What You Can't Say - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Apr 09
  

  Craig King
  • t's the nature of fashion to be invisible,
  • What scares me is that there are moral fashions too.
    They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people.
    But they're much more dangerous.
    Fashion is mistaken for good design;
    moral fashion is mistaken for good.
    Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating
    moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or
    even killed.
  • 4 more annotations...
  • • Mapmakers
      deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can
      tell when someone copies them
    • If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can
      you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you
      were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation
      owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or
      among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you
      would have.
    • Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say.
      We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least
      have enough chance of being true that the question
      should remain open
    • <!--
      (I have this commented out while I investigate whether the current
      fashion for the word "divisive" really began with the Republicans.
      So far it seems not. Oops; sorry.<br><br>We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them.
      Many come from the left, including
      the startlingly general "inappropriate", but the most recent comes
      from the right: "divisive", which the current
      administration uses to silence opponents on almost any topic.
      -->
      We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them,
      from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive."
      In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are,
      simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree
      with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is
      mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he
      attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive"
      instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying
      attention.
• 09 Feb 09
  

  Pratik Stephen
  • It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every
    period, people believed things that were just ridiculous,
    and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in
    terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
  • The statements that make people mad are
    the ones they worry might be believed.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • The early adopters will be driven by ambition:
      self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves
      from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'll
      be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear.
• 18 Dec 07
  

  tipper
• 24 Apr 07
  

  bill dettmer
• 12 Aug 06
  

  billso

  clothing fashion history images teaching usa

  • 
    Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and
    been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually
    dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how
    silly we looked.
    It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the
    same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all
    of us riding on it.

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