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> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longe
by Pxtl 11y ago
> "I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase 'In these days of political correctness…' talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, 'That’s not actually anything to do with "political correctness". That’s just treating other people with respect.'Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase 'politically correct' wherever we could with 'treating other people with respect', and it made me smile."
-- Neil Gaiman.
http://www.upworthy.com/what-political-correctness-does-and-doesnt-mean http://www.upworthy.com/what-political-correctness-does-and-...
- mistermann 11y agoYes that certainly sounds very nice (pretending that political correctness is only about "being nice"), but in my opinion is an excellent example of the problem. Some topics are going to hurt people's feelings, there's no getting around it, so if "treating people with respect" is an absolute, then it is in many scenarios outright censorship of ideas. The article you links claims that is simply not true but offers absolutely nothing to substantiate that claim. I find this type of reasoning pretty common on the left.
- favoritethings 11y agohttp://i.imgur.com/dmgpS.png http://i.imgur.com/dmgpS.png
- gherkin0 11y agoYou can see that process in action on metafilter.com. There, terms like "treating people with respect" are basically euphemisms for a continually narrowing set of opinions-treated-as-fact. You can't go against them without being dog-piled and probably banned (more or less for the reaction your disagreement caused in others). That hasn't happened to me, but I've seen it happen enough to not want to bother.