• Ilya B Shambat
    194
    The proponents of political correctness like to portray anyone who takes objection to political correctness as a bigot or a neanderthal. Any expression containing even a hint of anger brings on that response. I am responding now to political correctness in a manner that is fully reasoned and that cannot be portrayed credibly as any such thing.

    Political correctness not only fails to achieve its stated goals of tolerance and respect; it prevents them from being made possible at all. In order to actually respect or tolerate the next person I need to understand their perspective. For me to do so the next person will have to be able to tell me their honest opinions however offensive these may be. And if the next person cannot tell me their honest opinions because someone may find them offensive, then I will never understand the next person's perspective, and I would not know whether or not to extend to that person actual tolerance or actual respect.

    What is achieved this way is nothing close to tolerance or respect. What is achieved this way is suffocating insincerity. And insincerity is a horrible thing to inflict upon a population. It makes Americans look to everyone else like scammers. Even I, who have fought this state of affairs ever since I knew what it was, could not escape this stereotype when I went to Australia.

    Now there have been many arguments by conservatives that 1960s and 1970s liberalism degraded national character. Political correctness does that much more. People having sex and doing drugs does not necessarily make people worse human beings. Being taught to be insincere, however, very much does make people worse human beings. And that degrades national character for real.

    Before political correctness in America, there were similar attitudes in Japan. According to their beliefs you get what you send out; so you cannot say or even think anything negative. But there are many situations in which you do have to say things that are negative. When a nuclear reactor explodes you have to tell people what actually has taken place. Doing anything else is not enlightenment, it is lying.

    Similar themes have been tried in a fair country formerly known as Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was widely regarded as a civilized country, indeed the best country in the Communist bloc. The government preached something similar to political correctness, and it made sure that people conformed to it. Because people were not allowed to express their feelings, they could not move beyond their suppressed ethnic hatreds, which is what they had been feeling all along. The fair country called Yugoslavia was replaced with mass graves and rapes of every female aged 4 to 70. This was not accidental; it was a logical outcome of the politically correct policies that the Tito government had put into place.

    I am from Russia, and Russians are generally regarded as the rudest people in the world. I have encountered in any number of places – especially the American South – the attitude that politeness is the same thing as respect; but a credible case can be made that rudeness is actually more respectable than politeness. When you are rude I know where you are standing, whereas when you are polite I am left guessing. If you think that Russians, or Jews, or myself personally, are evil, then I would rather hear that than to see you pretending to be nice to me while waiting to stab me in the back. That way I know what I am dealing with, and I can find workable ways to deal with it.

    Now I do not necessarily advocate unchecked rudeness, as that can be off-putting to people and often deter useful input. But that outcome is far more reliably accomplished by the attitude that no opinion that anyone can consider offensive should be expressed. The outcome of the preceding, once again, is nothing close to tolerance or respect. The outcome of the preceding is suffocating insincerity. And that, once again, is very bad for the country. It makes everyone dishonest, and as such it degrades national character.

    Besides, once again, making all but impossible its stated goals of achieving tolerance and respect.

    Of course the participants in political correctness do not begin to follow their own stated claims of respect or tolerance. I have been viciously misrepresented by these people as everything that I am not. A sociopath, a racist, a misogynist, you name it. I have even been slandered ridiculously as a pedophile. Yet very few of these people have done anything to help women at the receiving end of real abuses such as severe brutality, death threats or corrupt courts taking away their children. Very few of these people have maintained close, lasting, serious friendships with people who were black, or people who were poor, or people who are socially ostracized. Very few of these people have done anything to confront real misogyny such as that of Eminem or Michael Murphy. I have done all of the above.

    The same people who call themselves feminists have been abetting the most viciously misogynistic ideology on the planet – Jihadist Islam. The same people who call themselves feminists have been excusing inner city thugs in their crimes against women. Of course they do not see the outcome of their policies; however the people who fund them and vote for them do.

    At this point the participants in this abominable movement will want to portray me as a dangerous person. I certainly hope to be dangerous to them; I hope that more people be dangerous to them, both on the Left and the Right. These people have inflicted a very real form of fascism upon countries that are intended to be free; and if America's founders were alive today they would see them for how gravely they have violated the constitutional intent.

    As well as, once again, degrading the national character.

    As well as, once again, making all but impossible their own stated goals of tolerance and respect.

    I have close friendships with a number of classical liberals, including some with major personal achievements, and none of them have any use for political correctness. One statement I've heard from a young Jewish lady is that political correctness is an embarrassment to liberalism; and that it is indeed. Liberalism was never meant to be the same thing as fascism, and liberalism was never meant to be the same thing as forced insincerity.

    A person who actually seeks to achieve things such as respect and tolerance will not be telling people to not say anything that somebody may consider offensive. He will allow people to say exactly what they are feeling and thinking, however offensive these things may be. Then people will understand one another's actual perspectives; and then they will know whether or not to tolerate or respect one another.

    Political correctness makes this outcome impossible. And that means that it is the biggest thing that stands in the way of the commendable goal of achieving tolerance and respect.
  • Sir2u
    3.2k
    Kids are taught to lie in school,
    When someone says "Good morning, how are you today?" you will reply "I'm very well thank you"

    My bosses get pissed of at me because I refuse to participate in the ritual of replying "excellent" when someone asks how I am. I have told them that 1) I am not a hypocrite and 2) I will not try to convince myself that I am excellent when I feel crappy as they seem to be trying to do.

    People, including little kids, are being told that they should accept everyone as an equal without it being explained to them how that is possible when they are obviously nothing alike.

    Boys and girls are not the same, even though common sense says they should be treated the same and have the same rights. Political correctness seems to want to go beyond common sense and eliminate any and all differences between them. I believe that this is one of the reasons why so many kids nowadays are confused about whether they are boys or girls.

    There are lots of examples of political correctness causing people to lose instead of gain because some people are getting jobs they don't deserve just because of their color or religion.

    One thing that is sure to happen is the death of comedy, no one will be able to tell jokes some without someone saying they are offended. Even slapstick will suffer because someone will claim that it is incorrect to laugh because they might actually hurt themselves when falling down even though they do it deliberately.
  • wax
    301
    yes I seem to agree with everything in both these posts.

    Political correctness seems to disable the ability for real dialogue, for real dialects to take place, and I do believe that dialect processes are really the only way for society to mature.
  • wax
    301
    one of the things about the dialectic process is that it might; it just might, make you look bad...it might lead to someone expressing all sorts of opinions that maybe they have tried to hide most of their lives.
    This must be a real fear for some people.
    They might have gone through life trying to create one impression of themselves or another, and the dialectic process might completely blow all that away.
    I think this is partly what motivate some people to support and promote 'political correctness'...

    I realise that there are other motivations eg that some ideas, if gone unchecked, could lead to a very bad outcome, but if I use my first argument about dialectics, this is exactly what happens when political correctness itself goes on unchecked.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    What would a psychologist say about political correctness? Are discriminated people in denial and suffering from an inferiority complex or are those who discriminate on the basis of race, wealth, etc are themselves suffering from disorder of personality?

    I guess you're comparing insincerity with political correctness and I agree but those who advocate political correctness are comparing it with chaos (riots, etc.)
  • wax
    301
    sorry, another point...

    If on asks the question, 'is it ok to challenge a system A?,' and people's answer is 'no, it is not ok to challenge system A, because system A doesn't approve, or it violates system A's way of behaving, in some way'.

    In this kind of argument, you can set A as anything you want....that to me seems pretty dangerous
  • andrewk
    2.1k
    One person's political correctness is another's basic good manners.

    You will need to be more specific about what form of political correctness you object to - giving examples - if a useful discussion is to occur.
  • aporiap
    223
    I think you have to be careful with this. You mention in OP that unchecked rudeness is not what you advocate, but I've seen it all too often, in social circles where PC is devalued, that this enables -at the very least- non-constructive criticism and gross, blatant stereotyping. Sure, you get the honesty in those circles, but you do not get the respect. Let me be clear that I'm not in defense of political correctness, but I disagree that you can simply just attack it without providing an alternative etiquette for expressing plainly honest beliefs. I think there's a way to promote that or perhaps enable it after setting the context for potentially stinging statements. Maybe its enough to reiterate the importance of giving honest opinion or maybe the rule is PC in certain contexts - work place, sensitive social gatherings [funerals] - and non-PC in others. The point is you should offer an alternative
  • Ilya B Shambat
    194
    Interesting. I suppose the etiquette that I would advocate is being honest. If someone expresses an offensive view, then the correct response is to refute it rather than try to censor it. Generally the gross stereotyping of which you speak is wrong and can be refuted. However artificial blindness is not the solution. Artificial blindness and bigotry feed into one another. A man notices a social phenomenon and proposes a typically false explanation; the academic says "this is a stereotype" or "this is a generalization," the man looks at it again and says that it is definitely going on, so he decides that the academic is full of crap and goes on with his bigoted explanation. The real way to deal with this is to realize that, if something exists at a rate greater than chance, then there must be a reason for it, although it is usually not the reason that you expect. So the generalizations and stereotypes should be used as grounds for further research to find an actual explanation.
  • ssu
    7.9k
    I am from Russia, and Russians are generally regarded as the rudest people in the world.Ilya B Shambat
    Who thinks so? As a Finn I think Russians are quite friendly people. And if you are a guest of a Russian, you are treated extremely well. The Russians I've met have never been arrogant or condescending.

    The basic problem with some people like (Americans and the British) is that they simply don't understand Russians. They far too easily relate the Russian people with the (present) political system in Russia at the time and think somehow the people are quite the same as the system. Hence typically how Soviet (Russian) people were depicted in the West in films or books was quite a superficial actually incorrect stereotype.

    But to the OP. The antidote for political correctness is plain and simple good manners. When talking about political correctness, the problem lies on the political aspect of it: it's only political, it's just in the present political climate correct. It's something that can change. And what makes it political is the political nature of the issue, where there are obviously many different viewpoints. You don't relate the correctness in political correctness to basic moral values that are quite apolitical.

    Simply put it, being nice and respecting others isn't a sign of hypocrisy, just as being rude isn't a sign of honesty.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    Political correctness not only fails to achieve its stated goals of tolerance and respect;Ilya B Shambat

    The goals are bogus anyway. No one is required to like anyone else or what they do, and no one is required to respect anyone else. If you want respect from someone, earn it.

    PC is the "participation trophy" mentality applied to tolerance and respect.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    "A bore is someone who, when you ask him how he is, tells you."

    Because such ritual questions and responses are not to be understood literally, but as signs of social recognition and inclusion. They negate the implicit threat of proximity rather than invite an exchange of personal history. "Take your self-righteous honesty and stick it where the sun don't shine, wankers!" he helpfully explains.
  • wax
    301


    this may be ok if you feel fair to middling, but if you are really going through a bad time then saying 'I feel excellent!', might feel like lying...'oh yea, most of the people I care about just died in a plane crash, but I FEEL EXCELLENT!'. ... :)
  • wax
    301
    But to the OP. The antidote for political correctness is plain and simple good manners. When talking about political correctness, the problem lies on the political aspect of it: it's only political, it's just in the present political climate correct.ssu

    I sort of see it the other way around; good manners is a subset of political correctness; it's just a kind of aspect of how it might present.

    If something were just about good manners, then it should have its own description....like 'social pragmatism', or something.

    People often defend political correctness with the reference to good manners, and just behaving in a pleasant/reasonable manner etc...but that is like defending Mussolini's actions by saying something like 'he always made sure that his guests were well catered for, when they visited him', as a defence for his other actions.
    Sure looking after your guests is a good thing, and can't really be argued with.. ..but that was(I assume) just a subset of his broader activities.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    'Excellent' is also the WRONG answer. The mistake is to think when I say 'how are you?', I am asking how you are. I'm not, and I don't want to know how you are. I'm reassuring you that I'm not about to assault you, and the RIGHT response is for you to give me the same assurance in turn, by saying, 'Fine, how are you?'. I then say 'Great.', and we're done, and no one has been injured. Then and only then, you can tentatively presume on our acquaintance to the extent of mentioning that your dog just died and you have been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and if I don't give a shit I'll say 'Hard luck old man, you know, if there's anything I can do...', and And if I do give a shit, I'll say, 'let's go for a drink after work.'

    Why is it philosophers don't know what anything means?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    The mistake is to think when I say 'how are you?', I am asking how you are. I'm not, and I don't want to know how you are.unenlightened

    Hmm . . . with the people I say this to, I actually want to know how they are. I just figure that if they don't detail anything, they're par for their course.
  • wax
    301
    'Excellent' is also the WRONG answer.unenlightened

    but I think the answer 'excellent' was mentioned up thread a few posts back.

    I don't know if some work environments expect that kind of response from people, but as you say it is pushing things too far, beyond the realm of etiquette, and more into the realm of social control.

    I agree that the interaction you suggest seem fine...it's not too hard to say, ok', or 'fine'(pushing it a bit), and there is always the reply 'not too bad'...which is one of the options within etiquette, yet also states, in a potentially literal way, that the person does feel bad, but not too much...
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    What I'm saying in general is that political correctness isn't an ideological innovation, it's about avoiding fights. People who assert the right to say all the horrible things that naturally pop into one's head through the frictions of life, are asserting the right to get their heads kicked in by the people they enrage. If people value honesty over a peaceful neighbourhood, they're liable to get what they want.

    But usually they don't like being called out themselves as aggressive morons unfit for civilisation, but expect others to be polite to them. This is the foolishness of political incorrectness.
  • wax
    301


    But people who criticism the promotion of political correctness in its present form, aren't usually advocating that people should have the right to say 'all the horrible things that naturally pop into their heads through the frictions in their lives'...so that line of defence of political correctness is a bit of a strawman.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    But people who criticism the promotion of political correctness in its present form, aren't usually advocating that people should have the right to say 'all the horrible things that naturally pop into their heads through the frictions in their lives'wax

    You may be right, or it may be that two straw men are burning each other. What really is political correctness and what do its critics criticise? This?

    The proponents of political correctness like to portray anyone who takes objection to political correctness as a bigot or a neanderthal. Any expression containing even a hint of anger brings on that response.Ilya B Shambat
  • wax
    301
    What really is political correctness and what do its critics criticise? This?unenlightened

    well there is no central control of what the term 'political correctness' means, it is just used a lot and people associate the meaning by how they hear it used.

    A lot of the time it seems to be used in the context of a type of authoritarian attempt to control how people express themselves, or behave. It is a top down approach of control, with no official body at the top. Anyone can criticise anyone under the banner of political correctness...its effect often seems to be to stifle debate and behaviour without any recourse for appeal.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    Well there you have it. Authoritarians with no authority, you can't get more straw of a man than that. That is to say anyone who wants to make accusations of political correctness is a proponent of political correctness, trying to control the debate.
  • Fooloso4
    5.4k
    Would you like freedom fries with this? PC is not just a left wing abuse.

    See the Disinvitation Database compiled by the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):
    [url=http://]https://www.thefire.org/resources/disin ... -database/[/url]

    It list speakers from both the right and the left who have been disrupted or disinvited.

    According to a FIRE report from February, although a majority of disinvitation attempts come from the left against the right, a greater proportion of attempts to shut down speakers are successful when they come from the right than from the left — 55 percent versus 33 percent. The sheer quantity of attempts to limit speech on campus would suggest that left-wing political correctness is more prevalent, but right-wing PC is more effective.

    At issue here is not whether you agree with any of these positions. At issue, rather, is that while we assume the most dangerous thing you can say on a college campus is something like "There’s no such thing as rape culture," the consequences of doing so — of defying left-wing political correctness — pale in comparison to what happens when someone says something like mass shootings are perpetuated by "the white supremacist patriarchy." At Drexel University, George Ciccariello-Maher was placed on leave after receiving death threats, and eventually driven to resign, for saying exactly that.
    ([url=http://]https://www.chronicle.com/article/Poli ... un/242143[/url])
    Conservatives were completely outraged last week after "Saturday Night Live" cast member Pete Davidson mocked then-candidate — now Congressman-elect — Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) for wearing an eye patch as the result of an injury he sustained as a military service member.
    The National Republican Congression Committee condemned the joke, saying: "Pete Davidson and NBC should immediately apologize to Dan, and to the millions of veterans and military families who tune in every weekend — because they're not laughing." Fox News' Laura Ingraham lashed out, saying of Davidson on Twitter: "How long do you think this 'comic' & the writer responsible for this disgrace would last in @us_navyseals training?"



    Trump has frequently demonized NFL players who kneel during the national anthem — which is a quintessential example of trying to enforce a certain form of "political correctness."
    [url=http://]https://www.salon.com/2018/11/14/politi ... t_partner/[/url]
    But a data analysis from March by the director of Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project suggests that this “crisis” is more than a little overblown. There have been relatively few incidents of speech being squelched on college campuses, and there’s in fact limited evidence that conservatives are being unfairly targeted.

    ...

    The raw numbers here should already raise questions about the so-called political correctness epidemic. According to the Department of Education, there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (including two- and four-year institutions). The fact that there were roughly only 60 incidents in the past two years suggests that free speech crises are extremely rare events and don’t define university life in the way that critics suggest.

    Moreover, there’s a consistent pattern in the data when it comes to conservatives — one that tells a different story than you hear among free speech panickers.

    “Most of the incidents where presumptively conservative speech has been interrupted or squelched in the last two or three years seem to involve the same few speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter ,” Sanford Ungar, the project’s director, writes. “In some instances, they seem to invite, and delight in, disruption.”

    What Ungar is suggesting here is that the “campus free speech” crisis is somewhat manufactured. Conservative student groups invite speakers famous for offensive and racially charged speech — all of the above speakers fit that bill — in a deliberate attempt to provoke the campus left. In other words, they’re trolling. When students react by protesting or disrupting the event, the conservatives use it as proof that there’s real intolerance for conservative ideas.

    The other key thing that emerges from the Georgetown data, according to Ungar, is that these protests and disruptions don’t just target the right. “Our data also include many incidents, generally less well-publicized, where lower-profile scholars, speakers, or students who could be considered to be on the left have been silenced or shut down,” he writes.

    Examples include Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s commencement speech being canceled after receiving death threats for criticizing President Donald Trump and the president of Sonoma State University apologizing for allowing a black student to read a poem critical of police violence at commencement.

    ...

    Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Canada’s Acadia University, put together a database of all incidents where a professor was dismissed for political speech in the United States between 2015 and 2017. Sachs’s results, published by the left-libertarian Niskanen Center, actually found that left-wing professors were more frequently dismissed for their speech than conservative ones:

    ...

    Some campus free speech critics, I suspect, aren’t operating in good faith. For them, the entire debate is a way to attack universities as hopelessly and dangerously liberal — to undermine higher education for nakedly partisan reasons.

    Indeed, four Republican-controlled state governments have set up new rules for political speech in public universities in response to concerns about free speech. At least seven other state legislatures are considering doing the same, efforts that the New York Times reports are “funded in part by big-money Republican donors” in a “growing and well-organized campaign that has put academia squarely in the crosshairs of the American right.”
    [url=http://]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... georgetown[/url]


    Most right-wing critiques ... are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.



    At Texas A&M, Tommy Curry, a black professor, was driven from his home with his family after his controversial remarks on violence and race drew the attention of American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher; singling out left-wing college professors is a frequent source of content at Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick cannot find employment in the the National Football League after his protests against police brutality. A police union in St. Louis urged members to bombard a local store owner with calls, after he accused some officers of misconduct, one of several recent examples of police unions attempting to intimidate critics. Black Lives Matter activists protesting the lack of accountability in lethal shootings of black men by police are routinely attacked as terrorists.



    During the debate over the Iraq War, the Republican chairman of the House Administration committee was so triggered by French opposition to the ill-fated invasion of Iraq that he directed the cafeteria menus to substitute “Freedom Toast” and “Freedom Fries;” his Democratic colleague Barbara Lee, who voted against the war, received boxes of letters calling her un-American, treasonous, and far worse. In the years following that conflict, liberal and left-wing critics of the war were frequently called treasonous; in 2006, President George W. Bush told campaign crowds that “the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses.”


    GOP lawmakers have used the state to restrict speech, such as barring doctors from raising abortion or guns with patients, opposition to the construction of Muslim religious buildings, and attempts to stifle anti-Israel activism.



    Trump’s threat to tax Amazon because its owner Jeff Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post, which has published coverage critical of the president; the White House’s demands that ESPN fire Jemele Hill, a black on-air host who called the president a white supremacist; and Trump’s attempt to chill press criticism by naming the media an “enemy of the people” have all drawn cheers from some conservative commentators.
    [url=http://]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... es/541050/[/url]



    Some history of the use of the term:
    Until the late 1980s, “political correctness” was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy.



    But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement, “political correctness” became a talking point for neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American universities and cultural institutions – and they were determined to stop it.



    In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and D’Souza were funded by networks of conservative donors – particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families – who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new “counter-intelligentsia”.



    PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. “Political correctness” became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the “liberal elite”, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

    Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States,” Bush said. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land,” but, he warned, “In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity.”
    [url=http://]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... nald-trump[/url]

    This post was edited to make clear that I am quoting the sources that are linked.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    What I'm saying in general is that political correctness isn't an ideological innovation, it's about avoiding fights. People who assert the right to say all the horrible things that naturally pop into one's head through the frictions of life, are asserting the right to get their heads kicked in by the people they enrage. If people value honesty over a peaceful neighbourhood, they're liable to get what they want.unenlightened

    You don't have a right to physically attack someone just because they say something. Learn how to deal with people saying things that you don't like/don't agree with.
  • wax
    301
    Well there you have it. Authoritarians with no authority, you can't get more straw of a man than that. That is to say anyone who wants to make accusations of political correctness is a proponent of political correctness, trying to control the debate.unenlightened

    Authoritarian control....well maybe I should have just said 'control'....it might feel authoritarian though, if you feel that you are being censored and controlled, eg by people in situation in the media that have a level of authority..
  • ssu
    7.9k
    I sort of see it the other way around; good manners is a subset of political correctness; it's just a kind of aspect of how it might present.wax

    Hmm... lets start with a definition of political correctness:

    Someone who is politically correct believes that language and actions that could be offensive to others, especially those relating to sex and race, should be avoided.

    Since the late 1980s, the term has come to refer to avoiding language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting groups of people considered disadvantaged or discriminated against, especially groups defined by sex or race. In public discourse and the media, it is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.

    Now if good manners were a subset of political correctness, then people would be against good manners as they as they are... excessive or unwarranted?

    Politically correct people surely would want that political correctness would be part of 'good manners', but it (at least yet) isn't so. People who aren't rude or impolite can surely say an opinion that a politically correct person feels to be insulting.
  • wax
    301
    I always had problems with my venn diagrams. :)

    What I mean is that good manners is just a part of political correctness.
    Having good manners doesn't necessarily mean that someone will ascribe to political correctness.

    By attacking the the concept of political correctness, then, doesn't mean that they are attacking the concept of good manners, in the same way as attacking the way Mussolini's way of behaving doesn't attack something like his use of a belt to hold up his trousers..
  • Judaka
    1.7k

    Political correctness is both an ideological invention and a way of avoiding fights. I think political correctness as an ideological invention is most prominent when people are using the idea of "not offending" people to shutdown attempts to discuss things in entirely reasonable terms. I think that asking "how are you" is pretty much a terrible misunderstanding of what political correctness is and your explanation of what it is is far more accurate. It is merely a way of acknowledging someone in an ingratiating manner which shows feelings of goodwill.
  • fdrake
    5.8k
    Has anyone actually heard of a vocal proponent of political correctness, that isn't just some wackjob on Tumblr, saying: 'I believe that no one should say anything offensive to anyone. And moreover, that if you say something offensive it should be punished with law and ostracism'?

    I've seen waaay more exaggerated critical discussions of political correctness and literally only one citation, ever, for a defence of it - which isn't even an impassioned defence. It was just 'political correctness is an often clumsy negotiation towards a more formally inclusive language... when I was a boy the teacher in my primary school called our one black student 'the black spot' - things are better now'.

    I'll be worried about the implications of people in power advocating political correctness when I see any sufficiently strong examples. The people who have to invoke such airy-fairy language are usually politicians, or other media sensitive authority figures, obfuscating. And who can blame them, they are just trying to void avoid the media which storms whenever someone says something that can be reasonably construed (as in avoiding slander or libel litigation) as racist or a sexist.

    My view on the topic is that it's a content generation tool for two reactionary poles of reactionary media in a stupid reactionary dance about shit that ultimately means nothing. Political analysis should not be clickbait.
  • unenlightened
    8.7k
    Political correctness is both an ideological invention and a way of avoiding fights.Judaka

    Well I'm open to correction, political or factual, but I'm only really aware of the phrase being used as a term of abuse. Can you find someone who has declared themselves an advocate?

    Alas, fdrake stole my thunder while I did a quick google.
  • fdrake
    5.8k
    Alas, fdrake stole my thunder while I did a quick google.unenlightened

    No worries, I had to edit the post 47 times for it to be coherent. You can be the lightning.
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