ValentineWiggin wrote:
It actually refers to the anguish felt by those shoehorned under pain of politeness into avoiding their usual sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever commentary.
Liberals rarely use the term...but then, liberals don't have to censor themselves because they don't hold such ideologies in the first place.
Political correctness was invented by the Left.
From the wiki article:
By 1970, New Left proponents had adopted the term political correctness.[1] In the essay The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara says: ". . . a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist too." The New Left later re-appropriated the term political correctness as satirical self-criticism; per Debra Shultz: "Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives . . . used their term politically correct ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts".[1][2][7] Hence, it is a popular English usage in the underground comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, while ideologically sound, an alternative term, followed a like lexical path, appearing in Bart Dickon’s satirical comic strips.[1][8] Moreover, Ellen Willis says: " . . . in the early ’80s, when feminists used the term political correctness, it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement’s efforts to define a ‘feminist sexuality’ ".[9]
The Lefties have you coming and going.
ruveyn
Did you overlook your responses to the thread for "Is political correctness anti-scientific?"
The buzz slogan "Politically Correct" as a propaganda fad started with the Grand Ole Party playing dismembered Teddy Bear Parts when the Tanks decided to bury the Bull of "Where's The Beef?" under tons of "Plain English" Super-Bull Manure that made Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly most proud and more smelly, trying to save poor PappaBush from lecherous HillBillies.
Don't worry, the same line of Conservative, plus the branch of Libertarians, on the same tree, gave the phrase "Weapons of Mass Destruction" Born-Again Status to JFK to shun BabyBush Blundering Responsibilities also.
P.S.: Since your Historian practices are so selective, here are some old repeated Bran Flakes for another try at regularity with historical accuracy:
"She remarks elsewhere that John always was careful to conduct himself in a politically correct manner as an American Citizen." New Catholic world, Volume 171, page 27 (1950)
Felix Grundy (1775-1840) was the first "politically correct" U.S. Congressman.
"From the same rostrum where Roosevelt a few weeks later made his acceptance speech, Ding twice addressed the GOP delegates. Each time he was on the losing side, but on the side realized later to be politically correct. He tried to make the Republicans go all the way wet, and he tried to nominate for vice-president a young Legionaire instead of Dolly Gann's brother." Business week, Issues 305-330 (1935) page 16.
"The inaccuracy of political conception was fostered by inaccuracy of common speech. 'Is a toast asked? "The United States," instead of "The People of the United States" is given. This is not POLITICALLY CORRECT. The toast is meant to present to view the FIRST great object in the Union. It presents only the second." The Pennsylvania magazine of history and biography, Volume 45 By Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1921), page 29. (Also in U.S. Supreme Court reports, Volumes 1-4, and before in 1882).
"hon. and learned Gentleman to be practically correct, though legally incorrect — whether it was politically correct or not — that was to say, whether the Tripartite Treaty was or was not looked upon as binding by the Government ? " Great Britain Parliament 1880.
"The minister did not contend that this mode of reasoning was politically correct, but reminded his auditors that it was undoubtedly honourable to those who entertained it. In his official eulogy upon the great military hero, ..." "Life and Campaigns of Arthur, Duke of Wellington (1841), page 150.
"That his lordship was either morally or politically correct, in an opinion which tended to perpetuate political incapacities on account of religious tenets, would, perhaps, be difsicult to" prove ; but that he acted on that occasion, ..." British Public Characters of 1798-9 (1801), page 271.
The phrase "Politically Correct" has been pulled inside-out, as a hundred years ago it involved fundamental "patriotic values", and over the last few decades, it has been manipulated with propaganda campaigns into something "anti-patriotic" by groups that have done the same to such concepts as "entitlements" now "bad", and "rights versus privileges" inversed. The "Where's the beef?" buzz with "Politically Correct" has worked so well in propaganda land, that it is often applied to the sciences (including mathematics, as in Politically Incorrect Prime Number Theory in encryption programs being silenced by brute force, medical sciences, geology, etc.). Don't worry, whale oil was replaced with petroleum, and petroleum will be replaced by, well, maybe whale oil. Burning food seems to result in food shortages for some overly difficult to deduce reason, but it makes Arnold's Hummer really Humm (the sex (without a charity-credit) was what was politically incorrect, not the mass starvation).
ruveyn wrote:
Anything not based on fact is anti-scientific.
ruveyn
Most all of art is not based on fact, and per se, art is usually not "anti-scientific", though most "scientific" attempts to analyze art end with just some pseudo-science bunkum distant from any science (mass advertising arts come the closest to being accessible by science through radical behaviourism models). Vladimir Nabokov's work with the rather bizarre pure aesthetic, such as "Pale Fire", seems as if designed to frustrate all attempts of any model other than "as is" of a successful hylephobic (a fear of materialism, a very modern distemper, which afflicts, now and then, a philosopher with a horror of contact with the fresh facts of science so necessary to his survival in the world of modern thought, and impels him to try to purge every element of matter from facts he cannot escape, but this is often regarded as another sacred madness (1887, Hall, Titchener, & Dallenbach)).
Tadzio
08 Feb 2012, 2:13 pm
