[quote]So what does it mean to be PC? Well, if you are in favor of affirmative action, feminism, environmentalism, gay and lesbian rights, human rights, legalized abortions, and Third World resistance to imperialism, then you are PC. By expanding the meaning of political correctness to include any expression of radical ideas, Wilson argues, conservatives distorted its original meaning and turned it into a mechanism for doing exactly what they charge is being done to them–silencing dissent.
Ultimately, the charge of PC becomes what Wilson calls a form of conservative correctness.The concept of political correctness becomes a proactive tool of right-wing conservative hegemony, not the cry of an embattled conservative minority drowning in a sea of arbitrary speech codes and unfounded sexual harassment suits. Wilson writes:
Conservatives present themselves as the victims of false charges of racism and sexism, victims of the repressive thought police, and victims of reverse discrimination. The critics of political correctness invert reality by declaring themselves oppressed by feminists and minorities. While sarcastically attacking the victims revolution of minorities on campus, Souza and other critics have created their own victim’s revolution with a new victim: the oppressed conservative white male. [/quote]
I have problems with it as a general concept - but can be persuaded in specific cases.
Not entirely sure what this is - would like a succinct explanation. But I am probably against as it sounds like a special case of genderism.
All for it.
of course, but how are they different to:
[quote]legalized abortions [/quote]- yes
[quote]Third World resistance to imperialism [/quote]- hmmmm is this a PC world for capitalism? Then, no.
can I have my badge, now or do flunk the test?[/quote]
Alien,
Affirmative Action - yes, but it should be based on socio-income levels rather than race. Anybody from a disadvantaged background could qualify.
feminism - if it means equal pay and opportunity etc. Not if it means suburban girls in North America acting like “bitches” and treating every man like he is a potential criminal.
environmentalism - yes
gay and lesbian rights - yes
human rights and legalized abortions- yes
Third World resistance to imperialism - No. This belongs in a textbook from three decades ago. Most developing countries promote business and SME development.
You two should go read the entire article I posted instead of just the snip, or don’t you have pdf?
This from white male Norman Mailer: The White Man Unburdened
snip:
[quote]It was a political bonanza for Bush provided he could deliver an appropriate sens of revenge to the millions? or is it the tens of millions??who identified directly with those incinerated in the Twin Towers.
The titular implication being, of course, that while it’s legitimate for all the other victim classes to be claiming victimhood white American males have no right whatsoever to complain about their legal and economic status in US society.
Maybe so. All’s I know is for myself I got tired of being told my seat was in the back of the bus because of privileges someone else had usurped long before.
Sorry, not interested in second-class citizenship in my own country nor in victimhood either.
That’s the biggest reason I became an expatriate and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I advise all my white male friends and family in the US to consider the same path: don’t get mad, get out. There’s a big world out there. Take your education, take your skills, take your ideas and hit the road, Jack. They don’t want you anyway except to chump you into fighting their foreign wars, do their dirty work and be the heavies in their movies.
Speaking of phony victimhood in the US, I think the epitome is the well-educated white female from a wealthy family complaining about being ‘left behind’ by a sexist society. Aye carumba! What a waste of a good education.
So here’s my favorite quote contribution. It’s from my unpublished opus, Victim Nation: affirmative action is a euphemism for two wrongs make a right.
Feminism is advocating for women to have rights that are equal to those of men (such as equal pay and equal opportunity) or regarding situations that are inapplicable to men due to their biological differences (such as womens ability to become pregnant and bear children) advocating for reasonable rights.
Is that reasonable? Could there be reasonable grounds for opposing such a doctrine?
It turns out, curiously enough, that any sort of reasoning – even well-intentioned – that starts out thinking in terms of artificial classifications of people (genitalia, skin hue, ancestral origin etc.) is drawn from the same intellectual well that ill-intentioned discrimination is drawn from and as a result inevitably leads to the same ends, only in reverse.
So rather than advocating that this artificial classification of people should be equal or that one should be equal, the only truly legitimate starting point for true civil rights equality is to advocate that all people are to have equal rights – and responsibilities.
Leave the artificial line drawing in the dustbin of history where it belongs. Learn the difficult skill of really putting on the blinders to race, gender, creed, age, national origin, sexual orientation etc. once and for all and pull that poisonous weed of thinking in terms of classifications of human beings up from the ground roots and all finally because it will never bear anything but bitter fruit.
Anyone who can reasonably show that they personally have been discriminated against should be made whole but not by employing the fallacy that two wrongs make a right.
[quote=“spook”]
It turns out, curiously enough, that any sort of reasoning – even well-intentioned – that starts out thinking in terms of artificial classifications of people (genitalia, skin hue, ancestral origin etc.)[/quote]
Racial and ancestral differences among people are negligible, but there is nothing artificial about the very real differences between the sexes.
There are very real physical differences between you and me but no inherent human difference.
There are many otherwise intelligent people who are privately convinced that there are inherent qualitative differences between themselves and others simply because the others have marked physical or cultural differences from them.
That’s the illusion that fuels bigotry and until we realize that, we’ll simply be endlessly repeating the mistakes of history, shifting them around, turning them inside out – everything but shaking ourselves loose from them and moving beyond to a world which realizes that there is really only one kind of ‘rights’ and that is human rights.
[quote=“spook”]There are very real physical differences between you and me but no inherent human difference.
[/quote]
That’s Cartesian dualist hooey. Men and women are physically very different, therefore we are very different in the head/mind/brain. Not 100% different, of course; it would surprise nobody that both a man and a woman might equally be reduced to tears at the end of a moving film, or that certain women might not cry as the credits roll while their male partners might. Still, with all of these hormones coursing through our veins and triggering various brain synapses, how could we not be different?
Acknowledging these differences does not necessarily lead to bigotry, and is no obstacle to equal, humane treatment of people of both sexes. For more information, I recommend Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
No one’s arguing that human rights should not be equally applied to everybody regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation. I was merely taking issue with your patently false assertion that differences of sex, sexual orientation and race are artificial.
How does acknowleding these differences, such as the fact that northern Europeans are more susceptible to various skin cancers with prolonged exposure to the sun, etc., lead to discrimination?
I was only arguing that physical differences are superficial in the context of human rights.
While (nearly) everyone understands the fallacy of white supremacist claims that white rights derive from physical differences between the races, I was making the point that even well-meaning advocates of group rights are unwittingly committing the same error.
Specifically, when you tally up the rights that “groups” claim, they always seem to add up to more than ‘mere’ human rights.
In other words, some people seem to be more equal than others and I attribute that to the fact that their apologists’ reasoning starts out flawed by focusing on physical differences as both a cause of discrimination and somehow a remedy for it too.
A corollary logical error that group rights advocates often make is denying that very real physical differences exist between races, the genders etc. I acknowledge these physical and statistical differences without hesitation.
Actually, that comes from an old Soviet era joke: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, this is reversed.”
White males make up 1/3 of the population in the U.S.A.; in Europe, Canada, and the Antipodes, the ratio is even higher. To make generalizations about such a huge group - nearly 100 million in the U.S. alone - is silly. The PC stereotype of all white males sitting around in corporate boardrooms smoking fat cigars debating, “Who are we going to oppress today?” is hilariously detached from reality. At most, privileged - genuinely privileged - white males only occupy a fraction of the population. The rest of us don’t have any serious power in the “system” and never will. Explain to me how a guy busting his ass eight hours a day on some crappy blue-collar job that barely pays the rent is a “privileged” member of the overclass. So he doesn’t get pissed on as much as a black guy. He still gets pissed on.
In fact, the divide and conquer method of fostering racial/ethnic divisions is a classic maneuver of the genuine overclass. In the Old South it gave dirt farmers with nothing something - the comfort that they may be poor white barefoot trash living in shacks, but at least they ain’t no ni**ers. By focusing their anger and resentment at those of a different skin color, they misdirected their energy away from the people they should have been pissed off at - the landed gentry, the sweatshop owners, the people that were exploiting them. Read up on any history of Russia or Eastern Europe - the “privileged, bourgeios” Jews made for powerful scapegoats, while the real rulers cynically manipulated to maintain their power. And don’t forget how ethnic Chinese get treated in places like Indonesia.
CHICAGO, Dec. 22 (UPI) – For the first time since tracking began 20 years ago, U.S. women outnumber men in higher paying, white collar managerial and professional occupations.
Chewy