Putting labels on things and people!

In novels set in strange future dystopias we read about history books being rewritten to reflect greater glory on current leaders, things being renamed to be made to seem more acceptable. And we wonder at the strangeness of it all and flatter ourselves into thinking that our society is somehow better than that. The dystopian novel world will make us stop short at such excesses.

And then this appears in a newspaper:-
 "Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead. A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that versees farmers' land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change."

Hmmm! Not quite Nu-Speak but ....

Here's another thing I found in yesterday's paper. A new study shows that atheists are more easily suspected of evil deed than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists – even by fellow atheists. Apparently “atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous”. Who would have thought that now, in the 21st century, many people would still believe that we can't really be good unless we fear punishment from an all-seeing deity. Even stranger is that some atheists believe that as well. Oh, boy! They must be pretty mixed up and their self esteem must be really low. Do they go around all the time fighting the urge to do something really wicked? Or do they just think that they can get away with it as a god they don't believe in can't actually punish them? Maybe such atheists are secretly hedging their bets and are readybto make a deathbed conversion, just in case! 

Years ago a friend of ours used to expound the view that babies are born selfish (after all, they demand attention so much of the time) and are intrinsically evil. Parents and society have to exert a civilising influence on children so that they can become properly functioning human beings. Come to think of it, there is some truth in that last statement and it may well be that parents and society are currently failing in that role. There is an awful lot of me-centred behaviour in the modern world! However, to go from the need to educate children to be good members of society to the belief that all children are intrinsically evil is a step too far for me.

In any case, as the same friend used to scrape all the seeds out of tomatoes as he believed that they caused appendicitis, tomato seeds being small enough to get into the appendix (??), I rapidly decided that most of his ideas were a little too extreme for me.