4 ms·

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real po

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights movement.

sedatk 2y ago
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
- mrkeen 2y ago
  I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago. Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog': The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1] I couldn't remember his name in order to write this up, so I went googling and stumbled across Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader "Enrique Tarrio". All boats rise with the tide I guess. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog
  - ColonelPhantom 2y ago
    Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'. Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled. [1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos-is-now-ex-gay-consecrating-his-life-to-st-joseph https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
- baumschubser 2y ago
  > unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
  - sedatk 2y ago
    Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
    - foldr 2y ago
      Röhm was actually known to the public to be gay for some of the time that he was in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal He wasn't quite 'openly gay' in the modern sense, but he didn't really put up much of a pretense.
      - dlivingston 2y ago
        The article you reference points out that, not only did Röhm lose all support in the Nazi party once he was "outed", but that Hitler had him executed due to, in part, his homosexuality. And: "After the purge, the Nazi government systematically persecuted homosexual men."
        foldr 2y ago
        That's not an accurate summary of what the article says. There's no doubt that Röhm rose through the ranks of the SA when it was already widely known that he was gay. Even Hitler himself knew: >Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who saw it as cementing the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing. His homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism, because of the Führer principle. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism. The leader of the Berlin SA, Walther Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would "never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Pupenjungen (male prostitutes)". On 3 February, Hitler dismissed Stennes's objection, stating, "The SA is not a girls' boarding school." In case it is not obvious from my original comment, I am not trying to paint Nazi party as a beacon of DEI. The Nazi state went on to murder thousands of homosexuals. But in response to the OP, Röhm was certainly not closeted and it is doubtful that his homosexuality could even be described as an 'open secret'.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  > I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland. Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
- rat87 2y ago
  I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
  - sedatk 2y ago
    That only makes the progressive outlook more remarkable.
    - rat87 2y ago
      Im not sure why you think this is a "progressive" take that's the mainstream view of the center right Christian Democratic party of Germany.
      - sedatk 2y ago
        Because I’m not making a contemporary comparison but a chronological one. Yes, women and LGBT leaders among fascists can be boringly mainstream today. It wasn’t until recently. That’s a dimension of progress.
        rat87 2y ago
        Oh sorry I might have misinterpreted your previous comment. I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out. One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer
- thrance 2y ago
  Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself). Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
  - pjscott 2y ago
    Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
    - BryantD 2y ago
      I don't think it's fair to say that he advocates against gay marriage; it would be accurate to say he's willing to donate to politicians who advocate against gay marriage, however. Blake Masters and J. D. Vance being the obvious cases. Kris Kobach and Ted Cruz also come to mind.
    - thrance 2y ago
      Well, that's embarrassing. I read the Wikipedia article wrong, he donated $10,000 to an organization that fought against a law that would ban same-sex marriage. The double negation got me... Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
      - newbiehere 2y ago
        Where is the evidence that Trump wants to federally ban gay marriage? You should learn more about Peter Theil. He is a libertarian.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to. They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
  - kazga 2y ago
    > They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress. Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      I'm not trying to. I'm presenting their interpretation of it.
- jacooper 2y ago
  Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists. They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_100572626/afd-schockt-mit-abschiebetickets-jetzt-kopiert-sie-die-npd.html https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
causal 2y ago
He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    Not all bad, then.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 2y ago
  I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
  - sparky_z 2y ago
    Those aren't citations, they're just asides.
    - ryantgtg 2y ago
      Yeah, it's very strange to write an "origins of" essay without citing examples (just Larry Summers?), referencing experts, or showing evidence. This article is just about his feelings. He's not an historian, or a social scientist, and frankly I don't think he's familiar enough with this topic to present an historical overview. It's an unconvincing essay. I laughed at the beginning when he stated that student movements in the '60s didn't have any real power. Paul, please just take a sociology class or something.
fatbird 2y ago
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness". One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation. It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
enragedcacti 2y ago
Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
- wendyshu 2y ago
  Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
  - enragedcacti 2y ago
    What "performative" and "social justice" would have meant in 1960 would be very different and a throwaway line to that effect does nothing to rescue the piece. But to give an example: > A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1] > The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction: "The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness" Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
    - wendyshu 2y ago
      I don't really know what you're saying but Graham is speaking against the religious zeal of woke people, especially in regards to censorship. I'm not sure what that has to do with the civil rights movement.

sedatk 2y ago

Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.

mrkeen 2y ago
I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago. Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog': The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1] I couldn't remember his name in order to write this up, so I went googling and stumbled across Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader "Enrique Tarrio". All boats rise with the tide I guess. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog
- ColonelPhantom 2y ago
  Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'. Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled. [1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos-is-now-ex-gay-consecrating-his-life-to-st-joseph https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
baumschubser 2y ago
> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
- sedatk 2y ago
  Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
  - foldr 2y ago
    Röhm was actually known to the public to be gay for some of the time that he was in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal He wasn't quite 'openly gay' in the modern sense, but he didn't really put up much of a pretense.
    - dlivingston 2y ago
      The article you reference points out that, not only did Röhm lose all support in the Nazi party once he was "outed", but that Hitler had him executed due to, in part, his homosexuality. And: "After the purge, the Nazi government systematically persecuted homosexual men."
      - foldr 2y ago
        That's not an accurate summary of what the article says. There's no doubt that Röhm rose through the ranks of the SA when it was already widely known that he was gay. Even Hitler himself knew: >Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who saw it as cementing the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing. His homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism, because of the Führer principle. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism. The leader of the Berlin SA, Walther Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would "never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Pupenjungen (male prostitutes)". On 3 February, Hitler dismissed Stennes's objection, stating, "The SA is not a girls' boarding school." In case it is not obvious from my original comment, I am not trying to paint Nazi party as a beacon of DEI. The Nazi state went on to murder thousands of homosexuals. But in response to the OP, Röhm was certainly not closeted and it is doubtful that his homosexuality could even be described as an 'open secret'.
johannes1234321 2y ago
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland. Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
rat87 2y ago
I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
- sedatk 2y ago
  That only makes the progressive outlook more remarkable.
  - rat87 2y ago
    Im not sure why you think this is a "progressive" take that's the mainstream view of the center right Christian Democratic party of Germany.
    - sedatk 2y ago
      Because I’m not making a contemporary comparison but a chronological one. Yes, women and LGBT leaders among fascists can be boringly mainstream today. It wasn’t until recently. That’s a dimension of progress.
      - rat87 2y ago
        Oh sorry I might have misinterpreted your previous comment. I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out. One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer
thrance 2y ago
Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself). Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
- pjscott 2y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
  - BryantD 2y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say that he advocates against gay marriage; it would be accurate to say he's willing to donate to politicians who advocate against gay marriage, however. Blake Masters and J. D. Vance being the obvious cases. Kris Kobach and Ted Cruz also come to mind.
  - thrance 2y ago
    Well, that's embarrassing. I read the Wikipedia article wrong, he donated $10,000 to an organization that fought against a law that would ban same-sex marriage. The double negation got me... Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
    - newbiehere 2y ago
      Where is the evidence that Trump wants to federally ban gay marriage? You should learn more about Peter Theil. He is a libertarian.
mattmaroon 2y ago
They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to. They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
- kazga 2y ago
  > They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress. Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    I'm not trying to. I'm presenting their interpretation of it.
jacooper 2y ago
Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists. They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_100572626/afd-schockt-mit-abschiebetickets-jetzt-kopiert-sie-die-npd.html https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...

causal 2y ago

He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Not all bad, then.
PpEY4fu85hkQpn 2y ago
I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
- sparky_z 2y ago
  Those aren't citations, they're just asides.
  - ryantgtg 2y ago
    Yeah, it's very strange to write an "origins of" essay without citing examples (just Larry Summers?), referencing experts, or showing evidence. This article is just about his feelings. He's not an historian, or a social scientist, and frankly I don't think he's familiar enough with this topic to present an historical overview. It's an unconvincing essay. I laughed at the beginning when he stated that student movements in the '60s didn't have any real power. Paul, please just take a sociology class or something.

fatbird 2y ago

Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness". One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation. It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.

enragedcacti 2y ago

Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"

wendyshu 2y ago
Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
- enragedcacti 2y ago
  What "performative" and "social justice" would have meant in 1960 would be very different and a throwaway line to that effect does nothing to rescue the piece. But to give an example: > A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1] > The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction: "The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness" Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
  - wendyshu 2y ago
    I don't really know what you're saying but Graham is speaking against the religious zeal of woke people, especially in regards to censorship. I'm not sure what that has to do with the civil rights movement.