JR'S Free Thought Pages
                                                                       No Gods  ~ No Masters    ~ No Bullshit

                                                            

Updated Newspeak and Doublespeak Dictionary

 

A Bullshit Detection Short List inspired by Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary and a lifetime of exposure to Bovine Excrement from Religion, Politics and Business.

 

"War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength" - from 1984 by George Orwell

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.” - George W. Bush

In today's postmodern corporatized world it can be exceedingly difficult to navigate the torrent of media driven spin doctors with their hackneyed exhortations and technical jargon designed to overlook, obfuscate, mystify and propagandize. Our minds are assaulted and insulted by conservative corporate financed "thinks tanks" like the Fraser Institute and C D Howe institute that are self-proclaimed experts on everything. Their mission is to attack, plunder and privatize everything left in the public domain.

For elucidation and enlightenment, one must look elsewhere.

Education, news sources, history, politics and other cultural mechanisms have been manipulated and utilized by elite conservative forces that control and have always controlled wealth, power and the political apparatus.

It's a sad state of affairs that one garners more reliable information, even on our own country, from foreign news sources such as Al Jazeera than we do from our own national lame stream media. Once reliable public media and disseminators of education, culture, art and science such as the BBC, CBC and PBS have been underfunded, decimated and rendered mainly worthless by crass neo-conservative anti-intellectual politicians, turning them into useless clones of our wretched corporate media.

In the interests of promoting media literacy and general understanding we present here the following guide to just a few of the more ideologically laden words and emotionally charged expressions in current usage.

In Orwell's 1984, newspeak refers to language designed by a totalitarian regime to control thought and make subversive or dissenting speech impossible. It destroyed words with prohibited meanings so that critical thinking and heretical thoughts could not be expressed. A form of covert censorship, newspeak employed emotionally charged words and expressions frequently denoting the opposite the reality they originally described. For example, "joy camp" was the term assigned to forced-labor  and incarceration and the "Ministry of Truth" was an organ of propaganda, acts of omission and disinformation. In today's corporate dominated world newspeak is rampant; in fact it's the norm, not the exception.

The Short List....

Adjustment, quantitative easing (QE)

 

Real meaning: Socialism for the rich, printing money for indiscrete use by banks, financial parasites and Wall Street criminals .

Usage: With no strings attached, the governments have handed over to big business the entire nation’s GDP not to become bankrupt from their own reckless behaviour or move to China, Latin America and South East Asia. The apparent reasoning behind this ploy is to stimulate economic growth, thus prompting the gullible bewildered herd to exclaim: "Wow, quantitative adjustment is truly miraculous. Praise Jesus!"

Adjustment, structural

 

Real meaning: War and violence by other means.

Usage: It was once the case that we would invade you, steal all your land and resources and any other valuable "stuff" at the wrong end of a sword, gun or F-35 fighter jet. Now we achieve the same result with an IMF, World Bank plan to service your imposed debt peonage. In John Perkin's book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man you will find a disgusting blow by blow personal account of the machinations of this sordid business.

Afterlife

 

Real Meaning: A product of wishful thinking, a comforting meme. "Afterlife" (or Life after Death - a self-contradiction) is synonymous with the state of being "Dead". In spite of this obvious conceptual/logical  problem , an afterlife continues to be one of the many manifestations of religious nonsense and delusion. The carrot/stick blackmails of Islam and Christianity inform us that unless we believe in their fables, our afterlife will be unpleasant, specifically it will entail an eternity of suffering and pain in their personal dungeon called hell.

 

Usage: A form of fear-mongering to facilitate social and political control. But you are provided with alluring "choices": Believe or Burn. Charles Darwin called the notions of heaven and hell a "damnable doctrine" and wrote: "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true." Stephen Hawking regarded the brain "as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark."

 

Anarchist

 

Real Meaning: A critical thinker who challenges all forms of authority, both religious and secular, demanding legitimacy which invariably cannot be provided. The basic tenet of anarchism is that hierarchical authority - be it state, church, patriarchy or economic elite -  is not only unnecessary, but is antithetical to liberty, free thought and inherently detrimental to the maximization of human potential. Anarchists generally believe that human beings are capable of managing their own affairs on the basis of creativity, cooperation, and mutual respect. It is believed that power is inherently corruptive, and that authorities are inevitably more concerned with self-perpetuation and increasing their own historical entitlements and entrenched power than they are with doing what is best for their constituents. This is equally true in totalitarian, capitalist and communist states as it is in our faux democracies. As one of the great twentieth century anarchists Rudolph Rocker stated: "Every type of ecclesiastical and political power presupposes some particular form of human slavery, for the maintenance of which it is called into being" Listen to two short lectures by celebrated anarchist Noam Chomsky here and here.

 

Usage: Anarchism is one of the most grossly misunderstood concepts in history. It's been distorted and demonized by conservatives of all stripes, none of whom have read a single word written by an anarchist philosopher. To them, and regrettably many liberals and Marxists, anarchists are bomb throwing maniacs primarily interested in creating chaos and disorder throughout the world. I suggest the uninformed start by reading God and the State by Michael Bakunin, a book perhaps short enough to hold the attention of even a the dullest sclerotic conservative. It should provide a basic starting point to your enlightenment and stimulate further reading.

 

Atheist

Real Meaning: A default position you are born with. An atheist is a person with no invisible means of support who worships the holy trinity of truth, logic and reality. According to Voltaire, atheism is “the sin of intelligence” and to Shelley, the “crime of inquiry.”

 

Usage: A person held in contempt and pitied by pious Christians because he is incapable of believing in preposterous propositions for which there is not a shred of evidence.

 

Attack

 

Real meaning: Criticism.

Usage: As someone in a position of power, I don’t feel as though I ought to be responsible for the consequences of my actions today, in the past or future. I think I’ll just simply conflate "criticism" as being "attacked" and play the victim so that I can shift the onus of responsibility onto my critics and anyone trying to hold me accountable for my actions. Then I’ll reinvent myself as a champion of democracy in the face of the terrorist peril with the support of the mass media and militarized police forces.

Bias

Real meaning: Impartial.

Usage: The national broadcaster was very biased in its factual reporting of government corruption and the revolving door between it and big business. Soon the revolving door will be removed since government, the banks and multinational corporations are all in bed together anyway, deciding our futures in back room deals. Only a fool can deny this after the events of 2008.

As for our "impartial" corporate media granting a platform for perspectives on the left of the political centre, they are dismissed as being a hotbed of communist (the old phantom bogeyman) or terrorist (the new phantom bogeyman) insurgency. The corporate state needs an enemy, real or imagined, to justify the police state as a device for keeping the bewildered herd docile, compliant and in a condition of perpetual fear.

Book of Mormon

 

Real meaning: A ludicrous book of fairy tales vying for first place along with L Ron Hubbards Dianetics and Little Red Riding Hood as the worst science fiction ever written.

 

 Usage: None. A misspelling of Book of Moron.

 

Born Again Christian

 

 Real meaning:  Someone you wish had not been born the first time.

 

Usage: A person who refuses to grow up and insists on being an even bigger pain in the ass the second time around.

 

Business Ethics

 

Real Meaning: Vacuous , meaningless. No such thing. At best, an outrageous  oxymoron.

 

Usage: Your call is important to us. We care about our employees and customers. If you are looking for an ethical bank, (all of which pretend to be pure as the driven snow) forget about it. You can get a more honest loan and better financial advice from your friendly neighbourhood Hell's Angels.

 

Cardinal

 

Real Meaning: A bright red bird with an IQ of 13.

 

Usage: A self- important member of the Catholic hierarchy having less intelligence than the former.

 

Chaos

 

Real meaning: Functional, normalcy, status quo.

Usage: We can either have a society in which the entirety of the legislative and juridical process is dominated by and functions to uphold interests of the miniscule minority of the mega-rich at the expense of the other 99.9% of the population or we can have rebellion and pandemonium.

Christmas

 

Real Meaning: The birthday of a an itinerant Arabic guy claimed to be born of a virgin.

 

Usage: A day of mourning on over-extended bank loans and maxed-out credit cards

 

Civilisation, western

 

Real Meaning: Conflict, savagery, barbarity, plunder and perpetual war. Any semblance of civilization we have had in the West has been the result of a willingness of enough people of conscience, particularly those with power, to subordinate their self-interest and egoism to the common good.

Usage: A casino economy based on the jungle morality of winner-take-all Social Darwinian survival of the fittest as the crowning glory of western "civilization". The losers (the 99.9%) are subjected to the laws of capitalist jungle's flourish or die mentality whereas the one-tenth of 1% can gamble and risk everything but be provided with a golden parachute when they fail, having their stack of chips replenished to start the vile process all over again. Every advance of civility, justice and freedom from the spread of science, literacy and reason and the abolition of slavery have had to confront the objections that they violated God-given laws.

Collateral Damage, Externalities

Real Meaning: Unintended consequences of a morally intended act. An honest oversight.

Usage: Murdering thousands of civilians and creating ecological toxicity and contamination in a colonial or imperialistic war (are there any others?) Remember Vietnam all you former hippies who are now commodities traders? The damage done to humans and other living things in the natural environment by the capitalist system, costs of which are rarely if ever considered in the balance sheets or financial statements of businesses and corporations. Losses are offloaded onto governments (and its people) as profits are hoarded and protected in offshore tax havens.

Communist

 

Real meaning: Independent thinker who questions the status quo and arbitrary authority; one who has a social conscience and cares about things other than exploiting his fellow man, the almighty dollar and profit before all else. The ideology of a family that cares.

Usage: If you have people thinking for themselves and caring about social justice challenging hierarchy and oligarchy and expressing uncontrolled empathy, love of your neighbour and real bottom-up democracy, the result will be chaos, murder and mayhem.

Conservative:

Real Meaning: From the root "conserve", meaning preservation of worldly institutions, norms and rules that preserve their inherited and stolen wealth until the end of time. Often combined with Christian fanaticism and  fundamentalism, espousing a despotic political regime ordained by god that cares for you before you were born and after you die but doesn't give a rat's ass for you in between. Most Christians (who are invariably political conservatives) have never read the Bible cover to cover (99.99% by some biblical scholars), an anti-conservative tract, and one might say, radical.

Usage: Compassionate conservative: an oxymoron like business ethics. A political sentiment on the political right, just a short step to the left of fascism. People who love order, hierarchy and authoritarianism, provided it is they who are perched comfortably  atop the economic, social and political order. Believe in myth of hard work and the self-made man but apply these adages only to those in their employ of the business empire they inherited from their family.  

Correction

Real Meaning: A pathetic stock market euphemism used by idiots on business news networks and stock brokers. A phenomenon in which there are more sellers (pessimists)  than buyers (optimists). Invoked by most delusional stock market gurus and so-called financial experts to describe the massive meltdown in 2008. Loved by short sellers, the only realists in the market.

Usage: A lame attempt to placate and calm investors about a potential impending bear market.

Creation, Job

 

Real meaning: Exploitation of workers, women, indigenous and Third World peoples, the ecosystems, flora and fauna and in fact the perpetration of practically any mind destroying work you can imagine that requires the labour of workers to be imposed at starvation wages. Re-read The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital; they are as valid as they ever were during the era of Charles Dickens and "Hard Times".

Usage: "Right to work" means the right, legislated by the corporatist state, for scabs to take your union job, break the union and the grant the right of employers to auction off your meaningless bullshit job to the lowest bidder. Slavery is back; in fact it never left.

Credulity

Real Meaning: Gullibility. Faith. The willingness to believe without evidence or sound argument. Considered an intellectual vice on a used car lot or in the presence of a politician or stock promoter but a virtue in religion.

Usage: The credulous and others who prefer blissful ignorance are the preferred targets of advertisers, evangelists, and political dogmatists. Loved by all those with economic and/or political power and arguably the primary reason we have had tyranny and authoritarianism (and not democracy) throughout human history.

Crucifix

 

Real Meaning: An insult to a man executed by being stapled to a cross. His crime was apparently worshipping a politically incorrect sky daddy.

 

Usage:  A pendant worn by defendants in court hoping for leniency from the judge and by pretentious lame-brained athletes expecting the Lord’s intervention on their behalf as they fumble the ball on the goal line or strike out at the plate.

 

Democracy

 

Real meaning: Oligarchy, Corporate plutocracy.

Usage: Under this farcical facade you have a choice every four years of endorsing either the pro-big business party on the far right or the pro-big business party from on the far, far right (the latter being fascism as expressed in the ideologies of the Republican Party in the US or Conservative Party of Canada).Isn't such a duopoly the nothing more than a dictatorship, in which you have no choice at all. First tragedy, then farce.

Eco-terrorist

Real Meaning: A person of conscience who cares about the survival of the planet and its ecosystems.

Usage: An enemy of state capitalism and the right of corporations to put profit before all else and the state to inflict violence and war wherever profit can be made. Profit overrides all else, including clean water, safe food, climate change and the life of every living thing on earth.

Entitlement

 

Real meaning: God given right to all authoritarian systems, wealth, hereditary privilege and for conservative elites to own everything on the planet. It's the  essence of political conservatism. Entitlement, from the root word "title" - do you get it now? You know - kings, queens, lords, robber barons, real estate tycoons who have stolen land from indigenous peoples or bribed a politician for real estate speculation - such as in the clearing of the plains in Canada of inconvenient native people or the purposes of lily white Christian settlement and the building of the CPR.

The right of every unemployed person or person working at a bullshit minimum wage job to own a Lamborghini, go on a decadent cruise or posh holiday in Tahiti or reside under a bridge and live on expiry dated Kraft Dinner.

Usage: We had to cut back on aid and health care to the poor and disabled living on the streets to pay for tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy. Also reductions in the amount of oxygen entitlements in the atmosphere to the masses in the interest of maintaining the tar sands, economic growth rates and to compete with China and India.

Evidence

Real meaning: An important component of any empirical argument and the cornerstone of research and the scientific enterprise. Any theory, claim or hypothesis asserted without evidence can be rejected without evidence. The more extraordinary the claim, the greater is the demand for extraodinary evidence.

Usage: The absence of evidence is universally endorsed by all  religionists, politicians, profiteers and marketers.

Exposure

 

Real meaning: Subject to the vagaries of market forces, reserved primarily for working people competing for ever-diminishing low paying shitty jobs because all others have been outsourced. Would you like fries with that sir? Welcome to Walmart!

Usage: It was necessary to have all the states of the European Union achieve consensus in reducing Greece to blackmail and debt peonage with its people submissively huddled in the foetal position so that the bank mafia in the European Central Bank and IMF could avoid the dire perils of unnecessary contagion. Debt forgiveness is out of the question for the good Christians of the EU troika. As anyone with a brain stem can tell you, this is the standard textbook neoliberal procedure in the manner in which a Third World Banana Republic is created.

Socialism for the rich and a steady stream of corporate welfare for big business and the banks. For the rest of the 99.9% it's systemic economic risk, dog-eat-dog competition and austerity.

Extremist

 

Real meaning: That's the other guy, not us.

Usage: The demonized "extremist" critics or anyone daring to demonstrate dissent, question or challenge the status quo of corporatist state ideology. Ad hominem attacks and depictions of "terrorist" is reserved for anyone who defies authority and the prevailing oligarchy of governments such as Stephen Harper who responds with his police state Bill C-51. People who champion social justice, environmentalism or in any way disagree with Herr Harper and his Fourth Reich are deemed candidates for arrest and incarceration.

Fact

 

Real meaning: A reality based truncheon with which to defeat your intellectual enemies. To the great science fiction writer Philip K Dick reality (or fact) is something that "will not go away when you stop believing it".

Usage: A fact is an inconvenience for politicians, economists and the religious who hold to their injustices and absurdities regardless of evidence flying in the face of their dogmas. Facts are obstacles to belief that can be easily overcome by taking religious faith seriously.

Faith

 

Actual meaning: Belief without evidence combined with blind obedience and submission. A labour saving device for arriving at a conclusion without the intellectual toil of digging up the facts, evidence and arguments to support it. According to Archie Bunker of "All in the Family" fame, faith is "believing something that no one in his right mind would believe." Any claim that can be accepted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence; the supernatural has no more place in academic scholarship or science than it does in our courts of law. So why are we required to swear on the Bible in our courtrooms?

Usage: It's high time you demonstrated your  patriotism and started supporting our working class troops (rhymes with dupes) and its military escapades for the rights and freedoms of multinational corporations and the rich man by singing our national anthem, waving the flag and having some faith in our dear leader, Crime Minister Stephen Harper.

Fear Mongering

 

Real meaning: Science such as Evolution, cellular biology, genetics, astrophysics and climate change theory.

Usage: The scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences, is engaging in a great deal of fear mongering and conspiracy theory regarding the data surrounding climate change and species extinction. I believe some of them are even playing into the hands of the dirty bastard communists and anarchists who are trying to cast doubt on the glorious beneficence of the almighty dollar, the Book of Genesis and the divinity of Jesus.

Freedom

 

Real meaning: Enslavement, Debt penury,; the freedom to drive a Rolls Royce, work at mind numbing  job earning chump change and to sleep in a cardboard box inside a dumpster. In the globalized economy, the freedom to have your land, life and resources exploited or stolen by the rich and powerful.

Usage: We are free to choose our masters and oppressors, trading freedom for bogus security, rather than having them imposed on us by force. We are free to be exploited for wages constituting a tiny fraction of the value we create for our bosses who  steal the rest. Every four years we enjoy the freedom to choose between the pro-big business anti-labour party on the right and the pro-big business anti-labour party on the extreme right at the ballot box. It's called democracy. Stop whining, you  ungrateful pinko commie creep. Altogether now "Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee, God save our land...yawn...."

Free Trade/Free Enterprise/Free Market

Real Meaning: A fictitious idea about a meritocracy and an even playing field in the human endeavours of economics.

Usage: Exploitation by bribery, larceny, imperialism and war. Freedom in the economic realms is a code for whatever yields advantages for the world's corporations and wealthy elites. This has been the essence of colonialism and imperialism from the very beginning, the victims being indigenous populations and those living in the global south. The IMF and World Bank are the facilitators of free movement of capital to  wherever exploitation of land, resources and labour can take place. They call it "structural adjustments", "economic development"  and other fuzzy sounding apparently benign strategies. Debt is one of the prime tools of control as it is presently in Greece, in addition to privatization, austerity, elimination of public services and democratic oversight and spending cuts (except for the military and arms purchases).Read the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for a personal account of how this is carried out. In today's work of casino capitalism, the criminals who run investment banks and real estate development cartels, sell mortgages and run hedge funds, rating agencies and operate with impunity and are "bailed out" if they are big and powerful enough. They gain re-entry into the capitalist casino with their stack of chips replenished, courtesy of the taxpayer.

 

Friendly Persuasion

Real meaning: An attempt to convince someone by using logic, evidence and sound argument.

Usage: Police state surveillance, brutality, rendition and torture.

God

Real Meaning: Deadbeat Dad of the Universe. Dog to a dyslexic. An alpha male cruel comedian who created his own audience. Why are they not laughing, one might ask? Perhaps it's because they were created with extremely short miserable lives injected with vile genetic defects, illnesses, a defective thinking apparatus and psychological dysfunction.

If such an arrogant vindictive despotic asshole really did exist, as Michael Bakunin, the great Russian anarchist, proclaimed, "it would be necessary to abolish him". Fortunately for humans, God only exists in the minds of childish neurotics and worshippers looking for a father figure authority.

Usage: The cause of all good things that happen to people from a walk off home run to winning a lottery. It has been claimed that the Christian God performs miracles; so why doesn't he/she/it prevent blindness, cancer or Stephen Harper before they occur? Or perhaps the great omnipotent one could perform a real violation of the laws of physics and biology by removing a fatal genetic defect or regenerating a missing limb. And surely any decent deity would allow someone to live, at the very least, a healthy life of 1000 years rather than the typically unhealthy paltry 70. Moreover, if god really wanted humans to be morally sensitive, peaceful, free of evil thoughts and more intelligent, he should have taken more care in creating such a flawed species. Perhaps then we would not be on the short list for extinction.

Golf

Real Meaning: Flog spelled backwards was, according to, Mark Twain, "an enjoyable walk destroyed". An alleged sporting activity whereby someone 100 lbs overweight can carry a cigar in one hand, a beer in the other and spend most of the activity driving around in an annoying electric  cart and have the audacity to call himself an "athlete".

Usage: A mostly sedentary activity in which men dressed like pimps try to hit a tiny ball into a hole in the ground. A colossal waste of water and real estate. The only activity more boring than watching golf on television is watching people talk about golf on television. Take up a real sport such as full contact poker. 

Growth, economic

 

Real meaning: Protecting and extending social and economic entitlements for a tiny conservative elite while the rest of us scramble for the crumbs that trickle down from their chins. Infinite plunder of a finite planet.

Usage: We must drastically reduce wages and environmental oversight to compete with Asian sweatshops and reintroduce chattel slavery as a means of boosting economic growth.

Hate

 

Real meaning: Criticism resulting from intense dislike of something irrational and/or destructive.

Usage: When I point out to the fundamentalist Muslim or Christian that he's a medievalist subscribing to beliefs fundamentally at odds with science, reason and civilised society, he reacts with personal attacks and hatred, informing me I'll burn in their Lakes of Fire called Hell for eternity. I can escape this fate by having faith in either Jesus or Mohammed and their respective deities.

Illegal Immigrant

Real Meaning: A valuable foreign source of cheap exploitable slave labor to the corporations and multinational agribusinesses.

Usage: According to red neck racists like Donald Trump, dirty Mexican, Latino  and Islamic drug dealers, rapists and terrorists.

 

Infinity

 

Real meaning: An important abstract concept in advanced mathematics, indispensible to understanding differential and integral calculus. According to Big Al Einstein two things are infinite: the Universe and human  stupidity, but he was not too sure about the former.

 

Usage: The upper limit of the greed, salary, bonuses and other compensation perks for corporate executives.

 

Intellectual

Real Meaning: A person of the enlightenment and scientific revolution. Someone who demonstrates a high degree of philosophical, literary, cultural, scientific and historical erudition and critical free thought fatal to success in business and theology.

Usage: A conservative lackey and hit man with an MBA and PhD in Accounting Fraud who works for criminal outfits like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, HSBC, the IMF and World Bank.

Intelligence

Real Meaning: A rare attribute among the species called homo sapiens. Often measured by IQ tests, the median initially determined to be 100 which is now estimated by a German team of cognitive psychology researchers to be about 85, the estimated IQ of George W Bush and Stephen Harper. Yes we humans which are now on the extinction list (we lose about 5-10 plant and animal species a day) are getting dumber and dumber.

Usage: Spying, espionage, surveillance. Governments now spy on everyone, including its own citizens and allies. Canada with our Crime Minister Stephen Harper's new Bill C-51 has now joined the United States as the dear leader of an oligarchic fascist police state.

Jehovah's Witness

Real meaning: Not unlike mainstream Christians, a person suffering from a childhood neurosis (to use Freud's description), indoctrination and possible self-inflicted irreparable brain damage.

Usage: An insufferable jerk who knocks on your door Saturday morning to engage in intellectual gibberish about Armageddon and the end times. In this sense, in addition to their rejection of much of science, they differ little from Christian fundamentalist evangelism.

Note: In its infancy this Christian reformist group, founded in the late 1870s by Charles Taze Russell with the formation of Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society, was highly critical of mainstream Christian doctrines such as heaven and hell, the afterlife and the resurrection. They considered that  Christianity had become corrupt, complicit with wealthy elites, robber baron capitalism and its gangster politicians in government. Hard to disagree with that. They also rejected the mindless patriotism, flag waving, war-mongering and imperialism of most Christians and the US government. For this in particular, like all peaceniks, conscientious objectors and ant-war activists, they have been persecuted by the state.

 

Jobs

 

Real meaning: Profit before people. Wasting your precious life on a mind destroying activity for someone else's profit.

Usage: As everyone ought to know, the main reason anyone ever goes into business is to create jobs for the bewildered herd.

Law

Real Meaning: An impartial rule of justice that serves all people in the interest in the common good, civility and decency.

Usage: Nothing to do with justice, fairness or democracy In fact, an impediment to justice, fair play and the moral point of view. Laws serves the golden rule; that is, those who have the gold and make the rules.  A rule upheld by corrupt working class cops who serve and protect the status quo of wealth, power, corporate privilege and entitlements of conservative elites. The law employs unscrupulous professional gunslingers with a testicular fungal infection called lawyers hired to manipulate laws and compromise universally accepted ethical rules on behalf of a greedy paying businessman client, thus paving the way for his entry into politics.

Leftist

Real meaning: Pissed off member of the working class who understands how the conservative dominated authoritarian world works. Someone who has to learn how to lose and accept that the political left has disappeared, save for the pseudo-left (the NDP since Tommy Douglas) that never utters the word "socialism". The once proud Labour Party in Britain was demolished by the Catholic fundamentalist sell-out Tony Blair to fellow neo-con and war criminal and George W Bush. The left in the United States disappeared during the 1950's McCarthyism Red Scares and  commie witch hunts.

Usage: Don’t pay attention to that bellicose Marxist-Leninist-Maoist commie bastard who wants to destroy my American Dream of becoming the next Bill Gates; he's delusional. Every conservative is a potential fascist ready to overthrow or declare war on any regime to the left of Attila the Hun.

Motivation Seminar

Real Meaning: An attempt by an asshole micromanager to get an underpaid employee to work harder at a mind destroying job, threatening being fired so your job can be outsourced to the Third World..

Usage: A class taught by a member of the unemployed who instructs directionless lame-brains with the personality of speed bumps and passion of a turnip. The curriculum includes toilet training, how to get your ass out of the fart sack by noon, how to use a pencil and other important “life skills” and common sense notions that should have been learned in pre-school. A more effective motivational strategy is to strike them on forehead with a ball peen hammer or kick them in the balls.

National Interest

Real Meaning: The endorsement of policies that promote justice, real democracy and the common good.

Usage: Whatever serves the interest of entrenched wealth, power, privilege and big business. The military industrial complex, as Dwight D Eisenhower put it.

Newspaper

 

Real meaning: Propaganda, misinformation and premeditated omissions. A platform for corporate power, conservatism and inherited wealth.

Usage: Everything you need to know is in your local corporate newspaper and television newscast.

Obedience

Real meaning: A nauseating principle that most people embrace throughout their lives of quiet desperation. A word that ought to be removed from the dictionary.

Usage: A distinguishing characteristic of lap dogs, army privates and other lower ranking members of the military, sheep, religious people and all hierarchical, authoritarian arrangements.

Parasite

Real meaning: Blood suckers. leeches, tapeworms and other slimy creatures that live off the flesh of others.

Usage: A synonym for a pimp, real estate developer, lawyer, investment banker, commodities trader Christian missionary, televangelist and other reptiles in suits.

Patriotism

Real Meaning: The thinking of a sceptical citizen who actively questions the legitimacy of all authority, including everything a politician says and everything his government does.

Usage: Jingoism. I support my government right or wrong. America - love it or leave it. God bless Canada. God save our land; we stand on guard for thee. Hail to the chief Stephen Harper. I mindlessly stand up on cue like a robot and sing the national anthem at sporting events, complete with military presence. I enthusiastically wave the flag and say a little prayer for our troops "fighting for our freedoms and values" every time our country decides to bomb the shit out of some country in the "national interest" - of the rich man and corporate profits.

Pimp

Real Meaning: Agent or business manager for ladies of the night.

Usage: Politicians, lobbyists and courtesans serving corporate interests and the rich. An entrepreneur or corporate CEO who rents out captive human beings for exploitation and profit, spending his ill-gotten gains on a Lamborghini, luxury Hawaiian condo, yacht with a helicopter pad and a Rolex watch for every day of the year.

Power, hostile

Real meaning: Foreign nation state not easily manipulated, exploited, plundered and bombed into oblivion.

Usage: The government of one particular foreign country had enough leverage over the United States, the IMF and World Bank to say "No" to its blackmailing demands. It is thereby deemed to be a belligerent and failed state run by a commie regime.

Practical, Pragmatist

Real meaning: Opportunist, entrepreneur, the ability to dictate, exploit and pillage.

Usage: When I argued we should move all eco-terrorists (aka environmentalists) and activists for social and economic justice into internment camps for the sake of national security I was merely being practical.

Psychic

 

Real Meaning:  Someone who, if they had the powers they claim, would not have to earn a living as a psychic.

 

Usage: A charlatan with a supernatural ability to extract money from ignoramuses and idiots.

 

Principles

 

Actual meaning: Assuming you have any, principles are moral rules conveniently ignored when demonizing or annihilating your enemies.

Usage: When we criticize and demonize the Peoples Democratic Republic of North Korea we suddenly remember that authoritarian police states like the one in which we live, are also undemocratic and evil.

Realism

 

Real meaning: Whatever serves the status quo, vested interests and the medieval autocratic entitlements that justify it. Might is right. All power to those who have always had it.

Usage: That’s very interesting what you say about the golden rule being that "those with gold make the rules". Since the primary function of all governments is to protect the privileged minority of the super rich from the herd majority, as James Madison put it, we have a serious problem of democracy. The major problem then is ridding ourselves of oppressive oligarchies of thugs and criminals like in countries in which we reside and make sure they’re not able to perpetuate themselves as they've done throughout history in one form or another.

I on the other hand, as a pampered conservative, feel that we should accommodate power structures, reasoning being because I think I have a better handle on reality than you. The masses need to be controlled.

Refugee, Immigrant

 

Real meaning: Scapegoat.

Usage: With the global economy, natural environment and current geopolitical situation all circling the drain and the fact that we don't have any solution on how to deal with them that would involve making any meaningful changes or accommodations ourselves, we are satisfied that the chaos it is producing is generating a steady flow of desperate refugees for business to exploit for cheap labour.

Regime Change

Real Meaning: Holding elections with real choices for the people in order to peacefully decide who shall govern a genuine democracy.

Usage: Violently overthrowing a foreign government and assassinating its leader by a powerful state (e.g., United States) because the people chose the wrong political leader (e.g., socialist or communist).  A few examples of American "regime change": Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Iraq 1960-63, Dominican Republic and Congo in 1961, South Vietnam in 1963, Brazil 1964, Chile in 1973, Turkey 1980, Nicaragua 1981-90, etc, etc, etc...

Relations, public

 

Real meaning: Corporate propaganda.

Usage: We are not trying to put a positive spin on the lies we tell, we are conducting a public relations campaign.

Rottweiler, Doberman

 

Real Meaning: A guard dog or family  pet that will eat you out of house and home and requiring carpet cleaning services every two weeks.

 

Usage: Something black and brown that looks good on a corporate lawyer or conservative politician.

 

Security, national

 

Real meaning: Security to "serve and protect" those with wealth and power - but risk for the rest of us. Thank you Lard for the RCMP.

Usage: When the Harper government had finished passing the infamous legislation of Bill C-51 making it illegal for dissent or anyone exposing the truth about banks and corporations, especially where the revolving door between government and military contractors was concerned, we have a problem with national security and potential terrorism. This ought to be punishable by a life sentence in a privately-run work prison where inmates are forced into telemarketing and making i-Phones for ten cents an hour. I made a statement to the press pointing out the necessity of doing so in the "national interest".

Self-loathing

 

Real meaning: The capacity for reflection and self-criticism.

Usage: Those anarchists and lefty socialists from the slums really display a lot of self-loathing about their privileges and entitlements and sour grapes because they never inherited a family fortune. They need some self-esteem to pull themselves up by their bootstraps even if they have no boots. Referring to class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and the fact both parents were crack heads is a copout.

Self-Made Man

 

Real Meaning: A fiction. Non-existent delusions like ghosts, goblins, deities and angels.

 

Usage: Silver spoon pampered lazy ass incompetent who inherits the family business. The same assholes who promote the laissez-faire dog-eat-dog laws of the jungle that are claimed to be the hallmark of capitalism.

 

Soft

 

Real meaning: Restrained, tolerant.

Usage: Anyone against turning the government into a fascist police state is soft on terrorism. Three cheers for Stephen Harper and neo-Nazi Bill C-51. God save our land.

Terrorist (1)

 

Real meaning: Not us. A phony ploy to justify infringements of constitutional rights and freedoms.

Usage: The terrorist using arbitrary violence outside of all international law and United Nations oversight to achieve political ends wasn’t working for us.

Terrorist (2)

 

Real meaning: Freedom fighter. Not a fan of the corporatist state and kamikaze capitalism. Someone who refuses to sing our national anthem, wave the flag for every imperialistic war (is there any other kind?) and genuflect in the presence of dogs of war such as Stephen Harper.

Usage: The terrorist using arbitrary violence outside of all international law and United Nations oversight to achieve political ends wasn’t flying a drone around Pakistan from the safety of a control room in the Midwest while drinking a beer and devouring a bag of Doritos. A right wing conservative who endorses a military coup to depose (and murder the members) of any government in the world that is to the political left of Attila the Hun or Adolph Hitler.

Terrorist (3)

 

Real meaning: Person with brown skin. Non-Christian person.

Usage: When I was sitting in George's Greasy Spoon waiting for a plate of pork ribs and poutine, the terrorist waiter in a turban looked suspicious.

Terrorism, Counter

 

Real meaning: Corporate plunder and state terrorism.

Usage: We decided to employ arbitrary state violence outside of all international law and United Nations oversight and in the face of the manifest opposition of a great wave of public opposition because we felt that this was the best way to engage in counter-terrorism and defend the democratic principles we maintain a thin pretence of understanding.

Un-people

Real Meaning: On the face of it, any living thing not human. In Orwell's 1984, a person who has been "vaporized"; who has not only been murdered by the state, but effectively erased from existence. Such a person would be written out of existing books, photographs, and all family history and written material with the original copies destroyed, so that no trace of their existence could be found in the historical record. 

Usage: Anyone not a member of the super-wealthy 0.1% or corporate elite who own most of the planet and control its governing bodies.

Voter

 

Real meaning: Sucker, Dupe, Victim

Usage: As the voter approached me and the shills from the opposition party got ready to move the policy shells around as though there was any way we would ever in a million years let him find a pea of enfranchisement; I knew then we would take that credulous dumb ass for everything he was worth.

Welfare

 

Real meaning: The tiny portion of the government budget that goes to the helping the poor and those wage slaves with bullshit jobs.

Usage: The government introduced a bill to scrap welfare which is nothing but an excuse for lazy sloths to sit around and leech off the taxpayer. We need that money to help support the umpteen trillion dollars in tax breaks for corporations and parasitic banks earning billions every quarter.

War (1)

 

Real meaning: Rich man's racket.

Usage: Saddam Hussein refused to do as he was told and make his oil reserves and other natural resources available for us to plunder and steal. Consequently, we lied to our citizens, bombed the shit out of his country and strung him up without trial.

War (2)

 

Real meaning: Turkey shoot, killing fish in a barrel.

Usage: Our remote controlled drones have killed tens of thousands of non-combatants and innocent civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere because they have the wrong skin colour and hence, are potential terrorists

Work, Employment

 

Real meaning: Slavery. Useless, meaningless and mind destroying toil  at slave wages.

Usage: Entrepreneurs! Don’t tie up valuable capital in your slaves – lease them instead! Better yet, hire prisoners from our privatized prisons for $10 a day while the prisons pay them 10 cents an hour. Another option: move your business to a Third World sweat shop where there are no labour laws, environmental standards or human rights and you can pay your slaves 25 cents an hour while working 12 hour days 7 days a week; just follow the lead of upstanding corporate citizens such as Nike, Walmart, Apple and Microsoft.

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For more fun with Newspeak and Doublespeak check out the Cynic Dictionaries.

 The Curmudgeon’s Lexicon of Religion

http://www.skeptic.ca/Curmudgeon_Religion.htm

 The Curmudgeon’s Lexicon of Business

http://www.skeptic.ca/Curmudgeon_Business.htm

 

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