Unchecked competition doesn’t make young kids tougher, and rewarding participation, when that is what you are attempting to encourage, doesn’t make kids soft.
This is just flat out wrong. You do realize something can be a social construct, yet still have real, demonstrable effects, right? You’ve just made up strawmen that aren’t even asserted in a particularly logical or coherent manner.
FTR, I have never seen someone who argued race is a social construct be deemed a racist solely for that argument.
Right, so as I said I hope the other person will ask, and be willing to listen to the answer.
And if you were around here, I would not discount your experience but would be aware your reaction to the phrase is shaped by a different set of information.
Was going to say the same thing. I don’t know where people get the notion that something being a social construct somehow means it’s a fantasy to be ignored.
My personal definition of PC rhetoric does not include calling someone a nigger, faggot spic, Jew-boy or even a woman driver. Those are mainstream offenses that almost everyone can agree on.
What is PC is trying to call people out for innocent expressions of thought that somehow run afoul of current leftist ideals. Those are often transient and completely arbitrary. Two examples are the terms Black versus African-American and Native American versus Indian. At certain points in the recent past leftist types decided that these historically oppressed groups needed new names and tried to enforce that usage on everyone. People that didn’t comply weren’t considered as enlightened as they were. It didn’t work. Most American blacks still prefer that term over African-American just as many Native Americans prefer the term Indian over the former.
The basic problem is that most of the PC movement is driven by a small subset of white Leftists that are insufferable. I have explained this to people in those movements many times. I personally love people from all races, ethnicities and economic backgrounds. I chose my current job because I get to work and personally help with authentic people from lots of different backgrounds and they love me for it. The irony is that I am not prejudiced against any minority groups but I truly cannot stand white Leftists that practice their pseudo-religion on unwilling people. I love them and hate their supposed proponents that do much more harm than good in my opinion.
Luckily I am old and established enough now where it is just an academic concern. I can just watch the bullshit fly from the stands and then do whatever I was going to do before I got subjected to yet another lecture from an overprivileged know-nothing blowhard.
All of this PC bullshit rhetoric could have been summed up in the Golden Rule much more effectively but that doesn’t get you any grant money or create enough divisiveness to make that approach attractive to the extreme Left.
If you’d taken into account my whole post, rather than responding only to the first part of it, you’d have seen that I explained that the apparent contradiction is actually addressed by the people who are accused of fomenting the PC movement.
I was also responding to Shagnasty, who was the one who said that “A bunch of Dopers could get nailed for the offense” of not believing in race.
All groups in all societies do this: it’s how jargon is defined and enforced.
Go to a British hunt club and talk about the “dogs.” Go aboard a sailing boat and talk about the “ropes.” It’s just how people do things: we separate the insiders from the outsiders by their knowledge of jargon.
Do you imagine that right-wingers don’t do this?
You do realize that the second concept invalidates the first, right? (refer to bolding if there is any confusion)
wham…zham…sham…zlam…wham…zham…sham…zlam…wham…zham…sham…zlam…
That is the sound of my time machine
wham…zham…sham…zlam…wham…zham…sham…zlam…wham…zham…sham…zlam…
Now it’s 1965
I can’t believe I can’t call black people The N word any more!!! You can never legislate against hate… if people want to hate… they are going to hate. We have too many rules already!!!
Correct. Right-wingers certainly do it as well and I believe it is equally wrong. I am an Independent but I can certainly understand what people are complaining about. The term ‘PC’ generally refers to intended restrictions on speech and general behavior from the Left but I am equally opposed to it when it comes from the Far Right. It is same recipe with only slightly different ingredients.
The irony is when each side can’t see that how similar they are when you strip away the supposed surface motivations. It is all authoritarian and has been going on since societies were first founded.
I agree you make some good points here
Here is where we leave any sort of consensus. The condensed version:
It is 2015. If someone is still racist in 2015 the solution is not more hand holding and more patience. At this pointy social ostracism of racism becomes much more effective in implementing change.
No, I don’t get it and I am not being deliberately obtuse. According to some of the published guidelines, I have been both innocent and run afowl of some of the restrictions without meaning to or even knowing such rules existed. According to some of the more severe PC guidelines, good intentions are not enough.
What is the contradiction you see?
Actually, I think most of the left would recognize and admit we are employing social ostracism to effect change. Some may feel smug about this. However, many, or most, I believe have reached this point via frustration. It is 2015 and there is still a sufficient amount of racism and sexism that still exist in society. I think it is an appropriate and effective tactic to employ “PC Police” tactics. I’m not sure if that is a permanent solution, it might be, but I’m quite comfortable employing it for the next 5 or 10 or 20 years, however long it takes until this society no longer has a “sufficient amount of racism and sexism.”
I agree it creates a climate where racist people are kind of awkward to say racist things. Isn’t that the whole point???
Shagnasty your comments sound like someone in 1965 trying to defend the use of the word “negro”. Maybe it had no negative connotation then, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, I wasn’t alive in 1965. But… you seem my point. I think by 1975 it certainly did, right?
I believe you, by the way, when you say you are a basically good person and like all kinds of people. I think that if you changed your views of disliking the “PC Police” you would come to see that a little social ostricsim to help effect change is not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
I hope you have a god week… I was real lazy last week. Need to do better this week.
Ok, look, I am going to purposely make this example as generic as possible.
Suppose the word poor took on a negative connotation. Like, severely negative. (can’t think of a better example at the time) Suppose for the sake of my example all the right wing TV and radio people and bloggers had co-opted the word for over a year to use it in a much more negative tone than it normally used to have.
Well, you can honestly say you made a mistake by saying “My friend Dave is quite poor. I gave him a ride to work for 6 months and he was able to save money and get his own car”. Maybe, the new term is impoverished and not poor. So,of course you made an honest mistake by calling him poor. But to fight against not using the word poor anymore and to fight against the “PC Police” is not really a function of ignorance or innocence. It is just reluctance to change.
And words do change. Look at the term “colored” at one point it was a word that was respectful. But it was co-opted to mean something else. Certainly you will agree that across decades, words can change their meaning, right?
No I was talking about someone I grew up with and had known for years. You can’t change everyone’s mind and it is not your job to try. This does not mean people can’t think about what kind of behaviors lead to people changing their minds.
I don’t have children but one would have to be a pretty piss-poor parent to not be able to counter such a pathetic tactic.
Have you ever encountered this for real?
On the left, it’s really pretty micro-authoritarian. Seriously, who are these speech enforcers, and where do I run into them, outside of the ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered walls? I think the last time I actually ran into someone who made a point about enforcing PC talk was when I used to go to a lefty health food store in Charlottesville in the early to mid 1980s.
On the left, referring to minorities in the wrong way might get you called out. Annoying, perhaps, but that’s about as bad as it gets. On the right, you know the sort of thing that gets you in trouble? Claiming that climate change is real, man-made, and not an academic/leftist plot. PC is serious shit on the right, fucking up our ability as a society to respond to massively real problems.
When were you called out & what had you said or done?
Good point about online communities. They can be like KKK cells, just easier to get to and you don’t even have to waste a sheet. I think the extremism we see is from people hanging out in their communities and not really being aware of the arguments for other positions.
An example is how religious creationists come into GD spout their nonsense, and then seem totally shocked when Dopers fire back iron clad refutations. They’ve been hanging out in their churches where strawmen prevail.
I think people who really get upset about “PC” stuff are in real doubt about their opinions. I eat meat. I love meat. That is not PC but it doesn’t bother me since I’ve thought my position through and am willing to defend it.
Here, I must disagree. The Left is trying to be permissive, and limits only those things that infringe on permissiveness. The Right in non-permissive.
i.e., the Left says, “Don’t use belittling terms for races, religious minorities, women, and so on.”
the Right says, “Don’t hire races; don’t allow religious minorities to play golf at our private golf courses, don’t let women become executives of corporations.”
The fallacy is still popular…and still wrong…that intolerance of intolerance is “just as bad” as intolerance of groups of people for existing. This is hogwash.
It’s a million times worse to say, “You’re bad because you are black” than to say “You’re bad because you used a rude word about blacks.”
You can lose your job for using the word “niggardly” in a contextually-valid manner.
Deny this absurdity and you are part of the problem, not the solution.