New in PJ Media:
Elon Musk has bought Twitter amid promises to make the platform more hospitable to the freedom of speech, but perhaps not coincidentally, both former president Barack Obama and never-president Hillary Clinton have recently come out strongly in favor of speech restrictions. It’s clear that the powerful forces that want to silence political and cultural dissent in this country today, and make it impossible for anything but the Left’s favored positions, are not giving up, Elon Musk or no Elon Musk. Google has added a feature to Google Docs that will nudge writers toward using language that is more “inclusive,” that is, more in line with Leftist sensibilities.
Google Docs is supposed to be simply an online word processor and document editor that makes it easy for multiple people to see and work on a document. That part is great, but it’s increasingly clear that the Left never leaves well enough alone when providing a service. And so on March 31, Google announced that it was providing “More assistive writing suggestions in Google Docs,” and they didn’t just mean prompts that would alert you to when you wrote “your” for “you’re.”
The new features, Google explained, would “provide a variety of tone and style suggestions to help you create impactful documents faster.” These would include suggestions for “more dynamic or contextually relevant wording,” using “active rather than passive voice,” and employing “more concise phrases.” All that had the potential to be bad enough, for while it is indeed good to use dynamic and contextually relevant wording, and avoid the passive voice and excessive verbosity, the idea of a computer program doing this automatically had the potential to smooth out everyone’s language into featureless, computer-generated, workaday prose that had been drained of individuality and personality. Can you imagine running William Faulkner through Google Docs? Even Ernest Hemingway’s precision and concision would end up homogenized. Would it be possible to tell the difference between Faulkner and Hemingway once Google Docs got through?
But that was not even close to being the worst of it. Google Docs also now promises to help the reader use “more inclusive words or phrases” and reconsider “potentially inappropriate words.” Last Monday, real estate journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba showed how this worked: she tweeted a screenshot from Google Docs showing that when she typed the word “landlord,” a prompt came up saying: “Inclusive language: Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Try instead ‘property owner,’ ‘proprieter.’” Baird-Remba replied to skeptics: “i love how people are asking if this is real. yes! i was writing a lease story in google docs and this popped up in the first sentence.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
Pierre Delecto says
Off topic. Before rescuing the Republic becomes impossible, we should consider mandatory voting.
If citizens are faced with a legal challenge to prove they’ve legally voted, exactly once, and this is not the case, they are in hot water.
Harassment is not the goal. Detecting voter fraud, and revealing immigration violation are.
Please comment.
JimJFox says
Australia has had this for years, but I can’t vote as a non-citizen.
gravenimage says
I am someone who for years has acted to get out the vote. I registered people to vote, created posters urging people to register and vote, and helped line up rides for people with mobility problems to get to the polls. I have never missed voting in an election.
But *mandatory voting*? Absolutely not. People have the right to vote or not to vote–the idea that you can be cited, fined, or even imprisoned by the state for *not* voting is, with all respect to Australia and similar nations, just grotesque.
I will also stand for people who don’t want to vote, for whatever reason. I believe in a free nation.
somehistory says
Good for you, g.
People should have a choice. Haven’t we seen where some don’t want certain ones to have a vote…saying they are too ignorant to have a part/
and, some of us don’t want to vote for religious reasons. we shouldn’t be forced to or go to jail or be fined. And some people don’t feel that they are qualified to pick someone to make those heavy decisions.
Did you see where people in RI are going to be forced to be vaxxed or have to pay a fine and extra fines every month until they and their children have the shots?
Our freedom to choose is being whittled away…some of it in big chunks.
gravenimage says
Thanks, Somehistory.
Pray Hard says
Google can KMA in Macy’s front window on Christmas Eve.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
==QUOTE== when she typed the word “landlord,” a prompt came up saying: “Inclusive language: Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Try instead ‘property owner,’ ‘proprieter.’==UNQUOTE==
If only Google Docs could also spell. There is no such word as ‘proprieter’; the correct spelling is ‘proprietor’ (or ‘proprietrix’ for a landlady).
somehistory says
good catch…and they must not know that the word they attempted is not “inclusive” of the female.
gravenimage says
Good point, Mark. So much for the idea that Google Docs actually wants to improve users’ prose…
somehistory says
I say…glad I don’t bother with that googly eyes on my writing. It’s bad enough when I writing a text to someone and words get changed and I have to keep backing up for a retyping of the word I want to use.
and, part of the problem is that those making all of these decisions as to what is supposedly “better,” are idiots and can’t think for themselves.
Correcting Jesus…How very arrogant. He is Lord and was a Perfect Man. What He wanted to say and what He said was “perfect.” Just the way it needed to be said, He said it. Of course, the ***translators** are the ones who chose that particular word, so maybe google should take it up with King James and the guys who worked for him.
In any case, “wonderful” is a lot better word, in my mind, than “lovely” to describe God’s Works.
some of them are lovely…flowers, sunsets…but “all” of them are Wonderful.
Infidel says
Soon, we’ll all have to switch to text editors, such as ‘Text’ or ‘Wordpad’ in Windows. And if they muck around w/ that, computer programmers will have no way of inputing their code into the computers
gravenimage says
Google Introduces Prompts to Make Sure You Write Like a Leftist
………………..
Just Orwellian…
James Lincoln says
Google should go all-out and not even require prompts.
Just create a “normal” document on Microsoft Word and then have Google do a computer analysis and turn it into a “Leftist” document.