You may wonder, after reading this diary, why I am returning to this well. What follows below is a response that I’d written for a DKos member who’d asked very specific, in-depth questions about my last diary, which was meant to be a pivot diary so I could focus on other topics. However, the nature of the challenge cut at the foundations of my position, so I’d asked for a bit of time to gather sources.
The DKos member had actually told me never to mind, but someone else revived the inquiry, so I went ahead and drew up a response to the original set of questions. So that’s why I’m posting this several days after things had died down.
Were I to post this some time down the road, after the dust has settled, I would be sure to incur questions about why I was bringing the topic up again out of the blue. So I’m just going to post this now, not only to answer the questions asked of me but to be able to refer to this post later.
It’s lengthy—not going to lie. So if you feel like you’ve gotten your fill of the topic in total, I understand! This is for completeness’ sake, and to be thorough. It’s here that I answer a lot of the probing challenges I got to the underlying, fundamental assumptions of my original position. So if you’re curious about that, feel free to keep reading. If you’re not interested, that’s fine, too.
I will note that here I not only treat the use of the term that’s against site rules; I also go into treatment of propaganda, what it is and how it operates. So if you’re interested in that, please keep reading. In fact, it’s for this reason that I’m posting this extensive response at all: I think it will be more broadly useful than just the narrowly cast discussion we were having before.
So, again, you can take it or leave it. You can respond here if moved to do so, or you can find me through Kosmail. It’s all up to you; but if you do read, I thank you for your time. If not, I plan on writing about cults soon—maybe we can meet up there.
First, I’ll post what the DKos member said in-full, so you can follow the train of thought as that person laid it out.
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How about adding another “broad category” of people who disagreed with your diary (or at least the parts of it that refer to “that word”) to include one that isn’t quite as deliberately manipulative in their word choice as the ones you listed?
Some people, and I’m one, see “that word” as wordplay — paronomasia: a humorous play on words — & nothing else. No hidden meanings, no dehumanization, no subtle calls to murder. Conflating silly word games with actual dehumanizing language to support one’s point in an argument is specious; using Tirrell’s valid & important essay to criticize recent diaries & comments here on DK is both specious & dangerous as it minimizes & indeed trivializes the actual dangers as explained by Tirrell.
And I’m sorry, but conflating Daily Kos with Rwanda in a cheap attempt to create drama & stir emotion is not only an appalling insult to the over 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi who were butchered — & trust me, I use that word literally — by Hutu “soldiers” during what is now recognized as an ethnic cleansing, it’s embarrassing (or should be).
I don’t use “that word” on DK, not because I for a moment believe the nonsense about it being “dehumanizing” — I trust anyone reading or posting on DK is bright enough to know the difference between wit & insect larvae. I don’t use it because arguing about it with people who for some reason have invested themselves heavily in perpetuating the link between the two is a gargantuan waste of time better spent battling the real enemy.
My take-away: it’s really too bad that such an important issue has been so trivialized by such a ridiculous argument. The word-we-must-never-use was never going to be mistaken for “dehumanizing” language by anyone using it until a handful of people got a bee up their backsides about it after misapplying the Tirrell essay sans context, content, intent, nuance or meaning. It could have been a good conversation. Now it’s just another touchy topic to be avoided.
Some of those reading right now might agree with this. If this is true, then it’s just as well that I post a reply.
Parts will thread portions of the above; at other times the reply will call in outside sources. I address the person as “you”; hopefully that’s not too jarring, as this is meant to be a direct response.
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How about adding another “broad category” of people who disagreed with your diary (or at least the parts of it that refer to “that word”) to include one that isn’t quite as deliberately manipulative in their word choice as the ones you listed?
Some people, and I’m one, see “that word” as wordplay — paronomasia: a humorous play on words — & nothing else. No hidden meanings, no dehumanization, no subtle calls to murder.
First, let me thank you for bringing in technical terms for rhetorical devices. For much of my life, I have written poetry and indeed have served as editor for more than one print literary magazine. So I relish the opportunity to break this down to a more granular level.
Paronomasia — punning — is an old form of humor. John Hughlings Jackson, writing in the British Medical Journal in 1887, posited punning to be “the least evolved system of joking,” followed evolutionarily by wit and then humor. In his estimation, punning is the most ancient and most preserved form of humor (which, framed another way, would indicate that it reaches some of the most basic levers in our semantic machinery).
Hughlings Jackson praised punning and stated that its appearance in human history is a sort of proof of a form of double consciousness which he called “surplus mind”:
There would be a great intellectual advance—due, I presume, to Internal Evolution—when man began to value things for their beauty apart from their use: one sigh of his having “got above” his mere animal self. For it allowed that, over and above mind required for mere animal existence, he had some surplus mind for greater ends of life. So I contend that our race owes some respect to the first Punster. For the dawn of a sense of the merely ridiculous, as in punning and simplest jokes, shows the same thing as the dawn of aesthetic feeling—surplus mind, something over and above that required for getting food and for mere animal indulgence. All the more so if punning be that out of which wit and humour are evolved.
Hughlings Jackson also defined punning as evoking “the sensation of complete resemblance with the sense of vast difference.” While elevated, the definition circles back to puns as devices of speech, pointing to how they operate, how they perform the function that they do.
One of the points of a pun is that it brings a plurality of definitions at once. It isn’t that the mind hears the one word and chooses one meaning over another; it hears the aural form, understands that both meanings apply, and thus accepts both. That’s precisely how puns work. The ambiguity brings a form of double consciousness, which not only deepens the meaning but provides satisfaction.
Beyond this, it is debatable that the term reducing MAGA followers to vermin is merely a pun. It seems to be working on several levels: as a symbol, an epithet, a stereotype, as identical rhyme, as self-same vehicle and tenor, as a behabitive, and as “happy” utterance. I’ll expand on just a few of these.
I would argue that, instead of (solely) a pun, what we encounter in the coinflip of MAGA* is homophonic rhyme, a type of identical rhyme. Lewis Turco in The Book of Forms defines homophonic rhyme as “words that sound alike, but that are spelled differently and have different meanings: I, eye, aye.” I argue that MAGA* is identical rhyme because it’s an aural pun, where the sounds are exactly the same.
Turco says, “Identical rhyme is really a form of repetition.” It’s an axiom of propaganda that repetition is one of its most efficacious, most reliable techniques in terms of creating effects. Repetition permits information to sink into memory more easily.
But here, in this context, I would assert that the form of the device itself creates the effect, as the word would be “repeated” in working memory in order for the semantics to resolve. This recalls what Hughlings Jackson spoke about surplus mind and how “complete resemblance” and “vast difference” first compete and then blend.
The ambiguity that inheres also plays a big role in this process. Turco defines ambiguity as “the allowance of extra (connotative) meanings to a word in the context of a sentence or larger literary construct.” It’s clear that two separate meanings are present when MAGA* is confronted, especially when the word is encountered in print, as the aural form must be “supplied” by the reader. The first would be “a member of the Trump-led social movement known as MAGA” and the other would be “a type of insect that historically has been associated with death and decay.” Both of these meanings pop up at the same time, and the mind is obligated to resolve these two separate meanings in order to “get it,” to achieve what J. L. Austin calls uptake.
What do I mean by “obligated”? The human brain, when it is presented with linguistic stimulation, completes the interpretation automatically, and this process cannot be negated or halted. “A crucial component of automatic processes is their inescapability; they occur despite deliberate attempts to bypass or ignore them,” Patricia Devine tells us. That is to say, if the person pays attention to the stimulus, the stimulus is interpreted.
It is estimated that a joke takes ~250 msec to resolve, the same amount of time it takes for this automatic process to occur. And while this automatic process can be ameliorated as time progresses, the person must make conscious effort to neutralize the initial, automatic evocation of meaning. Said meaning cannot, however, be countered completely.
Author Ellen Bryant Voigt, in The Flexible Lyric, highlights something very similar about the craft of poetry when she says, “What carries these progressions, or phrases, into the reader’s right brain, bypassing the discursive habit of language, is the texture of repeated sounds.”
It is not enough to say that puns are “a humorous play on words — & nothing else,” because that formulation discounts the fact that puns are one of the intrinsic features of sloganeering, a form of propaganda. Muzafer Sherif, quoting Frederick Lumley’s Slogans as a Means of Social Control, lists fourteen such features, many of which are poetic devices. Punning is one of them. As it can be so folded into such a project, punning is not innocuous by mere means of existing. If it is put to propagandistic use, then it is implicated in that use.
“Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols,” the sociologist Harold Lasswell tells us in “The Theory of Political Propaganda” (1927). He continues:
Collective attitudes are amenable to many modes of alteration. They may be shattered before an onslaught of violent intimidation or disintegrated by economic coercion. They may be reaffirmed in the muscular regimentation of drill. But their arrangement and rearrangement occurs principally under the impetus of significant symbols; and the technique of using significant symbols for this purpose is propaganda.
Propaganda as a word is closely allied in popular and technical usage with certain others. It must be distinguished from education. We need a name for the processes by which techniques are inculcated—techniques of spelling, of letter-forming, adding, piano-playing, and lathe-handling. If this be education, we are free to apply the term propaganda to the creation of valuational dispositions or attitudes.
Some people may take exception to the diary I referenced, where that passage with the verminesque term was found, as propaganda. However, it’s incumbent upon all of us to understand that propaganda is a method, a mode, of communication. It’s not inherently bad; in fact, when the term came into vogue at the turn of the 20th century, it referred both to political mass messaging as well as commercial advertising, because not only were the methods in distribution similar but so were the techniques of persuasion as well. (See this presentation on the techniques of propaganda for further perspective [especially ~6:10 for positive aspects of certain types of propaganda]).
Lasswell further elucidates:
If we state the strategy of propaganda in cultural terms, we may say that it involves the presentation of an object in a culture in such a manner that certain cultural attitudes will be organized toward it. [...] An object toward which it is hoped to arouse hostility must be presented as a menace to as many of these values as possible.
It can hardly be argued that vermin are not seen as a menace to civilization. Similarly, Tirrell takes pains to show that the labeling of Tutsi people by Hutus as snakes and cockroaches insinuated that those persons were just the same threat to society. Further, the language suggested to the hearer that the people labeled as such should be treated as such: “Assign the status, and the treatments follow.”
vermin (n.) : noxious, objectionable, or disgusting animals collectively, especially those of small size that appear commonly and are difficult to control, as flies, lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, mice, and rats. (dictionary.com)
To the point, maggot is defined as “a soft-bodied, legless larva of certain flies; the soft limbless larva of dipterous insects, esp the housefly and blowfly, occurring in decaying organic matter.” This is clearly a form of vermin, and clearly there is a historical bias against such threats. These are seen as vectors of disease and/or things that need to be stamped out. That’s a deep, historical memory in human evolution.
Considering that the evocation of these meanings are automatic and obligatory, their occurrence in the context of propaganda compounds this effect, especially if there is repetition over time, a phenomenon known as accumulation. In this way, a word meant to solidify attitudinal change can harden into a stereotype. Then the associations grow even more reflexive and more automatic still, until they occur so outside of attentive awareness that one may start interpreting the term as a standalone word that means what it says: MAGA* for maggot. As mentioned earlier, if this process occurs outside of conscious awareness, the subject will not have a chance to confront it anymore, as the confrontation must be intentional.
(Speaking of, please take the time to decouple the two things that I just put together in an academic context. Remind yourself that it was in an academic context. Practice taking these things apart.)
Kathleen Taylor provides a specific example of accumulation, where the process over a longer piece (a manifesto commitment by the British National Party, not simply a single word) is made clear:
While the dumping of asylum seekers on our communities is fundamentally the fault of the government, BNP councillors will do everything in their power to prevent asylum seekers being dumped in our areas [...] Whilst we do not believe that the current wave of asylum seekers have any right to be in Britain, while they are here we will insist that benefits provided by the local community are repaid by asylum seekers being put to work to clean up the streets and carry out other tasks on behalf of the local community. This must not be at the cost of cleaning jobs at present held by local labour—there is plenty of squalor to be tidied up. Such employment should not be taken to mean they have any legal grounds for residential status.
Taylor’s analysis, at length, explicates the passage:
Setting aside the sentiments, consider the words in the light of what we have learned about cogwebs and how they form. Chapter 8 noted the importance of the timing, intensity, and frequency of stimulation for strengthening these mental associations. In the above short extract, the term ‘asylum seekers’ occurs four times; the only words which occur more often are ‘the’, ‘of’, and ‘to’, common words to which we usually pay minimal attention. At the same time, the reader’s brain is receiving some emotive verbal stimuli. Positive words like ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘local’, and ‘behalf’ draw the reader into the BNP ingroup. Negative words—’dumped’, ‘squalor’, ‘fault’, ‘cost’—push the outgroup, asylum seekers, further away. Note how the metaphor of rubbish is emphasized, at the beginning by using words like ‘dumping’ and ‘dumped’, later on more explicitly by insisting that asylum seekers should do menial cleaning jobs, tidying up the squalor presumably created by good white British people. Note also the presence of ethereal ideas: ‘power’, ‘community’, ‘legal’, and ‘asylum seekers’. No attempt here to differentiate crooks from doctors, economic migrants from torture victims. What we have here is a piece of prose which is doing its damnedest to slip you [...] the idea that all asylum seekers are garbage.
Joel Kovel, in White Racism, spoke of humans becoming “thingified”; once that happens—once a person is transformed into a thing—any treatment can be justified, as people and societies can do anything to mere objects.
Sarah-Jane Leslie affirms this concept, noting the work of social psychologists to underscore her point:
A related and fascinating line of empirical research has been pioneered by Leyens and colleagues under the heading infra-humanization. They present a series of empirical findings that suggest people are more reluctant to attribute uniquely human emotions to members of (at least some) out-groups. While people readily attribute to out-group members emotions that are shared with animals (e.g., fear, anger, surprise), they are less likely to attribute uniquely human sentiments (e.g., shame, resentment, love) to out-groups members vs. in-group members. The researchers argue convincingly that this reflects a tendency to deny fully human essence to certain out-groups. This work thus suggests that, not only are out-group members seen as possessing a distinctive essence, but that essence is fundamentally less than fully human. Conversely, one might interpret their findings as reflecting that, to the extent that the in-group is essentialized at all, its essence consists of a purely human essence.
Dehumanization is a step beyond even this removal of human traits, reducing a person to the level of non-sapience, even to the point of mindless, active threat such as infestation or disease.
Another aspect of accumulation was what I was getting at with regards to the passage that my original diary pointed out. The use of ‘kill’, ‘butcher’, and ‘destroy’ in such a compressed space was a form of accumulation that, taken together (especially appended to an emotion-stirring diary), would lead the reader to feel threatened. This would heighten a sense of mortality, leading to what some experts term terror management. As I explained to elenacarlena:
This theory posits that when people are reminded of their upcoming demise, especially when it’s presented as being imminent, they respond in certain ways. They’re more likely to radicalize in the direction of the beliefs they already hold, so we progressives would tend to become hardcore progressives in the face of such material. They act out of fear; they’re more reactionary as a result.
I wasn’t saying 1) that some of those in the RW wouldn’t want to cause harm and havoc—obviously some do, but those do not comprise all of MAGA, that’s just plain; or 2) that Yosef 52 was advocating for such violence to be done to these offenders. However, because he used these emotionally laden words in such an atmosphere where the reader is already charged with emotion AND provided a designated target to receive those feelings, he created a space where the reader was encouraged to produce hate and to transfer those feelings onto a scapegoat. That’s hate speech. That’s what hate speech does. That’s its function.
This process does not feel like radicalization to those who are receptive to it or who are otherwise susceptible to these effects (which may be hard to detect).
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Conflating silly word games with actual dehumanizing language to support one’s point in an argument is specious; using Tirrell’s valid & important essay to criticize recent diaries & comments here on DK is both specious & dangerous as it minimizes & indeed trivializes the actual dangers as explained by Tirrell.
You acknowledge that Tirrell’s essay is “valid & important,” but you also implicitly devalue my diary by such overt contrast with your descriptions of it being “silly,” “specious,” “trivial,” “minimizing,” even “dangerous”(!). This is a rhetorical trick, and indeed you are the one minimizing while you accuse me of doing so—when, in fact, I utilized Tirrell’s argument to elevate not only her point but our discourse.
More to the point, even linguists contend that these types of verbal moves are “games.” (Specifically, Tirrell titles her piece “Genocidal Language Games.”) So they have an element of play to them. Why would this be? Primarily, because language has built into it an element of call and response, which inheres due to there always being a speaker and a listener, this necessitates a form of a toss and a reception. This is a basic game that all persons who’ve utilized a ball will recognize immediately.
Tirrell’s point is that, while these are games insofar as they are linguistic moves, they are anything but silly. In fact, in certain social circumstances where conditions are ripe, they can indeed engender future acts of violence. This is not to say that those acts would be immediate or even inevitable, as the chance of any genocide occurring anywhere is remote; but such games lay the rail for the locomotive of carnage, if it does follow, to travel.
So Tirrell is saying that, yes, word games can be seen as identical to “actual dehumanizing language.” It is a proper reading of her work, and I stand by that reading.
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And I’m sorry, but conflating Daily Kos with Rwanda in a cheap attempt to create drama & stir emotion
I was not “conflating Daily Kos with Rwanda,” nor was my diary “a cheap attempt to create drama & stir emotion.” The fact that you’ve asserted that flatly in a compartment of argument that is meant to be taken as a given, as part of the common ground (which I explain below), is underhanded—and I say that at the very least.
In How Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley describes what linguists call “common ground,” where information is held in common amongst communicants:
The at-issue content of an utterance is the information asserted by the utterance. … To assert something, as the linguist Sarah Murray describes, is to propose to add it to the common ground. To assert something is to advance it as something the speaker knows, and to thereby propose that its content be added to the common ground. [...]
In contrast, … additional material that comments on what is asserted … is not-at-issue content. The not-at-issue content of an utterance is not advanced as a proposal of a content to be added to the common ground. Not-at-issue content is directly added to the common ground. For this reason, not-at-issue content is in general “not negotiable, not directly challengeable, and [is] added [to the common ground] even if the at-issue proposition is rejected.
You keep characterizing without supporting your statement and without rebutting my point. But by the time the reader finishes what you’ve written, you’ve said your sentiment many times in different ways, and the force of that repetition makes it seem as though your sentiment were true (and that’s in addition to this rhetorical maneuvering that takes these assertions out of active consideration). You must know what you’re doing, what effect you’re creating.
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is not only an appalling insult to the over 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi who were butchered — & trust me, I use that word literally — by Hutu “soldiers” during what is now recognized as an ethnic cleansing, it’s embarrassing (or should be).
I hope you can see that Tirrell raised an alarm. She was not merely reporting on the events at one time, in one place. The features of language that she unveiled and unpacked are general features, and she described them as fungible. Indeed, Tirrell makes clear that she means for her analysis to inform all of us to future potential uses of similar language that could be the proverbial canaries in a coalmine.
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I don’t use “that word” on DK, not because I for a moment believe the nonsense about it being “dehumanizing” — I trust anyone reading or posting on DK is bright enough to know the difference between wit & insect larvae.
I disagree that it’s nonsense, and I have to make that explicit, because you’ve put it in a linguistic area where it is not available for dispute or debate. So I bring it back to what Jason Stanley and others refer to as the common ground. There is nothing to indicate that it’s nonsensical other than your assertion.
In fact the dehumanization is inherent in the word, as that’s the basis of the punning to which you yourself referred. So there’s no nonsense to be had here, except in your declaration (which is rather a shadow method of referral—I can’t even call it an argument).
I argue that the term is not wit at all but rather a dead metaphor—merely a vehicle for contempt and stereotypy.
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I don’t use it because arguing about it with people who for some reason have invested themselves heavily in perpetuating the link between the two is a gargantuan waste of time better spent battling the real enemy.
This is not an either-or. Of course there is work to do in the trenches, to contest and to battle against the array of forces that face us in the form of groups, alliances, echelons, and yes, even cabals (though not in the sense with which that word has been tarnished, as an anti-Semitic slur). There are vast networks of people who intend to take us toward a time unrecognizable; and they mean to do so with all the weapons at their disposal, including human weapons in the form of militia groups and stochastic terrorism. Of course we resist that.
To say that one (eschewing dehumanization as a social practice) must be forsaken for the other (resisting fascist acceleration) is a false choice. We can pursue both—and, in fact, I would say that they go hand-in-hand.
I will forgo a deep inspection of your use of “because” in the preceding sentence—it’s doing tremendous, unearned work—and merely point out that again you have inserted information into the common ground, reworking repetition to create an impression.
You haven’t actually refuted my overall point that dehumanizing words reduce the target into a thing and thus facilitate possible future reprisals due to softening the ground ahead of time.
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My take-away: it’s really too bad that such an important issue has been so trivialized by such a ridiculous argument.
It is your frame that has attempted to trivialize and ridicule. The issue itself is anything but.
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The word-we-must-never-use was never going to be mistaken for “dehumanizing” language by anyone using it until a handful of people got a bee up their backsides about it after misapplying the Tirrell essay sans context, content, intent, nuance or meaning. It could have been a good conversation. Now it’s just another touchy topic to be avoided.
This is a strange way of putting this, as it ignores the timeline. The site instituted the rule before I ever brought up Lynne Tirrell’s essay; I brought it into my support of the rule only after I read the piece, which even was after I’d originally penned a diary stating why the term was a form of dehumanization. (I wrote the diary in January but did not come across Tirrell’s piece until the following month.) You have the order backward in just about every way.
But beyond that, there has been no misapplication. Tirrell herself raises the alarm, not about Rwanda in that time and in that place only, but rather about the features of language in social situations and how they may in general presage atrocities by laying the groundwork linguistically. It is by these locutions that permission is granted on a wide scale to those who adopt the use of dehumanizing terms. That’s her warning. She is not limiting her work to only the Rwandan genocide—she writes not as a historian but as a linguist, individualizing and isolating the mechanics in order to detail how they operate in a social context.
Jason Stanley states this about propaganda:
Reasonableness presupposes, at least in humans, the capacity for empathy for others. If I am right, we should expect paradigm cases of propaganda to have as part of their communicative content that a group in society is not worthy of our respect. So one characteristic way to convey that a target is not worthy of respect is to cause one’s audience to lose empathy for them.
It is clear that using the aural cognate of ‘maggot’ to describe political opponents satisfies this definition of unreasonableness, that its aim is to reduce empathy, and thus it qualifies, in and of itself, to be akin to propaganda. If it’s used in the context of clear partisan polemics, then doubly so the word / acronym would function as an epithetic symbol of contempt and would be beyond the scope of rational discourse. That the term directly evokes the name of a specific type of vermin indicates its dehumanizing nature. Thus, to use it is to derogate a person of that group to nonhuman status, even in a “joking,” satirical form.
I thought this was clear, which is why I did not spend much time at all laying out these building blocks. But now, with the planks of the argument clearly in sight, I hope you can see why I make the argument that I do. MAGA* is beyond the pale, and we should treat the use of all dehumanizing language as anathema.
References
- J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962/1975). Harvard University Press.
- Babette Deutsch, Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms, Fourth Edition (1957/1974), pp. 84-85, 178, 194. HarperPerennial.
- Patricia G. Devine, “Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1989), Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 6, 9.
- S. I. Hayakawa, “General Semantics and Propaganda.” The Public Opinion Quarterly (1939), Vol. 3, No. 2, especially pp. 205-207.
- John Hughlings Jackson, “The Psychology of Joking.” British Medical Journal (1887), Vol. 2, No. 1399, p.870.
- Harold D. Lasswell, “The Theory of Political Propaganda.” The American Political Science Review (1927), Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 627, 628, 629-630.
- Sarah-Jane Leslie, “The Original Sin of Cognition: Fear, Prejudice and Generalization.” The Journal of Philosophy (2017), Vol. 114, No. 8. (Preprint available at doi: 10.5840/jphil2017/114828 ; citation found on p. 20 of preprint.)
- Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970/1984), p. 91. Columbia University Press.
- Muzafer Sherif, “The Psychology of Slogans.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1937), Vol. 32, Nos. 3-4, pp. 453-454.
- Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (2015), pp. 133, 135, 166-167. Princeton University Press.
- Kathleen Taylor, Brainwashing: The science of thought control (2004), pp. 223-224. Oxford University Press.
- Lynne Tirrell, “Genocidal Language Games.” in Speech and Harm: Controversies over Free Speech (2012), Ishani Maitra & Mary Kate McGowan (eds.). Oxford University Press. (Essay referred to in its entirety, but the quotation about assignation can be found on p. 193.)
- Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (2000), pp. 53, 70, 79. University Press of New England.
- Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Flexible Lyric (1999), pp. 108-109. The University of Georgia Press.
- George K. York III, “Hughlings Jackson on joking.” Brain (2015), Vol. 138, p. 1435.