Epoch 132 -- Institutionalized Stupidity and Enforced Ignorance
So, a little bit more than a week ago I stumbled across this fascinating little article with the headline CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity shared by a friend on Facebook. This gave me a bit of pause because more than a year ago I would have looked at this kind of a headline and thought to myself "Can our government really be this stupid?" and my mental response to myself would have been "Probably not." But, in the current government climate the answer is a resounding "Yes." and that's cause enough for alarm. I hate politics. I don't do politics. But when my own government is being this flagrantly stupid I have to take a step back and wonder why it makes me so angry in the first place.
The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
This is supposed to be the CDC, right? Center For Disease Control and Prevention, an agency that's meant to protect the health of American citizens as well monitoring the collective health of the rest of the world to beat out the scary stuff before it becomes a worldwide pandemic. I mean, clearly they've already missed a spot with the stupidity problem, but no one seems to know what to do about that so I'll be letting that one slide at least. I'm sorry, but the government shouldn't be censoring medically relevant terminology, especially not by very underhandedly threatening to withhold payment to the CDC for the usage of such terms. As far as I'm concerned this sort of thing ought to be incredibly illegal and really, for all I know it is. I'm not a legal expert by any means, but a list like this is just inherently very, very suspect.
Instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said.
I'm sorry, but what the actual hell did I just read? Again, this is the supposed to be the CDC, right? All this will actually accomplished, as my boyfriend so eloquently put it, is bringing in an era in which scientists won't be able to function by writing like scientists. Again, what the actual hell is this? Well, since there isn't a completely appropriate universally accepted term for whatever the hell this is supposed to be let's call it "institutionalized stupidity" or "enforced ignorance". Because clearly someone from some manner of institution, be it religious-based or otherwise, didn't like these terms being used by the CDC and fearing for the general public wishes to enforce ignorance by having such terms banned from a government agency meant to regulate disease and prevention.
So, why am I so pissed off that I'm actually writing about this? Look, it's one thing for organized religion and other fanatical groups to hide behind their own ignorance like it's some kind of psychological security blanket and quite another for the United States government to be promoting blind ignorance on such a massive scale as this. This is a bunch of blind men and women in the government without ears flapping their mouths and expecting for the rest of us to do as we're told without question so they can take all our money while we're being distracted by the greedy machinations of an over-inflated orange masquerading as a pompous wannabe dictator.
And don't even get me started on climate change deniers. It's right there in the name, "deniers" which implies wanting to sustain ignorance or obliviousness to an otherwise rational viewpoint. True, man-made climate change is poorly understood, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking it very, very seriously because if we don't there's a very high probability that while the Earth will indeed live on, we might damn well drive our own stupid species to extinction long before we work out some kind of contingency plan to promote our survival elsewhere in the cosmos, although frankly the universe might be better off without us if this is how we're going to treat each other and the environment we live in.
Seriously, if there's other intelligent life out there in the universe it wouldn't surprise me at all if we've already been put on a galactic quarantine list for being such a blatantly destructive and self-destructive species.
The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
This is supposed to be the CDC, right? Center For Disease Control and Prevention, an agency that's meant to protect the health of American citizens as well monitoring the collective health of the rest of the world to beat out the scary stuff before it becomes a worldwide pandemic. I mean, clearly they've already missed a spot with the stupidity problem, but no one seems to know what to do about that so I'll be letting that one slide at least. I'm sorry, but the government shouldn't be censoring medically relevant terminology, especially not by very underhandedly threatening to withhold payment to the CDC for the usage of such terms. As far as I'm concerned this sort of thing ought to be incredibly illegal and really, for all I know it is. I'm not a legal expert by any means, but a list like this is just inherently very, very suspect.
Instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said.
I'm sorry, but what the actual hell did I just read? Again, this is the supposed to be the CDC, right? All this will actually accomplished, as my boyfriend so eloquently put it, is bringing in an era in which scientists won't be able to function by writing like scientists. Again, what the actual hell is this? Well, since there isn't a completely appropriate universally accepted term for whatever the hell this is supposed to be let's call it "institutionalized stupidity" or "enforced ignorance". Because clearly someone from some manner of institution, be it religious-based or otherwise, didn't like these terms being used by the CDC and fearing for the general public wishes to enforce ignorance by having such terms banned from a government agency meant to regulate disease and prevention.
So, why am I so pissed off that I'm actually writing about this? Look, it's one thing for organized religion and other fanatical groups to hide behind their own ignorance like it's some kind of psychological security blanket and quite another for the United States government to be promoting blind ignorance on such a massive scale as this. This is a bunch of blind men and women in the government without ears flapping their mouths and expecting for the rest of us to do as we're told without question so they can take all our money while we're being distracted by the greedy machinations of an over-inflated orange masquerading as a pompous wannabe dictator.
And don't even get me started on climate change deniers. It's right there in the name, "deniers" which implies wanting to sustain ignorance or obliviousness to an otherwise rational viewpoint. True, man-made climate change is poorly understood, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking it very, very seriously because if we don't there's a very high probability that while the Earth will indeed live on, we might damn well drive our own stupid species to extinction long before we work out some kind of contingency plan to promote our survival elsewhere in the cosmos, although frankly the universe might be better off without us if this is how we're going to treat each other and the environment we live in.
Seriously, if there's other intelligent life out there in the universe it wouldn't surprise me at all if we've already been put on a galactic quarantine list for being such a blatantly destructive and self-destructive species.