Political Correctness

[Rev. Rye]

That's a strange and cynical belief.

Yes it is, but it's one I've seen throughout history, and my entire life, if I'm honest.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's never occurred to you that we see it because we maintain it?  Not because it's inevitable or because it's not realistic for things to be some other way?

Lets take a simple pc example.

A person can think that whites, their group... are not inherently dumb. If they can think that..can't they also think that the blacks™ are not inherently dumb? Lets call both groups Americans. Can they believe that americans are not inherently dumb?

OFC they can..in fact, most racist patriots already think that.......

Is it..then, reasonable...that people can refrain from making those sorts of statements on TV as "news"...you know, just the facts? OFC. Does it make sense that a statement like that would be disqualifying for government service, particularly in leadership? AYUP.

*or maybe human beings are fundamentally sinful and broken and evil and none of us can be oitherwise and it's pointless to try, and unrealistic to suggest............................. This wasn't the consensus of all of history..lol, it's a xenophobic christian trope.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Your point being that only klansman can pull it off?  That's nonsense.

My point being that people are fundamentally bastards, especially on the large scale, and that it's a fool's errand to not expect it to seep out somewhere.

My own observations have made me believe that being a bastard is too much work for most people.

[Rev. Rye]

My point being that people are fundamentally bastards, especially on the large scale, and that it's a fool's errand to not expect it to seep out somewhere.

My own observations have made me believe that being a bastard is too much work for most people.

Being kind is even harder, especially towards people you don’t know.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

My own observations have made me believe that being a bastard is too much work for most people.

Being kind is even harder, especially towards people you don’t know.

How is that? I visited over 70 countries when the tax payers were footing the bills for my twenty year vacation and rarely ran into a dick. Probably the worst time was dealing with Spanish border guards as we drove around the Med in a microbus. Even that was funny later on, they wanted so badly to catch us with hash or something.

[Rev. Rye]

I’m just going from what I’ve seen in my own life.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We each have our own set of experiences. I may be luckier than some, I've encountered so many good people. I had a dozen Bedouins piss on my truck once, there was a leak in the radiator and that ... water ... was available. Topped off the radiator until we could get to a well. One of them broke an egg into the radiator, it actually stopped the leak for a sufficient amount of time.

[CapnAwesome]

It's interesting to see this become such a big political topic again. This is a rather broad topic but in general are your more in favor or against political correctness?

The hard right think they have the writ to shout it down now that der Trumpmeister is in. 

I've never seen a complaint about "PC" that didn't indicate the speaker wasn't happy about not being able to insult anyone he chose.

Never?! That seems unlikely. I mean most of the arguments I've against it aren't like that.

[SteelCurtain]

"PC Culture" is just code for the axiomatic truth that societies change and things you used to be able to say aren't kosher anymore. It's been true forever, and it's true now.

It's just magnified because of social media. If you made a slightly racist joke in private, you might have gotten laughter, you might have gotten polite chuckle, you might have gotten a glare or a rebuke, but it was limited to the 3 people who heard it.

If you slapped your receptionist's ass at work, it used to be just fine and dandy. Now, you'll get #metoo'd (hopefully) and rightfully so.

Historically oppressed minorities never had a collective voice before social media. Their voice is now combined with other historically oppressed minorities, and our tolerance for bullshit is at a historical low.

Now you post a racist joke on twitter and it is there for everyone in the world to see it. People weren't ready for that. The backlash is swift and sometimes out of balance with the 'crime,' as it were. But them's the breaks. Sorry you didn't get the memo. We're done with getting stepped on because you could before.

Learn. How. To. Treat. Everyone. As. Equals.

[Rev. Rye]

Case in point, there's this scene in The Human Stain.





This might seem like a strawman, but according to Philip Roth, this actually happened to a friend of his:

This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. “The Human Stain” was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester.

Having finished taking the roll, Mel queried the class about these two students whom he had never met. “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?”—unfortunately, the very words that Coleman Silk, the protagonist of “The Human Stain,” asks of his classics class at Athena College in Massachusetts.

Almost immediately Mel was summoned by university authorities to justify his use of the word “spooks,” since the two missing students, as it happened, were both African-American, and “spooks” at one time in America was a pejorative designation for blacks, spoken venom milder than “nigger” but intentionally degrading nonetheless. A witch hunt ensued during the following months from which Professor Tumin—rather like Professor Silk in “The Human Stain”—emerged blameless but only after he had to provide a number of lengthy depositions declaring himself innocent of the charge of hate speech.

A myriad of ironies, comical and grave, abounded, as Mel had first come to nationwide prominence among sociologists, urban organizers, civil-rights activists, and liberal politicians with the 1959 publication of his groundbreaking sociological study “Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness,” and then, in 1967, with “Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality,” which soon became a standard sociological text. Moreover, before coming to Princeton, he had been director of the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations, in Detroit. Upon his death, in 1995, the headline above his New York Times obituary read “MELVIN M. TUMIN, 75, SPECIALIST IN RACE RELATIONS.”

But none of these credentials counted for much when the powers of the moment sought to take down Professor Tumin from his high academic post for no reason at all, much as Professor Silk is taken down in “The Human Stain.”

To be fair, he was eventually exonerated, after about a year of deliberations, where presumably, there were long stretches of time where nobody on the academic board thought "You know, maybe the accusation against Tumin doesn't make any goddamn sense. I mean, if it's racist, he would have to mean 'Are they real or are they black?' I mean, I know logic doesn't usually enter into racism, but even with that in mind, would you even imagine anyone racist saying something like 'Black people don't actually exist?'"