| Hmmm, interesting coincidence you're reading 253, as I just went through the online version of that again a few days ago. Unless you mentioned it in passing and that caused me to hunt it down, or vice versa, and I just forgot that bit of causality. Ben - Tue Nov 4 06:44:17 |
| Good read. Unfortunately, since it was written by liberals, my conservative friends won't read it.
Oh yeah, I just read 253 from your All Consuming link. Cool thing. Zarba - Tue Nov 4 11:44:02 |
| Just a visitor here, but this seems a very odd example. Taxes are by their nature something that people are compelled to do under penalty of fines and incarceration. Hence reducing taxes is relieving the people who have to pay them of this burden. This is a pretty reasonable use of the English language.
Now, in not all situations are people better off being relieved of their burdens; taxes may well be one of these situations. However, calling reducing taxes "tax relief" is a reasonable and honest use of the language. Not all language which conservatives use is, though I can't think of any good examples at the moment. (Even the absurd 'war on drugs' is accurate, if the thing itself is quite stupid.) But this example is rather odd, as it's one of the more obvious and natural uses of terminology. Couldn't the author come up with something better? ctl - Wed Nov 5 19:05:33 |
| This is *exactly* what the term "tax relief" is doing, though - emphasising the image of "tax" as some unpleasant and natural phenomenon which Candidate X can help to reduce, rather than it being a way of, say, funding valuable public services. (That Candidate Y's liberal "not cutting taxes, to pay for schools and hospitals" policy becomes sadistic and voter-hating, for not relieving any painful, painful tax.) Kevan - Thu Nov 6 11:13:20 |
| Kevan,
People do sometimes understand that they have to bear burdens. Children are a burden that many people bear gladly. However, to complain that taxing people is inherently bad and so consequently explaining the case for why you must do this bad thing to achieve a better result is complicated is just silly. Yes, it's a difficult case to make. I should hope that every case to do something bad for a greater good is difficult to make. For example, those who think that a minimum wage merely exascerbates poverty rather than helping it have a difficult case to make. Those who favor any given war have a difficult case to make. Those who favor the death penalty have a difficult case to make. Those who favor pro-black(etc.) discrimination have a difficult case to make. Some cases are simply difficult to make because they involve explaining the relative benefits of a trade-off. This is natural, and at best it's highly dishonest to try to misuse language so that a difficult case appears simple. Tax relief is plain english. Affirmative Action is not. Pro-abortion and Anti-abortion are plain language. Pro-life and Pro-choice are not. Yes, everyone tries to cast their cause in the most positive language that they can, but "tax relief" is one of the few examples where this isn't the case. "Tax relief" may not tell the whole story, but it is plainly descriptive of what's going on. ctl - Thu Nov 6 18:38:43 |
| Is Homeland Security plain english? Just asking. Zarba - Thu Nov 6 19:19:00 |
| Not as much as the ATF or the INS used to be. It's accurately descriptive, but of something which is very general. The department of homeland security is about that, and it has (at least tried to) gather all homeland security related departments into itself.
If it didn't have a general name, though, it would have a very long one (given all of its current functions). It could certainly have a better name, though I can't think of what that would be right now. ctl - Thu Nov 6 21:06:20 |
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