Rex Kerr
3 min readOct 15, 2022

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I very much agree with your overall thesis. It's absolutely true that people are living to a great extent in their own bubbles of "reality" (i.e. delusion or mutual incomprehensibility), that this is exacerbated by corporate interests (both what-the-consumer-wants-to-hear style media, and social media), and that this does terrible things to our ability to recognize each others' humanity.

However, calling yourself "independent" is somewhat disingenuous given that you managed to use entirely examples of the Left (supposedly) relabeling things in order to gain an advantage on the Right (or conservative).

The right has been doing the let's-switch-up-language thing for ages already. For example, calling a adopting a completely standard, substantially flawed right-wing perspective an "independent mindset", like you appeared to do, is a very popular right-wing redefinition of what "independent" means.

This isn't to say that the left isn't doing it too, and at a greater pace presently than the right. But it's important to recognize that it's not a unimodal phenomenon. It's not just progressives.

Also, sometimes language is simply misleading and needs to be fixed. The CDC, for instance, had a silly definition up before given that there were "flu vaccines" for many years that completely meet the immunological and medical definition, but weren't "vaccines" by the CDC's statement (Covid vaccines outpace flu vaccines in every measure by a large margin, even if they aren't as effective as, say, a full course of the measles vaccine). It took the furor over Covid to get them to notice they messed up in their attempt to simplify. They tried again and, I'd argue, still messed up (went from too narrow to too broad), but it's closer. If someone insisted that the old CDC definition was exactly the way it had to be, that would be redefining terms (hmmm, and who is insisting on that?).

There is nothing about "terrorist" that ever meant "foreigner". That would be a redefinition. For example, the unabomber's actions were widely called terrorism at the time. The definition is simply to use violence, often lethal, against civilians, to achieve political aims. The United States had a really good run from the 20s through 60s of having very little of that; and in the 2000s, the domestic terror incidents were overshadowed by those of Al Qaeda and the like. But the foreign threat is much diminished now, and the domestic threat is much increased, so calling it like it is isn't redefining terms. It's just noticing what happened. On the other hand, if people use this idea to cast suspicion on a huge number of people who really just don't fully agree with government, well, we've seen that before in McCarthyism, for instance. That's extremely harmful to the freedoms enjoyed in the United States, but isn't really related to redefinition per se. It is related to mind-reading: the idea that you can know with confidence what someone else is thinking because of small clues in their behavior that suggest that they're "witches" (effectively). I don't see any evidence that any sizable group of people even on the far left think that having non-mainstream ideas is "domestic terrorism", just that expressing them means that you are liable to storm the Capitol or something (which would be domestic terrorism).

The recession thing is more clearly just bunk; you're absolutely right that "racist" is being redefined; the "woman" thing is certainly a change (whether good or bad, it's definitely different); "conspiracy theorist" does get overused (but, to be fair, people do believe more genuine conspiracy theories than they used to, in large part because of the exact mechanism you say: people inhabit different linguistic realities which makes discussion harder); I think you overstate the case about "white supremacy" by picking overly extreme examples that are not representative of any sizable body of opinion, but it undeniably gets used for way milder stuff than it used to; and you don't even state the changed meaning of "freedom of speech" strongly enough--you can find lots of people on the left (?!?!) arguing that it only applies narrowly to laws against what you can say and it's totally fine to use any other oppressive measure to control discourse (?!?!?!).

So, a lot of good points there. But you might look around a bit--your lopsided and in some cases actually wrong examples suggest that you've been more affected by the bubble-and-redefinition phenomenon than you might hope, given that you're clearly aware of it and think (as we all should) that it's a bad thing.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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