What I Wish For 2016

[CatNadian]

What i wish for 2016

Is that the rod in the ass tribe,stop intimidating people over words that offended no one 30 years ago.

Its getting annoying all this PC bullcrap,it look like Big Brother newspeak from 1984.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Back to your cave, troglodyte. I suspect the words you're thinking about were found to be plenty offensive by the people they were used to describe; except back then, small-mindedness was socially acceptable, just like it used to be socially acceptable to give yourself (and everyone around you) lung cancer.

[LadyTevar]

What I wish is to get a full-time position again.

[Iroscato]

What i wish for 2016

Is that the rod in the ass tribe,stop intimidating people over words that offended no one 30 years ago.

Its getting annoying all this PC bullcrap,it look like Big Brother newspeak from 1984.

Words such as...?

[Raw Shark]

Because fuck world peace and feeding the hungry, right guys? What we really need is society's permission to talk like assholes without being called out on it.

Tell me, CatNadian, how have you been subjected to "intimidation" over your word choices? By whom, specifically? Were you threatened with getting your lights punched out if you repeated something inflammatory, or just with becoming a social pariah if you piss people off everywhere you go? Please, enlighten us as to how this became your sole priority for social progress in 2016.

[General Zod]

What i wish for 2016

Is that the rod in the ass tribe,stop intimidating people over words that offended no one 30 years ago.

Its getting annoying all this PC bullcrap,it look like Big Brother newspeak from 1984.

Instead of getting annoyed, have you tried not being a pussy?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Yup, asking people not to say the n-word is EXACTLY what George Orwell was talking about in "1984". No question.

EDIT: I always find it extremely ironic that the people who are always up in arms about "SJWs" and political correctness have such thin skins. Even just the suggestion that some people might find a word offensive always has them whining and offended and claiming some nebulous "persecution". It would be funny if they weren't so stubborn and loud about their hypocrisy.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Can I suggest that this thread be repurposed around something more productive, like a discussion around the content of this article?

It’s time to retire the PC police
Ending political correctness is a bad joke in a country with real rights violations to worry about

November 7, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Malcolm Harris @BigMeanInternet

“South Park” dodged a bullet. The show’s 19th season premiere is about PCU, a new frat whose members are political correctness vigilantes set on blasting their sirens before violently “checking someone’s privilege”; a new character, the aggressive PC Principal, spends his time enforcing a microaggression-free campus. When resident smartass Eric Cartman stumbles over his (for once) well-intentioned words, PC Principal beats him unconscious in a school bathroom.

If Comedy Central’s schedule had been a few weeks off, the channel would have been looking at a big, ironic PR problem: On Oct. 26, a Columbia, South Carolina, school resource officer threw a teenage student out of her desk and dragged her across a classroom. The video of the attack went viral. In the absence of a full-on scandal, the juxtaposition nevertheless makes the writers of “South Park” look small-minded and foolish. The episode is a classic PC-police story, and it shows how little the caricature of an uptight lefty has changed in 30 years: These stuck-up people, the line goes, become so opposed to oppression that they start oppressing other people.

“South Park” has long represented a brand of libertarian cultural conservatism that’s enchanted with blasphemy and playful hate speech. It’s a political aesthetic that made a lot more sense in the days of Lenny Bruce, when comedians risked actual prosecution for off-color routines. But today, a new national understanding about how the police do their jobs, spurred by videos like the one from Columbia, shows just how stupid the police metaphor is. A child being beaten by the police for using the wrong words isn’t a silly joke; it’s the real evening news.

In the face of actual police violence, calling people out for policing because they’re aggressive about their politics would be laughable — if it weren’t so pathetic. In an excellent feature for The East Bay Express earlier this month, Sam Levin explored the use of the neighborhood organizing site Nextdoor in Oakland. Nextdoor is an electronic bulletin board where neighbors can post messages, sort of like an online telephone pole; it also makes it easier to reach out to authorities about suspected crime. Some white Oakland residents have used it to report “suspicious” black people who weren’t doing anything wrong. When black neighbors complained about racial profiling on the site, an administrator said these folks they were being “pretty aggressive at being the political correctness police.”

Comparing someone to the police for asking people not to call the police is the height of libertarian cultural conservative contradiction. All the anti-PC platitudes about free speech and the right to one’s opinion in a free society fly out of the window when people defend not their safety or well-being but their right to live free from nonwhites. By any consistent ethical standard, a black person’s right to walk down the street unmolested trumps homeowners’ right to use the police for real estate segregation. Yet the cop callers are more concerned about the overpolicing of their language than the overpolicing of their streets.
As a political position, anti-PC isn’t about exercising freedom of speech; it’s about wanting to be protected from it.

Any American who’s paying attention has seen videos of their fellow citizens beaten or killed by the police for saying the wrong thing. Take this recent video of Yibin Mu, a skateboarder in the New York borough of Queens who was thrown to the ground in a chokehold and pepper-sprayed in the face after he failed to show proper deference to a policeman. In Columbia, the girl’s crime was looking at her cellphone during class. But the anti-PC crowd isn’t outraged about actual police literally hurting people — or at least not rhetorically. They’re in it for their own right to be mean without consequence.

As long as they’re being hunted down by the PC police, cultural conservatives can pretend that they’re the victims of modern culture. Think about it: An entire society wants to marginalize them for talking about black-on-black crime or genetic definitions of gender. Of course, no one is going to arrest them under PC law, try them in PC court or lock them in PC jail. But they feel excluded and socially coerced to behave in particular ways, so they fight back wherever they can against compulsory thoughtfulness.

What “South Park” libertarians don’t seem to realize is that they’ve crafted a whole politics around their bruised feelings, which is exactly what they accuse the PC police of doing wrong. More than police brutality or wealth inequality or state surveillance, they don’t like being told that they’re wrong or should behave differently.

If the Nextdoor affair tells us anything, it’s just how zero-sum freedom can be, especially when it comes to feelings. The First Amendment sanctified freedom of expression in part to ensure that my comfort isn’t an excuse to quash what you have to say. But freedom of speech doesn’t protect a libertarian’s right to misgender a trans woman any more than it protects my right to tell them to shut up. As a political position, anti-PC isn’t about exercising freedom of speech; it’s about wanting to be protected from it.

It’s time to retire the PC police — not by legal edict but by ignoring people who whine about it. We should treat anyone who uses this line the same way we’d talk to someone who says jet fuel can’t melt steel beams or that the lizard men run the world. Fear of a politically correct planet is not a position that engages seriously with what happens in our world, so it doesn’t deserve to be treated like one. With so many stories of real police violence, fewer fair-minded people have time to humor the persecution fantasies of edgy joke guys. Maybe the anti-PC folks are whining harder now because they can see the end is near.

[Raw Shark]

That article sums up my opinion fairly well: The anti-PC crowd are free to sound like prejudiced dicks as much as they want. I'm free to tell them, and everybody I know, that they're prejudiced dicks. Nobody is being oppressed here. Hooray for freedom of speech!

[TithonusSyndrome]

Even that seems overgenerous to me; even mildly right-wing social injustice warriors aren't chided when they're called "dicks", they just interpret that as a vindication of their belief that you're the squeamish one who doesn't have the guts to call a spade a spade, in their eyes. If you're going to reach them and make a critique they'll actually have a chance of heeding, you have to call them lunatics, not dicks.

Like the article says, they need to be treated the same way twoofers and Annunaki preppers are, because short of changing their minds, the next best thing you can do to these people is mark them as the unserious pants-on-head loons they are and exclude them from as many social and political decisions as possible until they wither and cease to exist.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

That article sums up my opinion fairly well: The anti-PC crowd are free to sound like prejudiced dicks as much as they want. I'm free to tell them, and everybody I know, that they're prejudiced dicks. Nobody is being oppressed here. Hooray for freedom of speech!

The problem with that line of reasoning is that social consequences are real. Just because no one is coming to sue or arrest you doesn't mean that society imposes no penalties. In the 1960's, it wasn't a crime to be gay in states like California or New York, yet people felt compelled to hide their identities due to the weight of social pressure.

If everyone around you judges you poorly for stating an opinion, that is akin to said opinion being criminalized. The difference lies only in the magnitude of consequences. As a society, we currently pretend that it's OK that there is an unlimited amount of ostratization, boycotts, and negative speech directed at an individual for holding an unpopular opinion as long as there is no official governmental action. The truth is that the police and courts don't need to get involved for a person's life to be ruined for being unpopular, and we need to be aware of that in this viral era where thousands or millions of people are free to direct their feelings toward one individual.

I'm not saying that we should enact new laws restricting the freedom of speech, but we should all remember that there is a human being on the receiving end of our expressions, no matter how abstract the Internet may make them seem.

I'm not saying that you are advocating for the lynch mob, Raw Shark, just pointing out the pitfalls of the philosophy of "You're free to say what you want, and I'm free to criticize you for it".

[Raw Shark]

I don't disagree with any of that, but my response to implied accusations of attempted censorship or intimidation or whatever remains the same. The idea that we're trying to make them shut up completely when we're actually asking that they not be assholes is either a straw man of the PC position or a tacit admission that they can't avoid being assholes without shutting up completely.

[Borgholio]

Yup, asking people not to say the n-word is EXACTLY what George Orwell was talking about in "1984". No question.

EDIT: I always find it extremely ironic that the people who are always up in arms about "SJWs" and political correctness have such thin skins. Even just the suggestion that some people might find a word offensive always has them whining and offended and claiming some nebulous "persecution". It would be funny if they weren't so stubborn and loud about their hypocrisy.

Here's my issue with being PC - it's not even always correct. For instance, the "Black vs African American" label. African American is simply incorrect. Just because you're dark skinned doesn't automatically make you African and just because you immigrate from Africa doesn't mean you're going to be dark skinned. Plus, some black families have been here for hundreds of years. At what point does one stop being African American and simply be American? I mean even us white folk came from Africa at some point. Why aren't we African American?

Now I may be thinking about something totally different than the kind of PC discussed in the article, but when I think of PC I think of "self censorship" for the purpose of preventing someone else from being offended. Now if it's something serious like using the N-word, then I think it's reasonable to not say that. But if someone wants to be called African American instead of black? Sorry, come up with a more accurate term and I'll use it.

[TithonusSyndrome]

What you appear to be missing is that some of these terms are inextricably tied in with a culture of abuse, exploitation and inferiorization. After all, "Chinaman" couldn't be a more inoffensively literal description of a person from China, right? No better or worse than "Englishman", surely? Well, Englishmen weren't being called Englishmen by the railroad builders who didn't use them as canaries and guinea pigs on their aggressive construction campaign in the North American west, so there's more that goes into whether or not a phrase is derogatory than simply whether or not it appears to be a slur on the face of it.

Is "black" one such phrase? I honestly don't know, but rather than obsessing over the literal-minded details about why the term may or may not have descriptive value in a perfect world, how about asking one of the objectors what baggage it carries, or looking it up for yourself?

[Borgholio]

but rather than obsessing over the literal-minded details about why the term may or may not have descriptive value in a perfect world, how about asking one of the objectors what baggage it carries,

Done that...they don't seem to care which term is used.