‘Politically correct’ is so unamenable to non-absurd definition that it seldom receives even the lightest semantic gloss. So this is noteworthy, from Lowry and Ponnuru:
Among the most consequential forms of political correctness — in the sense of the use of social pressure to suppress the expression of widespread and legitimate viewpoints
It is, I suppose, possible that by ‘legitimate’ they just mean conservative. But that would be rather question-begging. The alternative is that they are begging the question against conservatism, which reduces to political correctness, due to it being a not utterly un-Burkean affair. A third possibility is that our authors haven’t given the matter much thought.
{ 72 comments }
Lord 10.08.15 at 6:01 am
Political correctness is dissembling by those lacking the courage of their convictions and can only be overcome by them finding some.
bad Jim 10.08.15 at 7:03 am
The problem with political correctness is that it doesn’t “suppress the expression of widespread and legitimate viewpoints”. They’re being shouted from every corner. Everyone on talk radio and cable TV says “I’m not allowed to say this” and then says it.
It puts me in mind of the scene in “The Pirates of Penzance”, where the police repeat “We go, we go”, in Mozartean fashion, and the general complains, “but you don’t go!”
P O'Neill 10.08.15 at 9:57 am
They don’t help their internal logic with a later section of the article:
Trump responds to this kind of criticism [of remarks about women] by casting himself as a brave dissenter from political correctness. Here, too, he discredits a worthy cause. Conservatives and some honorable liberals have stood up against the oversensitivity and censorship of legitimate political viewpoints that has spread from college campuses over the last three decades. Trump appears to confuse simple decency with PC. Republicans should not embrace this confusion by cheering him on.
So Trump is both successful because he flouts political correctness but is also hurting the battle against political correctness by using as anti-PC as a shield to be disparaging and demeaning!
Map Maker 10.08.15 at 12:16 pm
Trump can play the bull-in-the-china shop and we can all make fun of him, because of course nothing like that would happen at our place of employment …
But on the serious side, what has your department done about the wage gap between women and men? Our department just had the data out – on average men make ~20% more than women. Adjusting for age and tenure, the gap closes somewhat. We can’t discuss this openly because half the department believes this the outcome of the sexist patriarchy and the other half thinks the data can be completely explained away. Call it “PC” or “simple decency”, we don’t talk about it and we let people stick with the different views… I’m just thankful Trump is running for President – imagine if he was appointed to do to CUNY what he did to the skating rink!
Bloix 10.08.15 at 1:06 pm
My recollection is that he personally paid to renovate the rink and had it open in 3 months after it had been closed “for repairs” for six years.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/06/nyregion/who-can-fix-the-wollman-rink-faster-city-and-trump-agree-it-s-trump.html
Lynne 10.08.15 at 1:31 pm
So it’s due to political correctness that no American leaders have spoken against immigration? I don’t think so. More like political ambition, likely.
Riccardo Cabeza 10.08.15 at 1:41 pm
John, are you being deliberately obtuse? You are overthinking it in republican fashion. Political Correctness is simple politeness. republicans abhor being pleasant and therefore detest being PC. As such, conservatives hate being called racist, bigots or….polite. It makes them feel all small endowed and childish. It’s much better in the conservative mind to be hateful and mean spirited at every opportunity.
Besides, you expected nuance from Rich “self contained opinion bubble’ Lowry?
Glen Tomkins 10.08.15 at 1:55 pm
” A third possibility is that our authors haven’t given the matter much thought.”
That should be the first possibility considered in such cases of ideological pathology. To go further and analyze the content is to fail to recognize the intent, which is not to be correct, or even persuasive, about the content, which they haven’t paid attention to because they don’t really care about it. The content is just material for spin.
Adam Hammond 10.08.15 at 2:40 pm
I define political correctness (when it means anything substantive) as close to a synonym for “groupthink.” The term is thrown around as rhetoric all the time. At such times the term is meaningless.
My parents were part of the internal debate as the weather underground split from the SDS. Fortunately, they were on the non-violent side. The movement suffered terribly from a social process of excluding people who were skeptical of certain tenants. This lead to a group of young, dedicated, active people who spent too much time talking to each other and not enough time considering alternate points of view.
I watch this happen every year, on a smaller scale, on campus. Groups form that have somehow agreed that certain ideas are Truth. A person doesn’t get to be in the group if he or she expresses skepticism of the Truth. These groups then get called P.C. by those who are excluded (and care about it). I don’t see this underlying dynamic as a terrible thing. I assume that social scientists have fully explored this kind of dynamic. I observe that most students get over it — and I did. I think I am better inoculated against the process as a result of the experience.
It takes national political interests to summarize all of the individual tribal circle drawing and suggest that this is some organized liberal movement to end debate.
LFC 10.08.15 at 3:02 pm
from the OP:
It is, I suppose, possible that by ‘legitimate’ they just mean conservative. But that would be rather question-begging. The alternative is that they are begging the question against conservatism, which reduces to political correctness, due to it being a not utterly un-Burkean affair. A third possibility is that our authors haven’t given the matter much thought.
A fourth possibility is that they are using “legitimate” v. loosely to mean “a viewpoint that is not obviously bonkers, i.e., not a viewpoint that 90 percent or more of random people stopped on the street would say is bonkers.”
LFC 10.08.15 at 3:07 pm
p.s. haven’t read the piece, don’t plan to. If it weren’t for Holbo I’d be pretty much ignorant of what Nat’l Review says. Wouldn’t it be fun if Holbo stopped reading NR for a while and started reading some leftist (i.e. to the left of ‘liberal’ in the U.S. sense) sites and/or journals of various sorts and reacting to them? (On second thought, maybe not.)
engels 10.08.15 at 3:07 pm
I agree with LFC. I’d imagine he thinks:
1. some opinions are illegitimate and should be suppressed by social pressure
2. some opinions aren’t and shouldn’t be
3. PC = misapplication of techniques of (1) to opinions of (2)
Patrick 10.08.15 at 3:19 pm
People disagree about things. People use social pressure to mark certain positions as being without status in the relevant contexts. People who hold those views and don’t like the resulting status loss in that context invent terms like political correctness, scientism, close mindedness, etc, by which they mean an inappropriate denial of status to the ideas they hold. The set of ideas that lack status in a given context is typically larger than the set of ideas that unjustly lack that status, so a lot of stupid ideas get defended using those words. This fact is used to discredit all uses of the word, effectively using uncontroversially low status ideas to discredit the terminology that could otherwise be used to defend more controversially low status ideas. Additionally, it’s human nature to be jealous of the status of others and dismissive of your own. So those marking ideas as low status in their social context learn to easily switch to speaking in broad terms about the status of the ideas in question in larger social context, where the low status they’ve assigned the idea does not apply, in order to argue that those who object to their status assignations are whining about nothing. The end result is that a lot of jerks attack the status of ideas that have more value than they’re acknowledging, and get further by associating those ideas with the ideas of a second set of jerks, who themselves have terrible ideas that they defend using terminology that has social cachet precisely because of the excesses of the first set of jerks.
I think that about covers it.
Bloix 10.08.15 at 3:33 pm
Lowry and Ponnuru:
“Among the most consequential forms of political correctness — in the sense of the use of social pressure to suppress the expression of widespread and legitimate viewpoints — has been the failure of leaders in almost any field of American life to give voice to discontent about mass immigration.”
Now, obviously, for years, conservative political leaders have been falling over themselves to talk about immigration, from Mitt “Self-Deport” Romney on down. So what is meant by “widespread and legitimate viewpoints” is not just “here’s what we need to do about immigration.” No, their complaint is that political and other leaders fail to “give voice to discontent” out of fear of “social pressure.” The “voice of discontent” they’re talking about is the public expression of racism.
This is a euphemistic way of saying that, other than Trump, Republican leaders tend to moderate their public statements, because they know that too many Americans will turn away from them in disgust if they say what they really think.
Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t care that people know he’s a racist, because he’s angling for the racist vote.
What Ponnuru and Lowry are saying while trying hard not to say it is that racism is a “widespread and legitimate viewpoint.” The result is an incoherent article that damns Trump for giving Republican voters what they want while telling other candidates that they need to give the voters what they want, too.
CJColucci 10.08.15 at 3:41 pm
But isn’t suppressing viewpoints, whether cranky minority views or “widespread and legitimate” views uncongenial to whoever is in a position to apply social pressure, a good bit of what social pressure is for?
Jerry Vinokurov 10.08.15 at 4:03 pm
Truly, being criticized on the Internet is the greatest of evils.
Jerry Vinokurov 10.08.15 at 4:05 pm
One could note in passing the irony of an “intellectual” movement that explicitly seeks to bring back social shaming as a tool of regulating sexual behavior complaining about being socially pressured, but that would clearly make one a perverse social shamer, which is the worst thing that one can be.
R.Porrofatto 10.08.15 at 4:29 pm
I think Mr. Holbo is right: “politically correct” is now so broadly applied to anything and everything that no single definition could ever have consensus. But no matter. Right-wing GOP candidates have certainly defined its antonym: bold courage to think, say or espouse anything that many if not most people — especially liberals — consider patently illegitimate, inhumane or demeaning.
I’m expecting any day now for one of them to say something like “I for one am no longer going to submit to ‘political correctness’ when it comes to our most successful citizens — it’s time to have the courage to say it out loud: ‘Let’s cut their taxes, dammit!'”
steven johnson 10.08.15 at 4:51 pm
There’s nothing at all mysterious about “PC.” I don’t think it’s any vaguer than “asshole.” The term PC is a pejorative way of identifying moral and social values and phrases enforced by the totalitarian Left. It’s the same thing as “goodspeak,” if I remember 1984 correctly. I suppose the kind of people who feel oppressed by PC would use goodspeak instead, except 1984 is exclusively antiCommunist. PC can be applied to anything to the left of the user. That’s one reason it’s kind of vague. Another reason is that there’s not any such thing as totalitarianism. And yet another is that the “Left” doesn’t run things and is in no position to oppress anyone.
How is that relevant to a good insult that demeans its targets and sanctifies the user as a victim? PC is never used as an insult to right wingers, so obviously no one is confused as to what it means. PC is every bit as acceptable as a genuine concept as totalitarianism.
Mr Punch 10.08.15 at 5:00 pm
Political correctness has a core definition that is pretty clear: it’s the insistence that the feelings of members of one (disadvantaged) group trump the rights of another (advantaged) one.
Stephen 10.08.15 at 5:03 pm
Steven Johnson: “there’s not any such thing as totalitarianism”.
In the USA, in the past, at the present, in the reasonably foreseeable future; granted.
In the rather large part of human experience outside those blessed boundaries: are you sure?
Stephen 10.08.15 at 5:05 pm
CJ Colucci: “isn’t suppressing viewpoints … a good bit of what social pressure is for?”
The question, I think, is whether that is what social pressure ought to be for.
steven johnson 10.08.15 at 5:16 pm
“In the rather large part of human experience outside those blessed boundaries: are you sure?”
Yes, I’m certain. If slavery wasn’t totalitarian, the term has no more intellectual content than PC.
The Temporary Name 10.08.15 at 5:18 pm
You don’t.
Waiting for Godot 10.08.15 at 5:38 pm
Hmmm…the torturous, over-intellectualized discussion of the definition of “politically correct” can be cleaned up by this definition in a post by Digby this morning: “‘political correctness”‘ (also known as good manners and basic human decency)…”
LWA 10.08.15 at 5:38 pm
As a leftist in good standing, where is this Totalitarian Left I hear spoken of?
I would very much like to enlist and perhaps serve out the duration as a FEMA camp counselor, or Gun Confiscator, maybe even on the front lines of the War On Christmas.
Waiting for Godot 10.08.15 at 5:47 pm
LWA @ 25
ROFLMAO…and when are we gunna start callin’ the folks on the right-wing what they are: fascists?
LWA 10.08.15 at 6:01 pm
As noted above, the “traditional” concept of a set of societal norms about what was decent or not, which must be enforced by shaming and shunning is a versatile tool, now cutting sharply against the hand which no longer holds it.
CJColucci 10.08.15 at 6:25 pm
PC is never used as an insult to right wingers, so obviously no one is confused as to what it means.
I use it that way all the time, because I’m old enough to remember right-wing political correctness avant la lettre. Drives the buggers nuts when I use it. Or is that no longer politically correct?
steven johnson 10.08.15 at 6:54 pm
CJColucci@28 “I use it that way all the time, because I’m old enough to remember right-wing political correctness avant la lettre. Drives the buggers nuts when I use it. Or is that no longer politically correct?” Using PC to mean “ideas and language in conformity with official or conventional opinion” is idiosyncratic, and no more acceptable than using “totalitarian” to tag slave society in the antebellum US. Yes, it’s a rational definition but insults aren’t about rationality but rationalizations. With your personal definition, one might end up regarding a US flag lapel pin as PC conformism, instead of patriotism.
Also, descriptivism instead of prescriptitivism, aka usage rules, is something like evolution: It refers to populations, not individuals.
But what’s really getting at me here, is, how do you tell they’ve gone “buggers?”
Marshall.peace 10.08.15 at 6:55 pm
In Berkeley in the ’60’s PC meant good alignment with The Chairman’s Little Red Book. Not originally ironic.
Bartleby the Commenter 10.08.15 at 7:13 pm
Me when it comes to clinking on NR links:
“I would prefer not to”
LFC 10.08.15 at 7:21 pm
engels @11
yes, basically, w the caveat that I think category (1), i.e. the set of ‘illegitimate’ opinions in this sense, is a v. small one.
Stephen 10.08.15 at 9:09 pm
steven johnson: I am seriously confused as to whether you are arguing @22 that slavery in the US was totalitarian (I would agree from the point of view of the slaves, though maintaining that from the point of view of the non-slave minority the US antebellum was not totalitarian): or that @29 that slave society in the US cannot be described as totalitarian.
Please remedy my confusion.
LFC 10.08.15 at 9:32 pm
Earlier this year L.D. Burnett wrote a two-part history of the phrase ‘politically correct’ at the USIH blog. Part I (with internal link to Pt. 2) is here:
http://s-usih.org/2015/02/politically-correct-a-history-part-i.html
Layman 10.08.15 at 10:44 pm
“I would very much like to enlist and perhaps serve out the duration as a FEMA camp counselor, or Gun Confiscator, maybe even on the front lines of the War On Christmas.”
I want to be on a Death Panel. Mostly because of the cool hats.
John Quiggin 10.08.15 at 11:19 pm
In the Oz (and I think UK) context “ideologically sound” had much the same history as “politically correct” in the US up to 1990, as a mildly sarcastic description of leftwingers who were more concerned with having the correct line than with actually achieving anything. But PC in the modern sense was imported from the US.
js. 10.08.15 at 11:46 pm
I keep hoping for a job in the Ministry of Culture of the New World Order. But fuckers are secretive!
Sancho 10.09.15 at 1:45 am
Modern conservative complaints about PC tie into the modern conservative belief that free speech not only means the right to speak freely, but the right to have the things you speak be treated with respect and admiration.
It’s routine for right-wingers these days to complain about censorship when they simply mean criticism.
gocart mozart 10.09.15 at 1:48 am
Political correctness is whatever viewpoint a conservative finds offensive, updated daily.
CJColucci 10.09.15 at 2:46 am
one might end up regarding a US flag lapel pin as PC conformism, instead of patriotism
One might indeed. Let’s see what happens if a politician stops wearing one.
Alan White 10.09.15 at 3:06 am
Pin suggestion for non-PC politicos:
Image of the US flag with small print below:
Ceci n’est pas un drapeau
engels 10.09.15 at 12:06 pm
Dogmatism is a style of thinking (certain opinions can not be revised). PC is a sttle of communication (certain things can not be said).
Loviatar 10.09.15 at 12:36 pm
Whenever I see the term PC combined with the phrase “I’m not” I think why is that person proud to be not Personally Courteous.
I’ve always see the the un-PC person as someone who is willing to use their speech/words to denigrate and humiliate someone else. I then think, whats wrong with being Personally Courteous, whats wrong with respecting others wishes on how they would like to be addressed/called/named? Is it so difficult?
engels 10.09.15 at 1:01 pm
I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture
Lynne 10.09.15 at 1:20 pm
Engels, why did you post that link?
engels 10.09.15 at 1:24 pm
It’s a recent controversy about ‘political correctness’ (sorry, I thought that would obvious)
Lynne 10.09.15 at 1:26 pm
Yes, I know. I’ve heard of it. I wondered what your thoughts are about it.
engels 10.09.15 at 1:32 pm
Briefly: Carter-Silk’s comment was sexist and unprofessional, Proudman’s reaction was unprofessional and misuse of social media Any more questions?
Adam Hammond 10.09.15 at 1:32 pm
PC means other people get to say the N-word all the time, but I don’t get to … well, I do … but then people call me a racist and that’s not fair! FREE SPEECH!
engels 10.09.15 at 1:34 pm
ZeK: no because dogmatism is about what you _think_, ie do and do not question whereas PC is about what you do and do not _say_ (and PC is a right-wing idea anyway, but that is what it’s supposed to mean as I understand). Anyway…
engels 10.09.15 at 1:55 pm
Sorry, I guess you’re saying that dogmatism (refusal to revise certain beliefs) motivates PC (prohibition on saying certain things). I’m not really seeing it. One idea of PC, as I understand, is that there are certain things which everyone knows but no-one will say (publicly)…
steven johnson 10.09.15 at 3:32 pm
Stephen@34
“steven johnson: I am seriously confused as to whether you are arguing @22 that slavery in the US was totalitarian (I would agree from the point of view of the slaves, though maintaining that from the point of view of the non-slave minority the US antebellum was not totalitarian): or that @29 that slave society in the US cannot be described as totalitarian.
Please remedy my confusion.”
People are indoctrinated with pseudoconcepts like “totalitarianism” for confusion’s sake. I rather suspect you will not give up the notion, therefore your confusion is ineradicable, at least not by any merely mortal means of persuasion available to me.
Nevertheless, I will try, so bear with me if I sound condescending.
First, no one respectable in conventional circles would ever accept that the antebellum US could be described as a totalitarian society. Everybody knows totalitarianism is what fascism and communism have in common, what makes them equally evil. People talked about slavery in Communist countries, and that talk is coming back as triumphalism keeps triumphing, but clearly no one will ever attribute anything Communist to something as beloved in US history as planter society. And people will not call planter society fascist (or proto-fascist, semi-fascist, crypto-fascist or even a fascist element.)
Yes, there were officially discriminatory status laws against minorities; official inequalities in civil and political rights; legal state and private violence against a racially defined minority, such as fugitive slave laws and slave patrols and passes for movement; widespread illegal violence against the minority; an elaborate racialist ideology; censorship of mails; violence against abolitionists and abolitionist presses; use of state power to redistribute property from the weak to the “nation,” i.e., sale of federal lands taken from native peoples; a continuing tradition of domestic terrorism, represented by the Klan etc.
Second, the doctrine of totalitarianism traces totalitarism’s intellectual origins purely to Europe, in the form of de Gobineau and European anti-Semitism (not the same thing, and the last I looked the contributions of the Tsarist Okhrana and the Black Hundreds seemed to be more or less ignored.) Theorists of totalitarianism do not even ask whether planter society has anything to do with fascism, which by definition is totalitarian. In view of the facts, this is senseless. If “totalitarianism” had any intellectual content whatsoever it would be at least debated whether one of its twin children, fascism, was born in the US. It is not debated, which demonstrates the notion is merely an elaborate ideological construct.
As for the odd notion that “the non-slave minority” wouldn’t find the antebellum South to be totalitarian, the violence against abolitionists, the threats of violence, the censorship of abolitionists, all refute you. I think this nonsense is cobbled up to exempt the planter society from charges of totalitarianism, a notion devised to equate fascism and communism. The word has no other use. At a first approximation, anyone who says “totaliatarianism” and means it, is lying.
Bartleby the Commenter 10.09.15 at 3:42 pm
Discussing the meaning of the term “PC” with Brett Bellmore?
I would prefer not to.
LWA 10.09.15 at 4:33 pm
WalMart admitted in court to knowingly hiring illegal aliens as a regular practice.
However, political correctness prevents newspapers from referring to WalMart as a “criminal enterprise”.
Monte Davis 10.09.15 at 4:35 pm
Marshall.peace @31: My memory tallies, but I find “the P.C” discourse more interesting not through actual morphing usage but as a gut expression of “We’re not being heard or taken seriously.” Once again, reflect on Andrew Sullivan’s late-1990s distillation of movement conservatism — it “won’t take ‘yes’ for an answer.”
From my own baseline (US, child in the 1950s, teen in the 1960s) I can make some sense of conservatives here feeling then that their views and voices voices were slighted as P. inC.: full-bore McCarthyism, then full-bore racism and apocalyptic “nuke ’em first” Cold War, really *were* discredited in circles much wider than just the liberal academy and NYC/LA media. My parents were centrist (I *would* say that, wouldn’t I?), but never dreamed of rolling back the New Deal, and thought of the Birchers and White Citizens’ Council and Goldwater as bad jokes. So, yeah — if I imagine myself holding the views of those last three, I can see feeling then that the public sphere did exclude our voices _tout court_.
But from the 1970s onward, of course, they’ve come roaring back — in US politics, through the Long March of organization and proselytization documented in Rick Perlstein’s Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan trilogy. And one of their strengths, dammit, is that they’ve maintained that sense of grievance, their own looking-glass version of “speaking truth to power.” So no matter how successful Fox News becomes, it’s a brave beleaguered holdout against the P.C. lamestream media. No matter how many legislative votes the NRA wins, it’s always the scrappy Minutemen facing the P.C. redcoats. No matter how paralyzed Congress becomes or how many Tea Partiers get elected, they’re always fighting a last-ditch defense of the Constitution and liberty against the P.C. juggernaut of activist Big Government.
“We’re not being heard!” Louder! “We’re not being heard!” LOUDER!!!
The Temporary Name 10.09.15 at 5:50 pm
Subject of importance to Brett Bellmore noted.
gocart mozart 10.09.15 at 6:27 pm
One person’s political correctness is another person’s political incorrectness.
Stephen 10.09.15 at 7:04 pm
Steven Johnson@56: I’m afraid that I still do not follow your arguments. You say
“no one respectable in conventional circles would ever accept that the antebellum US could be described as a totalitarian societyâ€
Well, that may be so, but then you also said @22 that “If slavery wasn’t totalitarian, the term has no more intellectual content than PCâ€. It seems to me that you are there insisting that (antebellum) slavery was in fact totalitarian.
I am not certain, but I am inclined to think that your grievance against the word “totalitarianism†is that you, mistakenly in my opinion, believe that it is “a notion devised to equate fascism and communismâ€; and that you detest the former but not so much the latter. You do indeed speak of “fascism, which by definition is totalitarianâ€; but then you also say “At a first approximation, anyone who says “totaliatarianism†[sic] and means it, is lyingâ€. I leave it to you to explain whether you are yourself lying, or not.
If I am correct, then your grievance also shows when you exclaim that “Everybody knows totalitarianism is what fascism and communism have in common, what makes them equally evil. People talked about slavery in Communist countries, and that talk is coming back as triumphalism keeps triumphingâ€. Well, there were some things that fascism and Leninist-Stalinist-whatever communism had in common; and there was, by any reasonable definition, a degree of slavery at times in Communist countries. Wouldn’t you agree?
I can partly agree with you when you say “clearly no one will ever attribute anything Communist to something as beloved in US history as planter societyâ€. To describe planter society as Communist would indeed be to go far beyond the boundaries of reason. To describe planter society as “beloved in US history†is, shall we say, idiosyncratic.
As for the legitimacy of discussing totalitarianism, I would refer you to Talmon and Arendt. You are of course free to dismiss them as ineradicably confused, if not lying.
As for your sounding condescending: I happily acquit you of that charge, since to do so you would have to stoop to the level of one of your inferiors. I can see no evidence that you are in any way my superior, in factual knowledge or in logical argument.
Bartleby the Commenter 10.09.15 at 7:17 pm
@The Temporary Name
Discussing trans rights with Brett Bellmore?
I would prefer not to.
steven johnson 10.09.15 at 7:33 pm
^^^” To describe planter society as “beloved in US history†is, shall we say, idiosyncratic.”
If you’re not from the US, you should think twice before laying down the law about what it’s like.
If you are from the US, re-watch Birth of a Nation, then consider the hostile reception by critics to Lincoln. Or you can re-watch Gone With the Wind, then consider the oblivion to which Glory has been consigned. (Glory, 1989 film starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Andre Braugher, Cary Elwes.) If two hours far exceeds your attention span, look for Confederate battle flags.
However, it is plain that you are no more interested than any other party who prattles about “totalitarianism.”
There is no reason to ask questions if you have no intention of responding, even if only to refute.
The Temporary Name 10.09.15 at 9:08 pm
No no. Maybe “Which is the best supermarket gossip magazine?”
Manta 10.10.15 at 9:08 am
PC is the right’s equivalent of “cyberbulling” and “trolling”: mostly, a handy excuse to silence criticism.
Rich Lowery 10.10.15 at 12:33 pm
You call me a racist, but then won’t let me do racist things. That’s PC.
engels 10.10.15 at 1:18 pm
A Sun columnist has come under intense criticism for claiming ‘Great British Bake Off’ winner Nadiya only claimed the top spot because of “political correctness” and bemoaned the “ideological warfare” her success posed to Britain. Nadiya Hussain, a Muslim mother of Bangladeshi heritage, was slammed by journalist Ally Ross for the paper in an article published on Thursday. Ross said BBC executives “no doubt did a multi-cultural jig of politically-correct joy” when judges Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry crowned her the cookery queen in a heated final aired last night. …
Watson Ladd 10.10.15 at 4:00 pm
steven johnson, I could have sworn the hostility came mainly from a belief that any discussion of the hard truth that white people died to free the slaves denied slaves their agency. In fact, that’s what happened not that long ago when a student group tried to show Glory at a school in Chicago. (I was informed by someone who was doing the screening, so you won’t find reference in the papers)
The fact is we’ve decided to accommodate the idea that there are some things you cannot say because they are insulting. That’s not criticism of ideas, but straight-up censorship. And you don’t need to be a right-winger to think that that is wrong.
Steve Williams 10.10.15 at 5:19 pm
The point of the NR post seems to be:
When liberals tell Lowry & Ponnuru what they can’t say, that’s ‘political correctness’ (gone mad?)
When Lowry & Ponnuru tell Donald Trump what he can’t say, that’s ‘decency’.
Stephen 10.10.15 at 6:26 pm
steven johnson: “There is no reason to ask questions if you have no intention of responding, even if only to refute”.
But my dear man, I do ask questions, I do respond, I do refute. I have, indeed, questioned you, responded to you, and I think refuted you. Can you disagree?
I fear you are far away in a world of your own where anyone disagreeing with you is by definition an ignorant liar.
I wish you joy of your incontestable possession.
John Quiggin 10.11.15 at 10:42 am
” there are some things you cannot say because they are insulting. That’s not criticism of ideas, but straight-up censorship”
To be boringly obvious, if “cannot say” means “will be forcibly prevented from saying”, you are right. If it means “will be called a racist/bigot for saying”, it’s a different story. The demand from the right is Lowry and Ponnuru is that words like “racist” should be censored because they hurt the feelings of racists.
engels 10.12.15 at 2:56 am
just came across this, which is one of the few times I’ve seen “politically correct” used as a positive term
Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) “Some cities seek to change 2nd Monday in October to a more politically correct, inclusive holiday. http://t.co/ABmw4Pxnne #ColumbusDay”
http://twitter.com/SmithsonianMag/status/653239159461646336?s=17
Roger Gathman 10.12.15 at 5:02 pm
How funny. Political correctness, to my mind, is the government pressuring academia to censure material in the public sphere. This is what real censorship looks like:
http://shadowproof.com/2015/10/09/classified-speech-purdue-destroys-video-of-presentation-on-snowden-documents/
The Chaitlings getting their feelings hurt is one of those minor things that seem major due to the distribution of old Marty Peretz employees in the higher echelon of the popular media.
“Gellman was invited to Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, to give a keynote presentation on Snowden and “national security journalism in the age of surveillance.†The presentation was part of a colloquium called “Dawn or Doom†on the “risks and rewards of emerging technologies.†It was live streamed, and Gellman was promised a link for sharing his presentation after the event.
Purdue University emphasized in its description of the event that Gellman would offer a “fresh account of the disclosures and their aftershocks, drawing upon hundreds of hours of work with the classified NSA archive and scores of hours of interviews with Snowden.â€
As Gellman has recounted, Purdue “wiped all copies†of his video and slides from university servers on the grounds that Gellman “displayed classified documents briefly on screen.â€
“A breach report was filed with the university’s Research Information Assurance Officer, also known as the Site Security Officer, under the terms of Defense Department Operating Manual 5220.22-M. I am told that Purdue briefly considered, among other things, whether to destroy the projector I borrowed, lest contaminants remain,†Gellman added.”
Watson Ladd 10.12.15 at 6:11 pm
We all know that when an event is cancelled on campus, we’re the organizers to hold it anyway, they would be ejected forcefully from the premises. The whole point of those calling for the cancelation of events is that they won’t happen and the views will not be heard. It really is what those who protest inclusion demand.
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