Is politically correct (PC) a form of lying?

Sure, and you could get jailed for eating pork or beef in some places. Or even for having your face uncovered. But here in the US that doesn't happen. (I was speaking primarily to the US since I was replying to the "melting pot" post.)

So how do you decide which celebrations of differences are real and which are artificial? Is Cinco de Mayo real or artificial? How about St. Patrick's Day? Bidil? The Knights of Columbus? The Portland Gay Men's Choir?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Any reality based informational or discussion format is going to look like opposition to the modern (since the '80s) wingnut rightwing faction of US political life, because their entire worldview is based on repetitions of bizarre counterfactual presumptions and fantasies.

We see that, for example, the rightwing news section of the Wall Street Journal, the entire politically neutral magazine Scientific American, and the right-dominated op-ed section of the New York Times, display oppositional tendencies and bias in the worldview of these people.

The only question is what label they will apply to this kind of unwelcome correction and opposition. The most common is "liberal", but "left" is seen, and others even less sensible. When the label is so ridiculous even they notice a threat to the credibility of the labeler, they simply ignore the matter (as with the Wall Street Journal news hole).

Factual accuracy and reality recognition is not a political bias, even if one political faction is bereft of it and another one has more than its fair share.

That is false, and deceptive in the extreme. You are capitulating to a current propaganda campaign by the corporate authoritarian right, an attempt to conceal their actual political operations and agenda behind labels such as "conservative", and associate all political opposition to this agenda with previously slandered categories.

Even here in the US such political terms have not yet completely lost all actual meaning, and certainly have not become interchangeable or synonymous labels for wingnut-imaginary "coalitions".

And treating them as such is mentally crippling - you end up believing stuff that would be an embarrassing memory of childhood's playground for anyone with a lick of sense. Like this:

Where does goofy bullshit like that come from? It isn't something all these people can possibly have made up on their own - there's too much consistency from one to the other.

His problem is that he keeps posting childish and petulant fantasies of himself being picked on as physical fact, and refuses to accept simple correction. This isn't a Fox News chatroom.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Human interactions happen on an individual scale.

Negative consequences for not eating meat are (directly or indirectly) a legal matter, in some countries.

I didn't get the impression so far that is the case that Marcuse and Wellwisher are at such odds as you describe.
But without Wellwisher's further input, I can't say much more.

Perhaps I understood the tone of this post of his and several others different than some of you have. It's something I could have said, in a cynical rhetorical manner, to express my dismay over the treatment I get from people who claim to be "tolerant," "pro-equality," "good," "decent," "constructive" and whatever the current power-words are.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I think the whole notion of "celebrating our differences" is nonsense, and very harmful at that.
Differences cannot be celebrated. Trying to "celebrate our differences" is like eating salt and claiming it is sweet.

"Celebrate our differences" is simply a PC term, in an attempt to gloss over the very real fact that segregation and discrimination always take place, in some form or other, and that equality is not possible.

But when segregation and discrimination are open and straightforward, at least we get the benefit of not having to struggle against the pretenses, the subtle or not so subtle psychological and physical abuse.

 

Or perhaps you just don't notice it, or perhaps they have found rationalizations that have convinced most people around them.

Doing anything that is considered "not normal," "out of the ordinary" when other people know of it, negatively affects one.


Yes, I have been criticized by important people in my life for not eating meat and for not drinking alcohol and coffee.
Not to mention the awkwardness that ensues when one refuses to eat and drink in the company of others, the same kind of food they eat.


People tend to tolerate a few "personal quirks." But when they deem that a person has "too many" of them, then that person is considered pathological.

Others might accept that one doesn't drink coffee, or that one doesn't eat meat, or that one doesn't drink alcohol. But when the same person doesn't drink coffee, doesn't eat meat, and doesn't drink alcohol, that is just too much for most people, and they will consider said person abnormal.

When it comes to people's opinions and how one's reputation is formed on other people's opinions, what you say above matters very little.
For one's own sake, it is necessary to control other people's opinions of oneself. Sometimes, trying to do so can be so overwhelming that it is easier to just go with the mainstream than to stick out.


Secondly "pathology" is a very relative term, subject to constant updating. It matters inasmuch that the mere term "pathological" carries such a heavy and lasting stigma for the one to whom it is assigned.

When things in ordinary interpersonal relationships come to the point that one is requested to cite scientific studies to justify one's lifestyle choices, then one has already lost.

So much for democracy and equality!!

 

Absolutely. And with "multiculturalists", the issue is considerably more intense and egregious, given that they act just the opposite of what they say.
There are "multiculturalist supremacists," and they are much more difficult to deal with than the ordinary supremacists.

I don't think he was serious about that.

Agreed. In European countries, there are usually more political parties involved at the top than just two. Here, we also see how nominally the same party, over time, shifts - from left to middle, from middle to right, from more social support to less, etc. New parties emerge, old ones dissolve. There is a lot of dynamics to observe.
In comparison, the US political system seems rather simplistic. Sometimes I even wonder whether the US Constitution has a clause according to which there can be only two parties in the US.

I think this is apt. Yes, I'd say that this is how I perceive the American political arena as well.

And I think this thread demonstrates this well.

 

They are on opposite sides of the question of tolerance, imposition of "PC" constraints, as it bears on current US media. Marcuse argues - carefully and at some length - that supposed tolerance of rightwing authoritarian rhetoric is "inauthentic", and interferes with actual or authentic tolerance or freedom of speech.

Nothing in this thread remotely suggests that.

That is not possible - such a "perception", that is. You cannot possibly perceive something so completely counterfactual, contradicted hour by hour and day by day in event and consequence. That is a work of imagination, not perception.

For example, "conservatives" - a meaningless and arbitrary label in this context, but never mind - very obviously do not see the nation as a larger community of which they are a part. They see the community of which they regard themselves as a part as defining and comprising the nation, other peoples being truly part of the nation only insofar as they join that one community. Hence the term "unAmerican" applied to people and thinking manifestly generated in America, the objections to "multiculturalism" and disparity in things like languages, the insistence on the central role of their religion (sometimes even their sect) in the establishment and continuing governance of the nation, some of the hostility towards other races, the insular and parochial curriculum they prefer for public schooling, and so forth.

This is not a subtle point - US "conservatives" are clear and often quite strident about who the real Americans are and aren't, what community one must be part of to belong to the nation truly, among the surrounding people who happen to live in the country. They are famous for this, and proud of it.

Or from the other - notably pejorative in its insinuations, for some reason - angle:

That love of country - of its prospects, its unique ability and tendency to change for the better, its characteristic and even defining orientation toward a future of continual effort and betterment and improvement and innovation for good, is exactly one of those American traditions that establish our national character down through centuries of optimistic struggle. Any "conservative" wedded to American traditions would embrace that attitude, that way of loving one's country, wholeheartedly. It's a liberal attitude of course - but such liberalism defines this nation, is central to its traditions and national character.

And so forth.