Here is an example of what I believe is political correctness gone amuck. The idea that victimhood prevents criticism. A classic catchphrase is “blaming the victim”. Like where you have a person of a particular “oppressed” group acting foolishly and as a result of their foolishness they have a negative consequence. A rational person would say stop acting foolishly and you might end up with better results for which that rational person is attacked for “blaming the victim”.
This is worth a read:
You’ll have to point that out to me, Doug K. I have that article, “A MAD Look at Christmas,” in front of me; the only things I see in front of House Number Two are the two front steps and two snow-covered shrubs. Please tell me where the nativity scene is.
Black and white are what I use. This African American terminology sounds nonsensical to me. Name 5 countries in Africa and I’ll reconsider on an individual basis.
I mean, there’s definitely a few valid points in there, but the tone is awful and condescending. It’s honestly not much better than the hate mobs they’re describing. They’re just framing anti-trans activism as being “about free speech” or whatever by subtly implying “people who called the man out” and “the hate mob” are equivalent.
I think the real problem here is Social Media and the internet. It’s made it far, far too easy to organize, it’s made it far too easy to contact someone you don’t like (and I’m not even referring to doxxing), and even though a lot of information is available, it is very much a game of telephone played through 140 characters, trendy Facebook pages, and clickbait news aggregators.
To use a less charged example than politics, let’s take the comments sections of relatively benign videos of people playing computer games. If it’s a relatively popular person, there’s always a deluge of people saying “you’re playing it wrong, and I am angry about this for some reason. Here is my essay.” They’re usually not too confrontational, but between the small number that are rude, and the sheer volume of these comments, it’s death by a thousand cuts.
It’s one thing to be told “hey, negro is… not preferred” and another to have 65 people tweet at you “Negro isn’t preferred” per hour, HuffPo to run an article saying “politician says negro in the year 2016”, and then 30 more people start calling for you to die. Then those last 30 people start goading their edgy cool internet friends into doing it.
The thing is, those last two steps aren’t organized or even really intended for the most part. It’s just a consequence of the fact that some people, agree or disagree with them, are hateful, spiteful, mean people and you happen to have a social media account that anyone (including hateful, spiteful, mean people who disagree with you) can find and write to without going through the effort of using the postal service.
It’s not really the days anymore where there’s a headline that says “NAACP lambasts senator”, followed by maybe a few dozen letters to his office that get screened by his secretary. Nowadays “NAACP lambasts senator” can immediately be followed up on by anybody sufficiently outraged with 30 seconds to spare; whether the NAACP wants them to or not. It adds a real danger to any activism, criticism, or attempt to debate and make social changes of any form. Because any criticism people care about, if it gets any press, is going to trigger at least a small hate mob as a natural consequence.
So in short, I think “PC gone mad” shutdowns are definitely a real thing, and loud, angry people really do silence others and bully them. However, the issue here is that any real, legitimate activism on any real, legitimate issue (and certainly a few dumb issues) is going to trigger this behavior. The only real answers are “stop any activism” or “find some way to live with the inevitable bullying mobs.”
Certainly I’m not saying that it’s just a tiny number of bad people, many news outlets (even legitimate ones) bask in and feed the outrage machine. And it’s not a dumb business move. It’s just that it’s almost impossible to disentangle legitimate criticism from its natural consequence of these blogs unleashing the hordes in the rapid-fire, everything-is-connected culture we have.
Here is an example of someone from the right doing what you just describe. Organizing a swarm of harassers to punish. The left calls it “consequences” and believes it’s entirely appropriate. Clear thinking people should be worried.
Did I ever say it was appropriate? No, individual people who do this, especially doxxing, should be punished for this. Both legally and on the sites they post on. It’s never appropriate. That doesn’t change that it’s still a consequence of how fast inflammatory headlines spread, and how easy it is to contact the people involved.
I didn’t mean that you personally think it’s appropriate but the overwhelming number of PC zealots are leftists and they do support people being “consequenced.” With regards to punishment what crime is being committed when one doxxes?
I agree… my first real experience with serious political correctness was when I was an RA in college, starting in about 1993.
Our training was about 40% actual “how to be an RA” type stuff, and about 60% indoctrination on diversity and sensitivity. Some of that kind of thing makes sense, considering that we were on a overwhelmingly white campus, but where I balked was at the LGBT type indoctrination. It wasn’t of the “Here’s how you have to behave with respect to LGBT people in the performance of your job as a representative of the university”, but rather in the “If you don’t think these things, or believe this way, your tolerance isn’t “fully developed”” or some such nonsense. They literally had a Bloom’s Taxonomy-esque toleration scale that they’d have us evaluate our LGBT/diversity tolerance on, and then tell us that we should be striving for the final stage of acceptance and celebration.
It wasn’t my personal LGBT opinions that made me balk, but rather the idea that a job was literally telling me how they believed I should think and telling me that there was basically something wrong with me if I didn’t think that way. The funny thing is that I wasn’t even homophobic; I worked for a super-gay flower shop the summer before, with both gay men and women who I really liked.
I just didn’t appreciate being told how to think, and that there was something wrong with me if I didn’t think their way, even if in reality, I wasn’t their target audience (the redneck hyper-Christians).
Exactly - and I’d suggest that You Must Be More Tolerant Than Everyone Else approach does quite a bit of damage to legimate causes (like ensuring members of the gay/lesbian communtiy get treated the same as everyone else).
I’ve often wondered about the same thing. There was a series of incidents in Halifax a fear years ago in which female university students encountered a man in their bedrooms in the middle of the night (I don’t recall if there were any assaults). As it turned out some of them lived in ground floor apartments and didn’t lock their windows. People who remarked on that were accused of blaming the victims.
A related issue is that of victims (survivors) having subject matter expertise suddenly bestowed upon them. If being a survivor spurs you on to doing serious research and actually becoming an expert, great. But being a survivor of something, by itself, should not give your word extra weight in related policy discussions.
I’m an engineer and I have a knack for precision. If a word is precise, I don’t really give a shit if it offends anyone. Of course I’m capable of metaphoric speech; “give a shit” is an example of something that may offend the religious-right, and it’s not strictly precise (well, strictly it is precise; I wouldn’t give a shit), but your religious-right sensibilities aren’t shared by the majority so I won’t tip-toe around such usage.
Their perspectives ought to have more weight than those of people who have neither personal experience nor serious research to draw on, yes?
I want to add that I wouldn’t have had a problem at all had the LGBT instruction been along the lines of the “As a representative and employee of the University in the job of Resident Advisor, you are hereby requested and required to treat all students in your Residence Hall with respect, dignity and fairness, and not to discriminate or behave differently according to race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, etc… blah, blah blah, ad nauseam” and then given us concrete examples of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors as an RA in those situations.
In other words, literal job training for how the university expected us to behave as RAs.
That way there wasn’t a question of belief; it was merely a set of job performance expectations and whether or not your job performance was adequate with respect to those expectations.
Instead, we got indoctrination, and independent of our actual performance, we were basically told to think a particular way, and told we were “undeveloped” or one of any number of other ways that we were wrong for not agreeing or merely not jumping on their bandwagon. Very little tolerance or room for “Well, I don’t agree, but as an employee, I’ll follow your rules.”, which should have been as far as it went in the first place.
THAT is why I have a problem with political correctness some of the time. It’s not necessarily about how you behave; sometimes it’s about how you think, and there’s no room for dissent or differing opinions. It’s not about not saying racist, bigoted or hateful things, it’s about saying exactly what the groupthink dictates you should say.
So to use a hypothetical extreme example, a 95 year old lady who uses the term “Negro” is somehow racist and wrong because she didn’t say “Black” or “African American”, despite that for a lady of that age, using the term “Negro” was, and probably is a sign that she WAS trying to be polite and respectful by not calling them “colored” or “nigger”.
But not toeing the line exactly as the PC crowd would like is the crime here, not the term she used, or any ill intent behind it. She used the term that she likely recalls as being polite and respectful, and is pilloried for not being up to date on what the current term is.
Several of us have mentioned being blindsided by the use of the term “Oriental” shifting rather rapidly in the 1990s. Same situation, younger people.
Or to go really extreme, what if I, as a fat man, decide that I’m offended by the term “fat” and that I want to be called “calorically challenged”? Should I get to make that choice? Is it absurd for me to expect others to toe that line?
You would be “avoirdupoisly challenged” or “a person of lipid”.
“calorically challenged” would be a skinny person.
“Avoirdupoisly challenged…”
never say in one syllable what you can say in seven.
After all, you want to sound important and erudite, in order to impress the uninitiated.
Even if you aren’t. It’s a helpful phoniness. :rolleyes:
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” --Shakespeare
I play Marvel Heroes with a Spanish-language guild. The game is translated to Spanish, for very low quality definitions of translated: Spanish is a language which the company behind the game recognizes exists, and there is a social channel that’s specifically set aside for Spanish as well as a section of the forums that’s in Spanish.
The language filter used to asterisk “negro” but apparently someone realized that means black in Spanish, so now it doesn’t get asterisked. Negra still does, in a game including among its characters Pantera Negra (Black Panther), la Gata Negra (Black Cat) and la Viuda Negra (Black Widow). There’s currently no characters whose name include the word Negro (the only well-known Marvel character I can think of with that in the name is Rayo Negro, Black Bolt). So… the word we’re unlikely to use is accepted and the version that’s part of the code isn’t, because it’s offensive to those who are not likely to use or recognize it at all, or even to be in the channels in which it will be used.
It’s a silly thing (few things get more silly than forced censorship in a video game), but it’s a sample of the kind of things that once you encounter them enough times make many people become wary when hearing “politically correct”.
Person of poundage?
I like that one!
But let’s say I was serious. Would that even be a valid thing to gripe about and get onto other people about?
And if you say yes, would it be reasonable in 10 years for me to change my tune and say that I’d rather be called a “corpulent chap”, and get onto you for not keeping up, even if you’re trying to be nice and call me a “person of poundage” rather than a fat guy?
Target no longer sells Christmas Trees? Maybe someone should notify Target of this decision!
It’s right there, in the URL and at the top of the page “Christmas Trees”. In addition, I randomly clicked on the “8.5ft Pre-Lit Wintergreen Fir Artificial…” product and sure enough the rest of the product description says “…Christmas Tree.”
Maybe the clerks look down or appear awkward in response to you wishing them Merry Christmas because you are associating a large persecution complex within those two simple words. I’d give you an awkward look too.