I’ll also go on another Orwell tangent: Conservatives love calling any new “woke” word that enters common usage as “Orwellian”, because they don’t want to be “forced” by social pressure to learn new terminology important to people whose humanity they refuse to acknowledge anyway

But Newspeak is a version of English where descriptive words have been removed, not added. 1984 is written with a deeply limited vocabulary set.......so in fact, conservatives share an ideology with *the villains* of 1984.
Newspeak is not called that because the words are new. It’s called that because that’s *exactly* what authoritarian fascists would call a restrictive language set, it’s propaganda. The state in the book came up with the name, and that context is important
It’s “Newspeak” for the same reason they’re “National Socialists”, an intentional misnomer intended to obscure reality, to wear down your defences. Fascists don’t call a spade a spade, they point at a cloudy sky and say “it is sunny”, until you’re tired of arguing with them.
Fascists may claim to value free speech, but they jump at the chance to censor specific words, and it’s not the words they themselves would use. That’s why they hate obscenities and any kind of terminology related to social justice, but not slurs.
The fucking fundamental point of 1984 is that you can more effectively curtail freedom of speech by obliterating the words you need to form and communicate complex ideas, than you would by simply making certain expressions seditious, because complexity is anathema to fascism
If I don’t have the word “genderqueer” in my vocabulary, I can’t be my entire self, that is a thing I struggled with for decades, and it was only in having that word that I was able to exist in an authentic way.

That’s literally why fascists protest having to learn new words.
So cast your mind back to “grab them by the pussy”

The left was offended because he advocated sexual assault, with the meaning and not the words themselves.

The right insisted we were offended by the word “pussy”, that “better” words would make the meaning more palatable.
I can’t think of a better illustration to keep in the back of your head any time you read or hear a statement being issued by a fascist:

Ignore the words themselves, interrogate what they MEAN, because they meticulously choose words to intentionally obscure meaning.
That’s counter intuitive if you’re someone who puts a lot of thought and effort into word choice because you want to accurately communicate what you genuinely think and believe, but I swear it is the decoder ring for nazi-speak.

More from For later read

Excited we finally have a draft of this paper, which attempts to provide a 'unifying theory' of the long economic divergence between the Middle East & Western Europe

As we see it, there are 3 recent theories that hit on important aspects of the divergence...

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One set of theories focus on the legitimating power of Islam (Rubin, @prof_ahmetkuru, Platteau). This gave religious clerics greater power, which pulled political resources away form those encouraging economic development

But these theories leave some questions unanswered...
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Religious legitimacy is only effective if people
care what religious authorities dictate. Given the economic consequences, why do people remain religious, and thereby render religious legitimacy effective? Is religiosity a cause or a consequence of institutional arrangements?

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Another set of theories focus on the religious proscriptions of Islam, particular those associated with Islamic law (@timurkuran). These laws were appropriate for the setting they formed but had unforeseeable consequences and failed to change as economic circumstances changed

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There are unaddressed questions here, too

Muslim rulers must have understood that Islamic law carried proscriptions that hampered economic development. Why, then, did they continue to use Islamic institutions (like courts) that promoted inefficiencies?

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