The latest, in the news bit about PC is Megyn Kelly and her blackface comments. So, PC is not letting white people dress up in blackface. Yep, PC is definitely incompatible with a free society. :rolleyes:
I’d prefer we be as accurate as possible - PC is not letting white people dress up in blackface without getting criticized for it by freely-speaking people.
It’s pretty important to distinguish between censorship and censure.
Very true and thanks for the clarification.
Playing dumb is beneath you. You are defending octopus. You can read the multiple posts in this thread detailing his asshole behavior. Yet you defend him. You lie and pretend it’s about “disagreeing” with him.
I notice you’ve changed your tune about PC again. Before it was a minor annoyance. Now it’s incompatible with a free society. You went from reasonable to defending Trump for attacking PC. And yet you can’t define it in a way that is actually used by anyone, including yourself.
And, again, identity politics is just the concept that people in certain classes (sex/race/sexuality/etc) have issues in common, and thus have more power if they vote as bloc. And intersectionality is the concept that a combination of two or more of these classes can have different issues than either class alone.
So you’re saying “voting with people who share the same issues as you” is racist.
I’ve seen you make some decent points. So why are you playing dumb now? Why are you remaining willfully ignorant? I remember back when I didn’t know what those politics words meant. I looked them up. And I learned.
And I have octopus on ignore. So I don’t even usually know what he says. But I read this thread to find out how he’d been an asshole (again). And then I didn’t defend him.
And I actually repeatedly defined what PC means in common practice. And you ignored it every time.
In fact, I quoted dictionaries on what PC meant, because I went and looked it up. But you’d rather make up your own definitions that no one uses.
You even made up a definition to attack Czarcasm for snarking back at you.
That’s a good practice. But, look 99.999999.5% of the time if I am slightly unkind to a poster it’s because they started a fight. Have I started a Pit thread? Not that I can recall. Do I ever pile on someone as part of an unthinking mob? Nope. Did I start this cancerous sub forum? Nope.
If there wasn’t a pit where a misanthropic, obsessed, and unhinged group could abuse other posters you wouldn’t see folks like me needing to post defensively.
It’s just that your ripostes are so cheap. There’s no wit. There’s no flair. There’s no argument.
They’re not fun to read, and you don’t stop. You just spew out tons of these short little contentless barbs in an apparent attempt to get the last word on an internet forum - where getting the last word means that you’re not an interesting person anymore, not that you’ve “won”.
Now, I get that once somebody insinuates that your mother is a hamster or your father smelt of elterberries, that morally requires you to shed the boxing gloves and start up a series of short jabs to the solar plexus. That’s surely what you do in real life, as I myself do any time somebody fails to nod at me or looks at me wrong. But on the internet it drowns any valuable posts you’ve made in a sea of shit, and upon that sea, your reputation sinks to the bottom.
You think I care about my reputation in the eyes of who I just called unhinged and obsessed? No. The people who Pit others, lie, and stalk over the course of years are the people you should be concerned about not their targets.
A quick glance at the forum page suggest that the average thread has at least 100x as many views as posts - to say nothing of the ratio of views to posters. Each of your facile little insult posts is targeting a single person, and thus is being viewed by hundreds or thousands of people who aren’t the person who you are calling unhinged and obsessed.
At best you’re a person screaming incoherently at a child in the middle of a grocery store. More realistically, you’re screaming at them on the local news. It really doesn’t matter how the child was acting; you look worse.
And on the internet, you’re nothing but the impression you make.
Wait. You mean to tell me it’s not the short sighted doofus who set up the pit and it’s not the venomous troglodytes who have inhabited the Pit for, in some cases, damn near two decades that are problem. The problem is a person responding to dishonest attacks from the mentally unhinged? :dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:
You said “shitty people,” plural. Your words suggested that it was more of a generalization than a specific. Octopus seems ok. I haven’t read everything he is written, but I bet he is a mix pretty much like anybody else.
Unfortunately for me, this a perfectly fucking fair criticism. So, yes, i’m Still thinking about it, and my views are still subject to change. The more I think about it, the less I like it. PC seems to cover a host of behaviors, some laudable and innocuous, some pretty awful. So, yeah.
I think this awful. It’s a terrible fucking thing. Race, sex, sexuality, religion etc. are the least interesting and the least meaningful things about people. I react strongly to the negative to anybody who dares think they have something in common with me because of these shallow features. It’s a terrible way to draw lines of tribalism. If you listen to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech,” it is pretty clear that he is the enemy of these ethics. Content of character, not color of skin, and such.
It is nothing less than a temporarily socially acceptable form of racism.
Let me make a suggestion that you are free to take or not. I don’t often live up to this, but I give it a shot. Steel man the other guy’s argument, don’t straw man it. The premise I disagree with is that people of the same race, sex, religion, etc. share the same issues based on those qualities. It’s a stupid assertion.
Sorry. I found the definition insufficient.
No.
Yup.
Political correctness as it applies to language is a deliberate experiment, run it up the flagpole, see if anybody salutes. For instance, “Ms.” as a neutral term like “Mr.”, without reference to marital status. The speed at which that experiment became standard practice was breathtaking. Mostly, I think, because we were ready for it.
“African-American” is another example. It is deliberately respectful, you know its deliberate because its not as easy to write or speak, it takes an effort. And even if that effort is hypocritical, it recognizes a value, even if only by lip-service. “Survivor” rather than “victim”, offer an alternative, see if it catches on. “Challenged” rather than “disabled” is another, and the people will decide.
They will use it or they won’t, if they do, the experiment succeeds, if they do not, try again.
Now, let it be clearly said, someone tries to enforce that experiment, they are fucking it up, it has to be entirely voluntary or it doesn’t work. But some folks just can’t help themselves, they are natural born scolds, and there is nothing to be done for them. Bless their hearts, they mean well, but bless them double if they shut the fuck up about it.
Look at what you said: either you were an asshole then (you told him to go to the gym) or you’re an asshole now. You can’t argue that you’re the one being picked on when you’re the one who drops turds in “nice conversations” - in the middle of an argument about how you don’t make nasty comments.
Here’s a suggestion. You seem to have this really broad umbrella of “things that bother you regarding inclusive speech”. You have, in the past, failed to define this term. You have also been informed that this term is a snarl word, one used as a weapon and a tribal signifier rather than anything that actually means anything.
Just stop using the term. Don’t call it “PC”. Just actually say what bothers you. “PC” means nothing. Actually explaining the problem saves you having this discussion every single time it comes up.
And this is how I know you’re white, male, straight, and probably belong to a local religious group that is not suffering significant persecution.
When you belong to a racial minority group that suffers from systemic racism, your race matters because of what others will do to you.
When you’re a woman, your sex matters because of what others will do to you.
When you’re gay, your sexuality matters because of what others will do to you.
Let’s just take the one I know is right from your posting history. You’re straight. You’re a guy, you’re married to a woman. You brought this up in what I still hold up as one of the best threads on the forum (and no, not because it features a republican getting tortured, but because it features someone going to fairly extreme lengths to test their beliefs, finding out that they’re wrong, and changing their minds, something which is entirely too rare). You don’t have any reason to vote as a bloc when it comes to your sexuality because your sexuality is the norm. Nobody is coming for your rights. Nobody is trying to pass off “He was hitting on me, so I panicked and shot him” as a judicial defense of murder. Your sexuality doesn’t seem to matter that much to you, but to a gay person, when deciding who to vote for, the reality is that one party wants to strip gay people of their rights. That’s a big fucking deal! That’s the kind of thing that makes identity politics not just sensible, but necessary, to the point where a gay man who votes for a republican is a bit like a black man who pines for the Confederacy.
Well, here’s the thing - the law may well mean that you have at least one very important thing in common with everyone else in that group. Maybe you and everyone of your skin color face increasingly serious difficulties being allowed to vote. Maybe you and everyone else of your sex has to worry about people forcing you to carry your rapist’s baby to term. Maybe you and everyone else that shares a sexuality with you faces a law that literally makes your existence illegal.
That’s why identity politics matters! For a gay person in, say, Singapore, what issue would you propose as “more important” than the repeal of the law that makes my literal existence illegal? And that’s something every gay person in Singapore has in common. That’s “identity politics”. And of course it’s not such a big deal for a straight white middle-class man, in the same way that “class politics” matters a whole lot to those working minimum wage and a lot less to those who recently made their first million.
Also, I’d be remiss not to link this article.
“You know what we had before Identity Politics? We had White Dudes.”
Yep, nothing like misappropriating MLK against identity politics. You realize his fundamental issue was the inequality faced by racial minorities, right? Y’know, something defined first and foremost by your racial identity?
No, it really isn’t. It’s about fixing past or current racial injustice.
Congrats, your steelman is still stupid, because politics is about law, and up until 2012, it was against the law for gay people to get married.
Err, quick caveat, I mangled my hypothetical structure there. I am not a gay man in singapore.
Quick caveat the second:
“No, it really isn’t. It’s about fixing past or current racial injustice.”
Modern black identity politics is first and foremost about this. But it is entirely possible to form identity politics that are all about racism; see also, Trump’s 2016 coalition.
Hello Sunny Daze!
You understand how context works and how you are the one turd dropping? In a different Pit thread that you started about yours truly I was having a pleasant conversation with begbert in the midst of a group of nuts flaming me. Well, it was pleasant for a little bit.
He brought up something about the ladies. 
About not having luck in the romance department. So, instead of giving him a bingo stamp, I put on my Dr. octopus hat and gave some helpful advice. Which I will copy and paste below:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/report.php?p=21010143
Notice: I am in the middle of the Pit in a thread you, of all people, start. I am being flamed by the usual pack of nutty jackals. I engage with someone who mentioned something to me in a decent tone. I suggested going to the gym just as an example where people hang out. Not to creep on women. But to do something positive with life and perhaps have a chance to build rapport and meet women. It was just an example.
Honestly, if I were single now I’m not sure if the gym idea still is good. I’ve been out of the dating game so long that my advice may be outdated or ineffectual. However, it was not motivated out of a desire to ridicule or be an asshole. I was having a normal conversation with someone in the midst of me being pitted.
What we need is a facepalm smiley for posts like yours in threads like these. Even my explanation to you, in another pit thread inspired by a stupid outcome in ATMB was far more polite and far more accommodating than anything you or multiple others have shown me.
You do realize this is a message board. Nobody actually lives in the Pit, and nobody makes posting in the Pit a lifetime occupation. People exist in the real world and sometimes get online, posting on the board because they feel they have something to say, and a topic here interests them, or because they have a grievance to vent about and doing so in the Pit is perhaps the most harmless and humanity-friendly method of venting their spleen possible.
Painting literally anything anyone posts in the Pit as a crime against humanity is absurd.
Oh, and also nobody’s stalking you. Some people respond to you a lot because they respond to everything, during the periods they’re reading the boards. The notion that you are so special that you have a grip on their attention is a similar idea to the notion that we don’t exist anywhere but on the boards; that we live in the Pit rather than post in it occasionally. It’s simply wrong.
Oh, and the people you’re responding to aren’t mentally unhinged, and most of them aren’t dishonest. You want to see dishonesty, look at those response attacks of yours. The mischaracterizations in those flippantly tossed-off insults are egregious.
Oh, and regarding that gym thing? I get that you were trying to lord yourself over me, but it wasn’t helpful advice. Particularly since at the time I was exercising an hour a night, every night, seven days a week. (“A few sessions?” Ha!)
But seriously, I’d completely forgotten about that until you brought that up again. Old conversations don’t matter, people. Live for the day!
I wasn’t lording anything over anyone. I didn’t bring up the lack of romance to start with. I was giving friendly advice on how to meet people. It might not be effective but the intent wasn’t anything sinister.