Political Correctness.

[theghostofjosh]

what's up with all the PC thought policing that's going on now? It seems people discard important issues to bitch about something somebody said about somebody else......it's ridiculous.

[jesse]

Political Correctness means power and control. It may also mean you've convinced a populace to put their faith and backing into a certain set of ideasl and make them believe that makes them better and puts them in the moral high ground. Once the ruling elite have the majority of the people backing what they supposedly admire, they can abuse their situation for instance by telling others how to act, how and what to believe, trust your leaders, love you country and more importantly, never question what is happening.

In today's fast-paced world where everything has to be fulfilled yesterday, PC is also a way to hide many ugly truths. Turn your head off and put it in the sand. Take for instance many countries in the European continent: some have legislation effectively making it a crime to deny, question, belittle certain historic events during the second world war. I tend to think they've done this because they want to wipe out and minimize people admiring fascism and extremism. Unfortunately it will solve the problem because some individuals are die hard supporters of their beliefs and ideals.

[anul]

Political correctness has slowly infiltrated society since the 80's. The best way to combat it is to ignore it completely, and don't allow it to shape you.

[Monte314]

I think many people are driven to political correctness out of fear... fear that they'll be called atheists, chauvanists, racists, you name it. In some venues, it's just safer to say what everyone else is saying, even when you don't believe it.

Of course, INTJ's are terrible at this kind of gutless compromise to cultural fashion; they regard it as nonsense... as well they should.

[png1977]

About PCness, I say - we ought not to cheat ourselves and sassiety by lying about or concealing our knowledge and understanding.

To go beyond the scope of this post, I've noticed a cultural artifact among some INTJs of disregarding the effect of their words or actions on other people, out of a sense of extra-special worthiness as uniquely awesome individuals. All I can say about this is that my comments about PCness don't imply that I think one ought to blurt out every defamatory or non-standardized sentiment that comes into her head (even INTJs can learn tact!). Just that, framed correctly, the sharper thoughts of an INTJ can do alot to counter the political ills of the age (including political correctness?).

[Shakyamuni]

Of course, INTJ's are terrible at this kind of gutless compromise to cultural fashion; they regard it as nonsense... as well they should.

Yep. Political correctness is nonsense. Express your opinion, don't be sheep. :)

[Homini Lupus]

I prefer caring about what I'm saying rather than how I'm saying it.
Besides, PC often refers to specific groups who probably prefers respect to pity, and PC sounds a lot like pity.

[knock7]

The cure(Political Correctness/Affirmative Action) is worse than the disease (racism/discrimination). Anyone who thinks they can avoid or ignore it is fooling themselves. We live in a state of constant censure for fear of legal, social, finanicial, etc. repercussions.

[Homini Lupus]

If you mean a basic level of civilised speech I can agree. But I say what needs to be said, not what PC allows. Every time i use a too convoluted term to define a specific goup, I'm stressing their difference.

[Erika Redmark]

Insistence on using PC language assumes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, and I don't think it is.

[Homini Lupus]

Insistence on using PC language assumes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, and I don't think it is.

Why not? language to me seems quite a strong frame for tought.

[Erika Redmark]

Why not? language to me seems quite a strong frame for tought.

To take politically correct lingo as an example, the fact that we have to go through a continuously evolving chain of euphemisms for certain things suggests that what those euphemisms actually are doesn't influence people's attitudes about them. Mental disabilities, for instance: people used to be referred to as "idiot", "imbecile", "moron", and the like as technical terms; those words came to be used trivially as insults. Then those words are deemed disrespectful, so you need more words. So then you get stuff like "learning disabled", and sure enough, you hear kids using "LD" as an insult, and so on. (It reminds me of the passage in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time when the narrator describes the kids jeering at the bus as it goes by: "Special needs!") No matter how well-intentioned some politically correct technical term is, the thing itself has bad associations, and it ends up just replacing the previous one. Changing what the most respectful way to refer to the mentally disabled is every couple of years doesn't make people any more tolerant of them.

It was the book The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker, that convinced me against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He describes an experiment where people were shown a series of either F shapes or backwards F shapes, rotated at various angles, and they were to press one button if it was forwards and another if it was backwards. What they found was that it took people the longest amount of time to determine the orientation of the shape when they were rotated 180 degrees; the closer the shape was to right-side up, the faster people could tell if it was a forwards or backwards F. This suggests that the subjects were literally rotating the shape in their mind's eye (which agrees with their introspection); if they were manipulating the words used to describe the shape, upside-down shapes should have been faster than ones that were rotated, say, 30 degrees, since an F is "a vertical line with two horizontal lines at the top right" and a backwards F is "a vertical line with two horizontal lines at the top left". If a subject were given a vertical line with two horizontal lines at the bottom right, they would change all the instances of "top" to "bottom", "left" to "right", and vice versa, to determine which verbal description the shape fit, and they'd be doing less work than they would on the 30-degree rotation since that doesn't have the vertical line in common, so the 180-degree rotations would have been faster.

People also make a really big deal about how English doesn't have a word for "schadenfreude" but German does, and they claim that English speakers can't understand the concept as well or something, but I don't think that's true at all (like the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", about the words for snow, and the Hopi tense hoax, which are also given as "evidence").

Here's an example from kiddie lit, but I think it pretty well sums up the failure of "using the right word" as a magic fix that will make everyone more tolerant: basically, in this series of kids' fantasy novels (by Zilpha Keatley Snyder), everyone thinks there are monsters that live underground (their legends call them the Pash-shan). It turns out that there are people who live underground, but they're not monsters; rather, they are a race of humans who were exiled by the ancestors of the people who live above ground (and everyone has forgotten about each other over the generations, helped by the fact that the surface world's government has kept it a secret), and they call themselves the Erdlings. (I promise, there's a point to this.) So these two groups of people have to get used to each other's existence; in particular, one character says to another about the surface people's fear of the people who came from below ground: "They try to say 'Erdling', but they still think 'Pash-shan'." I think this applies to the real world pretty well…you can use all the "right" terms you want, but that doesn't necessarily mean that your opinions regarding the things those terms refer to must be politically correct.

Regardless of whether words influence attitudes, I think that "sexist" language isn't as bad as people say: speaking of a woman as a "chairman" and not changing the term merely suggests that women can do what men can…

[meanlittlechimp]

Can you guys give more examples on how Political correctness has affected your lives? The other thread re: this topic (PC police and censorship in Media) mentioned how only black people can say nigger but white people can't (anymore anyways).

Is there anything else, specifically, about the PC police that ruins your day?

Take for instance many countries in the European continent: some have legislation effectively making it a crime to deny, question, belittle certain historic events during the second world war.

Can you be more specific here? Are you one of the people that believe the holocaust didn't happen?

[Homini Lupus]

Holocaust is one of the word I'm at odds with. Holocaust is a term referring to a sacrifice to God while what we are referring to is mass murder, so I call it extermination; at times, I've been considered racist just for that.

By the way E. Redmark, thanks for the explanation. I agree with you, but I was curious about your statement.

[ElstonGunn]

I don't see how it has much of an effect on me whether I call Mr Jones a "black dude" or "A person of African descent," or Miss Smith "one of them lady drivers" or "a female motorist," or Mr Doe a "garbageman" or a "waste removal technician," or Mrs Johnson a "secretary" or an "administrative professional." It makes no difference to me, so I might as well just call people by the terms that they prefer, especially if someone is going to freak out if I use the wrong term. I'd rather avoid that hassle and call them what they want to be called, even if it seems like a needless re-packaging of the self-identification that they're using.

[SeaCzar]

Dare one suggest that those who buy into this PC non-sense are riding the short bus, whether they realize it or not. Its nothing less than censorship. Eventually, the Supreme Court will throw it out as so much twaddle.

[Pirate1650]

I think it was some comedian who said,

"I'm not going to be politically correct, I'm just going to be correct"

That also sums up my perspective as well.

[Marcus]

People also make a really big deal about how English doesn't have a word for "schadenfreude" but German does, and they claim that English speakers can't understand the concept as well or something, but I don't think that's true at all (like the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax", about the words for snow, and the Hopi tense hoax, which are also given as "evidence").

A Japanese (English teacher by profession) asked me once what inhibited (to discourage from free or spontaneous activity especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints) means because that word does not exist in Japanese. He had hard time understanding the concept. We were joking that it's because all the Japanese are inhibited.

PS: English has a word for Schadenfreude:
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:)

[Beery Swine]

PC is boring. You can't even say a lot of things on this forum. Whenever I hear 50 cent I don't think "uneducated miscreant from a lower social order whose parents probably didn't care much about him," I think a word that'll probably get me a strike, possibly banned from the fora if I typed it out here. In reverse, I don't think of Michio Kaku as "an exceptionally talented Japanese-American theoretical physicist," I just think of him as a great scientist. What difference should it make what words I use to insult someone? The intent is the same.

[Erika Redmark]

A Japanese (English teacher by profession) asked me once what inhibited (to discourage from free or spontaneous activity especially through the operation of inner psychological or external social constraints) means because that word does not exist in Japanese. He had hard time understanding the concept. We were joking that it's because all the Japanese are inhibited.

Well…maybe the causality goes more like this: a culture doesn't place much importance on a concept (or views it as the norm and therefore nothing special), so they don't talk about it; so when they encounter a culture that cares more about that concept and/or talks about it more, they don't get it–maybe because they can't think of a way to translate it, but maybe also just because it's different culturally? So neither the vocabulary of one's language nor the understanding of a concept causes the other, but both are influenced by a "lurking variable", the culture?

PS: English has a word for Schadenfreude:
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:)

True. I just know I'd experienced the concept before I'd heard any word for it at all.

Can you guys give more examples on how Political correctness has affected your lives?…Is there anything else, specifically, about the PC police that ruins your day?

My main problem isn't really with the "you can't talk about firemen anymore" phenomenon (how, unfortunately, the English words for homo and vir are homonyms), although I did read an interesting book that talked about the process by which school textbooks are edited: one example I remember is of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story being adapted for use in some kind of elementary- or middle-school literature compendium…and all the references to Judaism were removed, making the story make no sense. (Of course, there's pressure from the religious right to censor stuff, too, notably people trying to get school libraries to stop carrying Harry Potter. They don't get that it's not real. o_O) But people care about the most inconsequential stuff–they employ people to sit on boards to review textbooks and standardised tests, and they have to hunt through the reading material for references to things that might be problematic. I'm not even talking about racial slurs; they do stuff like "Well, this story is set in the mountains, so it will put kids who don't live in the mountains at a disadvantage." As if kids couldn't imagine it for themselves. Rather a waste of time and money. I ought to go find that book…

No, I'm more worried about censorship of ideas, which is more akin to what I was talking about in the other thread. Prosecuting people in Canada for republishing those cartoons from Denmark, or running an excerpt from the book America Alone in a magazine. A Finnish blogger was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for (you guessed it!) drawing a cartoon.

[Marcus]

the culture?

Agreed. The question is whether PC talk shifts the culture in a positive direction. I think yes to some degree.

[Liquid]

After I saw this thread, I was reminded of a piece I wrote for my exam a few weeks ago. I posted it in a new thread (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) and not here because It’s sort of long.