I don’t agree with **iiandyiiii **on a lot of things, but wanting equal rights for all, and a reduction in suffering of human beings is somehow “uber-PC”? That seems strange to me.
I mean… that’s basically the descriptivist definition of “PC”, right? Back in 2011, The Escapist published an excellent Moviebob video explaining this exact dynamic. It’s 5 minutes long and clearly summarizes the actual usage of the term. A choice quote:
The people complaining about the headhunter and african AIDS crisis imagery in Resident Evil 5 were not upset because the game was being politically incorrect. They were upset because it was incredibly insensitive and trading in cruel stereotypes.
Because one of the most consistent and long-standing usages of “political correctness” is a snarl word to minimize, dismiss, or redirect anyone complaining about things like racism. “Pfft, what, you wanna censor my media because it’s not politically incorrect?” when the reality was simply “I want the game designer/filmmaker/comic writer to make the game less horribly racist and think about what they’re doing.” Without the “PC” boogeyman, it’s a lot harder to spin critique into censorship.
That was nearly a decade ago, before the “PC backlash” led first to a massive harassment campaign against women and people of color in gaming, then to a massive right-wing youth movement. Today, it’s still the same grift, just… worse. The usage has remained largely consistent; the rhetoric has become more vile; people are invoking it more and more in ways that make less and less sense.
I agree. I’ve yet to see a usage of “PC” to mean anything other than “I’m getting flak for saying racist and sexist things”
Just around four years ago, I posted this thread on the issue of those who whine about PC, by whom I mean the bigoted idiots who accuse perfectly reasonable people for having perfectly reasonable reactions to the bigots’ nonsense of being “PC”.
Unfuckingbelievable. You basically want to let the MAGA brigade get away with this. “These right wing assholes muddied the waters, so no sense even trying to look for your drowning kid, ma’am. Blame them, not me!” :smack:
Meanwhile, you, Manson, and Monty continue to bat around your strawman. Having fun?
I define political correctness as Jon Chait does: Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say
If you dismiss Chait, Traister, Rosin, Mounk, Weiss, etc. as right wing bigots who stand against “equal rights for all, and a reduction in suffering of human beings”, you might be an idiot. You might have your head in the sand. But it strikes me as more likely that you are deeply, deeply dishonest. Like Hannity or Ingraham, you are more interested in shilling for your tribe than engaging honesty, more interested in tearing people down with “callouts”, even if they agree with you on 80 percent, than in reaching out to help people up, to bridge divides, to form a majority coalition to defeat the right. It’s sickening. Grow the fuck up. :mad:
His full time job is creating content that supporters like me find valuable enough to pay for. Just like Beyonce, or J.K. Rowling.
I was initially just going to ignore your post because it is so flagrantly baseless. But then it occurred to me that some otherwise reasonable people who haven’t ever listened to the podcast might believe I’m implicitly conceding your absurd point. So.
–What “tradesmen” am I paying for “their skilled time, crafting, and labour” when I listen to the White Album? Pretty sure it all just goes into the pockets of McCartney, Yoko Ono, et al (or is Michael Jackson’s estate still in control of those rights?). After the Apple shareholders get their cut, of course.
–“Mailing monthly checks”? Did you just take the bus here from 1986? 
–Serving “comforting political opinions over a microphone”. I honestly am not sure if you are being disingenuous, or have never actually listened to the podcast and are genuinely confused as to what it’s all about. Either way, as I say, there may be others reading who don’t know what the deal is, so I’ll take a little time to eradicate some ignorance. Here are some excerpts (transcribed by me) from just the last month of the “Making Sense” podcast, since my card gets charged monthly. I have removed “ums”, “you knows”, and other verbal tics (for example “what-what are you…” is just transcribed as “what are you…”), but have otherwise attempted to present mostly contiguous, unedited blocs of conversation. Note that the middle two are not about politics at all:
#157 “What Does the Mueller Report Really Say?”
#158 “Understanding Humans in the Wild”
#159 “Conscious” (with, for the first time ever, Sam’s wife Annaka Harris)
#160 “The Revenge of History”
Now, orcenio: the choice is yours. You can stubbornly double down on your facile claims about this podcast, if you want to look utterly ridiculous. Or you can just bail out of the thread, or carry on within it as though I didn’t provide any of this evidence about the content actually found in the podcast. Or–and this would be impressive–you can actually acknowledge “Okay, mea culpa: even if I may not agree with Harris’s perspective on some things, there’s clearly a lot more to his podcast than I realized.” Ball’s in your court.
As far as I can tell, this appears to be a giant straw man.
…No, you’ve got it exactly backwards - the MAGA brigade are the ones who have it right for once. This is always what “PC” has meant; always how it has primarily been used. (People have been screaming about the cultural equivalent of “CAMPUS PC!” for nearly a century, by the by, and that’s just tracking the NYTimes!) As that moviebob video from 2011 shows, this abuse of “PC” far predates the MAGA brigade. It’s always been like that.
Notably missing from this article: an actual clear definition of what “PC” is! But for the descriptivist, it offers:
- Firing someone who wrote a shitty column mocking victims of actual bigotry from a volunteer position and expressing anger at them is “PC” (whereas the actual column is apparently inoffensive, because Chait is nothing if not privileged and wouldn’t recognize the bigotry if it beat him over the head, which it very much does)
- Instituting a campus-wide speech code (no mention of what’s in that code or why it matters) is “PC”
- Complaining or protesting about a demonstration you find demeaning to women (note: I do not agree with McKinnon) is “PC”
Do notice that I’m doing what Chait wouldn’t do: actually explaining the positions at hand that he’s waving away as “PC”. When you do that, they seem considerably less like a mob of anti-free-speech radicals and a lot more like a whole bunch of very disparate people doing very different things with different reasons, motivations, and justifications. All of that gets boiled down to “political correctness”, and I honestly cannot find the through-line. Moving on…
- Noticing that a satirical newspaper does a fair bit of punching down and hesitating to full-throatedly endorse them after they are attacked is “PC”
- Not deciding to publish cartoons your editorial staff deems “offensive” and most people would agree are “offensive” and which would, in fact, absolutely alienate Muslims in your audience is “PC”
- Not wanting a shitty hack comedian to speak at your commencement is “PC”
- Not wanting the head of the IMF to speak at your commencement, citing the colonialist actions of the IMF, is “PC”
- Not wanting one of the people who lied us into the Iraq War to speak at your commencement is “PC”
- Not wanting your university to give an honorary degree (note: Chait just straight-up gets this story wrong, Ali was not invited to speak at Brandeis’s commencement ceremony) to someone with a long history of inflammatory anti-islamic rhetoric, up to and including making excuses for Anders Breivik, is “PC”
- Content warnings to help students with PTSD avoid triggers is “PC”
- Attempts to educate about minor but nonetheless hurtful racial slights is “PC”
…In fact, let me pause here, because there’s something Chait refers to as a “central tenet” of PC right after that that absolutely gives the game away: “people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses”.
Or, to put it another way: “if something offends you, shut up, snowflake. I get to decide what is and is not worth getting offended over, and while it’s worth getting offended over Condoleeza Rice being deplatformed, it’s definitely not worth getting offended over a war criminal like her speaking at your commencement speech.” Man, that definition I provided is looking better and better!
So, moving on:
- Having a calm discussion with Native American groups on campus and, as a result, deciding not to run a play which is pretty fucking racist towards native Americans, is “PC”
- Deciding not to run a play in your student group because you’re worried it’s not inclusive to transwomen and instead letting a different student group run that play and writing and running a new play which is inclusive is “PC”
Again, quick pause, do note how Chait describes this, then head on over to the Stanford Daily article and Mount Holyoke statements to look at how the actual “victims” of “PC” describe it. Kind of a difference, right? Almost as if Chait is not being entirely charitable, reasonable, or even truthful in his descriptions of the “PC police”, and even if he were, including them on a list alongside “violently disrupted a feminist installation” gives people entirely the wrong impression. This is, again, a constant refrain.
Also, quick pause for a different, far more serious reason:
Fuck you, Jonathan Chait. What do you think “controlled” means in “controlled exposure”? I’ll give you a hint - it’s not “I was reading this book and suddenly a passage came up that reminded me of my recent rape”. You are not these kids’ psychiatrist; it is deeply unethical to give people psychotherapy without their consent; this is not what exposure therapy is or looks like. This objection to trigger warning basically says, “I do not know what exposure therapy is or how it works to help overcome trauma, but because the word exposure is in it, I insist you be exposed without warning to things that aggravate your trauma.” Chait consistently gets this one wrong, and he’s not the only one. This is something of a bugbear of mine, but really it’s just yet another thing wrong with this stupid, stupid article.
So, moving on with my list:
- A professor’s fear of seeing backlash for their words and actions is proof positive of “PC culture”.
…Huh. There we go. An actual definition. And you would have saved me half an hour if you had just quoted that one sentence.
Unfortunately, this falls completely flat because Chait is obviously not a prescriptivist on this. He’s not saying, “I define the term PC as X, Y, and Z, here’s a real-word thing that fits that definition”, he’s saying, “PC is a thing that exists and is characterized by X, Y, and Z”. That’s a descriptivist term, which means the obvious objection is, “that’s not how people use the term PC”.
How do I know? Because this definition he offered has fuck-all to do with a great many of the examples he cites! Who’s saying that it’s “illegitimate” or “bigoted” to invite a war criminal to your commencement speech? The kids just don’t want their commencement speaker to be a war criminal. Who’s saying that it’s bigoted to run the Vagina Monologues (hint: not the gals who, in their statement on why they’re not running it, point to another student group who are as an alternative)? The theater group in question just thought it might be insensitive to transwomen.
Additionally, as a concept, it’s not a very good one. Why, exactly, is it only “PC” when the left does it? The right is incredible at regulating political discourse by defining opposing views as “bigoted” and “illegitimate”! They do that all the time! In fact, unlike the left, sometimes, they actually have institutional backing in doing so! And if “PC” has its roots in the 1990s, they didn’t learn that from lefties; the “moral majority” predated the 90s, as did McCarthyism, as did countless attempts to frame atheists as anti-christian bigots for demanding the first amendment be upheld, and so on, and so forth. Indeed, Chait talks about “leftist hegemonic control”, which is just… Dude, that’s not a thing! People calling you a racist on twitter is not “control”; it’s certainly not the dominant social culture in any meaningful sense. A strongly-worded petition is not “control”. Even in academia, the idea that this was some kind of coup by the left is completely fucking wrong - left-wingers get attacked, deplatformed, and fired for this shit more than right-wingers (once you ignore the outlier of Milo Yiannopolous, which we should ignore, because he is a troll whose entire schtick is about baiting exactly that reaction).
Does Chait provide any evidence of “hegemonic control”? (Note: individual anecdotes plucked from context with no underlying data where most of those he’s talking about have been misrepresented is not evidence for what he’s claiming here.) No, he just moves on to talk about how social media has spread this phenomenon, as though getting ratio’d on Twitter somehow constitutes someone controlling your speech in a manner consistent with the dominant social power structure. Buddy, trust me, we’d all be a lot happier if things actually worked that way, because you’d shut the fuck up for once.
The reality is, most of those Chait is complaining about are relatively powerless. They’re not “hegemonic” - they’re not even able to exert control! They’re individual opinion column writers, or kids on college campuses, or random people on twitter. There’s no institutional power here. The “PC police” isn’t going to go to your house and lock you up - the absolute most they could possibly do is tell your employer, “the guy you’ve hired is kind of a dick, and I don’t like that”. In fact, almost every example he offers is kids on college campuses, which is kind of the definition of “powerless mob”. These aren’t the masters of your destiny! They’re a bunch of angry kids who may be able to call your fucking manager! Are they going to be able to “exert control” over any power structure that doesn’t decide to bend the knee? Does mainstream culture as a whole look anything like college campuses?
Everything about this is stupid and wrongheaded. If we define PC as " a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate", then PC is powerless and largely harmless. If we tack on “by exerting hegemonic control”, then PC does not and never has existed in any meaningful sense, because “the left” does not and never has had institutional power, outside of perhaps the USSR if you really want to stretch the meaning of the word “left” to the absolute breaking point. And if we define PC by how it is actually used, we end up with exactly what I’ve been saying: a right-wing snarl word used to minimize and dismiss anyone who has something to say about social justice.
Also, I would be remiss to point out that if we define “PC” that way, we’re left with very little recourse when something actually is bigoted and illegitimate. For example, let’s say a presidential candidate says “Mexico is sending us rapists”. That’s bigoted. That’s wrong. That position should damn well be “illegitimate”.
And any attempt to point that out is “PC” by Chait’s definition. Or at the very least, any attempt to put institutional weight behind that illegitimacy certainly is.
“PC” is inherently negative. It’s a snarl word. It never, ever, ever has a positive connotation. So where does that leave us? How do we respond to actual bigotry?
Again: shitty definition, harmful to discourse, Chait can go fuck himself.
BPC, unlike some others, I can’t claim that you didn’t grapple with the substance. Nearly everything you say makes my heart sink (and you definitely deserve the crown, more than Andy, of “most uber-PC person here”), but it was a substantive response, no question.
I’m not going to attempt to respond point by point (doing all that transcribing yesterday was already enough of a time suck, and I really think I am going to need to try to go “back on the wagon” in terms of staying off boards and social media on the weekend). But I do want to push back on one specific thing, which is the idea that college kids have no power. First of all, they go on to fill in the bureaucracy of powerful institutions of all kinds, including the media–and Weiss and Mounk have articulated how the new generation of Millennials filling those roles have had a chilling effect–but I witnessed up fairly close as a resident of Missouri at the time how untrue this is even while they are still in college. In a kind of Maoist coup, students got the top administration of the flagship University of Missouri hounded out of office, over…what, exactly? Their inability to prevent a few individual bigoted dickheads (who were not employees of the university) from acting like bigoted dickheads (albeit, it’s important to note, nonviolent ones)? And it’s really hard to say what proportion of the student body they represented, but I can’t believe it was anything close to a majority. Like Jacobins and Bolsheviks before them, they punched way above their weight.
The only positive outcome of any of this (not covered by the CNN piece) was Melissa Click’s firing.
With all due respect, I think the way people like you have ruined the terms Nazi, fascist, alt-right, and white supremacist is a wee bit more consequential. Like, ten years ago, if you told me Bob was a white supremacist I’d know exactly what you meant. Nowadays, I don’t know if Bob is a member of the English Defence League or if he voted to leave the EU. Any more dilution and we’ll have to retire those terms completely because they’ll just be utterly useless.
I’ll address the rest of your post when I’m back at my computer. Doing long posts on a phone makes me go all stabby 
It’s already worse than that. Those top Mizzou administrators were pushed out for allegedly being white supremacists because they didn’t exert a power they don’t even have (to prevent any individual on or near campus from ever saying anything bigoted), a power which would be completely illegitimate if they did have it.
The “original” (the term’s origins go way back but this is what most people think of) wave of “PC gone mad” complaints was in the early 1990s. People who were freshmen in college in 1990 have now been out of college for about as long as I’ve been alive. They’re typically in their late 40s. So if this argument is to make any sense, why is it that we’re not now seeing “PC GONE MAD” stories in basically every echelon of power? Why is it that all of Chait’s examples still boil down to college campuses?
Here’s a hint: “crazy shit I did in college” is basically its own genre, and this argument is really fucking stupid. People change. They grow up. They become less radical. Depending on how you want to see it, they grow thicker skins, or become beaten down by a hegemonic (using this word more accurately than Chait here) mainstream culture that really does not care about things like people of color being asked, “So where are you from? No, I mean, where are you from.” (Or, for that matter, concentration camps for immigrants and asylum-seekers.) I’m sure Weiss wrote about this - complaining about PC is her whole schtick - but if you give me Chait making a dozen complaints of varying degrees of good faith about colleges, I’ll respond to that in kind.
Really, this isn’t the part I’d rather you responded to. It’s a sideshow that’s barely important, and the objections to it are patently laughable (the example you bring up is the one person in a position of power they can influence, because they literally pay his salary).
What I want is an actual coherent definition of the term that makes a goddamn lick of sense. What I want to know is what “PC” is. The definition Chait offered was a bunch of fucking nonsense - it did not describe the things he was complaining about, and I don’t think it actually describes anything that has ever existed. That’s what we’re talking about, remember?
So yeah, “political correctness”: still just a right-wing snarl word. The only contribution Chait has offered is to outright say that it’s only ever pointed left.
I don’t agree, to say the least, that Chait’s definition is “nonsense”.
Because that wave (which I witnessed firsthand, as a college student in the early-to-mid-'90s) was weaker and more quickly was turned into a national punchline. Perhaps most important of all, there was no Twitter then.
I do keep hoping we’re on the verge of shaking off the delirium again this time, and going into an “emperor’s new clothes” phase. Fingers crossed!
They don’t. At public universities, taxpayers and deep-pocketed alumni provide most of the funds. The students involved here were neither, to any appreciable degree.
It’s funny you accuse me of strawmanning and then you post this. LOL
How is that strawmanning?
Because I posted nothing even close to what you are complaining about.
Sigh. You posted:
The post you quoted from me that you complain is “strawmanning” simply points out that “Chait, Traister, Rosin, Mounk, Weiss, etc.” (all figures on the left or center-left) have complained that political correctness is a problem. The clear implication of your words is that they therefore are racist or sexist and don’t want to be called out on it. Which is absurd. (Two of those I named are well known feminists; another has written multiple hagiographical books about Obama.)
I can see why some want to keep the “PC” label alive-“Anti-PC” sounds so much better than “Racist, sexist, and gutless pig”.
Here’s a quick tip for you. I don’t give a crap who is liberal or conservative or left or feminist or what-the-fuck else there is. I don’t know who any of those people are, and I don’t care. I don’t know what they said about PC or any other fucking topic. I posted two things:
[ul]
[li]I find it strange that you consider someone who only wants equal rights for all and to lower human suffering “Uber-PC”[/li]
[li]The times I’ve heard people say PC, it meant “I get flak for saying racist and sexist things”[/li][/ul]
As you can see, I didn’t mention anybody in your list of yahoos.
Your particular cites, and the people in them who complain about PCness have been more than adequately destroyed by others in this thread, so I don’t need to read that drivel.
Also, one last tip for you: 5 people or 70 people or 150 people posting something on Twitter is meaningless.