7 ms·

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 wor

by 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.
- newnewnew 13y ago
  PC rule #35 - never link to a non-PC writer, or a writer that links to a non-PC writer. A 3rd degree link is probably okay for now.
rsheridan6 13y ago
Why should "oriental" be offensive? It's derived from a word for "eastern." What fool came up with the idea that we should be offended by it, and start using the term "Asian," which could refer to anyone from Tel Aviv to Vladivostok? Why should "Mexican" be offensive? It's refers to a nationality. Are you offended by "American" or "Japanese," and if not, why should you be offended by "Mexican?" "Retard" was originally intended to be a clinical term referring derived from a word meaning "slow" or "delayed," which replaced previous terms such as idiot or imbecile. How much gentler can you get? If retard has become perjorative, it's because nobody wants to be what the word refers to, and there's not much you can do about that. If you successfully replace it with a nonsense word, say "quixmar," in ten years "quixmar" will be used as an insult in middle school, become offensive, and have to be replaced. Lather, rinse, repeat.
- gms7777 13y ago
  With regards to "Mexican", I think he meant referring to anyone of hispanic/latino descent as "Mexican". Its offensive in the same way as referring to any Asian nationality as "Chinese".
- Cushman 13y ago
  Calling someone Mexican is fine if you know they are Mexican. Calling someone Mexican because they're Chilean and that's your word for brown people is offensive precisely because it's a nationality-- you're saying that you don't know, or more likely don't care, that there is more than one country Hispanic people come from. I can't find a good source on this, but I suspect you're wrong about "retard" being used clinically. The terms "mentally retarded", and "mental retardation", were and still are used in clinical settings to describe delayed development (though they're going out of fashion quickly). The use of "retard" (as a noun) is pejorative because of linguistics relating to the distinction between attribute and essence; the same reason "a group of black men" is fine, but "a group of blacks" is not.
  - graeme 13y ago
    I read up on "retard" due to this post. Retard was originally used to replace words such as cretin, imbecile, fool, etc. Those were once clinical terms, but by the late 19th century they had become pejorative. So retardation was introduced, and worked for a while. Then it became a schoolyard insult, and was replaced by mentally disabled or mentally challenged. If schoolchildren invent an insult out of "disabled", then I imagine a new term will be introduced. This doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to replace "retarded", but it seems likely that there's no permanent solution.
pg 13y ago
The funny thing is, your own comment could make you look like an "asshole" in a few decades when moral fashions change again. That's part of the problem with political correctness. The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences.
- comicjk 13y ago
  His comment will never make him look like an asshole to anyone with historical perspective, because they will know that he was being polite in his time. Terms like oriental are offensive to many people this decade, so I won't use them this decade. If you think that's a moral fashion, then you're confusing the data ($offensive_things) with the moral principle (don't needlessly offend people). I hope you're not hard-coding the data into your morality - that's very bad practice.
- _pius 13y ago
  The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences. Not calling a black person a "nigger" may merely be a trivial moral fashion to you, perhaps, but language has been a very much non-trivial tool of fear and oppression for a long time. That's a fact. For black people, it matters that a newspaper can't be taken seriously if it uses "nigger" as a descriptor. For women, it matters that men can't walk around at a hackathon calling them "baby" and "sweetie" like it's a Mad Men episode. Surely it's obvious why. It's OK to disagree with that, but the burden of proof is on you. And linking to http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html doesn't cut it. There is baby and there is bathwater in this discussion and it's decidedly not useful to conflate them, which is exactly what glib dismissals of the whole thing as "political correctness" do.
  - sverige 13y ago
    I'm offended that you spelled out the N-word in its entirety. Please edit your post to correct this grievously insensitive act.
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
You really need to show me where The Founding Fathers say that Freedom is Speech is out there to talk about weather while enjoying tea. The Freedom of Speech is there to talk about dangerous, unpopular ideas without the Fear of Prosecution. And that's what PC killed. Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks. Just plain stupid. And I agree that future generations will be laughing at PC as much as they laugh at MacArthur communist witch hunt from 1950s.
- bjourne 13y ago
  > Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks. Exactly what incident are you referring to? If you want to claim that scientific thought is hindered by the PC police then you need to back it up with something. Otherwise you are just repeating allegations.
rmc 13y ago
We should replace the term "political correctness" with "being nice". It shows how complaints are absurd. "It's being nice gone too far!"
- summerdown2 13y ago
  I think the point is that it wouldn't be long before "nice" becomes a term of abuse. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JddNDtC-Yrs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JddNDtC-Yrs

by cjoh 13y ago

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.

newnewnew 13y ago
PC rule #35 - never link to a non-PC writer, or a writer that links to a non-PC writer. A 3rd degree link is probably okay for now.

rsheridan6 13y ago

Why should "oriental" be offensive? It's derived from a word for "eastern." What fool came up with the idea that we should be offended by it, and start using the term "Asian," which could refer to anyone from Tel Aviv to Vladivostok? Why should "Mexican" be offensive? It's refers to a nationality. Are you offended by "American" or "Japanese," and if not, why should you be offended by "Mexican?" "Retard" was originally intended to be a clinical term referring derived from a word meaning "slow" or "delayed," which replaced previous terms such as idiot or imbecile. How much gentler can you get? If retard has become perjorative, it's because nobody wants to be what the word refers to, and there's not much you can do about that. If you successfully replace it with a nonsense word, say "quixmar," in ten years "quixmar" will be used as an insult in middle school, become offensive, and have to be replaced. Lather, rinse, repeat.

gms7777 13y ago
With regards to "Mexican", I think he meant referring to anyone of hispanic/latino descent as "Mexican". Its offensive in the same way as referring to any Asian nationality as "Chinese".
Cushman 13y ago
Calling someone Mexican is fine if you know they are Mexican. Calling someone Mexican because they're Chilean and that's your word for brown people is offensive precisely because it's a nationality-- you're saying that you don't know, or more likely don't care, that there is more than one country Hispanic people come from. I can't find a good source on this, but I suspect you're wrong about "retard" being used clinically. The terms "mentally retarded", and "mental retardation", were and still are used in clinical settings to describe delayed development (though they're going out of fashion quickly). The use of "retard" (as a noun) is pejorative because of linguistics relating to the distinction between attribute and essence; the same reason "a group of black men" is fine, but "a group of blacks" is not.
- graeme 13y ago
  I read up on "retard" due to this post. Retard was originally used to replace words such as cretin, imbecile, fool, etc. Those were once clinical terms, but by the late 19th century they had become pejorative. So retardation was introduced, and worked for a while. Then it became a schoolyard insult, and was replaced by mentally disabled or mentally challenged. If schoolchildren invent an insult out of "disabled", then I imagine a new term will be introduced. This doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea to replace "retarded", but it seems likely that there's no permanent solution.

pg 13y ago

The funny thing is, your own comment could make you look like an "asshole" in a few decades when moral fashions change again. That's part of the problem with political correctness. The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences.

comicjk 13y ago
His comment will never make him look like an asshole to anyone with historical perspective, because they will know that he was being polite in his time. Terms like oriental are offensive to many people this decade, so I won't use them this decade. If you think that's a moral fashion, then you're confusing the data ($offensive_things) with the moral principle (don't needlessly offend people). I hope you're not hard-coding the data into your morality - that's very bad practice.
_pius 13y ago
The other and much worse part is that in some situations the choice of words that you present as (as it indeed is) such a trivial matter can have very nontrivial consequences. Not calling a black person a "nigger" may merely be a trivial moral fashion to you, perhaps, but language has been a very much non-trivial tool of fear and oppression for a long time. That's a fact. For black people, it matters that a newspaper can't be taken seriously if it uses "nigger" as a descriptor. For women, it matters that men can't walk around at a hackathon calling them "baby" and "sweetie" like it's a Mad Men episode. Surely it's obvious why. It's OK to disagree with that, but the burden of proof is on you. And linking to http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html doesn't cut it. There is baby and there is bathwater in this discussion and it's decidedly not useful to conflate them, which is exactly what glib dismissals of the whole thing as "political correctness" do.
- sverige 13y ago
  I'm offended that you spelled out the N-word in its entirety. Please edit your post to correct this grievously insensitive act.

LekkoscPiwa 13y ago

You really need to show me where The Founding Fathers say that Freedom is Speech is out there to talk about weather while enjoying tea. The Freedom of Speech is there to talk about dangerous, unpopular ideas without the Fear of Prosecution. And that's what PC killed. Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks. Just plain stupid. And I agree that future generations will be laughing at PC as much as they laugh at MacArthur communist witch hunt from 1950s.

bjourne 13y ago
> Example: try having any type od scientific discourse even in a medical field about DNA differences among races that cause higher rates of lung disease among blacks. Exactly what incident are you referring to? If you want to claim that scientific thought is hindered by the PC police then you need to back it up with something. Otherwise you are just repeating allegations.

rmc 13y ago

We should replace the term "political correctness" with "being nice". It shows how complaints are absurd. "It's being nice gone too far!"

summerdown2 13y ago
I think the point is that it wouldn't be long before "nice" becomes a term of abuse. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JddNDtC-Yrs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JddNDtC-Yrs