this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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When Israel re-arrested Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, the detainees faced familiar treatment.

They were blindfolded, handcuffed, insulted and kept in inhumane conditions. More unusual was that each man had a number written on his forehead.

Osama Shaheen, who was released in August after 10 months of administrative detention, told Middle East Eye that soldiers brutally stormed his house, smashing his furniture.

"The soldiers turned us from names into numbers, and every detainee had a number that they used to provoke him during his arrest and call him by number instead of name. To them, we are just numbers."

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[–] TheFonz@lemmy.world -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

All right Noam Chomsky. I think you shit your diaper again. Maybe you should call your caretaker to come change it. Your expertise on linguistics is on par with Joe Rogan. No one here is talking about linguistic purity dumbass. As native English speakers were just pointing out how the expression is used colloquially, which I know is a difficult concept for you to grasp.

I have no interest in moronic strawmen about linguistic purity since you are unable to hold more than one thought in your head at the same time without having to call someone a filthy little genocide denier

Go back to Tumblr or something.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

No one here is talking about linguistic purity dumbass.

Everyone in the comments are assuming the literal and first dictionary definition of branding by physical mutilation.

You're saying everyone in the comments is interpreting this headline as prescriptively as you pretend it is meant. Us using the same bar of prescriptiveness for your statement means you mean literally every single person is interpreting it as literal physical branding using a hot iron.

That's a ridiculous statement, and just me disagreeing with you would make it incorrect, and several other people have tried explaining this to you. You refuse to admit that there's such a thing as descriptive language or that "branding" can be used descriptively even if it lacked a meaning of a printed mark, which it does not.

"Moronic strawmen about linguistic purity"

You're the one making that moronic strawman though. You're denying the existence of descriptive language. This is what I meant earlier. You don't even understand what that word means, so you don't understand you're doing it, which makes this rather hilarious, as your linguistic understanding is on the level of a 16-year old.

You're trying to say the article is essentially propaganda against Israel. It's not. To say Israel is branding people in this context is well within linguistic and journalistic standards, despite you not understanding what those standards are, even when half a dozen people are trying to explain them to you.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=branded%2C+branding&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

See the usage going down steadily throughout the 1900's, until there's a marked uptick in the 80's, when the word resurfaced with a new context, that is currently the most colloquially used (brand as in trademark). That usage has lead to a semantic shift of the word, making it lose it's connotation of "physical mutilation with a hot iron" as you can see from for example the playphrase.me link despite you pretending that all of the examples I used referred to objects instead of people. Is Candyman an object or a person, hmm? What about "I"? "They"? Hell, even the clip from a show that's depicting a scene in the wild west, where there was actual branding, the quote isn't referring to "branding" via a hot iron, but in the sense that it is most commonly used. Here in the headline of our article it just happens to overlap with making a physical mark on the people, which also fits the definition of "brand".

You don't understand linguistic or journalistic standards. You're wrong in your childish assertions, but you'll never be able to accept that.