Dogwhistles
Mar. 15th, 2009 03:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstill"Dogwhistle" is now being used as a metaphor (I know, Jenny Behind-The-Fair here, probably has been for ages) for a code phrase that sounds innocuous to the general reader/listener, but which carries specific meaning for a subgroup of the audience.
"Family values" used to be a dogwhistle, for example; now it doesn't work because everybody knows it means "stomp on women and gays."
There was a great article in New Scientist that lays out a lot of these dogwhistles that Creationists use. But once a dogwhistle is generally known, its secret info-communicating properties become useless, so someone apparently complained, and the spineless editorial staff at New Scientist took it off the web. This was pretty useless because 1) somebody grabbed the page before it disappeared and now it's available from another source and 2) the article was in the print version of the magazine anyway; as one commenter remarked (roughly) "What are they going to do; hire people to go to subscribers' houses and rip it out?"
And naturally, the act of withdrawing it only served to focus attention on it, and Pharyngula reported on it, which is how I even found out.
So now I link to it in my turn: the article Creationists don't want you to read, or, how to recognize one of their stupid books before it wastes too much of your time.
Quick redux: Dogwhistles to listen for---
"Darwinist" instead of "biologist"
"Darwinism" instead of "evolution"
"scientific materialism" instead of "science"
"blind random undirected process" as a description of evolution
"molecular machine" as a description of anything biological
linking supposed moral outcomes of believing something to whether it's true or not
"Family values" used to be a dogwhistle, for example; now it doesn't work because everybody knows it means "stomp on women and gays."
There was a great article in New Scientist that lays out a lot of these dogwhistles that Creationists use. But once a dogwhistle is generally known, its secret info-communicating properties become useless, so someone apparently complained, and the spineless editorial staff at New Scientist took it off the web. This was pretty useless because 1) somebody grabbed the page before it disappeared and now it's available from another source and 2) the article was in the print version of the magazine anyway; as one commenter remarked (roughly) "What are they going to do; hire people to go to subscribers' houses and rip it out?"
And naturally, the act of withdrawing it only served to focus attention on it, and Pharyngula reported on it, which is how I even found out.
So now I link to it in my turn: the article Creationists don't want you to read, or, how to recognize one of their stupid books before it wastes too much of your time.
Quick redux: Dogwhistles to listen for---
"Darwinist" instead of "biologist"
"Darwinism" instead of "evolution"
"scientific materialism" instead of "science"
"blind random undirected process" as a description of evolution
"molecular machine" as a description of anything biological
linking supposed moral outcomes of believing something to whether it's true or not
