Is politically correct (PC) a form of lying?

I do think all minorities are equal in terms of potential, but the fact is they are victims of historical racism if nothing else. So, if the goal is to ensure they are equally prosperous, we do have to give them special consideration, and this is not racism. The issue is you want to deny that there is even a problem anymore, it fits with the stepford wife mentality of conservatives pining for a time that never was and sweeping our very real problems under the rug.

 

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Wellwisher, I find your posts a little bit cringe-worthy but then I realize that it's my inner-PC talking...you essentially speak the truth.

I ask this to everyone here: what if a group IS inherently inferior to another? Should we accept that as natural or attempt to level the playing field? An example might be women's vocabulary advantage over men...if we could prove that it's genetic rather than cultural, what sort of reaction should we have to it? Another, more obvious, one is men's physical advantage over women. No amount of word-games will be able to blur this distinction, and our apparent reaction to this is the severe social stigma, and jail time, involved with men attacking women, while women attacking men is usually laughed at followed by people asking "wow, that guy must have really screwed up!!"

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As the example of the CP term "liberal" illustrates, claims of moral superiority are not the only, or even the most significant, aspects.

Now we all have to use "liberal" the way the CP propagandists shoved down our throats, and we can no longer discuss matters in, say, the terms of Lionel Trilling, when he wrote his famous essays central to liberal thought a couple of decades ago. That prevents intelligent public discussion of liberal ideology, the clear and succinct application of liberal principles to issues of the day, and so forth.

The dumbass won that one. And moral inferiority is not the central aspect of their victory.

Indeed.

To what extent do we allow our vocabulary to be dictated by those incapable of handling concepts as central as - for example - race as a sociological construct?

 

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You are talking about averages. Individuals can always be above average. I've known weak men and very strong women.

 

Again there is a difference between individuals and the PC group abstractions which get milage lumping the past with the present as though people today should get credit for the past before they were born. How did President Obama do it if he was a cog in the abstract wheel of PC past? He did not accept the PC herd illusion but became an individual.

Martin Luther King said, judge by content of character and not color of the skin. Character is part of being an individual. The skin color is the herd thing that PC tries to equate in terms of manipulation.

 

Bingo. You want to know the Liberal definition of "oppressed"? It's any group that can be exploited for votes, period. Take a disadvantaged group that won't sell their vote in exchange for their principles and...they aren't considered "oppressed"! The Appalachian poor are a great example - broke as dirt, uneducated, rotten health, but they're less susceptible to exchanging their votes for Liberal assistance, therefore they get no PC protection!

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Can you imagine the outcry if Deliverance had been filmed in an inner-city ghetto and all of its inhabitants were depicted as a bunch of retarded inbreeds? It absolutely CONFOUNDS the Liberals why they would offer "free money" to people and those people won't forfeit their principles (i.e. guns, religion, pride, tradition, culture, etc). They come out with movies like What's the Matter With Kansas? which tries to "understand" the problem with these people, when no consideration is given to the idea that the problem resides in the analyzer.

In the end, it's clear that PC isn't about being polite and it isn't about protecting the oppressed. It's a facade of a political movement, period.

 

Is the term "Liberal" your version of politically correct? Because it doesn't correspond to any Democratic party principles I'm aware of. It's just a facade for your political movement (backwards). Deliverance is a product of Hollywood, not Washington, and plenty of people did object to the characterization of poor Appalachian whites as fantastic musicians.

 

Which is why "Liberals" think wealthy Evangelical Christians are oppressed - because they are so easily and obviously exploited for votes.

Right?

 

I don't really follow your point. You would prefer "Progressive"?

A term is only offensive if you allow it to be. Call me a Conservative* in your most condescending tone and I won't flinch; this is why Conservatives don't need to change labels every decade. Changing your political label from Socialist to Liberal to Progressive isn't going to make your world view any more popular, just as changing a racial label from Indian to Native American isn't going to make their plight any easier.

* I'm only conservative in the fiscal sense; I'm actually pretty socially liberal...but the PC movement still bothers the hell out of me

 

You were trying to define "liberal" as someone who wants people to forfeit principles for money. I'm calling that a negative version of politically correct, correct in terms of your culture war against a perceived enemy to your values. If you really dislike PC, which is the re-imaging of labels, maybe you should avoid it yourself.

 

Well, my point was that people unwilling to vote for a Liberal agenda get no "Politically Correct" linguistic protection. The National Organization of Women is the first on the scene when a reference is made to a woman's gender in a pejorative way...unless that woman is Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, etc. This doesn't mean that I believe Liberals have no principles, and it doesn't mean that Conservatives don't try to purchase votes, either, it's just a comment about the thread topic of the sham of Political Correctness.

 

What about depicting black men as sex-crazed threats to our white women? That disgusting imagery has deep historical roots in America and was the basis for many lynchings, yet it's apparently permissible to make these allegations if those black men are conservative such as Clarence Thomas or Herman Cain. Not a peep from the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, Sharpton, etc.

It builds the picture that these groups are not representative of the constituents that they proclaim to represent, but rather only the subgroup of those constituents who vote correctly...which implies that their true principles are not in line with their stated ones.

 

The accusations against Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain were not based on stereotypes but rather eyewitness reports.

I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to poor white residents of Appalachia. Efforts to reverse the economic situation among this group was spearheaded by the Democrats, and I've never heard them say a non PC thing about them. Where is the blowback you refer to?

 

Then you missed my point about Deliverance above. Where was the PC outrage over characterizing the entire area as a bunch of inbred mutants?

 

I saw three "native" characters portrayed in Deliverance, hardly representative of an entire people. And hardly worth the attention of any political party.

 

Three? Watch it again. The entire THEME of the movie was how backward the South is...with the small concession that they knew how to play music. And I'm not talking about political parties getting (or not getting) involved, just a lack of PC cover in general. I ask again, do you really think this would get the same pass (or even the same critical acclaim) if it were filmed in a ghetto?

Coincidentally, I just came across a post on Slashdot that perfectly sums up what we're talking about:

Slashdot is basically a wiki-moderated "geek" site, with Liberal leanings. I see comments like this modded "5, Funny" all the time, which stems from the fact that it's clearly OK to make fun of Christians as being stupid even though the theoretical protection of Political Correctness covers them.

 

Perhaps you haven't internalized the usual typization procedure in the interpretation of works of art, and so you don't "see" what other people "see".

Indeed, there were only a few native characters in "Deliverance" and they were all characterized as "a bunch of inbred mutants."
Someone who has "successfully internalized" standard intepretation procedures would say that "all natives were characterized as a bunch of inbred mutants" and that this is to mean that all natives are a bunch of inbred mutants.

Some reviews of "Deliverance" surely stated something to the effect of "the clash of two cultures - the one from the city and the one from the outback."
Some see "Deliverance" as a manifesto of "modern culture finally winning over the primitive culture" ("although with some fear that the victory might not be complete").

IOW, not everyone views the film as a story of one group of men against another group of men, but rather in more extended terms, such as a culture clash.

 

It still isn't politically correct to refer to people from the South as hillbillies or rednecks, so I'm not sure what your complaint is.

 

I'm not 'complaining' about anything, really, and I'm not defending the inbred mutant hillbillies in Deliverance (

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); what I'm doing is pointing out that the movie was considered a masterpiece in spite of the fact that it clearly had a message of insensitivity towards a clearly disadvantaged group of people...and the reason there wasn't a backlash over it is because that group of people don't vote a certain way.

 

You are equating a public backlash with political correctness, and I don't think they are necessarily related. Is it only the political left that ever objects to films?