Begum: Two Minutes Hate”

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Boiling the Frog Yields Diminishing Returns

When a country enjoys relatively good protections for human rights, citing the most extreme examples of rights abuses elsewhere could inspire compancency, not vigilance. To make the defence of the Human Rights Act into a vote winner, we need to frame the debate closer to home.

Last week I made some notes on Yvette Cooper’s speech on the balance between liberty and security. I wrote this:

The Shadow Cabinet need to find the passion and the language to defend the Human Rights Act against a sustained Tory attack. If the entire Labour Party routinely cites liberty as a way of empowering ordinary people, then its support for human rights can become a vote winner.

I have been thinking more about what that ‘language’ shoud be… and what it should not be. Is the current approach to human rights advocacy effective in the British context?
A favourite tactic of human rights campaigners is to argue that a particular policy could send us down a ‘slippery slope’ to more widespread rights violations. We also use the ‘boiling frog‘ analogy, where tiny changes (to the law, or to the temperature in the pan) eventually leads to danger. The argument appears in three guises, depending on whether the end result is similar to an example from 1) fiction; 2) another country; or 3) some point in history.
Continue reading “Boiling the Frog Yields Diminishing Returns”

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Notes on PRISM, privacy and surveillance

I have been away this week and unable to write anything on the PRISM revelations that have dominated the news over the past few days.  Here are a few notes and links in lieu of something more rounded.
At ORGcon, I did preface my remarks during the ‘free speech online in the UK’ panel to note that the right to free speech includes the right not to be surveilled.  If you think your conversations are being monitored, then you are not going to speak as freely as you may wish.  (I will post a longer reflection on the ORGcon discussion soon).
This week I did read an article by Daniel Solove in the Chronicle of Higher Education which summarises variations on the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” argument for surveillance. It’s obviously extremely relevant given recent revelations surrounding the US Government’s PRISM programme.
Solove’s article is a frustrating read, because the arguments against surveillance are, like many human rights issues, bound up in ‘slippery slope’ or ‘boiling frog’ concepts that tend not to resonate with ordinary people. Public interest (and outrage) at privacy invasions only occur when rare real-life examples manifest themselves, as when the damage has already been done (the hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile phone being the prime example).  Liberally minded people who oppose surveillance and privacy intrusions on principle need more sound-bites to compete with “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. Solove lists a few candidates – “Why do you have curtains, then?” is probably the best retort. Continue reading “Notes on PRISM, privacy and surveillance”