18 ms·

A History of Political Correctness

78 points by Aloha 13y ago

detcader 13y ago
All this weaponization of the words "political correctness" is quite obviously a nervous white phenomenon, a defense mechanism -- for example, do we talk about the banning of the ethnic studies program and Latino/Latina social studies books in Arizona as "political correctness gone awry"? [1] No, but that's obviously what it is: latin@ teachers exposing latin@ high school students to material [2] that offends white people. If anyone but white people are offended they're "just being PC"; if white people are offended, they get to be "victims of reverse racism"; same for gender of course. As a colleague of mine put it: "Political correctness, as a concept, is a figment of right wingers, that usually accompanies ideas like agenda, or guilt. I think what we're referring to when speaking of sensitivity is something other than the typical "PC" concept. Inclusivity, and thoughtfulness are nearly unarguably good things. I think most reactionaries, and lesser angry white guys typically dislike the increased sensitivity that goes along with this more inclusive attitude America has today. No one has a right not to be offended. No one should expect civil treatment 100% of the time; people aren't that thoughtful. Further, there's no responsibility to not harm or injure another's sense of well being through speech. I'm free to be a racist ignoramus, and alienate anyone I choose to talk to in public, and it's a good thing. It's also a good thing that I will have to face consequences for socially unacceptable behavior. I'm mostly tired of trite apologies from people that lacked the backbone to stand behind their speech, for instance, Tracy Morgan, who repented quickly about his anti-gay stand up. I wish people had the foresight to realize the consequences, and if they decide to say something, they should have enough will to counter criticism as a valid personal opinion, which all types of heinous stuff are. It's heinousness is not the same as lacking in credibility, or serious intent." FIRE is an explicitly right-wing org whose purpose is to deliberately conflate violation of free-speech rights (which only the government can do) with criticism and banning of certain kinds of speech by non-government people and institutions from their forums and spaces, when it is not illegal to do so. It's a bit like the ADF, whose purpose is to conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism... it also reminds me of people who complain about CPS, but that's just me [1] http://saveethnicstudies.org/ http://saveethnicstudies.org/ [2] http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books
- glenra 13y ago
  > it also reminds me of people who complain about CPS, but that's just me I give up; what does CPS stand for in this context?
  - detcader 13y ago
    Child Protective Services, i.e. the thing that discourages people from beating their children. Some see it as "liberal values" being imposed on them or w/e rather than a legitimate attempt to curb violence
    - lobotryas 13y ago
      You make it sound like CPS is the innocent underdog trying to do good. How do you reconcile that with the long list of criticism the organization has drawn over the years? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Criti... ?
      - jes5199 13y ago
        Wow, thank you for a vivid demonstration of Poe's Law.
        makomk 13y ago
        Did you actually read the link? "The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had itself been an object of reports of unusual numbers of poisonings, death, rapes and pregnancies of children under its care since 2004." "Texas Child Protective Services was hit with a rare if not unprecedented legal sanction for a "groundless cause of action" and ordered to pay $32,000 of the Spring family's attorney fees. Judge Schneider wrote in a 13-page order, "The offensive conduct by (CPS) has significantly interfered with the legitimate exercise of the traditional core functions of this court."" Suuuure, the only reason people object is because they want to be able to beat their children. Yeah right.
- 13y ago
mynameishere 13y ago
It actually goes back to the early fights between socialists and communists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to-mid_20th_century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to-... Religions change. It used to be about class; now it's about race. No sane person gives it a thought except when they are materially associated with the lunatics who get offended by racial thoughtcrimes.
- detcader 13y ago
  What are "racial thoughtcrimes"? Maybe something like this? http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
  - growupkids 13y ago
    Nah, that's just either a bad joke, or stupid.
    - detcader 13y ago
      Why? Also, can you tell me what "racial thoughtcrimes" are?
      - smsm42 13y ago
        A though on the topic of race that one could be punished for. Obviously, not one done by Ignatiev, as he is obviously not being punished for it.
  - yetanotherphd 13y ago
    I believe what he is referring to is the fact that people self-censor their own thoughts, and fear the social repercussions if they don't. For example, I studied econometrics, and one regression that is often run is regressing CRIME (a dummy variable for whether someone has committed a crime) on a number of right hand side variables, include BLACK, a dummy variable for being Black. Now it is a well known fact that no matter how many right hand side variables you include, the coefficient on BLACK will always be significant and positive. That is, even after accounting for income, education, etc., Black people commit more crime. Now we are allowed to say this in class, because it is already understood that by getting this far into a PhD, you have proven yourself not to be an evil racist. For example, everyone knows that the positive coefficient on BLACK must be a result of complex social interactions and not genetics. But ordinary people aren't so sophisticated, so they are not allowed to even know that the coefficient on BLACK is significant. They would certainly be accused of racism for stating the true fact that Blacks commit more crime even after accounting for these other variables. And I assure you that none of us PhD's would come to their defense when they were accused of this. After all, that person might actually be a racist. So thoughtcrime is thinking bad things about race, which can include true things if you're not in the inner circle of people who are allowed to discuss such matters openly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Glyptodon 13y ago
Sadly I'm afraid of sharing this article.
jaibot 13y ago
Before engaging in any discussion of this genre, I encourage people to take some IATs, if only to have some quantifiable introspection going in. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
- coldarchon 13y ago
  I clicked on 3 different pages YES I AM READY AND UNDERSTOOD and the test was still not shown, boy that sucked.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
So, here's part of the problem: Sandy Hingston mentions some genuinely absurd overreactions (a student enraged when a grocery circular put an Black History Month banner next to an ad for chicken); and she also mentions Jennifer Livingston, who called bullshit on a guy who tried to guilt-trip her for being fat in public; and Hingston implies that both of these are equally bad. This right here is half the problem. The reason we have people who are offended by everything is because of people who refuse to permit anyone to be offended by anything. Ms. Hingston, their bullshit is an overreaction to your bullshit. If you refuse to acknowledge any difference between oversensitive conniptions and calling out genuine assholes, you really have no business speaking on the subject.
- laichzeit0 13y ago
  "I have the right not to be offended" is a false statement. No one has such a right.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    People have the rights we collectively want them to have. If people are punished for offending others, then that right exists, whether you and I like it or not.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Why the quotes? No one said there was a right not to be offended.
    - makomk 13y ago
      That's another part of the problem - anyone who complains about stuff like being called fat is accused of demanding "the right not to be offended" and wanting special treatment even if they're doing nothing of the sort, as a way of pressuring them into shutting up.
      - laichzeit0 13y ago
        If they _are_ fat, what is the basis of their complaint for not wanting to be called fat?
TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
Political Correctness and being insulted are not the same. The former is institutionalised politeness where we use less objectionable terms. We'll call black people blacks and not niggers or negroes, we'll call call inuit inuit and not eskimos, we'll call Native Americans Native Americans and not Red Indians, and so on. But being offended is not about PC. Now, yes, PC terms ultimately derive from avoiding using derogatory phrases towards people. But someone suing someone else for being offended by their remark is not "Political Correctness gone mad", as the Daily Mail might say. It is likely just somebody's overreaction. I think PC culture is a good thing. We take a tiny effort to use more neutral language and it makes a whole lot of difference for some groups of people.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  Exactly. The right-wing's redefinition of PC, and subsequent use of such as an attack on anything it disagrees with is possibly the biggest strawman of our time.
- sverige 13y ago
  I am offended that you spelled out the N-word in its entirety. Please edit your post to correct this grievously insulting use of language.
cjoh 13y ago
It's too bad that the term political correctness is so generically incorrect. Doing things like swapping out the N word for "african american," dropping the word "retard" from your vocabulary, referring to adult women as "women," and referring to people of non-european descent as more than "oriental" and "mexican" is not "being politically correct," it's doing something that takes you no effort that makes you less of an asshole.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rimantas 13y ago
  That's the biggest problem with PC: it just makes you to switch your brains off, to the point where blacks who have nothing to do with Africa are called african americans. This PC trend is really retarded.
  - gizmo686 13y ago
    A few years ago, a friend was telling me about a post-colonial African country (I think the Republic of Congo). He mentioned something along the lines of how after they gained independence, the majority of their government was African American. I almost imminently said something like "thats horrible", thinking that he was implying that America managed to set up our own colonial rule under the guise of independence.
    - Apocryphon 13y ago
      Ironically, that really did happen to an African country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberian
- icecreampain 13y ago
  PC-types enjoy attacking how people say things, instead of what is being said. Personal anecdote: I started up a visitation group for the lonely elderly where I used to live because I felt that it must be pretty shitty to be old and alone. Wrote up a website, fixed up a nice pamphlet and organized everything with the municipality. All out of my own pocket. The PC media interviewed me and they latched on to the fact that, in my personal explanation on the site, I had linked to a news story on a non-PC site that wrote about a municipality in another part of the country that had cut down on the elderly care budget so much that food rationing was implemented. See, the PC media were far more horrified that I had linked to the site, than they were about the fact that homes for the elderly in a first-world country were even rationing food for the generation that had built the country.
yk 13y ago
Thats a remarkably bad article, almost to the point of satire. It just sparkles some anecdotes over the fallacy that politeness is somehow impeding free speech. If you are offending someone, then you should apologize or the offended party has every justification to think of you as an asshole. The free speech issue is actually calling someone a asshole here. And if you can not express your opinion in a way that does not offend, chances are that you should reconsider your opinion. In the unlikely case that a opinion is both offensive and reasonable, you will have to live with people calling you insensitive. Which brings me to this gem: Yes, of course there are students, and citizens, who have genuine grievances. But we no longer distinguish between them and those claiming harm where none exists. Problem is, there is no objective scale to the subjective qualia of being offended. People have every right to be offended whenever they are. [Edit: botched formatting.]
- jniles 13y ago
  I thoroughly disagree. The point is that we are seeing too much PC, and it is corrupting the nature of public debate. All comments become subjective to the audience, rather than subjective to the speaker. The examples cited by the author all are encompassed in the quote " I think it’s these very small things that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes.. " to which the author disagrees. You are correct, there is no appropriate scale to measure being offended, which is why unchecked (read: no scale to judge) PC results in kids being kicked out of school, a huge industry being built around PC counseling, etc. The author is not proposing removing PC altogether, just that it is being laughably abused to the detriment of everyone. I'd be inclined to agree.
  - yk 13y ago
    " I think it’s these very small things that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes.. " I tend to agree with the quote. To use a analogy to programming languages, in Python one is always tempted to use lists, whether they are the appropriate data structure or not. And experience then comes in the form of many solutions using lists. As for too much PC, I think the problems are rather created by lazy thinking instead of PC. So in a way there is a industry which exploits PC, but the solution is not less PC, the solution is more critical thinking. ( And bad articles really do not help with that.)
mvaliente2001 13y ago
Oh, god, how I hate political correctness! I can understand that people get upset and offended. They can boycott someone they don't like, but that PC bullshit infuriates me. It only makes communication difficult and people more manipulable. Take terms like "imbecile", "Idiot" and "retarded". They were medical terms applied using more or less objective measurements. What happened then? They became un-PC and were replaced by "intellectual disability". How much time before the "dis-" is considered offensive? Maybe we should use sometime abstract like "green thinker" and "orange thinker"? But it doesn't matter what term we chose, it'll be associated to something negative and it'll become an insult for the general population. Do you want to live in a world where you have to say that the umpire has "visual impediments" for fears to offend to blind people? No, "impediments" is too strong, maybe "visually challenged"? No, too negative. "Almost all the senses of the umpire are up to the level of a person of his age, with the possible exception of one that, although its absence doesn't demerit him at all as a human being, maybe would suggest that he'll be better in another line of work, like piano tuner."
- DanBC 13y ago
  > Take terms like "imbecile", "Idiot" and "retarded". These words now have an everyday use. They are no longer used medically because medical science advances and we have much better understanding. > They were medical terms applied using more or less objective measurements. They were medical terms used to detain people in hospital, or to deny them medical treatment, or to keep them in prison, or to deny them rights to fair trial or to justice if they were abused or murdered. > They became un-PC and were replaced by "intellectual disability". No. They became outmoded and less useful because times change. > Do you want to live in a world where you have to say that the umpire has "visual impediments" I don't want to live in a world where it's acceptable to kill someone who has a low IQ just because they have a low IQ. I don't want to live in a world where someone with a low IQ is denied medical treatment. I don't want to live in a world where someone with a low IQ is raped with no consequence. I don't want to live in a world of lazy stupid designers who can't make a website accessible to all. I don't want to live in a hateful, hurtful, world where ignorant bigots can spew their bile and get offended when people tells them they're being an arsehole.

78 points by Aloha 13y ago

All this weaponization of the words "political correctness" is quite obviously a nervous white phenomenon, a defense mechanism -- for example, do we talk about the banning of the ethnic studies program and Latino/Latina social studies books in Arizona as "political correctness gone awry"? [1] No, but that's obviously what it is: latin@ teachers exposing latin@ high school students to material [2] that offends white people. If anyone but white people are offended they're "just being PC"; if white people are offended, they get to be "victims of reverse racism"; same for gender of course. As a colleague of mine put it: "Political correctness, as a concept, is a figment of right wingers, that usually accompanies ideas like agenda, or guilt. I think what we're referring to when speaking of sensitivity is something other than the typical "PC" concept. Inclusivity, and thoughtfulness are nearly unarguably good things. I think most reactionaries, and lesser angry white guys typically dislike the increased sensitivity that goes along with this more inclusive attitude America has today. No one has a right not to be offended. No one should expect civil treatment 100% of the time; people aren't that thoughtful. Further, there's no responsibility to not harm or injure another's sense of well being through speech. I'm free to be a racist ignoramus, and alienate anyone I choose to talk to in public, and it's a good thing. It's also a good thing that I will have to face consequences for socially unacceptable behavior. I'm mostly tired of trite apologies from people that lacked the backbone to stand behind their speech, for instance, Tracy Morgan, who repented quickly about his anti-gay stand up. I wish people had the foresight to realize the consequences, and if they decide to say something, they should have enough will to counter criticism as a valid personal opinion, which all types of heinous stuff are. It's heinousness is not the same as lacking in credibility, or serious intent." FIRE is an explicitly right-wing org whose purpose is to deliberately conflate violation of free-speech rights (which only the government can do) with criticism and banning of certain kinds of speech by non-government people and institutions from their forums and spaces, when it is not illegal to do so. It's a bit like the ADF, whose purpose is to conflate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism... it also reminds me of people who complain about CPS, but that's just me [1] http://saveethnicstudies.org/ http://saveethnicstudies.org/ [2] http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books

glenra 13y ago
> it also reminds me of people who complain about CPS, but that's just me I give up; what does CPS stand for in this context?
- detcader 13y ago
  Child Protective Services, i.e. the thing that discourages people from beating their children. Some see it as "liberal values" being imposed on them or w/e rather than a legitimate attempt to curb violence
  - lobotryas 13y ago
    You make it sound like CPS is the innocent underdog trying to do good. How do you reconcile that with the long list of criticism the organization has drawn over the years? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protective_Services#Criti... ?
    - jes5199 13y ago
      Wow, thank you for a vivid demonstration of Poe's Law.
      - makomk 13y ago
        Did you actually read the link? "The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services had itself been an object of reports of unusual numbers of poisonings, death, rapes and pregnancies of children under its care since 2004." "Texas Child Protective Services was hit with a rare if not unprecedented legal sanction for a "groundless cause of action" and ordered to pay $32,000 of the Spring family's attorney fees. Judge Schneider wrote in a 13-page order, "The offensive conduct by (CPS) has significantly interfered with the legitimate exercise of the traditional core functions of this court."" Suuuure, the only reason people object is because they want to be able to beat their children. Yeah right.
13y ago

mynameishere 13y ago

It actually goes back to the early fights between socialists and communists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to-mid_20th_century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#Early-to-... Religions change. It used to be about class; now it's about race. No sane person gives it a thought except when they are materially associated with the lunatics who get offended by racial thoughtcrimes.

detcader 13y ago
What are "racial thoughtcrimes"? Maybe something like this? http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
- growupkids 13y ago
  Nah, that's just either a bad joke, or stupid.
  - detcader 13y ago
    Why? Also, can you tell me what "racial thoughtcrimes" are?
    - smsm42 13y ago
      A though on the topic of race that one could be punished for. Obviously, not one done by Ignatiev, as he is obviously not being punished for it.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  I believe what he is referring to is the fact that people self-censor their own thoughts, and fear the social repercussions if they don't. For example, I studied econometrics, and one regression that is often run is regressing CRIME (a dummy variable for whether someone has committed a crime) on a number of right hand side variables, include BLACK, a dummy variable for being Black. Now it is a well known fact that no matter how many right hand side variables you include, the coefficient on BLACK will always be significant and positive. That is, even after accounting for income, education, etc., Black people commit more crime. Now we are allowed to say this in class, because it is already understood that by getting this far into a PhD, you have proven yourself not to be an evil racist. For example, everyone knows that the positive coefficient on BLACK must be a result of complex social interactions and not genetics. But ordinary people aren't so sophisticated, so they are not allowed to even know that the coefficient on BLACK is significant. They would certainly be accused of racism for stating the true fact that Blacks commit more crime even after accounting for these other variables. And I assure you that none of us PhD's would come to their defense when they were accused of this. After all, that person might actually be a racist. So thoughtcrime is thinking bad things about race, which can include true things if you're not in the inner circle of people who are allowed to discuss such matters openly.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Glyptodon 13y ago

Sadly I'm afraid of sharing this article.

jaibot 13y ago

Before engaging in any discussion of this genre, I encourage people to take some IATs, if only to have some quantifiable introspection going in. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

coldarchon 13y ago
I clicked on 3 different pages YES I AM READY AND UNDERSTOOD and the test was still not shown, boy that sucked.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

So, here's part of the problem: Sandy Hingston mentions some genuinely absurd overreactions (a student enraged when a grocery circular put an Black History Month banner next to an ad for chicken); and she also mentions Jennifer Livingston, who called bullshit on a guy who tried to guilt-trip her for being fat in public; and Hingston implies that both of these are equally bad. This right here is half the problem. The reason we have people who are offended by everything is because of people who refuse to permit anyone to be offended by anything. Ms. Hingston, their bullshit is an overreaction to your bullshit. If you refuse to acknowledge any difference between oversensitive conniptions and calling out genuine assholes, you really have no business speaking on the subject.

laichzeit0 13y ago
"I have the right not to be offended" is a false statement. No one has such a right.
- icebraining 13y ago
  People have the rights we collectively want them to have. If people are punished for offending others, then that right exists, whether you and I like it or not.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Why the quotes? No one said there was a right not to be offended.
  - makomk 13y ago
    That's another part of the problem - anyone who complains about stuff like being called fat is accused of demanding "the right not to be offended" and wanting special treatment even if they're doing nothing of the sort, as a way of pressuring them into shutting up.
    - laichzeit0 13y ago
      If they _are_ fat, what is the basis of their complaint for not wanting to be called fat?

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago

Political Correctness and being insulted are not the same. The former is institutionalised politeness where we use less objectionable terms. We'll call black people blacks and not niggers or negroes, we'll call call inuit inuit and not eskimos, we'll call Native Americans Native Americans and not Red Indians, and so on. But being offended is not about PC. Now, yes, PC terms ultimately derive from avoiding using derogatory phrases towards people. But someone suing someone else for being offended by their remark is not "Political Correctness gone mad", as the Daily Mail might say. It is likely just somebody's overreaction. I think PC culture is a good thing. We take a tiny effort to use more neutral language and it makes a whole lot of difference for some groups of people.

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Exactly. The right-wing's redefinition of PC, and subsequent use of such as an attack on anything it disagrees with is possibly the biggest strawman of our time.
sverige 13y ago
I am offended that you spelled out the N-word in its entirety. Please edit your post to correct this grievously insulting use of language.

cjoh 13y ago

It's too bad that the term political correctness is so generically incorrect. Doing things like swapping out the N word for "african american," dropping the word "retard" from your vocabulary, referring to adult women as "women," and referring to people of non-european descent as more than "oriental" and "mexican" is not "being politically correct," it's doing something that takes you no effort that makes you less of an asshole.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rimantas 13y ago
That's the biggest problem with PC: it just makes you to switch your brains off, to the point where blacks who have nothing to do with Africa are called african americans. This PC trend is really retarded.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  A few years ago, a friend was telling me about a post-colonial African country (I think the Republic of Congo). He mentioned something along the lines of how after they gained independence, the majority of their government was African American. I almost imminently said something like "thats horrible", thinking that he was implying that America managed to set up our own colonial rule under the guise of independence.
  - Apocryphon 13y ago
    Ironically, that really did happen to an African country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberian
icecreampain 13y ago
PC-types enjoy attacking how people say things, instead of what is being said. Personal anecdote: I started up a visitation group for the lonely elderly where I used to live because I felt that it must be pretty shitty to be old and alone. Wrote up a website, fixed up a nice pamphlet and organized everything with the municipality. All out of my own pocket. The PC media interviewed me and they latched on to the fact that, in my personal explanation on the site, I had linked to a news story on a non-PC site that wrote about a municipality in another part of the country that had cut down on the elderly care budget so much that food rationing was implemented. See, the PC media were far more horrified that I had linked to the site, than they were about the fact that homes for the elderly in a first-world country were even rationing food for the generation that had built the country.

yk 13y ago

Thats a remarkably bad article, almost to the point of satire. It just sparkles some anecdotes over the fallacy that politeness is somehow impeding free speech. If you are offending someone, then you should apologize or the offended party has every justification to think of you as an asshole. The free speech issue is actually calling someone a asshole here. And if you can not express your opinion in a way that does not offend, chances are that you should reconsider your opinion. In the unlikely case that a opinion is both offensive and reasonable, you will have to live with people calling you insensitive. Which brings me to this gem: Yes, of course there are students, and citizens, who have genuine grievances. But we no longer distinguish between them and those claiming harm where none exists. Problem is, there is no objective scale to the subjective qualia of being offended. People have every right to be offended whenever they are. [Edit: botched formatting.]

jniles 13y ago
I thoroughly disagree. The point is that we are seeing too much PC, and it is corrupting the nature of public debate. All comments become subjective to the audience, rather than subjective to the speaker. The examples cited by the author all are encompassed in the quote " I think it’s these very small things that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes.. " to which the author disagrees. You are correct, there is no appropriate scale to measure being offended, which is why unchecked (read: no scale to judge) PC results in kids being kicked out of school, a huge industry being built around PC counseling, etc. The author is not proposing removing PC altogether, just that it is being laughably abused to the detriment of everyone. I'd be inclined to agree.
- yk 13y ago
  " I think it’s these very small things that reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes.. " I tend to agree with the quote. To use a analogy to programming languages, in Python one is always tempted to use lists, whether they are the appropriate data structure or not. And experience then comes in the form of many solutions using lists. As for too much PC, I think the problems are rather created by lazy thinking instead of PC. So in a way there is a industry which exploits PC, but the solution is not less PC, the solution is more critical thinking. ( And bad articles really do not help with that.)

mvaliente2001 13y ago

Oh, god, how I hate political correctness! I can understand that people get upset and offended. They can boycott someone they don't like, but that PC bullshit infuriates me. It only makes communication difficult and people more manipulable. Take terms like "imbecile", "Idiot" and "retarded". They were medical terms applied using more or less objective measurements. What happened then? They became un-PC and were replaced by "intellectual disability". How much time before the "dis-" is considered offensive? Maybe we should use sometime abstract like "green thinker" and "orange thinker"? But it doesn't matter what term we chose, it'll be associated to something negative and it'll become an insult for the general population. Do you want to live in a world where you have to say that the umpire has "visual impediments" for fears to offend to blind people? No, "impediments" is too strong, maybe "visually challenged"? No, too negative. "Almost all the senses of the umpire are up to the level of a person of his age, with the possible exception of one that, although its absence doesn't demerit him at all as a human being, maybe would suggest that he'll be better in another line of work, like piano tuner."

DanBC 13y ago
> Take terms like "imbecile", "Idiot" and "retarded". These words now have an everyday use. They are no longer used medically because medical science advances and we have much better understanding. > They were medical terms applied using more or less objective measurements. They were medical terms used to detain people in hospital, or to deny them medical treatment, or to keep them in prison, or to deny them rights to fair trial or to justice if they were abused or murdered. > They became un-PC and were replaced by "intellectual disability". No. They became outmoded and less useful because times change. > Do you want to live in a world where you have to say that the umpire has "visual impediments" I don't want to live in a world where it's acceptable to kill someone who has a low IQ just because they have a low IQ. I don't want to live in a world where someone with a low IQ is denied medical treatment. I don't want to live in a world where someone with a low IQ is raped with no consequence. I don't want to live in a world of lazy stupid designers who can't make a website accessible to all. I don't want to live in a hateful, hurtful, world where ignorant bigots can spew their bile and get offended when people tells them they're being an arsehole.