What is wrong with Political Correctness in some cases?

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Ex Post Facto means making a law and punishing people retroactively, for breaking that law before it was a law. What you post does not say that. Obviously, rules are established after certain actions are taken. Otherwise, we could only make laws before those actions occurred, which makes no sense. Should rape be legal because it wasn't prohibited before the first rape?

It's language designed to treat everyone as equal. The way you describe it fits someone who doesn't see others as equal, and find tolerance a burden.



That's what politics is. You don't need political correctness for that. There are plenty of oppressive governments hoping to shape people's lives around minority opinions.



Artful compared to who? Conservatives who want to ban abortion and ruin the environment, corrupting people's health for money? Maybe this forum should be called Paranoia, Politics, and Religion. I'd think of a nicer name, but I know a lot of you hate political correctness.



You're right. No conservative has ever told people what they want to hear. It's not like that's the basis of politics or anything. People like Donald Trump just sit quietly and let others speak.

I don’t value equality, and tolerance IS a burden. What matters is the individual, not the group. It’s normal for individuals to desire personal achievement and to be better than other individuals. Tolerance just means having to accept things you dislike or things that are potentially harmful. Put together, tolerance and equality just mean that all persons are equally marginalized.



On this we agree. Political correctness is one tool out of many. However, pc happens to be the current topic.



Abortion should be banned. And who’s ruining the environment? Who’s corrupting health and how?

And I really couldn’t care any less. I’m only concerned with what is maximally beneficial for the individual. Abortion is murder until the baby threatens to kill their mother. And then it’s self defense. If an individual harms the environment, he violates himself by threatening other individuals. Others can reasonably retaliate and punish anyone who harms the environment. Same regarding health. People aren’t equal, but people do have equal rights as individuals. So as a rational person you will look after your own health, setting aside money in a health savings account, buying insurance, and going in for routine checkups. If you can afford better because you achieve better (earn more money), then you pay for better and get better.

Me? I don’t earn that much money. I’m responsible for 7 people all living under the same roof and only make $30k at my day job. I suffer from anxiety and depression and don’t have the luxury of a shrink to cry to. I recently discovered kratom and can actually function at work for the first time ever, and I’m not spending thousands of dollars to see a psychiatrist and fill unnecessary prescriptions when 3 oz. bag of Bali red vein is less than $20 at the local vape shop. I’m also looking to give myself a $20k+ raise in the next year. So maybe I can afford to get my wife nasal polyp surgery and get myself to a dentist to have my teeth cleaned.

But first things first. When health care is unaffordable and people like me sit things out, providers suffer from unprofitability. If they are unprofitable, they cannot continue to provide care. That means they are forced to lower their fees for service, which in turn means more people can afford it.

When governments grant monopolies to insurance companies and eliminate competition, providers can afford to artificially inflate the price of health goods and services, meaning people like me struggle. In my case, we bought in to a health sharing scheme that took advantage of us along with maybe thousands of others. We owe tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills after having a miscarriage and later having a baby. Nothing more complicated than a C-section. We have lawyers threatening to sue us who we politely share contact info for our provider on the off chance those lawyers are interested in getting in on a possible class action. We know good and well no judge is going to force us to pay these bills. With what? Lol. If doctors and hospitals are getting screwed, it’s because patients are getting screwed. And patients are getting screwed because governments really are involved in giving preferential treatment to greedy insurance companies who wouldn’t otherwise exist without state government help.

And I’m not afraid of lawyers. They do this every day, so they know good and well there are people worse off than us they’ll never get a dime out of. We do believe that doctors earn their money, so we WANT to pay them so we can keep seeing them. It’s only right and fair. So within reason we negotiate with bill collectors to do SOMETHING. It’s just the right thing to do.

As long as the government is keeping these creeps in business, other people out there are going to struggle. It shouldn’t take an entire paycheck just to keep everyone insured. That’s messed up.



Factually wrong. Conservatives tell conservative voters what they want to hear, same as Democratic pols tell liberal voters what they want to hear. You are correct that’s how politics works.

I’m concerned for the sake of this discussion about the relevance of PC speech. I don’t think PC speech is something to worry ourselves with. I’m don’t want to worry about nitpicking every word I say because it might offend someone. I dislike how PC words reshape the narrative when said narrative is an attack on my rights as an individual. I don’t need a political party to tell me what to think. I draw my own conclusions. What I want a political party to do is serve my individual interests at the government level: stay out of my way and let me do my job, keep me out of harms way, give me access to justice, and protect me from foreign invasion. I don’t want or expect a government or political party to impose new words on me for the purpose of controlling my mind. They won’t succeed, but that they TRY is what I find disturbing. And they wouldn’t try if they hadn’t been successful with certain groups of people.

I don’t speak PC. All I care about in that regard is whether I have done something that hurt someone and whether I should reasonably be made to feel responsible for hurting someone. I have no animus against black people. So why would I say something to belittle another person because of the color of their skin? That’s stupid and I don’t want to do it.

But at the same time, I don’t want to feel that fear of hurting someone’s feelings marginalized MY rights. I look at individuals, not skin color, and so I prefer to view the world through a racially color-blind lens. There are groups of individuals whose identity is so bound up in race and other things that they are not emotionally, mentally ready or mature enough to assert their individual identity. If someone says I’m racist because I’m white and I DON’T regard a person’s skin color or give anyone special treatment, then I guess I’m just going to have to be a racist.

Special treatment is something that is earned or deserved. It is not something your are born with. A baby born into wealth is loved by his parents and given wealth as an expression of that love, thus there is nothing wrong with saying that baby deserves the best. Not ENTITLED to the best, only that his parents love him and give him their shoulders to stand on. People born into poverty don’t have that, nor are they any more entitled to it, but possess no less the ability to earn good things in their lives. People like myself must see our own inherent worth and assert it, translating inner worth into outer wealth not by begging, pleading, and demanding, but through hard work and gratitude towards likeminded individuals with whom we share values.

Getting back to PC speech, my point is that people who demand things they don’t earn and are easily offended are people I simply avoid. I just avoid them. People who complain about race or how all whites people are racist—ok, there’s not a single word, not even a nice or polite word, that WON’T be offensive. The least offensive thing I can do is remove myself from the equation. What PC language has effectively done better than anything else is not being people together in unity for common causes, but rather divide people along lines of achievers and those offended by achievement. I see myself as a winner, so I seek out other winners.

My workplace has become populated with perpetual losers. I don’t want to work there anymore. Am very excited about great things to come in the next year! I want to go where the winners are. PC speech is—unattractive.

Are you just advocating for predatory bully-or-be-bullied?

We do need a certain amount of "political correctness."

Sometimes, though, "political correctness" is taken too far. I've seen situations involving "political correctness" which have similarities to things like the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China. It is mostly not so extreme---but it can become this extreme unless it is monitored.

Not at all. If someone is being hurt, there should be consequences for that. But calls for tolerance usually mean "tolerate MY views" with no intention to respect the views of others.

And nobody really wants tolerance either. Think about it. True tolerance means ALL ideas are equal. ALL of them. That means if I think we should tolerate all people of all skin colors, EVERYONE has to tolerate people of all skin colors. Well, that's sensible, right? Why shouldn't we tolerate people of all skin colors? But what about people who DON'T like people of a certain skin color? If ALL ideas and people are equal, then we are compelled to accept that people will bully others for any stupid reason they want. Tolerance in its truest sense requires tolerating both innocent people of all skin colors AND violent racists. If you can't accept that people disagree with your views regardless of what they are, then you aren't a tolerant person.

It is UNREASONABLE to expect universal tolerance. You don't tolerate murderers or bullies. So all this talk about tolerance is stupid.

There is tolerance WITHIN REASON, however, and the line is drawn where you tell someone who/what they can/can't tolerate. Once you physically attack someone, you've crossed the line. Once harm comes to someone because of your intolerant actions, you've crossed the line. Once you define what people must tolerate and force them to comply you've crossed the line. The only tolerance that IS reasonably possible is that we respect each other as individuals and stay out of each other's way when those values come into conflict. Do you think all white people are racist? Ok, I disagree with you. But if you hate white people I'm not looking to invade your safe space. My religious views are not up for debate, so I'm not going to allow someone of a radically different faith tradition to set foot in my house telling me what to believe. Do you hate gays? Who am I to tell you that you can't hate whoever you want to hate? Look, this is really simple. If you don't like gay people, don't go where gay people are. But if you are sympathetic to LGBTQ+ causes, GREAT, but you still don't have the right to drag people who aren't into the spaces of people they oppose.

And, no, people aren't equal. And there's nothing wrong with that! As a teacher, I'm more knowledgeable and experienced than my students. Guess what? I have students who are better athletes than I can ever hope to be. I go to their games and cheer for them! Being better than someone is not something that should worry anyone. It's just a fact of life that no matter what you do, there's always someone better. You cheer for those people. You try to discover their secrets. You work your butt off to be better than they are. It's not a mystery. Sometimes great people disappoint us, like how GRRM absolutely refuses to finish ASOIAF. Do you know what I do? I read someone else's books and watch someone else's TV shows.

We hold ourselves back hanging all our hopes and dreams on tolerance and equality. Just respect everyone's rights as individuals and don't freaking hurt people. It's not to much to ask. It's the part about respecting individual rights I think more people struggle with. But when we don't respect people's individual rights, which is all reasonable equality really is, we lack any conscience to stop us from hurting people. And when nothing stands in our way of hurting other people, we ALL get hurt ("Defund the police" is in view here).

I believe you misrepresent tolerance.
Tolerance is "I don't like it but it should not be punished". And it does have boundaries. Obvious, intentional harm is typically outside them.

Poland had religious tolerance "before it was cool", since at least 16th century, practically it started back in the 10th century, with significant Orthodox and Jewish population. It never meant a belief all religions were equally right. It meant an opinion that religious beliefs should never be enforced by the state. Result: in times when the rest of Europe was in a bloodbath of religious wars, in Poland competition between religions happened in realms of culture and education.

This is how I understand tolerance and why it is important.

The top response to a websearch for "dictionary tolerance" turned up the following definition:


tolerance

tŏl′ər-əns

noun

1. The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

2. Leeway for variation from a standard.

3. The permissible deviation from a specified value of a structural dimension, often expressed as a percent.


Nowhere have I found an official definition for "tolerance" that says, "considering all things equal".

---

SMiLes, i Know Some Very,
Very Successful Folks, In Terms
of Monetary Success; With All the Toys
You Might Be Able to Imagine; Yet, They
Are Some of the Most Miserable Folks Walking the Face of

The Earth
Afraid of
And Angry
With Hate Against
Whatever HUMAN Is Different
They Cannot Understand From Them...

Yawn, Part of the Human Condition; Not Everyone
Shares the Same Intelligence in Empathy, Compassion
And Generally Love for Others; Yet Sadly That's A Real HeLL ON EartH
They've Created in Part For Themselves as it is usually Sadly Their Anxieties And

Depressions in Life That Drive Them Toward Addictions of Fear, Anger, And Hate
to Try 'FEEL' And Fill the Horrible Void Within; If it is Not Some External Substance
They Ingest

To try
to Erase
the Emptiness
Within Or The Negative
Feelings and Senses of Life
They Have No Mastery Over to

Become Naked, Enough, Whole, NOW
Complete With All That is DarK Thru LiGHT;

THE ACTUAL 'MYSTICAL' MESSAGE OF 'A NEW
TESTAMENT' BEYOND ALL DISCRETE EMPIRICAL MEASURE,

THE GOOD NEWS OF THE REAL KINGDOM OF HEAVEN WITHIN,

BEYOND MEASURE Other than Brain Scans that Give A General Indication
OF A Successful Mind AND BODY in Balance And Not All 'Whacked Out'

in Fear,
Anger,
And Hate
Out of Balance As Such,
Actually Wearing Down
Every Bodily System With

(FROM ALL THE STRESS
HORMONES HEAD TO TOE)

Premature Aging And A
Potential Sad And Much Earlier Demise...

i Have Yet to See A Truly Naked, Enough, Whole,
Complete Human Being Afraid And Intolerant of Being
Around LGBQT OR OTHER Folks WHO ARE DIFFERENT

(Do Note: How Rare is When i 'See' A Truly Naked,
Enough, Whole Complete Human Being)

As They Have No Where to Take others

Down to Attempt to Raise Up What's
COMPLETE Within;
It's Predictable

As Sunshine

And Grey
Clouds that
Never Break;

And The 'Winners'
Who Actually Are
in A Perpetual State of
REAL Loss All Their Life Within;

Indeed, The Kingdom of Hell Within For Real...

And to Be Clear; of Course Life Ain't Fair, So Much

Easier to Do if You Just Happen to Be one of the 'Chosen' ones
of Nature Who Gets Seeded in A REAL Paradise With All the 'Genetic Goody
Two Shoes' Propensities and Other Environmental Perks of Love That Make

Human
Angelic
Wings Real...


Yet You 'See', i've
Seen the Other Side
of Life too; i Have A 'Good'
Idea Where You Really Live my
FRiEnD; It's Not Hard to See From the Life Story you tale...

What's Really Injustice i See, For the State You Live in, is You Likely
Can't Get Medicaid in Mississippi For YOU or Likely Your Wife; And the Damned Place
Cannot Even Afford You as A Family of 7, A Frigging Living Wage More than less Than
40,000 At the Poverty Level At 30,000 Dollars As A Professional Band Director At A School...

Yeah, Baby, Socio-Economics Makes A Difference In Who Never Ever Has Enough And Always

Has too Much

to Appreciate

All they Are Already

Born With if they Are Fortunate
to LiVE iN A Place of LoVE For REAL
NAKED, ENOUGH, WHOLE, AND COMPLETE...

YET AGAIN, LIFE ISN'T FAIR; YET CHANGE IS POSSIBLE;

GOOD LUCK ON RAISING YOUR FAMILY OUT OF POVERTY;

THERE IS NOTHING RIGHT AND POLITICALLY CORRECT i See About Your
Socio-Economic Situation...

With Health
And Well
Being Now

Surely in Tow too...

The Thing About IT is, Life Ain't Fair;

Yet With Political Correctness That Holds
Up What is Just And Fair; There is the Potential

for Positive Change...

Yawn, It'S A Work of Art; Yet if Folks Wanna
Stay As Sticks in the Mud That is Where They Will Continue to Lie...

Other than That There's This: Happy Earth Day 2022; The Good Earth
Is Blessed With Abundance For All to Give, Share, Care, And Heal With
Inhaling Peace Exhaling LoVE iN JoY oF LiGHT For All Now With Least Harm...

Yet it All Starts
And Begins And

Never Finishes or Ends Within NoW...

---

To work? To a park? To public transport? To a grocery store? To a taxi? To my Uni? To a school?

I can understand not going to gay bars, I'm not into bars in general so I don't go there, but most of the time gay people live their lives just like straight people do. We need to share space, segregation has really infamous history.

But you cannot force a person to go where ever "they" go, whoever "they" refers to. If, for example, I were dense enough to want to avoid a grocery store because a gay person MIGHT be there, I could attempt to go off-grid and grow my own food. We're not really talking about stupid people wanting to avoid gays or blacks or pick-a-minority/victim class. Do people have at a basic level the right to choose who they will hang out with the most and who they will avoid? Of course they do, and it is always in someone's best interest to avoid negativity. I avoid people who complain a lot.

And speaking of segregation, are you aware of calls from within the American black community to keep whites and blacks separate? There are groups of people who feel that their lives are in danger as long as they have to integrate into the majority.

I've never seen such an official definition, either. But you cannot recognize and respect a person's belief and practice when that person's practice means the unjustified destruction of human life. True tolerance is unattainable.

Like I said, if you don't like one group of people or another, avoid them. Don't impose your "beliefs and practices" on other people. It's really simple.

The thing with equality refers to HighLlama regarding PC speech and equality. I do not want to tolerate ideas I disagree with or things/people who are evil. I do not want to be "equal" with anyone. I see equality as mediocrity. Why should I expect less of myself because someone might feel badly if I do a better job than they do? I'm a band teacher. I specialize in woodwinds. Why should I feel jealous when a trumpet player can play the trumpet better than I can? I don't feel jealous--it means I have an amazing trumpet player who probably needs to start leading sectionals. I don't WANT my students to be equal to me. I want them to be BETTER. I will always be superior in knowledge, experience, and musicianship. The only thing left is to inspire others to reach for excellence.

Also, Fnord, I'd be surprised if you honestly didn't know that "tolerance" in our context has nothing to do with respecting others' beliefs. It's a buzzword intended to place guilt on those who don't want to accept some person or idea without reason. Do you think Antifa or the Klan are worthy of acceptance? If you don't, you aren't tolerant. I don't accept them, so I don't mind being labeled intolerant.

That brings a couple things to mind:

https://www.oed.com/public/oed3guide/gu ... edition-of
"
Scope and purpose

The Oxford English Dictionary is the most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. It traces the development of English from the earliest records , and formally from 1150 AD, up to the present day. The varieties of English covered include British English, American English, Australian English, New Zealand English, the Englishes of South and South-East Asia, Southern Africa, and the Caribbean, among others.

The Oxford English Dictionary is not an arbiter of proper usage, despite its widespread reputation to the contrary. The Dictionary is intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, its content should be viewed as an objective reflection of English language usage, not a subjective collection of usage ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’. However, it does include information on which usages are, or have been, popularly regarded as ‘incorrect’. The Dictionary aims to cover the full spectrum of English language usage, from formal to slang, as it has evolved over time.
"
and,

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/maga ... age-t.html

"
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition. “According to Webster’s,” begins a piece, blithely, and the lexicographer shudders, because she knows that a dictionary is about to be invoked as an incontrovertible authority. Although we may profess to believe, as the linguist Dwight Bolinger once put it, that dictionaries “do not exist to define but to help people grasp meanings,” we don’t often act on that belief. Typically we treat a definition as the final arbiter of meaning, a scientific pronouncement of a word’s essence.

But the traditional dictionary definition, although it bears all the trappings of authority, is in fact a highly stylized, overly compressed and often tentative stab at capturing the consensus on what a particular word “means.” A good dictionary derives its reputation from careful analysis of examples of words in use, in the form of sentences, also called citations. The lexicographer looks at as many citations for each word as she can find (or, more likely, can review in the time allotted) and then creates what is, in effect, a dense abstract, collapsing into a few general statements all the ways in which the word behaves. A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

Despite all the thought and hard work that go into them, definitions, surprisingly, turn out to be ill suited for many of the tasks they have been set to — including their ostensible purpose of telling you the meaning of a word.
"
...

"
Neither are definitions complete pictures of all the possible meanings of a word. One study found that in a set of arbitrarily chosen passages from modern fiction, an average of 13 percent of the nouns, verbs and adjectives were used in senses not found in a large desk dictionary.
"
...

"
Given these shortcomings of definitions, and the advantages of examples, why do we still cling to definitions? The short answer, for hundreds of years, has been a practical one: space — specifically the lack thereof. Print dictionaries have never had sufficient page-room to show enough real, live, useful examples to create an optimal and natural word-learning experience. Even the expert lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary, which famously includes “illustrative quotations” alongside its definitions, still put the definition and its needs first, making new words wait their turn to make it through the definition bottleneck.
"
...

"
If we stop pretending definitions are science, we can enjoy them as a kind of literature — think of them as extremely nerdy poems — without burdening them with tasks for which they are unsuited.
"

Oh, I definitely agree with that!  The sole point I was trying to make is that unless everyone in the same discussion uses the same definitions for the same words, some people will re-define some words solely to suit their claims.  Then reverting to the pre-defined definitions allows all claimants to re-state their claims in terms that everyone agrees upon and understands.

Mine is sort of a meta-discussion.

---

Yeah, There's A Lot of Gay Folks

That Get Born into Families

Who Are So-Called Christians;

It's So Ironic As Science Shows These
People Are Born With More Cooperative
Nature's Overall With Empathy For Others;

And Less Competitive Nature's That Come From

The Reproductive Game of Competition; So True In this
Way They Are The Creme of The Crop For Potentials of

Unconditional

Love in Helping

Others; Wonder What
Happens to Them When They Are

Born in a Catholic Family; Often They Are
Forced to Hide Their Nature And in Some

Instances, They Become Catholic Priests;

Survey's Within The Catholic Church

Show Up to 58 Percent

of Catholic

Priests

Are of Gay
Orientation;

True, 'God' Works
In Mysterious Ways
ThiS Way FOR REAL AS NATURE

DOESN'T TELL ANY POLITICALLY CORRECT Lies....

It's So Sad And It's So Frigging 'Trump
Town Deep South' Ignorant...

And In A 'Few' Other Places too...

As Ignorance Is the
Worst Human Pandemic
oF All that Harms, Rapes,
Maims, And Kills Us And
The Rest of Nature Most; Just
Continuing to Eat Our Own Faces
(Free Nature) in A Zombie Apocalypse of Ignorance;

i'd Get Up And Give
This 'Politically

Incorrect'

'Sermon'

In Church

if They Weren't

So God Damned

Afraid of Unconditional Love

And So Filled With A Pandemic
of Human

Ignorance...

In Other Words,
If i Was Truly Welcome
in that Place to Be me...

It's True As Usual There
Is No Where For Unconditional

Love to Rest Its Soul in Tradition;

As By Very Nature STiLL; Tradition
Excludes Love FOR ALL FOR REAL

From Its Full Recipe...

It's the Human
Condition; Yet
It's NOT Every Human Condition...

T,
G.

PS: Science Also Shows
That Bigger Families

Naturally are

More Likely

to Include
A Homosexual
Individual; Particularly
When Socio-Economic
Stresses Impact the

Womb During
Pregnancy

With Floods

Of Hormones

That Change the
Developing Fetus
into A Homosexual Person...

It's So Ironic; Folks Create

What They Fear

The Most

With The Fears They Have...

There Are NO Real Winners
in this Pandemic of Human Ignorance...

Sure, Perhaps An Educational Video Might Cure Some Ignorance...

i Don't Have Much 'Faith' Though; From What i've Seen in 'Christian' Churches...

At Least

Not in

Trump Town USA;

Other Places Have
BELIEFS Actually Based ON LOVE FOR REAL...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Khn_z9FPmU

---

Indeed!

I'm not much on strict definitions. Occasionally you run across things that cannot be defined. A trick I used to fall for was getting into a war of definitions to somehow, strangely, discover that whatever the thing was I was arguing about didn't actually exist. On reflection, I realized I'd gotten everything right the first time, but allowed myself to be led astray by a multitude of conflicting definitions. It's a cheap but effective trick, yet it doesn't make the word magician right.

I'll usually just start ignoring someone when that happens.