Political Correctness

[Rev. Rye]

Or that it’s pointing out that it CAN go too far and that it can easily go from being a means of enlightening people to just becoming a weapon used at the first sign of a poorly worded statement without thinking things through any more than the target did. It can be used as a force for good or for ill. Fritz Lang in Metropolis said “the mediator between the hands and head must be the heart.” I say the heart and head need to work together if we want to reasonably expect anything to be done.

I think we agree. It can absolutely go too far.

I don't think the outliers heavily inform the central idea, however.

Perhaps, but if they rely more on emotion than actual facts, the central idea can lead to the outliers with a depressing ease. The solution? Learn to rely as much on reason and empirical facts as on emotion when making moral judgments.

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Depends. I'm generally in favour of it until they start referring to genocide as "ethnic cleansing".

It's fucking genocide.

Technically, “ethnic cleansing” and genocide are two different concepts.

The UN definition of Ethnic Cleansing: "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group"

The UN definition of genocide: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part ; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

These are, in fact, separate concepts, though I think ethnic cleansing may actually encompass genocide (among many other things).

You may say “that doesn’t make it any better.” To this I say “No fucking shit. Of course it doesn’t.” They’re still crimes against humanity and major human rights violations. But “ethnic cleansing” isn’t necessarily a far right euphemism for genocide. It may have started out that way in the Yugoslav Wars, but, over the years, it has developed its own meaning.