So they were indeed. But we now have female tool vendors. The universe is surely coming to an end. 
This. Post of the thread.
I’ve got a great example of someone who has in fact pledged to insist that people use one of these phrases, and to chastise them for using the other:
Weird. Not a liberal.
How he plans to enforce such a thing, I have no idea. Maybe he should just realize that the world is not perfect, it’s not the way he wants it to be and it never will be, and that he’s been blessed from birth with a quality called coping ability, which will allow him to function and even live happily in such a world, filled with those who believe other than he does nonetheless, and that it isn’t incumbent upon the rest of the world to comport itself so that the tender sensibilities he may or may not have shall not be offended, and to recognize that in fact to take such offense is ridiculous.
A few years ago, someone related the story of a woman who objected to an illustration of Confederate soldiers. Her reason? The soldiers were depicted as holding a…Confederate flag.
Because in significant part ‘political correctness’ is whatever the offenderati - those who enjoy being offended and look for opportunities to be so - say it is. They can also be rather aggressive about it, which irritates people.
My six year old and my four year old get to watch a movie on Saturday afternoon. They trade weeks over who gets to choose the movie. The six year old picked Harry Potter, and the four year old (understandably) informed us that it was too scary. So, we told the six year old to pick a different movie. The system worked.
Except, now the four year old claims “It’s too scary” for every movie that he doesn’t want to watch. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cartoon movie that he’s seen 100 times and he clearly isn’t scared of it. He will find something about it to claim to be scared of in order to get his way.
Nobody was actually scared by “Trump 2016” in chalk at Emory, to use a recent example. But, they pretended to be and they got concessions and attention, and human nature being what it is, will do the same thing again next time because it worked. The point is that there are certainly legitimate issues, but sometimes there are a lot of people acting like four year olds.
Every year here in the People’s Republic of China, I see quite a lot of signs and other displays with “Merry Christmas” on them. Perhaps instead of inspiring others to move to a communist country, Trump could move to one himself if he’s all that worked up about people not saying “Merry Christmas”.
But, please, let it be a different communist country than this one!
Isolated? Hardly. Those were all widespread, mainstream beliefs and attitudes.
Nope, nope, nope. Seriously, I know you’re found of ridiculous, historically ignorant claims, but this is just silly. People getting snotty at you because you still use “colored people” is not a national emergency. It is the smallest of small potatoes.
Ha, no. Nobody on the left cares about this issue at all. The “controversy” here is completely manufactured. Say “Merry Christmas” all you want. Nobody gives a shit.
merest of anecdotes, to be certain, but I for one have been chastised for saying Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays by some asswipe I wasn’t even aware was in the room. I was meeting my wife at doctors office and we were in the waiting room(she arrived a few minutes before me) when we exchanged greetings with each other.
general bit of advice for all expectant or hopeful parents-to-be; never call the Favored Niece of your OB/GYN a waste of skin or oxygen thief, at least not in a single sentence.
No, you’re getting the information you wanted. This is how some people view “political correctness”, which, remember, started as a joke progressive told about themselves.
(But where they meet all these people who get nasty about “Merry Christmas” is a mystery to me … unless they’re the same people who snap “Jesus is the reason for the season” at me when I wish them Happy Holidays.)
And, as I pointed out before, what people typically decry as political correctness is closer to the former. The latter is actually quite rare. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, what appears to be the former turns out to be the latter if you just take the time to try and understand why someone is upset rather than assume they must be just “looking to be offended.” Even if you disagree, there’s still a point in there.
The last time I remember a genuine example of “PC gone amok” on this board was the one about calling yoga cultural appropriation. It was people using the term as a buzzword without actually knowing what it means. Yoga was shared with the rest of the world. It was ridiculous for a college to shut down a yoga class over it.
The other times I remember either made sense if you tried to understand, or were exaggerations made by people’s opponents. Despite popular belief, people don’t actually enjoy being outraged. They always have their reasons that things bother them–even if you disagree with them.
Hell, there’s a site I know right now that bans the words “crazy” and “lame” except in quotes, where you have to bowdlerize them and include a trigger warning. PC run amok? Nope. They have their points, even though I disagree.
Exactly. Positive reinforcement.
What speech should be restricted? Who should restrict it and what should the punishment for a violation be?
What if it is decided that it is your speech that should be restricted?
Slee
Then why do you spend most of the rest of your post acting like it’s a problem? If you want to be civil, not use ethnic slurs or slang instead of non-insulting terms, then you’re going to have to sit up and pay attention to what is insulting so you don’t say them. Slang changes. What people use to attack people for being of a particular minority changes–so ethnic slurs change. What people use to insult one another changes.
There are no unannounced changes. There may be changes you didn’t hear about. But, if they were unannounced, how did the progressives hear about them?
When someone gets offended by something you say, the best thing you can do if you really don’t want to offend them is to apologize and take what they say to heart.
I did want to leave it at that, but I have to briefly address the rape issue. You do realize the meaning of what you said, right? You just said that women should not dress provocatively or get high or drunk if they don’t want to get raped. Otherwise, what is the reason to point out that information? Other than not doing those things, how is that information supposed to help?
That’s the issue. Thinking about how what you say affects others.
Seeing as he was talking about what is already happening in the real world:
Speech that serves no purpose but to offend. Society itself restricts it, and the punishment is social ostracization.
And I either stop offending people, or I get ostracized. Seeing as I’ve made it 31 years without a problem, I’m not too worried.
And why is that supposed to mean that you stop trying not to hurt others and instead put productivity first?
You did just nail the issue, though. Priorities. You don’t see the moral imperative as trying to increase net happiness. You see productivity as a main goal. Making money and doing things.
I would gladly be a less productive business to make happy employees. You wouldn’t. I see the music thing as a win. You see it as a loss. I see a clear answer to the gay vs religion situation: religious person is a bigot, and thus doesn’t get what he wants. And I see no reason to put up a girlie calendar at work where you only get the calendar function out of it.
Then the religious person is unhappy. How does that square with your desire to have “happy employees” as you stated?
Why? There is something wrong with it. The woman is selfish, and wants to use a bad word, and is coming up with an excuse to use it, when practically any other word would do. Words have meanings, and she’s directing a particularly nasty word at her kid. She is choosing to communicate hatred towards said kid.
And, yes, that’s just picking apart your example, rather than your point. But, the problem is, for every example you could come up with, there are encyclopedias of reasoning behind the position and why it is always wrong.
Take your same statement. Replace “cunt” with “nigger.” I’m a mom, and that’s what I want to call my son. Are you really saying that people should just accept that? And not think that I’m greatly insulting my son and that I have a problem with black people?
And I promise this is my last post, as I don’t want to overdo this. I have a lot to say about this stuff, as I hang out on Reddit where you see what happens if you let anti-PC stuff spread.
No, they’re not even close to being as widespread and mainstream as are the attitudes aligning to foist politically correct practices and beliefs upon the country these days, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, virtually all of the country’s entertainment media, its educational system, and liberals of many and varied stripes all agitating on behalf of an apparently unlimited number of grievances.
I knew, I absolutely knew, someone would try to bring up the Civil War as an example of the country being at each other’s throats, so congratulations on fulfilling that premonition, I guess.
However, as violent and awful as it was, pitting brother against brother, etc., it still falls far short of the pervasiveness with which political correctness is pitting various groups of people against each other these days. During the Civil War, most people had a position on who was right and who was wrong in regard to slavery and the right of the south to secede. But they weren’t being assailed from every direction by whingebags of every stripe agitating over an unlimited number of social grievances like they are today.
As far as Selma, Alabama and other locations where civil rights protests took place, 99% of the country were removed from them and while everyone almost certainly had their own ideas as to how right or wrong the civil rights movement may have been, they still weren’t at each other’s throats about it. And as far as the shootings at Kent State are concerned, they were nothing more than the result of young, poorly trained national guardsmen panicking in the face of what they believed to be an oncoming attack by a crowd of protestors. And once again, 99% of the country was removed from it in terms of having to contend daily with agitation and aggressiveness on the part of others like they do today.
Most of the claims I’ve made that people like you find historically ignorant are based upon ignorance of your own which follows in the wake of history revisionism perpetrated by those whose ideology benefits by it. I was there and know better first hand how things have been exaggerated and blown out of proportion, and presented with a deliberate slant intended to foster erroneous beliefs about the past so as to create the impression that everything sucked then (and, amusingly, to excuse the many negative societal problems that have blossomed ever since).
But be that as it may, no one ever got “snotty” with me for “still using” colored-people. But I have seen other people assailed aggressively and hatefully for being racists when they’ve used the term themselves in complete ignorance of the fact that this once polite and considerate term had suddenly and mysteriously become insulting, just like I’ve seen people hatefully called sexist because they dared to contest some impassioned feminist’s declaration that any woman could perform any man’s job. Men are capable of some things women aren’t capable of, and women are capable of some things men aren’t capable of. But to take the position that both sexes are equal in every way is just silly, yet at one time political correctness insisted that we claim it so on pain of betraying our innate sexism.
Still, these are only examples to illustrate a point. If political correctness involved only using proper terms for different racial groups and support for things like equal pay for equal work and expanded job opportunities for women, there’d be little problem with it. But it’s become the case that far too many people in this country feel free to jump all over someone else over virtually any and every real or perceived slight or offense they can think of.
And enough people are pissed off about it that it plays a large role in the fact that Donald Trump is about to become the Republican nominee for the presidency.
Nobody on the left cares about it at all, huh? Then why has it come verboten over the last few years for employees to be instructed not to say Merry Christmas but to wish Happy Holidays instead? Why are companies like Target no longer having Christmas sales or selling Christmas trees, having “Holiday Sales” and selling “Holiday Trees” instead? And why have I been met with hard looks or downcast eyes on occasion when wishing some of these companies’ younger (i.e., classroom indoctrinated) employees Merry Christmas?
The putative answer, as has been voiced at times on this very board and by the companies themselves when challenged on it, is that Happy Holidays is being promoted as being more inclusive of those whose religion is something other than Christian but who also celebrate their religion at the same seasonal time of year. (This is also the claim that has been put forth by Starbucks in defense of its decision to remove reindeer and other winter/Christmasey symbols from its coffee cups.) Unfortunately for this argument there doesn’t seem to be much record of Jewish people or those who celebrate Kwanzaa rushing out during the holiday season to buy huge numbers of gifts for their families or Pine trees for their respective celebrations.
As I said though, that’s the putative reason. The real reason is that a significant portion of the country’s liberal contingent is seeking to drive Christianity behind closed doors and to remove as much of it as possible from public view, seeking instead to make the country’s public face as secular as is possible.
You have no right to demand that other people use greeting that doesn’t offend you. That is what political correctness is. A private company is free to use any greeting they want, and you are free to shop elsewhere. Nothing is being foisted on anyone, unless it is you demanding that others conform to your religion.