There has been a lot of discussion about free speech, political correctness and censorship of late. That had me thinking; while the debate about “PC” tends to go nowhere because people can’t even agree on what “PC” means, it might be good to look at the whole underlying issue of truth itself.
There are some people who insist, “It’s not racist if it’s true,” and then there are those who say that some speech should be censored even if it’s true.
Now, off the top of my head, I can only think of one type of speech, in America, that is currently banned even if factually true, and that is classified information that is sensitive to national security. I’m sure there are more other reasons though.
Can anyone think of a reason why government, schools, etc. should be able to ban speech if (A) that speech is non-classified and not about national security; (B) is factually true?
Edit: Wow, I typed the thread title as “should to be censored.” Today isn’t my proofreading day.
This is the magic ritual that summons Great Cthulhu from the depths: “Ftagn R’lyeh [remaineder of text censored.]”
The issue with PC is not truth. PC stuff is no less true, just said in a way to make it less insulting. The stuff I don’t tend to want said is not true. A few things are true, but said in a way that hurts people.
And it’s not censorship, since I have no desire to control what you say. What I want is a society where people think about other people and try not to hurt them with what they say. The idea is to change hearts and minds. And, no, not by making something a thought crime, either.
That’s not to say I don’t want racist stuff to not be said, but, again, that’s because it’s not true and hurts people. So the real line is there. That’s where I’d begin.
I apologize if this didn’t make too much sense–I’ve been up all night.
So, BigT, what you are saying is feelings are more important than facts?
Facts can be humiliating. Not sure they can be insulting.
What facts (insulting, humiliating or otherwise) are being censored or suppressed?
Truth matters.
There was a recent example from Germany. On New Year’s Eve, hundreds of middle eastern immigrants went on a crime spree in Cologne, and hundreds of German women were raped, robbed, or assaulted. The government chose to attempt to cover up the entire event, but after videos appeared online that became impossible. Then the public learned of similar events on a smaller scale in other European cities. Then came a leaked report showing that the German government expects rising crime and radicalization among the wave of immigrants currently arriving.
So plainly the government is in no rush to have the German people know the truth about the results of immigration. What will happen as a result? People will trust the government less. People will wonder what else is being covered up and what other topics the government is lying about. It won’t be good.
They should have told the truth from the start.
I think that homosexuality and fetishes (as well as heterosexuality) are all based on a similar process as imprinting. Since we largely lack sufficiently strong sense of smell and odor producing glands, our sexuality lacks a biologic linkage in our brain and the sexual urges need to be linked up by non-hormonal, cognitive means. We have to (to some extent) think about and decide what visual, tactile, or other signals are sexually notable. Once that happens, the pathway between those signals and our sexual urges are formed. Usually, based on cultural norms, that creates hetero-normative connections, but every once in a while it creates same-sex desires, an attraction to anthropomorphic animal characters, or the feel of wool on your skin. And then, once imprinted, the connection in your brain is locked in.
Now, that hypothesis might not be true, but until gay marriage was legal, it made more sense to back the PC hypothesis that “people are born that way”. Regardless that it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, it had popular support and sells well to people who would oppose homosexual relationships. And, personally I’m pro-homo since I don’t think that it’s anyone else’s business what two (or more) consenting individuals do together, so long as it isn’t actively injurious to others. And so, until gay marriage was legalized, it made sense to self-censor.
But I do think that the urge to be PC, to back gay marriage, probably held back research that would narrow down the origins of human sexuality. Though, I’m not sure that there’s any real need to get an authoritative answer to that.
But, on the other hand, transgender research might be lagging because it is PC to support transgender folks. But there it might make sense to figure out what is happening since, with modern technology, we can’t fully change the gender of a person and people can get suicidal if they stay as they are. It’s a case like dwarfism where the end result isn’t technically bad, but if we can prevent it from happening, the life quality of the individual would probably be improved.
But that comparison to dwarfism isn’t very good in modern life. Modern society isn’t good with middle grounds and grey areas, everything has to be “bad” or “perfect”.
PCness is largely a subset of that tendency. It’s a mechanism that allows the thinkers and leaders in society to press the rest into a desired end result, but it also prevents the thinkers and leaders from dealing honestly with some societal issues.
It’s a mixed bag.
Sure, but that’s not so much suppressing the truth, as the truth isn’t being actively researched.
I mean, if there was somehow a huge sympathetic outcry for trans people, without the current acceptance, there might be a lot more research into the biological hows and whys, but with the current rising tide of acceptance, it may not be quite so urgent.
That’s different from deliberately suppressing the truth. I’d think that the only situations where the truth could even be deliberately suppressed would be in the realm of government policies. Academic research is peer-reviewed, so any good research is by definition not suppressed. But the government could choose to suppress (prob. by not gathering the data in the first place) any information about their chosen narrative about any number of things.
I don’t think the names and backstories of terrorists and mass murders should be publicized. They commit these atrocities because they want to be famous. Let’s take that incentive away from them.
Freedom of speech has it’s time and place. A school could censor certain forms of speech without stepping on anyone’s rights if they have other forums available.
In the category of etcetera outside of government there are plenty of restrictions. And within the government the courts can place gag orders.
I don’t like most restrictions but I don’t have a problem with the location of ships at sea during time of war, the basic reason for classified information, but unfortunately that exception is readily abused.
It’s not speech per se, but I wonder about the more “science-fictiony” cases. Say a huge asteroid was going to kit the earth and destroy all life. Should that truth be told? Or are we better off not knowing?
Or Asimov’s The Dead Past, where revealing the truth doomed us all to a hellish future.
Actually I think I have seen more censorship of truth from the right than from the left.
Preventing doctors from suggesting abortion as an option, Preventing pediatricians from discussig the dangers of guns in the house, preventing the release of global warming studies doen by the EPA, preventing the CDC from studying gun related deaths, etc.
At one extreme, there’s the brutal truth, saying it as plainly and as factually as possible, at the other end is being nice, to the point that whatever is being said is either so buried or so distorted as to be ineffectually communicated. The trick should be to find some optimal point in between. So, for instance, if saying something with 100% truth is also very offensive, but getting 99% truth with and almost completely inoffensive is reasonably doable then, for most situations, that’s a good trade-off. Usually, it’s far muddier and any two different people will value truth and kindness a bit differently and come across with different values.
The problem arises when people start being offended by simple facts. For instance, if someone is fat, to avoid offense, I’m not even going to mention it unless it has to be, and even still, will likely use a euphemism like “over-weight” or whatever. However, some people are offended by the simple idea that they’re fat. For instance, I’ve had people ask me for advice at the gym, and I always preface any advice by asking about their goals, but then someone wants to “get cut” but doesn’t want to admit that that means losing fat. Just a couple weeks ago, someone who was obviously new and caught me doing abs asked me about getting a six pack and seemed bothered when I told him you can’t just spot train (in fact, abs with heavy weights can even make one look fatter, if one’s goals are the traditional aesthetically pursed six-pack) and that they’re earned as much or more in the kitchen and he needs to adjust his diet. He seemed rather deflated by that. Or there’s always the cliched example of a woman asking her boyfriend/husband whether a particular outfit makes her look fat.
But when I hear about PC, at least today, I hear about things that aren’t about just finding the kindest way to say something, but seem to actually be about censoring things that people don’t want to hear at all. Yes, to a certain extent, we can all do more to be aware of how what we say affects others, but I think a significant amount of the onus should be on the offended to take a step to understand the motivations of those saying things. For instance, sometimes people say things to me that hurt, sometimes even a fair amount, but when they come from people that I know have no intention to hurt me, whether it’s a loved one or a random stranger, I can see it as it is; it’s just a mistake. Part of making it in the world is not being too sensitive to minor things. In fact, I HAVE gone out of my way in the past for people I love to do those sorts of things for them, and not only does it weight me down, but it does them a disservice because they’re ill-prepared to take on those sorts of situations when I’m not there to do that for them.
As for truth that should be censored, I think very little should. There are situations where it won’t do any good, but those are mostly the sorts of situations where it’s not so much censoring as just not bothering to bring it up. For instance, in a situation where a kid’s parents divorced due to one of them being unfaithful. It doesn’t really matter to that kid why they divorced, especially since it’s seldom as simple as one parent being unfaithful, there was probably a lot more that led up to it. What matters is that the kid is taken care of and loved and I’d say it would be wrong of the parent that was cheated on to tell the kid that the other parent cheated. That’s not really censoring, as I see it. However, if the kid eventually starts asking questions when he gets older, I wouldn’t say lie about it either. But that’s mostly because age matters in that sort of thing; I’d think if an adult’s parents divorced for the same reason, they’d probably either be straightforward or decide it’s not their business anymore.
Really, I just don’t see how deliberately censoring the truth when it’s relevant to someone is ever really a good thing. I’ll often try to find the nicest way to say something while making sure they’re getting the truth. Other times I’ll even preface that sort of thing by asking the person how honest they want me to be, and I don’t think I’ve once heard a response that they want the complete brutal truth. Hell, sometimes even when I’ve given the complete brutal truth, people still don’t hear it. The last person I told that to even went so far as to say she preferred her fantasy so she was choosing to ignore it.
[QUOTE=Just Asking Questions;19233358Or Asimov’s [The Dead Past]
(http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html), where revealing the truth doomed us all to a hellish future.
[/QUOTE]
Did that website have the rights to republish Asimov’s story? From their main page they list a lot of “free” books that I know aren’t in public domain and that it just isn’t possible they bought the rights to distribute freely.
Gay marriage was a fringe issue nobody talked about 20 years ago. It was a minority issue 10 years ago. Lawrence vs Texas was in 2003. Let’s let that sink in for a moment. Just 13 years ago sodomy was still illegal in many places in the United States. Not only was gay marriage not legal, you could go to prison for having gay sex. In 2003.
So you’d think that there could have been some social science going on about the causes of homosexuality. There are still lots of places that claim to be able to help people who struggle with homosexual attraction. What’s the track record on those places? Pretty dismal. They used to be able to claim to turn people straight, and when that turned out to be false they’ve changed to claiming to be able to help people with homosexual attraction to not act on those attractions.
So why didn’t those places, with thousands of motivated people trying to understand and change homosexual attraction, figure it out? If it’s so obvious to you what causes homosexual attraction, why couldn’t the conservative doctors who ran the conversion therapy camps figure it out?
The obvious issue is completeness. You can state a literal fact that is genuinely true and imply that it is in some way meaningful simply by not providing additional facts that alter the usefulness of assertion. For instance, convince me that white people do not like fried chicken.
Yeah, but they overwhelming prefer white meat to dark meat.
Do you feel obligated to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth if someone asks you what a goatse is? Or a pet topic of Opalcat’s in the old AOL SD live chat days, felching? Back then, when I was hosting and there were known minors in the chat, I’d just answer, when asked, that they misspelled the word “fletching”, it’s an archery term, and it’s those feathers on the rear of an arrow.
After you tell your 3 year old child they’re going to be a big sister and they ask how the baby got in mommy’s belly, do you really feel it’s necessary to talk about RNA and DNA, enriched uterine walls, and other topics many people think are more appropriate in an Intro to Obstetrics class in medical school?
While I sort of failed to fully connect my post to the topic of the thread, my intent was to do so. I don’t want to derail the discussion with a side topic.
But, I would suggest that those clinics thought that they knew the cause and how to solve it already. They weren’t in a search for fact, they were providing a (misguided and misinformed) service.
I’ve not heard anyone but me mention imprinting in any discussion of humans, let alone human sexuality, so I wouldn’t (and didn’t) say that it’s obvious. I said that it’s obviously not genetic. We know from history - Ancient Greece - that societies can produce a majority of bi- or homosexual individuals. While the exact state of affairs isn’t entirely clear from that era, we do know that men were having not just sexual but romantic relationships with boys, and there’s no indication that there was any difficulty in the participants to fulfill these roles, either as the boy waif or adult proposer. Rather, there’s stories of the steps that has to be taken to get the men comfortable with women as sexual partners, later on.
We know from this that there’s a cultural/learned component and we know from those who have undergone therapy to change their sexuality that it can’t be done, so whatever plasticity there is, is temporary and part of the development process. Once set, it’s as good as genetic.
So, to bring it back to the subject at hand, there was no value in making the argument since, so far as society is concerned, the end result is effectively the same. So there was some value in self-censoring. But, there’s definitely no value in legal censorship for something like that.