Article - Political Correctness: How the Right Invented the Phantom Enemy

Started by Shiranu, January 03, 2017, 01:15:51 PM

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Shiranu

Alternatively: How the Myth of Political Correctness and SJWs Won Trump the Election and Encourages the Bigoted/"Populist" Movements of Europe


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump?CMP=fb_gu

QuoteFor 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right â€" and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph.

Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald Trump had run as a candidate whose primary qualification was that he was not “a politician”. Depicting yourself as a “maverick” or an “outsider” crusading against a corrupt Washington establishment is the oldest trick in American politics â€" but Trump took things further. He broke countless unspoken rules regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.

Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems. “The special interests, the arrogant media, and the political insiders, don’t want me to talk about the crime that is happening in our country,” Trump said in one late September speech. “They want me to just go along with the same failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering.”

Trump claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let ordinary Americans suffer because their first priority was political correctness. “They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else,” Trump declared after a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I refuse to be politically correct.” What liberals might have seen as language changing to reflect an increasingly diverse society â€" in which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to one another â€" Trump saw a conspiracy.

Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism. During the first debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Trump how he would answer the charge that he was “part of the war on women”.

“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’,” Kelly pointed out. “You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees …”

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump answered, to audience applause. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”

Trump used the same defense when critics raised questions about his statements on immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to Mexicans as “rapists”, NBC, the network that aired his reality show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending its relationship with him. Trump’s team retorted that, “NBC is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be politically correct.”

In August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curial of San Diego was unfit to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities because he was Mexican American and therefore likely to be biased against him, Trump told CBS News that this was “common sense”. He continued: “We have to stop being so politically correct in this country.” During the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his proposed “ban on Muslims” by stating: “We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem.”

Every time Trump said something “outrageous” commentators suggested he had finally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.

Trump and his followers never defined “political correctness”, or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths by policing language.

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, that you are being silenced. But this idea â€" that there is a set of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the words you use â€" is trending globally right now. Britain’s rightwing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of “political correctness gone mad” and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the “metropolitan elite”. In Germany, conservative journalists and politicians are making similar complaints: after the assaults on women in Cologne last New Year’s Eve, for instance, the chief of police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to be politisch korrekt had prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National has condemned more traditional conservatives as “paralysed by their fear of confronting political correctness”.

Trump’s incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive “political correctness”. Some have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of political correctness, “identity politics”. But upon closer examination, “political correctness” becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an “exonym”: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong â€" the adverb before “correct” implies a “but”. However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being “politically correct” discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called “political correctness”. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

Most Americans had never heard the phrase “politically correct” before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned â€" under the headline “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” â€" that the country’s universities were threatened by “a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform”.

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student activism. He wrote that there was an “unofficial ideology of the university”, according to which “a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a kind of ‘correct’ attitude toward the problems of the world”. For instance, “Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not.”

Bernstein’s alarming dispatch in America’s paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the “brave new world of ideological zealotry” at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek â€" with a circulation of more than 3 million â€" featured the headline “THOUGHT POLICE” and yet another ominous warning: “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment â€" or the New McCarthyism?” A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991 â€" inside, the magazine proclaimed that “The New Fascists” were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on “a new intolerance” that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: “Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvard’s brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers. Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution.”

In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment described in the New York article had never happened.
There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure “artistic licence”. No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. When Richard Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future â€" a title alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of Terror, during which tens of thousands of people were executed within months.

None of the stories that introduced the menace of political correctness could pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets â€" Bernstein observed that the phrase “smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy”â€" but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be “ideinost”, which translates as “ideological correctness”. But that word has nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as “politically correct” in American communist publications from the 1930s â€" usually, she says, in a tone of mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s â€" most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into English with the title “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People”.

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective “correct” there. But they didn’t use it in the way Mao did. “Politically correct” became a kind of in-joke among American leftists â€" something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. “The term was always used ironically,” Perry says, “always calling attention to possible dogmatism.”

In 1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, used the phrase in an essay about strains on gender relations within her community. No matter how “politically correct” her male friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing to recognise the plight of black women.

Until the late 1980s, “political correctness” was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to organise against “political correctness” were a group of feminists who called themselves the Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” at a theatre in New York’s East Village â€" a rally against fellow feminists who had condemned pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them wearing leather and collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos. The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales summed up the mood when she told the audience, “We need to have dialogues about S&M issues, not about what is ‘politically correct, politically incorrect’.”

By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic, who has written extensively on race and social justice, recalls that the activists he knew then in the Bay Area used the phrase “in a jokey way â€" a way for one sectarian to dismiss another sectarian’s line.

But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement, “political correctness” became a talking point for neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American universities and cultural institutions â€" and they were determined to stop it.

The right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more than a decade. Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative donors had funded the creation of dozens of new thinktanks and “training institutes” offering programmes in everything from “leadership” to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising. They had endowed fellowships for conservative graduate students, postdoctoral positions and professorships at prestigious universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the dominance of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the academy.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Shiranu

QuoteStarting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow “cultural relativism” and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.

In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an “assault on the canon” was taking place and that a “politics of victimhood” had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments such as African American studies and women’s studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” or “The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?”

In June 1991, the young Dinesh D’Souza followed Bloom and Kimball with Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas Bloom had bemoaned the rise of relativism and Kimball had attacked what he called “liberal fascism”, and what he considered frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, D’Souza argued that admissions policies that took race into consideration were producing a “new segregation on campus” and “an attack on academic standards”. The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June cover story. To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article by D’Souza with the title: “Visigoths in Tweed.”

These books did not emphasise the phrase “political correctness”, and only D’Souza used the phrase directly. But all three came to be regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that appeared in venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the authors were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles uncritically repeated their arguments.

In some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine changes taking place within academia. It is true that scholars had become increasingly sceptical about whether it was possible to talk about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and representation. European theorists who became influential in US humanities departments during the 1970s and 1980s argued that individual experience was shaped by systems of which the individual might not be aware â€" and particularly by language. Michel Foucault, for instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically specific forms of power. Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of conservative critics, practised what he called “deconstruction”, rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the most seemingly innocent and straightforward categories were riven with internal contradictions. The value of ideals such as “humanity” or “liberty” could not be taken for granted.

It was also true that many universities were creating new “studies departments”, which interrogated the experiences, and emphasised the cultural contributions of groups that had previously been excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments reflected new social realities. The demographics of college students were changing, because the demographics of the United States were changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white. In California, the freshman classes at many public universities were “majority minority”, or more than 50% non-white. Changes to undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the student population.

The responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes they described were disproportionate and often misleading. For instance, Bloom complained at length about the “militancy” of African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught in the 1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation of African American studies were responding to: the biggest protest at Cornell took place in 1969 after a cross burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist burned down the Africana Studies Center, founded in response to these protests, in 1970.)

More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were “political”. Bloom, Kimball, and D’Souza claimed that they wanted to “preserve the humanistic tradition”, as if their academic foes were vandalising a canon that had been enshrined since time immemorial. But canons and curriculums have always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman Melville’s worst book until the mid-1920s. Many universities had only begun offering literature courses in “living” languages a decade or so before that.

In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and D’Souza were funded by networks of conservative donors â€" particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families â€" who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new “counter-intelligentsia”. (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and Scaife Foundations.) In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views: “They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.”

These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme â€" and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas that held very little benefit for those people.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible (“The Lesbian Phallus”), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation â€" the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people â€" attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign “others”.

PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. “Political correctness” became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the “liberal elite”, who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States,” Bush said. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land,” but, he warned, “In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity.”

After 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than “difference” and “multiculturalism”, Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces”, “microaggressions”, “privilege” and “cultural appropriation”.

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive.

In January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first new, high-profile anti-PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. “Not a Very PC Thing to Say” followed the blueprint provided by the anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York article from 1991, it began with an anecdote set on campus that supposedly demonstrated that political correctness had run amok, and then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In 1991, John Taylor wrote: “The new fundamentalism has concocted a rationale for dismissing all dissent.” In 2015, Jonathan Chait claimed that there were once again “angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas”.

Chait warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before. Political correctness was no longer confined to universities â€" now, he argued, it had taken over social media and thus “attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old”. (As evidence of the “hegemonic” influence enjoyed by unnamed actors on the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying that they had been criticised by leftists on Twitter.)

Chait’s article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media “cry bullies”. On the cover of their September 2015 issue, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The title, “The Coddling Of the American Mind”, nodded to the godfather of anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, another organisation funded by the Olin and Scaife families.) “In the name of emotional wellbeing, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like,” the article announced. It was shared over 500,000 times.

These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the 1990s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.

Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing. Chait said that leftists were “perverting liberalism” and appointed himself the defender of a liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system “rigged”.

The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as Breitbart.

QuoteThe opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders against authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the populist authoritarianism now spreading everywhere. Trump is anti-political correctness gone mad.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

Baruch

Ah yes, the vast Right wing conspiracy Hillary used to talk about ;-)

Yes, Left authoritarianism is so much better than Right authoritarianism, because the Left has a lock on morality (or identity politics or something).

But as a meme, not a legal system, (Left) political correctness was bound to be a fad, and pass like any other fad.

It is a fact, that the university people, particularly the younger faculty, and the students ... display a certain lack of maturity.  This is unavoidable.

The Closing of the American Mind is something I read way back when.  I was thinking at the time ... this seems like something applicable to political parties (where ideology is at a premium) rather than colleges.  There is still plenty of diversity in colleges (while they haven't gone bankrupt).  There were Great Books arguments way back in the 1950s ... my town library used to have a set of Great Books.  Problem was, unless you were a geek, you were mostly interested in Rock & Roll.  Only geeks like myself were ever interested in those (that is where I first encountered Spinoza in HS).  I got to college in the years immediately following Watergate, so what was at issue prior to Kent State, was no longer hot, and the Vietnam War was winding down.  Being in a technical curriculum, we geeks didn't have time for the "mere" humanities anyway.  Colleges that taught humanities, particularly philosophy and political science, were the hot beds of college revolt earlier.

PC was manufactured by the colleges, and eventually by their journalism graduates.  One can call that Cultural Marxism if one likes, but it wasn't coming from the lumpen proletariat ... the deplorables.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.


AllPurposeAtheist

Just yet another empty slogan that fires up the gullible. What really should fire them up, but won't is the republican house decided they wanted to gut the ethics committee so they could in essence never break the law they create because there would be no law to break. Oh yeah, that was a really bad idea.. They almost hung themselves with their brand new rope. Too bad they'll have to use a used rope to actually do it now. The rope is no longer new already.
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.


Shiranu

Quote from: chill98 on January 03, 2017, 10:57:17 PM
hahaha...



BLM - a different perspective.





Tell me... how many people do you think belong to this "Regressive Left"? How many people do you think are destructive members of not BLM... rather than the majority who are just protesting for justice? 1000 maybe? 5000? Shit... maybe even 10000? It has to be low given they never seem to actually do anything that ever effects anything more than the most local of events. Certainly nothing national of any note. How many "Regressive Leftists" are there in the Supreme Court? The House? Senate? How many "Regressive Leftists" and "BLM thugs" have had a single impact on your life?

Now... how many "anti-PC" people do you think there are who actively are working to subvert your democracy? How many "anti-PC" voters specifically voted for Trump just because he spoke unlike everyone else; that he "spoke his mind" rather than what was correct? How many people froth at the mouth the moment anything to do with actual issues is brought up because, "They have a social opinion different than me? Help! HELP! I'm being repressed!"

How many "Anti-PC" politicians are in Congress? The Senate? The Supreme Court? How much relative power does one single man who was voted in by 62.7 million people for one variation or another that he wasn't "PC" to the highest office of the land have compared to every single "Regressive Leftist" who has ever lived? How much damage do you think his nominees who hate science and hate the government doing it's job will do compared to every "Regressive Leftist" who has ever lived?


62.7 million people voted to be "Anti-PC"... be it for legitimately racist and bigoted reasons or they bought into your fear mongering... and now we once again have one of the most anti-democratic and anti-science/enviroment presidents in American history.

And you think the Regressive Left... that BLM... is what you need to be afraid of?

"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

drunkenshoe

pr126, your usage of English language, way of expression, the so called arguments you propose would make the best and dumbest examples to put into the OP.

Not to mention that anyone who is as ignorant -actually right down stupid that is something far beyond ignorance- as to claim the concept of 'political correctness' was invented in the 20th century as a result of Marxism, should be slapped on the forehead repeatedly till they get dizzy. 

I wish these people at least knew what these words actually mean. They started with 'Regressive Left', moved to 'Cultural Marxism' and they keep using whatever starts with Mar... and use it with the word Marxism interchangeably.

They also throw quotes from cultural historians and philosophers around, because they are listed as Communist in wiki. :lol: Some of the names gets thrown around are the most rabid rejecters of the concept of modern culture, and the so called understanding of 'cultural hegemony' supposedly criticised by the white bonobo monkeys. Some mentioned don't even recognise the concept of culture itself. And over all names like Gramsci, by expending the 'cultural hegemony' pointed out that upper class was actually tied to lower classes by folklore. (I saw a Gramsci mention in one of pr's posts.) By the way, this man rejects the defintion of culture,lol.

QuoteIn Gramsci's view, a class cannot dominate in modern conditions by merely advancing its own narrow economic interests; neither can it dominate purely through force and coercion. Rather, it must exert intellectual and moral leadership, and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces.

Hmmm... what it was the thing errr....that happened and still happening in the US lately. Sounds familiar, but cannot put my finger on it....hmm, just at the top of my tongue.  :eyes:

"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

Baruch

"Gramsci" ... Shoe and Pr the name droppers.  You realize that there are probably less than a dozen people in the US who know who he is?  Smarty-pants Europeans and ME intelligentsia ;-)  He has been dead since 1937.  Some student activists in the US in the 60s might have cared, when they weren't studying Che and Mao.

The recent coopted by the CIA cultural memes, like PC ... are tools of the narrative control.  Specifically to make un-good thought double-plus unthinkable.  As a political skeptic ... it has never impressed me.  Like most fads, it will fade with bellbottoms and tie-dyed shirts.

Progressives, like Regressives ... are idealists, whose prescriptive view of reality will always run aground on the descriptive reality (not view) of reality.  Yes, I want a unicorn to shit a rainbow of Skittles, and I want my enemies to pay for it ;-)

Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

drunkenshoe

Neither pr, nor the anti-sjw vlogger who quoted Gramsci knows who is. He is a target because, they often think he is the father of the cultural hegemony construction -he is not- and he is of course a 'commie' and a 'markseeest'. The reason I know his name is a translation I made on socio-linguistics and I also remember that I had to read him for another one related to social history and cultural history. Obvioulsy none of us actually 'know' Gramsci.

But there are far more than a dozen people in the US who just doesn't know his name, but also knows what was Gramsci talking about, Baruch.

"science is not about building a body of known 'facts'. ıt is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good." - tp

Cocoa Beware

What has been happening is so wrong in so many ways.

For example, personalities with a substantial following, such as Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, and Sargon of Akkad have been laughably intellectually dishonest in their endorsement of Trump.

All of this time these self proclaimed "skeptics" and "secularists" have completely ignored the fact the Trump is anti science, and has handed power to religious demagogues like Mike Pence.

They claim to resent labels, but their response has been to label people themselves (for example SJW is now considered a derogatory term in their opinion) They claim to be free speech, but seem okay with silencing people who do not agree with them: https://www.change.org/p/universities-suspend-social-justice-in-universities

What gets me is that Trump has never once said he thinks SJWs and the like are a problem or adversary. However, since Trump says whatever he likes, making myriad repulsive remarks in the process, anti SJWs have assumed this regardless.

I don't get what makes these people think in such a contradictory non sequitur-ish fashion.

Baruch

Quote from: Cocoa Beware on January 04, 2017, 03:03:15 PM
What has been happening is so wrong in so many ways.

For example, personalities with a substantial following, such as Dave Rubin, Gad Saad, and Sargon of Akkad have been laughably intellectually dishonest in their endorsement of Trump.

All of this time these self proclaimed "skeptics" and "secularists" have completely ignored the fact the Trump is anti science, and has handed power to religious demagogues like Mike Pence.

They claim to resent labels, but their response has been to label people themselves (for example SJW is now considered a derogatory term in their opinion) They claim to be free speech, but seem okay with silencing people who do not agree with them: https://www.change.org/p/universities-suspend-social-justice-in-universities

What gets me is that Trump has never once said he thinks SJWs and the like are a problem or adversary. However, since Trump says whatever he likes, making myriad repulsive remarks in the process, anti SJWs have assumed this regardless.

I don't get what makes these people think in such a contradictory non sequitur-ish fashion.

Someone here is awake, after partying New Years!  I can only speak about Sargon of Akkad, since I follow him sometimes.  Basically you are assuming consistency in the YouTube intelligentsia ... and no use of rhetoric.  Sargon would kick a SJW or a Feminist for anything at all, particularly if they are down, even if JEB Bush or Sarah Palin was President.  Trump's election is just an excuse, because it stirs up the SJW etc crowd like a swarm of blind hornets.  This seems to be a common behavior since the election, with similar YouTube commentators.

I have no idea, and wouldn't trust a politician to tell me ... where Trump is actually coming from.  Only look at what they do, not what they say ... and do the same with lame Democrats too.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

chill98

Quote from: Shiranu on January 04, 2017, 04:39:54 AM
Tell me... how many people do you think belong to this ... [insert pro/anti group here] SNIP

None of that matters.
Quote from: Shiranu on January 04, 2017, 04:39:54 AM
62.7 million people voted to be "Anti-PC"... be it for legitimately racist and bigoted reasons or they bought into your fear mongering... and now we once again have one of the most anti-democratic and anti-science/enviroment presidents in American history.
Thing is, the message of the two videos completely went over your head.  These things the 'right' were complaining about have come to fruition.  Its not made up, it is real.  The regressive left (TM) evolved from PC and Liberals (like true scotsmen) have done nothing to correct it. 

And you are a straight up liar when you claim 62 million people voted to be anti-pc. 

Cavebear

Quote from: Shiranu on January 03, 2017, 01:15:51 PM
Alternatively: How the Myth of Political Correctness and SJWs Won Trump the Election and Encourages the Bigoted/"Populist" Movements of Europe


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump?CMP=fb_gu

Congratulations; too long and disorganized to read...
Atheist born, atheist bred.  And when I die, atheist dead!

Cocoa Beware

Quote from: Baruch on January 04, 2017, 07:03:26 PM
Someone here is awake, after partying New Years!  I can only speak about Sargon of Akkad, since I follow him sometimes.  Basically you are assuming consistency in the YouTube intelligentsia ... and no use of rhetoric.  Sargon would kick a SJW or a Feminist for anything at all, particularly if they are down, even if JEB Bush or Sarah Palin was President.  Trump's election is just an excuse, because it stirs up the SJW etc crowd like a swarm of blind hornets.  This seems to be a common behavior since the election, with similar YouTube commentators.

I have no idea, and wouldn't trust a politician to tell me ... where Trump is actually coming from.  Only look at what they do, not what they say ... and do the same with lame Democrats too.

The other part that gets me is that they actually rely on SJWs in order to have an audience, and in reality eliminating them would be the worst possible thing that could happen to their channels.

Without this SJW "boogeyman" I'm pretty sure many of them would be at a complete loss as to channel content (At least in general they don't strike me as extraordinarily creative or adaptive)