Political correctness.

Gazpacho said:
And what? You want me to repeat my earlier post? It's about political goals, such as the goal of rolling back white supremacy and male supremacy on the institutional and individual levels.
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You appear to be espousing similar principles to that which David Irving employs to roll back Aryan supremacy and deny the Holocaust; call everything by a pretty name and pretend it never happened.

Personally, I would rather we keep the reminders in place so that we never forget how a supposedly civilised people came within a whisker of utterly destroying an entire culture for the sole purpose of turning its members into free labourers for themselves.

Rewriting history doesn't make it never have happened, only lets us forget it, and once we do that, we can't learn from it.
 
smartcooky said:
You appear to be espousing similar principles to that which David Irving employs to roll back Aryan supremacy and deny the Holocaust; call everything by a pretty name and pretend it never happened.
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:confused:

So because political correctness is there to reduce every day racism and bigotry, you think it encourages denial of history? That's quite a leap.

smartcooky said:
Personally, I would rather we keep the reminders in place so that we never forget how a supposedly civilised people came within a whisker of utterly destroying an entire culture for the sole purpose of turning its members into free labourers for themselves.
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And the means of doing that is to allow racism and bigotry all around us?

smartcooky said:
Rewriting history doesn't make it never have happened, only lets us forget it, and once we do that, we can't learn from it.
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Who's trying to rewrite history?
 
smartcooky said:
More raw perhaps, but would they be allowed to include the racist overtones that these programmes used to incorporate, using such terminology as Wop, Wog, Darkie, Paki and Nig-nog, all of which were commonly used in The Two Ronnies.

Would this not be considered Politically Incorrect....


...and likely to have one of those mad Islamic terrorist clerics calling for a fatwā against the writers like they did against Salman Rushdie, author of the fiction novel "The Satanic Verses"?

And what about this one?



I think rules 1,3, 5 and 7 might cause a bit of a stir, and rule 2 certainly would.
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What about this one?



How about this one?



Could those be made today?
 
smartcooky said:
More raw perhaps, but would they be allowed to include the racist overtones that these programmes used to incorporate, using such terminology as Wop, Wog, Darkie, Paki and Nig-nog, all of which were commonly used in The Two Ronnies.
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I'm a bit confused. Earlier on you were railing against the use of racial epithets such as "honky", "whitey" and "white trash" which I think almost never appears on TV today or even back then. But it sounds like you miss the racist words on the Two Ronnies. :p

I think you're right though. If I sat down to watch one of those comedy programmes they have on television early evening on a Saturday, I would be quite surprised if one of them contained a scene in a shop in which the owner called out to his customer, who happened to be black, "Hello Nig Nog!" But I wouldn't characterize my surprise as a symptom of the destruction of the fabric of society by cancer.


smartcooky said:
Would this not be considered Politically Incorrect....


...and likely to have one of those mad Islamic terrorist clerics calling for a fatwā against the writers like they did against Salman Rushdie, author of the fiction novel "The Satanic Verses"?
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I think it is terribly politically incorrect in its depiction of the white storekeeper as a thieving racist. :p

Interesting that Ronnie Barker says of the Golliwog on the Marmalade jar, "It's got one of your little friends on there. But not for much longer probably!"

I don't there would be much likelihood of a death-sentence fatwa against the Two Ronnies, though. The Ayatollah Khomeini was not really part of the PC movement, and the clip itself is only a few years before the Satanic Verses itself. Salman Rushdie is really of the age of the Two Ronnies.

smartcooky said:
And what about this one?



I think rules 1,3, 5 and 7 might cause a bit of a stir, and rule 2 certainly would.
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Terribly racist against our convict spawn.
 
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smartcooky said:
You appear to be espousing similar principles to that which David Irving employs to roll back Aryan supremacy and deny the Holocaust; call everything by a pretty name and pretend it never happened.
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1. David Irving doesn't want to roll back Aryan supremacy; from what Hitchens saw of him, it's quite the opposite.
2. I'm not pretending that history never happened; quite the opposite.
3. Godwin's Law.
 
smartcooky said:
You could apply that to Flying High (a.k.a. Airplane) as well.

Also, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, Open All Hours, The Two Ronnies, The Benny Hill Show and The Kenny Everett Video Show. None them would stand a snowball's chance in hell of being made today. Instead we get the banal crap that network executives try to pass off on us as "comedy" , such as Friends, Ned & Stacy, Big Bang Theory and Glee.
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Don't forget M*A*S*H. With it's anti-war stance and lack of reverence for the military, right-wing sissies would be trying to scream it off-air before the first episode aired.

I am personally skeptical of charges of political correctness and "sensitivity" police who a generally regarded as purveyors of political correctness. We live in a free society, sometimes people will say things that offend us. Deal with it.
 
Tony said:
Don't forget M*A*S*H. With it's anti-war stance and lack of reverence for the military, right-wing sissies would be trying to scream it off-air before the first episode aired.

I am personally skeptical of charges of political correctness and "sensitivity" police who a generally regarded as purveyors of political correctness. We live in a free society, sometimes people will say things that offend us. Deal with it.
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Point is, it's always been like that. If you perceive it to be more of it nowadays, it's because there's a lot more media today.

Personally, I think it's quite alright. It does have an effect on society, and for the most part, I perceive the effect to be positive. The people I hear complaining about PCness are those I don't want to listen to anyway.
 
I read a great one in our local newspaper today. A sports reporter called up one of the local scvhools to try and make some sense out of the cricket scores they had been given and asked for the names of those that could help. The response was a "Sorry we can't do that as it would be a breach of their privacy to give out names."
 
PhantomWolf said:
I read a great one in our local newspaper today. A sports reporter called up one of the local scvhools to try and make some sense out of the cricket scores they had been given and asked for the names of those that could help. The response was a "Sorry we can't do that as it would be a breach of their privacy to give out names."
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How is this an example of political correctness?

Over zealous data privacy adherence, maybe. What makes you see it as PC?
 
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smartcooky said:
These are among the first things that spring to mind for me

1. You can't tell Irish/Polish/Jewish or race based jokes any more, but telling jokes that denigrate or disparage white, middle-class adult males is considered to be perfectly acceptable.
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As a White middle class male I can assure you that jokes about the Irish/Poles/ and Jews still exist, and that there are has been no upsurge of jokes aimed at white middle class men. Maybe NZ is wildly different, or maybe you spend a lot of time reading reactionary editorials and mistake it for the news.
2. Nurses, doctors and paramedics (in NZ anyway) spend 40% of their study time being forced to learn "cultural sensitivity" (so that they don't offend someone's spiritual well-being and other forms of woo woo) rather than learning how to care for them medically and to save their lives.
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I'll call BS on this. I find it highly unlikely that you can find me any independent proof of this either.
3. Children at state-run schools are not allowed to excel, especially in sports. Excellence is frowned upon, so there are no winners or losers and the scores are not kept, lest it should dent the egos of the less successful children, and their parents. It is no coincidence that our most successful sporting schools are private schools (or as they strangely call them in Britain, "Public Schools")

4. Children at school no longer fail. We cannot say that a child has failed, we must protect them from this psychological trauma by calling it "deferred success".
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This sounds like BS as well. The way children are treated when they fail is far different than when you and i were children, but they most definitely are held back a grade still and they are certainly given failing grades as well. Perhaps NZ is wildly different, or maybe you spend a lot of time reading reactionary editorials and mistake it for the news.
5. The systematic, and misguided attempt to gender neutralise everyday terminology. We no longer have a gingerbread man, a chairman or a spokesman, we have a "gingerbread person", a "chairperson" and a "spokesperson".
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Oh dear God! It has totally changed the effectiveness of the Fire Department to call firemen "firefighters"! All the burly men who used to bravely save the lives of our citizens have been forced to grow breasts and vaginas and can no longer do their jobs! Oh, wait, that didn't happen. Turns out that changing job titles won't magically change the skill set required to do ones job, it just avoids the awkward linguistic artifact where a woman would be called a man.

Political Correctness is an insidious, creeping disease that has infected human society over the thirty to forty years, starting with the ramblings of self appointed social engineers like Virginia Satir, and continuing with her many disciples and ardent followers in the psycho-quackery trade. Her diatribe "I am me" contains, IMO, some of the most socially damaging ideas of the 20th century, extolling the virtues of "self-esteem" at the expense of personal responsibility.
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I suppose if you live in the bubble of conservative editorials and reactionary right wing tabloids, it might seem like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. The reality is far different. The predictions of a collapse of civilization casued by a few crackpot psychologists advocating for "self esteem" has not materialized. There've been crackpots throughout history and the human race still stands.
At a school where I used to teach, our heads of subject departments were known as "Managers". MDE was Manager; Department of English, MDS, Manager; Department of Sciences, MDH, Manager; Department of History etc. Then we had a new, woman Headmaster arrive (who insisted on being called "Headperson"). At a staff-meeting, she told us all that she wanted to change the titles of the department heads. This was because she considered the term "manager" to be gender-biased (having the prefix "man"). I laughed, and so did a couple of other teachers, and when she asked me what I though was funny, asked her if she understood the etymology of the word; that the "man" in "manage" wasn't a prefix at all; that in fact the whole word "manage" was actually derived from the Italian word "maneggiare" which means "to handle" or "to control". This brought more snickering and chuckling in the room, and her face went crimson!
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Wow, that would be newsworthy if it were actually something that happened more than once (or at all). But seriously, one crackpot headmistress makes an incredible (and I mean that literally) request and you equivocate this with the changing of "chairman" to "chairperson" or "chair".

And I think I smell BS in this story too. I can't find one single mention of this ever happening except in satires of "political correctness". Are you sure this wasn't something hatched in your reactionary imagination?
I respectfully suggested
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depending on your definition of "respectfully" I suppose
that she leave the names of titles as they are, but that should a woman be appointed to any of the positions, they could replace the word "manager", with "damager". Needless to say, this got me offside with the Headmaster (or should I say Headperson). Well, what did I expect, embarrassing her in front of her staff. Well, I did say earlier that I used to teach there.
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Yeah, I'm certain it came as a shock to you that you'd get canned after insulting your boss in front of your co-workers. It's really an incredible story all around.
All this brings to mind the final thing that springs to mind

6. Discouraging people being allowed to speak their mind. Instead, they have to tip-toe around the sensitivities of the overly precious.


I hate Political Correctness
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I haven't noticed a great deal of restrictions on my speech, or yours for that matter. People are still quite free to make asses of themselves, and are still free to make well reasoned arguments.

Honestly, about the only thing worse than the pathetic liberal bourgeois whining about political incorrectness is the pathetic petit bourgeois whining about political correctness.
 
smartcooky said:
Do you have even the remotest idea of the huge cost involved in manpower (oh, sorry, its "personpower" isn't it?), time and resources of going back and retrospectively amending, altering then reprinting and distributing amendment pages for manuals and handbooks, and all because some dick-wads can't get over their own preciousness?
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You clearly didn't read the entire link.
 
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