Correct. Usually the over the top PC arguments are caused by a huge overreaction to something where the 'outraged' people who are there to 'defend' correct values have quite a conspirational view of something valuable being attacked indirectly or in a hidden views. It is all about dog whistles and hidden meanings. And the normal response would be "You cannot be serious!", but the current climate makes us more likely just to be mute.

From the perspective of the right-wing and conservatives, Political Correctness can be seen from issues like defending "family values". Jerry Falwell attacking the British childrens TV show 'Teletubbies' and accusing one of the characters being gay because of the color purple and other 'gay symbols' is a good example right-wing PC outrage. The denial of the producers of having any sexual innuendos in a program intended for toddlers doesn't matter. It just "shows" how vast the "conspiracy" is when it's started at such young age.

And phenomenon won't go anywhere, it will likely just become worse.

There is another component to PC that should be addressed, and that is the use of euphemism and a kind of bureaucratic "broadcaster-speak" to alleviate offense. As an example Good ol' George Carlin, an enemy of political correctness, brought up the point that many soldiers with "post traumatic stress disorder" might have been given help a lot sooner if they had left the malady as "shell shocked". I think it's a good point that political correctness will disguise reality in favor of making palpable, like taking a hard-to-swallow pill by eating it with ice cream.

↪NOS4A2 to sum up my thoughts, the global billionaire mafia are hoping the people they have made poor by loudly pushing siphon up economic policies as if they actually could work will scapegoat others. Being anti PC is useful to them, and social media certainly help in the trend to polarization. P.C. wouldn’t even be in the news, we would just continue to progress to more inclusivity as communication shrinks the world if it weren’t for the economic cruelty insisted upon by the GBM and the fact that dupes don’t place the blame where it is deserved. I’m more afraid of the influence of the right with its legitimation of siphon up economics than I am of P.C. censoriousness, which is just a reaction.

That's completely fair. We should worry when the far-right or the far-left adopt legitimate criticism to further their extremist agendas. But I'm afraid of lions more than I am of political correctness. That doesn't mean political correctness isn't a problem that humans beings face.

P.C. Wouldn’t be perceived as a problem if the big money hadn’t pushed Reagan/Thatcher policies that vastly shrank the middle class. Censorious P.C. is a reaction to the volume of anti P.C. sentiment that gets aired when scapegoats (minorities and women) are required, someone for the poorer majority to blame. This is all a distraction.

P.C. Wouldn’t be perceived as a problem if the big money hadn’t pushed Reagan/Thatcher policies that vastly shrank the middle class. Censorious P.C. is a reaction to the volume of anti P.C. sentiment that gets aired when scapegoats (minorities and women) are required, someone for the poorer majority to blame. This is all a distraction.

But censorious PC has brought down nobel laureates, tenured professors, Harvard presidents, comedians, actors and musicians, politicians left and right, not to mention the countless others who have neither the fame nor power to defend their names. They were all innocent of anything evil save for stepping beyond the bounds of an unforgiving linguistic orthodoxy, for speech and thought crimes. So I do not think it is a distraction, though some might use it as such.

the point is not that P.C. censoriousness is utterly blameless but that it is a side effect of a dirty political economic climate. And in spite of the sins you have listed, it wouldn’t have come to this in the absence of the conditions I have already offered.

I’m not so sure of that. Political correctness is a tool of the privileged, not of the economically marginalized. According to its biggest critics it derives from the halls of higher academia, some of the most privileged institutions in the history of the universe. It also manifests in corporate censorship. According to the Hidden Tribes poll it is only progressive activists who actively defend it. American Indians are one of the biggest opponents of political correctness, while having some of the greatest poverty and unemployment rates in the country.

You must have misunderstood. I’m saying anti P.C. tend to be the less well off. The poorer majority. Scapegoating, distraction from the causes of their diminishing prospects, ie the siphon up economy advanced by the global billionaire mafia. Blame women and minorities rather than the greedy rich and powerful.

There is another component to PC that should be addressed, and that is the use of euphemism and a kind of bureaucratic "broadcaster-speak" to alleviate offense. As an example Good ol' George Carlin, an enemy of political correctness, brought up the point that many soldiers with "post traumatic stress disorder" might have been given help a lot sooner if they had left the malady as "shell shocked". I think it's a good point that political correctness will disguise reality in favor of making palpable, like taking a hard-to-swallow pill by eating it with ice cream. — NOS4A2

I love George Carlin, but I don't think he's correct. People who were called shell shocked were also often considered cowards. Also the term is not accurate, or at best, to some degree accurate for some of the veterans. Those whose trauma came via shelling. I don't see that term as PC. It is distanced clinical speak, but it was part of seeing that people who suffered after war (and then later rape and other things) were not weak people, but actually suffering a natural reaction to, well, trauma. The main problem is that this got channeled,as most things where there is emotional pain get channeled these days, into the arms of the psychicatric/pharma people. There are many non-medication approaches to dealing with trauma, but vet get over medicated almost as a rule. Money decides. I don't think keeping the term shell shocked would have kept vets out of the clutches of those guys. And the stigma would have kept most of them in the closet.

And the stigma would have kept most of them in the closet. — Coben

The stigma and how the mentally ill and traumatized get treated by society at large has a lot to do with their sometimes antisocial behaviors. Medicate them and shove them out the door is the cheapest way to deal with them, as this is truly a greedy, almost Satanic society (whether or not you believe in Satan as a being).

According to its biggest critics it derives from the halls of higher academia, some of the most privileged institutions in the history of the universe. It also manifests in corporate censorship. — NOS4A2

Here is one thing I'd like to point out.

PC "deriving" from higher academia and "manifesting" itself in corporate censorship is the wrong way to think about it (in my humble view). The conspirational view is that the leftist academia teaches PC to the students and these SJWs then occupy positions in the corporate World. I would disagree. It's not an agenda of higher academia, just as higher academia isn't infiltrated and taken over by "cultural marxists". This narrative misses the point and paints a picture of intent. The whole thing is far more unintentional without any objectives and agendas. Sure, there are SJWs, but these really are a small 'youthful minority' as izat so describes them. And perhaps this is something that many people don't get: many things in the World happen without a culprit pushing it to happen. Phenomena are just the end result of many different things coming together without active coordination by some individual entity.

Let's think about corporate censorship. Corporations typically handle public relations with a PR department, which usually isn't part of marketing, but a tool of the corporate leadership. The way these departments and spokesperson view this is seeing that their most important objective is to avoid scandals or issues that might send the stock price going down. If you ever have listened to PR people making their case (for their existence), it goes along these lines: public relations and interaction with stakeholders is important to avoid problems. Without taking care of these relations, the corporation is in trouble (hence you need the PR department).

This opens the door for 'PC culture' because there's people who's JOB is to engage with the community. And who wouldn't think their job was important? Hence you have what NOS4A2 describes as 'corporate censorship'. It doesn't derive from an ideology. Corporate leadership has usually outsourced PR and media relations to 'media' people, just like states have created diplomats to handle the delicate interaction with other states, because those relations are important: if everything goes really wrong, people die. (Hence the need for diplomacy and diplomats)

Let's then think about the academia. Yes, it's mainly liberal, but few are truly Marxists. And how I describe Marxists is that they really say that they are Marxists and genuinely believe in Marxism. Here too the PC attitude emerges unintentionally. Nobody thinks that promoting racism or discrimination is a good thing. Hence the window of discourse is and can be moved, because just defining what is 'racism' and what is 'discrimination' can differ. Add virtue signalling to the picture and that's all you need. You'll get a 'Keynesian Beauty Contest", where the judges don't pick the most beautiful contest they themselves believe, but think what the other stupid judges desire and pick that contestant, even if they don't consider themselves the most beautiful.

The stigma was orginally that they were cowards,not manly enough to withstand the challenges of war. Then it got considered a more medical type reaction, which is better. It's not a disease, however, but rather a natural response to overwhelming experiences.

You might find this interesting:

Quillette has a nice article on some books one should read which will annoy politically correct people--books like Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell or The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. The books the article recommends are all great reads.

So, Celeste Ng writes, “It’s difficult for me to explain how much I hate this book [The Good Earth].” And then she goes on to mention, among other things, “the weirdness that arises from a Westerner writing about a colonized country.” Ms. Ng was born in Pittsburgh, PA, grew up in Shaker Heights, OH, and attended nothing but exclusive American schools, including Harvard University. Ms. Buck, on the other hand, was taken to China by her American missionary parents when she was five months old. She was raised largely by a Chinese nanny, spoke Chinese before she spoke English, and spent most of the first 40 years of her life in China.

Why, then, would Buck not be entitled to write about China?

The author notes that if Gone With the Wind had been written by a man, it would have ended the search for The Great American Novel. Since a woman wrote it, it was consigned to the 'romance' category.

It is a terrific read.

I don’t believe “political correctness” is any intended consequence or agenda. The phenomenon, if we can even call it that, is so amorphous that it’s difficult to put a finger on (ironically, “political correctness” seems itself a euphemism) or to blame any one ideology.

You’ve brought up “cultural Marxism” in reference to my posts many times even if I’ve never mentioned it. For the record I don’t believe in it, nor have I read anyone who espouses the theory. So I don’t think we can completely blame academia. The faculty of any university is not monolith. But given the prevalence of political correctness on any given campus, and the general lack of life experience of the students, it appears this sort of culture is at least learned there.

There is, like you said, an element of public relations in it, as is evident by the use of euphemism and self-censorship. On the one had there are companies, academic institutions, broadcasters and bureaucracies that employ politically correct language to protect their public image by avoiding offence and stigma. On the other hand there is always a censorial group of human beings ready to pounce on anyone who runs afoul of their preferred way of speaking. This relationship seems to set the conditions.

The problem is that individuals don’t often have a public relations department. Recall the lady who made an unfortunate joke about Africa on Twitter just before flying there, only to realize she had been fired from her job before landing. People took offence, found out where she worked, and to save face the company fired her. As I recall some Twitter-users actually went to the airport to film her coming off the plane, her life ruined. Political correctness claims another scalp.

In the sense that this behavior doesn’t allow clarification, follow up, or even redemption, which is often necessary in plain conversation, there is mob mentality and cruelty in it. And of course there is the censorship. This is why it should be opposed, no political affiliations required.

Carlin’s claim was certainly counterfactual and thus cannot be proven to be the case, but I think his general point about how the jargon buries any humanity behind sterility is valuable.

Here’s the bit in a video as he does it more justice (trigger warning)

The real question is, WHY would we care about Celeste Ng's totally absurd opinion?

You’ve brought up “cultural Marxism” in reference to my posts many times even if I’ve never mentioned it. For the record I don’t believe in it, nor have I read anyone who espouses the theory. — NOS4A2

I know already your viewpoint (that you don't believe it) and I agree with you.

What I'm commenting is that this is the wrong way to criticize PC culture, because it's nonsense. In fact, in this forum I think we do discuss matters with genuine Marxists (if there are any) or hardcore leftists, and they have nothing to do with "Cultural Marxism".

Recall the lady who made an unfortunate joke about Africa on Twitter just before flying there, only to realize she had been fired from her job before landing. People took offence, found out where she worked, and to save face the company fired her. — NOS4A2

Luckily these are individual occasions. I'm not sure if these kind of incidents are an epidemic. More this shows just how easily people can be fired in the US.

Don't you get tired of doing this when confronted with a better argument?

What I'm commenting is that this is the wrong way to criticize PC culture, because it's nonsense. In fact, in this forum I think we do discuss matters with genuine Marxists (if there are any) or hardcore leftists, and they have nothing to do with "Cultural Marxism".

Just curious but why is the “cultural Marxism” theory nonsense? I’ve heard that it is an alt-right conspiracy theory, but upon taking a further look I find books and articles on it written by non-right-wing, even Marxist professors and academics.

Some examples:

Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies
Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies
Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Marxist cultural analysis as per the Kellner study you quoted is not anti-PC "cultural Marxism".

"In contemporary usage, the term Cultural Marxism refers to a far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory which claims that the Frankfurt School is part of an ongoing academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture and values.[49] According to the conspiracy theory, which emerged in the late 1990s, the Frankfurt School and other Marxist theorists were part of a conspiracy to attack Western society by undermining traditionalist conservatism and Christianity using the 1960s counterculture, multiculturalism, progressive politics and political correctness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory

It's a dumb right-wing meme used by people who understand nothing about Marxist theories of society and culture or even Marxism in general.

On the one hand we have marxists and academics using the term “cultural Marxism” to describe the critique of culture, and on the other we have it is a dumb right-wing meme. Is criticism of the academic use of the term possible? Surely one can criticize it without invoking Jewish conspiracies and gay agendas.

What's relevant to the anti-PC stuff and this thread is the dumb right-wing meme. Obviously, it's possible to critique, say, Frankfurt School theories of culture.

Look, here's how to know, whenever a popular right-wing influencer says "Cultural Marxism" they are going for the full retard version. And whenever some left-wing academic nobody cares about writes a book about it, it's the other one. There's not much cross-over there.

Lol. Fair enough. Yeah it seems too odious to touch. But the prevalence of left-wing academics and their influence on the growth of political correctness I think deserves a fair hearing.

Yeah, that's a different thing. Judith Butler had been very influential in the area of identify politics, for example.

I simply can't imagine being so obsessed over this complete nothingburger

Carlin’s claim was certainly counterfactual and thus cannot be proven to be the case, but I think his general point about how the jargon buries any humanity behind sterility is valuable. — NOS4A2

Sure, I don't think everyday speech needs to use PTSD. Trauma is a peachy word meaning....

a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.

Traumatized...
subject to lasting shock as a result of a disturbing experience or physical injury.

I don't think those words are depersonalized, the long diagnostic phrase is, but not that term and its family of related terms.

Shell shock was fine, in terms of blunt description. But it could confuse people when the soldiers did not go through the types of trauma associated with artillery. And it was good that they noticed, after studying Vietnam Vets that women who had been raped had very similar patterns.

We do walk around with a lot of daily psychological blather. I don't think the whole DSM diagnosis should be the general way we talk about it. I think trauma and traumatized are fine. Or 'got fucked up by his experiences in the war but he's working on it'.

But we can't really blame professionals for having jargon. I wouldn't walk around saying I got a nasty avulsion doing a slide tackle in my sunday soccer game. I'd say I scraped the shit out of my calf on artificial grass this weekend. But the doctors can have their nice abstractions.

I like your nuanced take on it here. Well said.

But the prevalence of left-wing academics and their influence on the growth of political correctness I think deserves a fair hearing. — NOS4A2

Being Marxist and being 'left-wing' are totally different. Somebody advocating for social security and a welfare state doesn't make him or her to be a marxist. Marxists (especially old school Marxist-Leninists) didn't get along at all with social democrats. PC is more of a phenomenon, not a conspiracy lead by some cabal.

I simply can't imagine being so obsessed over this complete nothingburger — Maw

About nothingburgers: let's then talk how ALL the conservatives (starting from Jordan Peterson, Roger Scruton, etc...) who people on the left see as advocates of the alt-right and white supremacy.

Same thing.

SSU tries his best, and for some people that's all we can ask of them

Being Marxist and being 'left-wing' are totally different. Somebody advocating for social security and a welfare state doesn't make him or her to be a marxist. Marxists (especially old school Marxist-Leninists) didn't get along at all with social democrats. PC is more of a phenomenon, not a conspiracy lead by some cabal.

No one said otherwise.