i’m an editor, and PC speech is actually important. It’s also incredibly annoying trying to keep up with it. :rolleyes: Words have power. If it’s acceptable to go around dehumanizing a certain group of people via language, the general populace dehumanizes them.
Actually progressive liberalism is the continuation of puritan christianity by other means.
Minus the God bit.
Yup, it is all about you. They only hold their beliefs in order to piss you off.
You need to get them to confess, if they do you can absolve them; saying go and sin no more.
If recalcitrant in their heresy, you need fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, so must publicly denounce them by name in the town square as enemies of humanity.
I am absolutely cool with regarding those who trumpet idiotic beliefs as retards.
Wiser words have never been spoken. Unfortunately the adherents cannot see the irony.
More like,
“I want to be able to go on being homophobic, sexist and racist, without people CALLING me homophobic, sexist, and racist.”
It’s like, let’s say I use a racist slur, naturally someone calls me out for it. Then I get all huffy and say, “Well, why should I be all PC? It’s a free country, it’s just my opinion, blah blah blah.” I think that’s what most of them mean by PC. They interpret criticism with censorship. Which it isn’t. You can be a douchebag if you want, but you have to accept that people are gonna be pissed about it.
That is precisely the definition of censorship. What happens when we disagree over which words we aren’t allowed to use? What if I unilaterally and arbitrarily handed you a list of words I find offensive and you aren’t allowed to say? Or told you that you weren’t allowed to read certain books or wear your hair a certain way? What right do I have to make those decisions?
Approximatey 50% of the electorate votes for them, so I would say they are getting quite a bit out of it.
How DARE you question my right to call somebody a nigger? How DARE you? Censorship!
Why is this the hill you want to die on, for fuck’s sake?
:rolleyes:
Do you sincerely want to understand the issue, or not?
That is the point. Various groups have tried to ban Mark Twain’s books, especially Huckleberry Finn, over the years just because they contained such terms and Samuel Clemens (the real Mark Twain) was not a racist himself. He is also the quintessential American novelist. Do you really want to support book banning because it contains politically incorrect words even though they meant the near opposite of their literal text when taken as a whole?
I have no sympathy for you if you truly believe that because it is historically, academically and intellectually devoid of all true thought. It is just stimulus-response like an amoeba would demonstrate. Your head is going to explode when I show you some truly politically incorrect statements by people like Abraham Lincoln.
Other people used to have a cow if you said “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays.” Now people protest if Starbucks drops the snowflakes from their red cups.
I just said “Happy Easter” to a cashier on Sunday. She didn’t say a word back and it occurred to me that maybe she doesn’t celebrate Easter. Neither do I, but it seemed like a nice thing to say.
Well, in fairness (and not unlike with the “nice guys” thread), it’s difficult to reach an understanding when people can’t even agree to definitions of terms.
How are we meant to reach an understanding on why some people are ‘resistant to political correctness,’ when we can’t even come to a consensus on what ‘political correctness’ is? There have been forty-six posts in this thread, and I feel like we’ve been presented with at least thirty different definitions of what the term means.
I am occasionally a member of “some people” myself.
I’ve answered this before. The annoying part of political correctness is the knee-jerk refusal to engage in any dialog about it, and instead move directly to condemnation of the violation and the violator.
Let me try with an example instead of intellectualizing about it. Let’s say it becomes politically incorrect to use the word “cunt”. The reasoning behind this is that it’s a word that has been used to insult people, and it relies on the assumed status of female people for its bite. And that’s bad, it insults all women. So therefore (concludes the party line on political correctness) it is wrong to use that word.
Then a woman who owns one of the parts in question chooses to refer to her own biological morphology using the word “cunt”. And is promptly told that she can’t do that, because she’s insulting women. And is therefore to be pitied for self-hatred, perhaps, but it’s just not to be tolerated.
What’s the offensive part of the political correctness? The rush to judgment, and the refusal to consider the possibility that the rule is not very well thought out and should not be considered applicable to this situation. Calling a person a cunt is readily understood as being offensive for the stated reasons, but to apply it to this context without at least being open to discussing whether there’s anything wrong with doing so is patently ridiculous.
Well said AHunter3. The troubling part of what I consider to be Political Correctness is the authoritarian and even fascist leaning nature of it. You have a group of people that already made up their minds that they are correct and any opposing opinions are met with hostility and sometimes even retribution if you deviate from the group-think.
If anyone thinks PC thought is all about race in America, you couldn’t be more mistaken. It manifests itself in everything from breast feeding societies for new mothers (they can be incredibly radical and eat their own so to speak) to trans-gender groups. Anti-vaccination, anti-GMO, and hard-core vegans often come out of the same mold. It all examples of the same type of behaviors that just manifested itself in different ways.
Yes, there are some idiots who think that “PC” means “Why are you preventing me from saying the N word!”. But the issue is more serious and complex than that.
Much of the conservative opposition to “political correctness” is based in the belief - true or false - that political correctness consists of censoring offensive truth - not because of its validity, but because of the fact that it makes people uncomfortable. That there would be a backlash against that sort of censorship shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Conservatives perceive - rightly or wrongly - that society is not willing to grapple with certain topics on an honest or fair footing - for instance, having students sent home from school for wearing American flag T-shirts (would someone have been banned for wearing a Japanese flag T-shirt? Bolivian? Canadian? Swedish? etc. etc.), referring to illegal immigrants as “undocumented residents” instead out of sensitivity, etc. Or whether there is scientific or statistical research done on minorities and crime, or minorities and academic performance, etc. - well, you can envision the backlash that there would be with certain publications even if they were factually true.
Incidentally, what ticks off some conservatives isn’t the censorship itself per se, as it is the perception that the standard isn’t evenly applied across all racial, gender, religious, etc. groups. There is this perception that minorities, women, Muslims, gays/lesbians, etc. will have more of a media and PC tide in their support (were such folks to come under mockery or attack) than if white folks, men, Christians, heterosexuals, etc., were to come under similar mockery or attack.
And then there’s the fact that to many people the decision to pounce upon the word ‘cunt’ and to declare that it’s an insult to all women is ridiculous, that it takes a word out of context and then ludicrously applies it to all women as an insult, and therefore its use is to be declared verboten and almost certainly marks the person who uses it as a ‘misogynist’.
People not so inclined to PC-ism may well ask, "Who the hell are you to decide to take this word out of context, attach a completely different meaning to it, attach that meaning to all women, and then assail me for using it in the way you have suddenly decided is offensive and demeaning to all women when I never meant it that way to begin with?"
The fact is that to a great many people, political correctness is all about a certain group of people taking it upon themselves to arbitrate what words or actions have what meaning, and then aggressively and hatefully insulting and attempting to demean anyone who doesn’t fall in line.
Most of other ways in which societies evolve seem to manage it without all the insults and hatred typical of political correctness. Clothing, hairstyles, language, music, etc., all change and evolve without all the sturm und drang associated with political correctness. Rather, these changes come about because people notice the trend in question and once it starts to become widespread, people find themselves beginning to adopt it themselves.
IMO, 99.9998% of political correctness has nothing to do with stopping use of the n-word or any other widely recognized and beyond the bounds insult. Instead it appears merely to be a way for people to indulge in the very strong human impulse to find some way to look down upon and criticize others.
And there’s seemingly no end to it. We’re to the point now where we’re supposed to be worrying about ‘micro-aggressions’ on college campuses and where a presidential candidate’s name written in chalk is considered threatening. And like I said before, we’re assailing people for not getting up to speed quickly enough on the correct pronoun to use for Caitlyn Jenner (who at the time said he/she didn’t even care), or getting into a snit because Kermit the Frog has a new younger girlfriend. None of these ‘offenses’ has anything to do with the n-word or a desire to be an asshole and not get called on it. Instead, they’re emblematic of the fact that it’s becoming the case that every damn thing that anyone can possibly some contort into some sort of offense must be recognized and honored, and if not then you’re some sort if ‘ist’ engaging in some sort of ‘ism’.
In short, political correctness has gone way too far. So far in fact that now many in the PC crowd are beginning to turn on their own and the country is devolving into countless groups of people with endless grievances who are all mad about something and insisting everyone else fall in line with how they think or there’s going to be trouble. The country’s more divided than it’s ever been, and because of the snarling, insulting nature of political correctness more people hate each other in this country than has ever been the case before.
It’s ludicrous!
And it’s a large part of the reason for Donald Trump’s popularity. People want to see someone in the White House who doesn’t kowtow to that nonsense, and who hopefully can serve as the standard bearer for a return to a time when everyone wasn’t offended by every damn thing under the sun.
SOME liberals think that. I’m convinced most of the SJWs do it to exert power and superiority over others.
In the following excerpts “white chauvinism” is related to “white privilege” and “racism”:
The two previous quotes are from American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957, by Joseph Starobin, then-foreign editor of the American edition of the Daily Worker.
Dorothy Healey, in California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990, U. of Illinois Press):
Healey was eventually accused of “white chauvinism” herself. She gave in to the charge because she thought the whole thing was a farce and this would end her involvement. But then she was ordered to sign a written statement, which was used against her in her later dealings with the Party.
She also writes:
Dalton Trumbo was severely criticized for “white chauvinism”. One of his sins was describing a Negro boy in one of his writings as “polished and dressed in his very best” because this implied he was “clean only on special occasions”! See Ron and Allis Radosh’s “Red Star Over Hollywood”. You can use Amazon’s “look inside”.
Nah, I don’t think that’s true. Trump was mightily offended by the use of “happy holidays” not that long ago. It’s the same partisan culture wars it’s ever been, the right wanting everyone to kowtow to their own particular brand of nonsense as the left wants theirs.
In any case, “political correctness gone mad” seems so down the list of actual, real world problems that should be tackled, that it’s a weird thing to make into a keystone issue.
I think resentment/scorn of it is much stronger than you think. It’s to the point now where it’s causing major problems and IMO is responsible for the political paralysis that so many people are fed up with. Politicians are so worried about being politically incorrect that a straight answer out of any of them is virtually impossible, so how is anyone to believe that any of them has any kind of idea how to tackle the actual, real world problems you allude to.
Time and again we see polls that indicate a major source of Trump’s popularity is his refusal to be politically correct. To me this indicates a desire to see political correctness go the way of the dodo is quite strong in the minds of many Trump voters, and very likely in the minds of other voters as well had they not been put off by other elements of Trump’s candidacy.
I think you have confirmation bias.
That’s really not the sort of thing you can’t say out loud for fear of PC-shaming. It is something (male) homosexuals themselves say.
I didn’t expect this.
Regards,
Shodan