Google has launched a new ‘inclusive language’ tool which flags up un-woke words such as ‘landlord’ and ‘housewife’ and suggests politically correct alternatives. The Sun has more.
Google’s suggestions for alternatives to ‘landlord’ include ‘property owner’ or ‘proprietor’.
Others include changing ‘mankind’ to ‘humankind’, ‘policemen’ to ‘police officers’ and ‘housewife’ to ‘stay-at-home-spouse’. It even objects to ‘motherboard’, the tech term for a computer’s circuit board.
If a writer uses terms deemed un-PC by Google a message pops up that reads: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”
Silkie Carlo, of Big Brother Watch, called it “deeply intrusive”, adding: “Google is not only reading every word you type but telling you what to type.
“This speech-policing is profoundly clumsy, creepy and wrong, often reinforcing bias. Invasive tech like this undermines privacy, freedom of expression and increasingly freedom of thought.”
The Google Docs program, which includes the new warnings function, is initially being rolled out to certain business users and is turned on by default.
Google said: “Our technology is always improving and we don’t yet have a solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases.”
The Times has written a longer piece about Google’s thought policing in which it points out that the new tool also suggests synonyms to help sentences flow better. For instance, if you use Martin Luther King’s phrase “the fierce urgency of now” it suggests “the intense urgency of now” instead.
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Great, it will be an opportunity to tell them to **** off and mind their own business
Sorry, that doesn’t sound inclusive enough. What about people who may be unable or unwilling to comply with your suggestion? How about “There are alternative places and milieux wherein you might choose to disport yourself in a wide variety of ways, and you are cordially invited to explore those possibilities in your own personal manner; always recognising, respecting and celebrating all other choices and none that may exist for you”?
Of course you meant to say “go forth and multiply”.
Oh, that’s naughty.
Every hole is a goal.
Data companies rely on pretty clean data, give them reams of nonsense.about you.
Make what they know about you wrong.
I’ve seen someone work on this. That was his strategy. Not blocking tracking but obfuscating it. He was working on browser plugins to this effect.
He had an online persona that worked all over the world from different locations whose principle interests I believe were books on flower arranging, lingerie and chainsaws.
Definitely the way to go. Overload their systems with bullshit.
If Klaus Schwab and all the ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ tribe think that we will own nothing and be happy (while they presumably own everything), let us start by posting them our complete junk, as they so clearly want it. I’m sure they’d love to be inundated with cheap plastic rubbish and plaster of paris tourist gaudily painted gunk, and so on.
Send them your used condoms, the food you found rotting at the back of your fridge, the rotting rat you caught marauding your compost piles, the gunk you emptied out of your vacuum cleaner etc etc.
Don’t send them anything neutral or pleasant, just send them the most horrifically unpleasant bits.
As far as I am concerned Facebook thinks if live in a seaside resort in the foothills of the local mountains – in Central Cheshire!
That’s why writing totally contradictory polemics across a variety of themes is a bugbear of theirs. How can you be both far left, far right, gentle, extremist, intolerant of Jews and their greatest defender, all at the same time?
Be a flirtatious minx online and make the data companies grovel for insights. Most of all, don’t give them your true thoughts, ever…..
Sounds doubleplusungood to me.
Whoops, don’t know where that idea came from…
From your fetish for reading subversive material and the wrongthink it induces. Room 101 for you, prole
Why are people who know better using software from these companies?
Just choose a non-FANG lifestyle.
Dump your subscription to the Woke providers, only use neutral software.
Better yet get rid of your smartphones.
Because that’s how slaves think. They don’t want to act they want someone else to fix their world.
What, doesn’t everyone want a bunch of software engineers directed by some tech oligarchs policing their thoughts?
How odd.
There’s a whole demographic brought up and incentivised on the belief that outsourcing common sense tasks is a sign of intelligence. Paying £1,000 for a phone to do their thinking for them.
What could possibly go wrong…?
If you paid 1000 quid for a fragile phone you’ve “passed” the first test!
And just £32 per month for those who pay £18k a year for Zoom invites over university 5G.
Surely 66% of the value of University is the F2F social experiences like freshers’ discos, being 200 miles away from parents in the presence of young attractive things of the opposite/same sex, pursuing interests in University Societies/clubs?
The lecture bits are just the automaton bits.
The human bits of University have been eliminated the past two years.
The price should reflect that.
Google said: “Our technology is always improving and we don’t yet have a solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases.”
The openly made assumption that this is an “improvement” and that biases are “unwanted” and that what Google “wants” is what we all should want. Bastards like these are running the world and are absolutely convinced that they are right and that they know better than we do. I sincerely doubt this feature was introduced by customer demand (though doubtless there will be those who welcome it and use it) – like the BBC I believe Google is a campaigning organisation that only provides what customers want in so far as it allows them to keep earning lots of money and having lots of power and access.
No, Google is a company run by people. Some of the people think like that, just like the BBC. Those people are individuals with names and faces.
People make these choices. Their choices reflect how they think. How they think is they should police language, all well covered by Orwell and others.
Well of course, but my point is that the dominant mindset among bosses and workers in these organisations is that pursuing campaigning initiatives like this one is legitimate activity, and in fact that using their platform to reshape the world in their preferred image is a top priority – just like Disney’s stuff about having more “different” characters. Not driven by commercial considerations.
Yes I agree. Where are the ruthless capitalists of old when you need them.
Google ARE ruthless capitalists. They cornered the market in online advertising – that’s how their profits are in the billions.
Surely, we can’t use the word people, yeah? I mean, people starts we “pe” which is also the start of the word “penis” which means that it is a word that oppresses wopeople.
Sorry, you are correct. When I said the “people” running google and BBC I of course meant c•nts.
Whoever knew that beyond failing to order the tide back, King Cnut also provided posterity with a censorship evading insult.
can’ts?
The BBC certainly don’t want any p***ks in-house, do they? Not unless they have undergone transitioning…..
You want to see the people deciding on SEO results at Alphabet. Put in place and protected by tptb on purpose.
‘Our intrusiveness is always improving and we don’t yet have a solution for unwanted humans that think that their right to privacy trumps our right to be peepshow perverts’.
Yandex seems a far freer platform.
You’ll be accused of being a Putin mouthpiece
VK and OK are social media platforms which have associations with Yandex
I am OUTRAGED. Surely the headline should read Big SIBLING is Watching You?
/what do you have against blind people!
You Disablist!
You are correct, we must move with the times. Big SIBLING is Tracking You.
Are you dissing people?!
Forgive me! I meant Sight Privileged Entities.
You surely meant visionly-abled persons
Something something is somethinging something.
Devoid of any meaning, hence, not offensive to anyone.
Discrimintarory against those identifying as non-things, I’m afraid. Racist.
Maybe, we should go back to inarticulate howling.
This would feel very natural to a lot of people who don’t ever do anything else.
“Google is not only reading every word you type but telling you what to type.”
Nailed it.
This is a case of Tillium’s Law: surveillance leads to control.
(Ian Tillium, “Technological Despotism”, 1995.)
Absolutely. And the plebs love it, that’s what we rarely discuss
And all this, on the day that red-haired and fertile Angela Rayner gets denounced as a witch in most of the British mainstream media.
I’m not joking about that. The unconscious doesn’t register negation. Anyone who doubts this should try to follow this instruction: do NOT, whatever you do, think of an elephant, a large grey one with a long trunk, two big flappy ears, and four dumpy legs.
Ohh should we burn her ??Does she float like a duck???
My academic chum, Prof A. Nity, suggests that hurling a buse at google should at least reduce tension.
Would love to, but never found a mechanism to do so.
Any suggestions how? Many corporations make dam’ sure you can’t contact them directly, offering only FAQs with no option to make up your own, as I found when trying to tell PayPal to get stuffed
Well you could stop using Google products, that has the reward of causing tangible harm, rather than perhaps just hurting their feelings.
I just read a good article by Reitschuster on the main difference between today and decades ago, on why todays politicians are such pathetic pygmaes compared to these times giants. His main observation is that todays elites primarily want to reeducate the people, why past ones just let them be themselves and cared about the important stuff instead (even in Germany, where a different kind of reeducation obviously was happening on quite a big scale and well into the 80s- maybe that precedent is also why the vast majority of Germans are particularly active and zealous participants in todays reeducation ploys, and why many/half of Brits and Americans in particular seem a bit more shocked and put off by it).
Obviously, this fits in nicely with the other bureacratic trends and agendas of the various elites and players.
Sheldon Wolin’s ‘inverted totalitarianism’ as per his ‘Democracy Inc.’ book probably describes all of that and them and what we can still expect best.
I prefer to avoid Google as much as I can… different search engines, blocking tracker’s, and regularly clearing saved data.
humankind isn’t inclusive, it should obviously suggest hupeoplekind. Otherwise, it’s just as guilty as Hitler.
Don’t forget that we should also replace person with perdaughter and amen with awomen.
‘and amen with awomen.’
No, no, that is to be replaced with ‘Allahu Akbar’ followed by a big bang.
And no longer just manhole covers, we must have femhole covers. And should Churchill not be changed to Mosquehill so as not to offend the permanently offended?
In about twenty years that will happen in most British cities anyway
The late Rachael Heyhoe Flint, lady cricketer extraordinaire, is reputed to have quipped that her team mates called their protective equipment “manhole covers”.
Nondenominalistplaceofcommunalgatheringhill
Your first clause is the important one, humankind isn’t inclusive. In the other sense of the meaning of course.
Their fetish for including is the fail point. Inhuman and childish.
The whole thing is a case of redefining a word and then becoming offended by your new defintion and suggesting that the word should never be used again. I had never previously considered that mankind might not include all members of the huperdaughterkind race.
Also, words have different definitions based on context. In this sentence: “The man is on the other side of the street”, man means a single male member of hupeoplekind. Whereas if you say, “Man has had a large impact on the flow of the Thames”, man means hupeoplety in general. In the second definition, huperthings don’t hear the exclusion of the female of the genus.
Perhaps this might get through to them:
What could go wrong
They built the ancient World too if White is taken to mean anyone not originating in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Actually, a lot of black men did that too, they just had white masters ordering them what to do.
I agree. But even this betrays their need for control and their inability to adapt to prevailing conditions. For most of us maturity is accepting the world for what it is and getting on with it.
High time we recast all this intolerance as a behavioural deficit, not superior moral authority. They are struggling and we ought to broadcast that.
We are dealing with people whose maturity and intellect has not developed beyond puberty.
I agree with this observation, and have often commented as such to others. This is people living in a perpetual adolescence, including the insecurity, emotional volatility and inability to understand consequences.
I’d love to see this more widely discussed.
Neoteny is also found in pets and other domesticated animals.
Interesting take.
Many have not even reached adolescence: they are stuck in 8 year old ‘rules-based order’ conformity, with them as the apparatchik barking orders.
Even worse are the ones stuck with the mentality of a two year old, constantly displaying Violet Elizabeth Botts behaviour.
The absolute worst are those stuck as emotional one year olds – the ego has established, the world view is entirely self-centred and everyone around you must serve your every need.
That’s a very good point. Their arrogance is mingled with a kind of petulance: why don’t you be good like me?
They haven’t yet examined how they chose what they chose as good to be good.
I love pork, the Muslims hate it. Why, is entirely arbitrary. But it has huge consequences for how societies are organised.
I respond to honest but respectful straight talk. Vast numbers of others are too immature so have to sidle around the truth. They always project that onto people like me, constantly failing to understand that I don’t respect their immaturity and will never submit to it either.
They can be a Consultant Doctor for all I care, when they are psychopathic control freaks they are less than worthless. It’s my value system….
I would like to laugh this offensive nonsense to scorn, and have enjoyed all the ridiculing it’s received here (and elsewhere).
But you’re right. It’s the intolerance of outrageous arrogance, masquerading as concern for others.
Almost everybody I know rolls their eyes in private, but placates in public. I have twice lost my temper about this – in a public place, and was surprised by the response. We are in the majority on this one.
You can actually overcome this through humour. A whole community was in raptures of laughter when I opined ‘It’s a shame you’re so thin and good looking, because otherwise I might have to call you a fat ugly c**t in public!’ But only after mimicking their aggressive belligerence in a humorous way of course…..got to give both sides a fair hearing, after all.
There is a great insight in here as all the people I know who ‘went far’ are absolutely controlling psychopaths. It’s positively a career derailer being a ‘live and let live’ kind of person.
Do you tell the woman you experienced carnal pleasure with what an ugly old cow she is when you are supposed to be post-coital lovey-dovey?
You really should be offended at actually enjoying atavistic carnal pleasure with anyone, you know.
How can you hump ’em and dump ’em if you keep telling them what a great shag they were?
That being the case, then humankind can’t complain when the excluded don’t obey their rules.
If you caste them out, they can behave however they see fit. Even if it offends you.
To avoid being speciesist it should be specieskind
Just include the entire genus or family to be safe.
The Maoist cultural revolution was similar to this in that language was relentlessly changed and redefined to confuse people and make communication difficult and dangerous.
The ruling class in the West have a hard on for China, they want to morph us into a similarly sick society.
Indeed they do and it betrays how shoddy their thinking really is. They are moving beyond parody, like Dr Evils.
The Chinese have had 5000 years of slavery hammered into their skulls. They are passive.
We are a little more boisterous by comparison.
‘We are a little more boisterous by comparison.’
Given how many just rolled up their sleeve I ave my doubts about that.
I hope I am wrong.
We have plenty of slaves, more than we did. But it is becoming apparent a solid 30% or so did not. Probably 50% for boosters.
A significant proportion of them are silently confident in their position. It is the authoritarian types who make a racket. That’s what Brexit proved; a majority didn’t buy it, despite the wall to wall propaganda.
Sounds akin to the recent medical re-naming of words
In order to demonstrate who the master is..
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-humpty-dumpty-said-in-rather
Ah but if you are a techno-nerd it automatically follows that you are a linguistic expert, a great writer, brilliant literary, film, and theatre critic, and a stupendous historian, political expert, philosopher, and indeed all round sage. You can truth-check in every discipline in the world, and know far more than those with multiple degrees in any subject.
This used to be so only for scientists, but that was just a modernist fallacy. Post modernism knows that the techno-geek is top of the pyramid, (or Tower of Babel).
That will be handy when the food wars break out.
Interestingly, in my experience most scientists are more widely read and with a broader knowledge that arts graduates, to whom the whole gamut of mathematical and technical worlds are alien and outside their comprehension.
We can all appreciate the magnificence of Beethoven or Goya, but how many arts students appreciate the innate beauty and symmetry of Quantum theory or Relativity, or how much of our world is governed by the constraints of the Second Law of Thermodyamics?
“We can all appreciate the magnificence of Beethoven or Goya.”
I doubt that all can, but even more so I doubt that many could write a worthwhile critical appreciation of the works. Similarly no doubt some scientists, though very few, have read the whole of ‘Paradise Lost’, but even fewer will have understood every word, cadence and allusion, and fewer still will have considered different critical approaches, and fewer still will have considered it within the context of its historical and literary times, its literary sources,and its biblical and deuterocanonical interpretations (including the Book of Enoch.) Even vanishingly fewer will have also read ‘Paradise Regained’ or ‘Samson Agonistes’ and be able and contextualise the work to those ones.
Every subject does have its specialists, as all too painfully obvious when Dawkins with significant braggadocio attempts to sword-swirl his way through the disciplines of theology and philosophy.
How are we supposed to achieve any kind of precision of language if all the language we write must be “inclusive to all readers”? For example, I might want to write something that indicates that some “property owner” is male, hence the concise term “landlord” meaning “a male property owner” (and vice versa concerning landladies).
You could equally attempt a correction of somebody who did use the phrase “property owner”, on the basis of it not being inclusive of those who don’t own properties!
Precision of language, like it or not, demands exclusivity, or its meaning is diluted.
Who is really under the impression that all fathers will be offended by the term “motherboard”, for goodness sake?
The point is:
It’s about intimidation and submission, getting people to use the Woke mob’s words and accept its lies – then Woke rules.
Control, in a word.
Language is naturally inclusive and exclusive. The inanity of those pushing this nonsense lies in the failure to understand that.
We use words in a general sense and in a specific sense. This is nothing to do with a moral choice. If I use the word “landlord”, I am choosing to speak of a male property owner and I am excluding, for the purposes of the sentence, landladies. Only a stupid person would believe that I am therefore denigrating females by implying that they could not own property. For crying out loud.
Words being what they are, images will be created which will differ from person to person. That’s the challenge we all face in our own way: what impression do I wish to create; what impression might I actually be creating for people with different perceptions.
People who have any appreciation or understanding of language find this interesting – not an object to be policed.
‘Google’ sounds a bit like ‘goolies’ which is street slang for testicles. Is the word ‘Google’ ‘inclusive language’ or smutty inuendo? Discuss.
How about inclusivity of other search engines!
Google needs to flag itself… Go ogle is very sexist.
Is there an obligation to use Google products? It isn’t difficult to avoid Google, plenty of competition out there.
Agreed – I use DuckDuckGo frequently as an alternative to Google, and have used Opera as alternative to Chrome.
Also, I usually turn off all of Google’s save activity options – if I want to repeat a search I prefer to re-type.
I guess the well known phrase ‘Play the white man’ will now be changed to ‘Play the white person’.
Person privilege?
And what happens to “white privilege”?
I’m curious.
What search engines are you folks using?
I ditched Google 2 years ago, moved over to DuckDuckGo. Now that’s been compromised too, I’m experimenting with Brave.
I’m trying Qwant.
For some years now I’ve avoided all Google products including Android phones. Search Engines are more tricky. Some supposed non-Google ones use Google results. After DuckDuckGo went over to the dark side I use a combination of Brave, Metager, Mojeek, Swisscows & Marginalia. There are others such as Presearch but it starts getting to be a pain. Basically, it depends on what kind of search you’re conducting.
The browser you use is also of importance – avoid Chrome at all costs.
Alexa, please write my presentation for me….
An early word-processing program called Word Perfect included the same sort of officious c-r-a-p.
It’s no longer with us.
I think I remember that – was it the one that snapped “syntax error”?
Curiosity worthy of being mentionened here: To people more fixated with English (many of them nevertheless German), German is a very evil language as nouns actually have genders, eg, der Ameisenbär, the ant eater, is grammatically masculine while die Waschmachine, the washing machine, is grammatically feminine. For as long as I remember, there has been a succession of proposalsfor a reformed, German grammer to eliminate this horrendous evil. The current one is to drop masculine foms altogether and use femine gender exclusively.
Eg, in grammatically correct German (meanwhile presumably politically correctly redefined) one would use die Kunden to refer to the customers, regardless of their sexes. For a long time, whoever wanted to express himself sensitively would use die Kundinnen und Kunden instead, with -innen supposed to signify that the grammatically already feminine plural form is also supposed to to be sexually female (so to say). The currently preferred contortion is to use die Kundinnen exclusively and insert a :, _ or * as tacit admission that some of the female customers actually aren’t: Die Kund:innen. A pause is supposed to occur when pronouncing this, giving the impression of someone who has only female customers and also a stammer.
Such is the nature of the extremely important problems Corona’s witnesses are solving when they currently don’t have a pandemic to apply their energies to.
On the positive side, the :innen use is a good test of institutions, businesses and individual peoples sanity now.
I am getting really, really pissed off at the way this country (and wider western world) is going. I get called right-wing for views that were, 20 years ago, perfectly acceptable – limiting immigration, men are men and women are women and there’s no in between, expecting our politicians to be doing the best for the country etc, etc. It’s all gone to shit. I keep thinking I’ll start a political movement, but one that is based on local decisions and fuck national politics right off. I’ve said it before, but anyone campaigning to split the UK into 2 parts – one with people like those who comment on here and the other with all the woke, illegal immigrants and lefties etc would get my backing.
I get called right-wing for views that are still held by some of the left, e.g. see http://www.leftlockdownsceptics.com.
It’s really not helpful to call groups of very different people ‘left’. I suppose it helps the authoritarians to have the debate so confused, though … divide and rule is the game.
Yes. Mike is rightly annoyed by the labelling of his views; then does the same himself. There are “lefties” of all sorts of opinions: on immigration, gender and the role of politicians.
Some of those lefties would agree with him completely – though they might do so with different language and for different reasons.
I have just disengaged myself from Google, as I have also done from Go fund me, I have never done Face book or Twitter and youtube is a site I prefer not to use, I have not had a TV licence since the entire Covid BBC propaganda machine was rolled out in December 2019.
I find that the only way to deal with these authoritarians is to not subscribe to their services
orwell would not believe how far downhill everything has gone
“Google said: “Our technology is always improving”
translation, we are watching you
Maybe the public do not care?
Another example of political correctness going way too far.
Mass trespass planned in West Berkshire over countryside access for people of colourLinking this to the trespasson Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932 only adds insult to injury.
May I just point out that this “inclusive language tool” is just that: a tool that is included with Google Docs, the (free) online word processing application.
Even within Google Docs, use of the tool itself is completely optional. You don’t have to use it. You may want to run your doctoral thesis in womyn’s studies or job application to some particularly woke organization through it. But you don’t have to.
Rest assured, you can type some truly un-PC phrases into Google Search uninterrupted. Believe me, I just tried it out.
Someone needs to develop a grammar checker that does the opposite: suggests swapping ‘humankind’ (meaningless woke) for the correct ‘mankind’, the obnoxious ‘chairperson’ to ‘chairman’, ‘Ms’ to either ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’, with the latter having the following advice; ” ‘Ms’ does not disclose the marital status of a woman, so useful information is not available. ‘Mrs’ or ‘Miss’ is to be preferred’ “. I could go on with loads of other examples but you get the drift.
Tell Google to f**k off. Remove your custom from all their platforms.
The world has gone mad. We must refuse to comply with the aim of these morons.
I’m going to enjoy baiting google.
If I woke up I’d change housewife to housebound.