Is politically correct (PC) a form of lying?

Of course not! But my entire point is that the PC backlash is conspicuously absent unless there's a potential Liberal voter being attacked...and once we admit that PC is only a tool used for defending Liberal voters it loses it's claim to moral superiority based on its supposed ideals of politeness.

 

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But blacks tend to vote Democratic, and they are stereotyped in movies all the freaking time, way more than poor whites from WV.

 

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I think this is the common misunderstanding about PC, that it's supposed to be politically neutral. Not at all. On the contrary, political correctness is not about tolerating the intolerant. It's about eliminating inflammatory and divisionary thinking and speech from our collective consciousness. That doesn't mean there is no room to say what you want in different context such as in a comedic context where it is understood to be for entertainment purposes.

The fact is we are either politically correct or competative thugs. Political correctness is needed to maintain smooth human relations. All you need to do is observe any diplomat engaging in international relations. These people know better than anyone else how to interact with other people. There is a reason you don't step on people's toes. You don't act like a bull in a social or cultural china shop and call youself "outspoken". No, you are rude, intolerant, arrogant, ignorant or insensitive. And it's right that political correctness doesn't tolerate you.

 

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Can you imagine the outcry if a story that referred to blacks as "niggers" was on high school reading lists?

There is, and there's not much outcry. Indeed, it's considered a classic.

Can you imagine the outcry if a story that depicted rape as acceptable was used as a fundamental text of a political movement?

There is, and a significant group of people think it's one of the most important books ever written.

There's a long list of movies that attack a group that there's been no outcry against. The Love Guru mocks Indians. Breakfast at Tiffany's and Sixteen Candles mocks Asians. Scarface makes out all Italians to be criminals. And of course Cheech and Chong present Latinos and Asians as brain dead drug users.

There are plenty of examples of every group you can imagine being ridiculed, and generally no one cares much. I think you're being oversensitive.

 

Was that the message? Not everyone agrees.

 

It depends on the viewers whether they make such generalizations or not.

If one character in the film is a criminal and also an Italian, that doesn't automatically mean that the film-makers wanted to send the message that all Italians are criminals.

Granted, many people believe that such is the message of such a film.

 

Your observation about literature is right on target. And your point about Hollywood reinforces it. It reminded me that some of those flicks were made in the era that was striving for the first time not to discriminate among actors, some who had lived during the blacklisting - another subject completely lost to the haters of civil rights.

By these folks' definition, many of the treasures of literature would need to be burned, for espousing "liberalism" and "PC". The entire educational system has been indicted already, so why not just burn the books, ban everything, because books, schools, and everything are teaching us that the white Anglo-Saxon protestant is no longer at the center of the universe. Technically speaking, that is.

Only now you can't burn the books anymore. So of course that makes the web and everything that hangs from it - including this site - a liberal creation that needs to be trashed, too.

 

Messages, to this thread, are the DNA of spin. The spinster is glorifying post Civil War hillbillyism, in counterposition to the humiliation at Appomatox (as reenacted in the humiliation of 2008). The message has mutated into a political platform, genetically engineered by the sickly crazed children of the Southern Fundamentalist and Conservative family, who are still inbreeding, forty years after Billy Graham telephoned Richard Nixon to ask: "what are we going to do about the Jewish problem?"

Maybe Deliverance could be rethought even as this thread clones its chromosomal aberrations. For example, when Sarah Palin wired up her constituents to exercise their "2nd Amendment rights", and they went and shot up Democratic targets, how is that any different than retarded hillbillies running through the woods with squirrel guns, itching to strike at anything that resembles progress?

 

The PC stereo-types attempt to define all individuals within any given stereo-type, using the limiting characteristics for each stereo-type. This is out of touch with reality, since one can always find individual data that does not fit this one size fits all theory.

The analogy is like saying the average shoe size of a PC protected group is 10, therefore everyone in that group wears 10. This is irrational since a politically correct herd average is not the same as each individual data point. The average of 1 and 3 is 2 which does not even exist as an individual data point.

PC follows this irrational group mold. One group will be pointed out in terms of a dramatic boo-hoo or horror story, as though this size fits all. This separates the bigger herd into those most likely to be to vote democrat or republican. There is no PC concern for groups the illusion cannot buy.

The other side will point out individual exception to disprove this theory. This is valid science if this behavior theory was indeed true like science. The counter argument becomes emotional manipulation defining you as a bigot for not blindly accepting the stereo-type. While you try to disprove this irrational attacked (one size fits all), the primary irrationality gets to hide in the smoke screen.

I tend to think the heart of PC is in the right place, but this heart is not connected to a rational mind. It reminds me of the overly protective mother, who projects her own fears into her children, and tries to manipulate that into reality. For example, if she is afraid of the water she all try to make her children afraid. The counter movement is more like the father who tries to break the apron strings of the mother, so the child can grow up. But mother will turn that around and try to emotionally back him into a corner to the issue with the child is protected. She is not concerned for the child or else she would be teaching autonomy and not dependence on her. This dependence translates in votes for her instead of dad.

 

Everyone here is missing my point. It doesn't do any good to point out instances of missed outcry because I can rebut with a dozen more where politically-correct recourse existed. To properly counter-argue what I'm saying you'd have to provide evidence of political correctness being equally applied to Conservative minority groups, which you cannot do.

My point is that PC recourse, when it is applied, is only applied to those people who vote a certain way, even if the people involved are "covered by the theoretical umbrella" of political correctness. My examples given are: Santorum and other Christians (religious sensitivity?), the Appalchian poor in Deliverance (sensitivity towards the oppressed and underprivileged?), Palin and Bachmann (sensitivity toward women?), Cain and Clarence Thomas (sensitivity toward blacks?).

I'm not being overly sensitive because I don't care for political correctness and I'm not asking for apologies. What I'm doing is pointing out that PC isn't about protecting the groups it claims to; it's about protecting groups of people that will vote a certain way.

Also, Tony Montana (Scarface) was Cuban.

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With all due respect, you are wrong in the case of Conservatives. In the case of Conservatives or any group who disparages another group or says "they are less than us" automatically forfeits the protection of political correctness. In the case of gays, atheists, women, etc, Conservatives have clearly fired the first shot.

 

I think that's an apt observation. Those promoting PC certainly do so for some particular purpose, such as protecting a particular voter demographic, and not because they would simply "really really care about all people and their feelings."

Of course, it is not PC to point this out to those PC promoters.

 

Every character in that movie was Southern, including the suburbanite whitecollar hero burdened with the existential angst of civilization. The theme was not how backwards the South is.

And "critical acclaim" is kind of relative - the whole scene there ended up damaging James Dickey's reputation among the critics important to him.

Meanwhile many Spike Lee movies filmed in a ghetto (Do the Right Thing, say) enjoy at least as much critical acclaim from the PC crowd as Deliverance, while portraying similar ranges of character. So do Martin Scorsese and similar genre crime films, portraying ghettos of people otherwise known as Democratic Party stalwarts (at least until very recently) in less than flattering light.

And I don't think most of these people you are accusing of such hypocrisy even know how the people portrayed in Deliverance would tend to vote - aside from a guess that the Action Hero, played by Burt Reynolds, might lean Libertarian.

Nonsense. Newsreaders trip all over themselves trying to avoid terms like "bigot", "racist", "ignorant", "uneducated", "pious", even "fundamentalist", "trailer park", "crime ridden" (when referring to rural white people's neighborhoods), "violent", "drunk", "redneck", "mean", "close-minded", even terms like "insular" are avoided; instead we get "conservative", "traditional", "small town", "religious", "family values", that kind of euphemism. Go back and look at the mass media coverage of Sarah Palin's crowd, or the Tea Party rallies - listen to the talking heads try to tiptoe around what's right in front of them.

And on the other hand the Fox crowd has made a freaking industry out of vocabulary management, from "homicide bomber" to "enhanced interrogation" to "hero" for anyone posted to a combat zone who avoids dishonorable discharge.

The US government sets up an entire archipelago of prisons for torturing information out of terrorism suspects, and the major media won't even use the word in the newscasts.

 

Of course you can. What can you conclude from that? Sometimes people get offended and sometimes they don't - and it has nothing to do whether they are liberal or conservatives.

Political correctness is applied all the time to homosexuals - and that application has nothing to do with whether they are Log Cabin republicans.

And I've given you counterexamples that prove that happens on both sides. You're going to have to do better than that.

And I'm saying that it's absurd to claim that "political correctness" is applied to all homosexuals except Log Cabin Republicans. It's absurd to claim that it's applied to all women except conservative women. It's absurd to claim that it's applied to all blacks except conservative blacks. The facts simply do not support your claim, as I have demonstrated above.

 

Agreed. Which is what political correctness is - the perceptions of people involved.

Exactly! And if two characters in the film are hillbillies, that doesn't automatically mean that the film-makers wanted to send the message that hillbillies are all idiots, or that one political party is more protected than another.

 

I see, so what you're saying is conservative gays, conservative atheists, conservative women, etc, are not deserving of politically correct sensitivity because "they hit me first"? If you're logically comfortable with this then so be it, but don't act like PC is more than it actually is - a sham of a political tool.

 

from the San Diego U-T:

=====================
Conservatives profess to be horrified over political correctness, which is roughly defined as the habit of stamping out frank discussion about matters related even tangentially to race, class, gender and ethnicity. Whenever a liberal raises concerns over whether a conservative initiative might damage the rights or interests of, say, African-Americans or Latinos, that liberal is accused of being "politically correct" and playing the race card – usually, just to make the sin sound really awful, off "the bottom of the deck."

But increasingly, it is conservatives who are using political correctness to sidestep hard issues. Consider the bait-and-switch in the Gonzales case: Democrats thought it appropriate to use Gonzales' nomination to launch a debate about torture policy. Gonzales is Latino. Therefore, Republicans insisted, Democrats who wanted to debate torture policy were anti-Latino.

The new conservative political correctness actually goes back at least to the battle over Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' nomination. When Thomas was fighting charges that he had sexually harassed an employee, he declared his opponents guilty of a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves." Whatever you thought of the mess that surrounded Thomas' nomination, could he have chosen a more racially charged metaphor?

Just a couple of years ago, Democrats who opposed the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit were accused of being anti-Hispanic in almost exactly the same terms invoked last week in the Gonzales battle.

To reject Estrada, said Sen. Charles Grassley, the normally mild-spoken Iowa Republican, "would be to shut the door on the American Dream of Hispanic-Americans everywhere." Estrada, of course, was one of several of President Bush's court nominees opposed by Democrats largely on philosophical (or, if you prefer, ideological) grounds.

Hatch neatly mixed the ideological and the ethnic. If Estrada were rejected, Hatch said, it would close the door to any nominee who was "number one Hispanic, number two Republican, number three possibly conservative, and number four, may have some ideas of his or her own."

This was too much for House Democratic Caucus Chairman Bob Menendez. "Republicans and Senator Hatch in particular can't have it both ways," Menendez said at the time. "They can't blatantly call for the end of affirmative action by characterizing it as a quota system while, at the same time, demanding that we support all Hispanic nominees simply because they are Hispanic."

More recently, Bush has invoked racial considerations in support of his plan to privatize Social Security. "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people," Bush said at a White House Conference on Social Security in January. "That needs to be fixed."

First off, the thing that "needs to be fixed" is that "African-American males die sooner than other males do." Moreover, Bush's underlying claim has been largely discredited. Precisely because of those death rates, African-American families are especially reliant on Social Security's survivors' benefits, and African-Americans need and draw on Social Security's disability benefits at a higher rate than whites. They are also more likely to rely on Social Security payments to stay out of poverty in old age.

But put all that aside. Isn't Bush playing the very "race card" here that liberals are perpetually accused of using as a trump? Why is it wrong for liberals to invoke the injustices of race (or class) when they talk about heath care, child care and taxes, but just ducky for Bush to make similar arguments on behalf of Social Security privatization?

No political camp in our country can claim utter innocence when it comes to racial politics. But is it too much to ask that those who constantly accuse their opponents of using "politically correctness" as a bludgeon at least be a trifle embarrassed over how often they wield it themselves?

 

Is it any different than the wordsmithing of Frank Luntz?

 

Just, wow.

 

Depending on what school you went to and according to what art criticism theory you were taught to interpret works of art (especially literature and films), such generalizations may be standard, though.


I remember that several of my teachers would insist in the question "What did the author want to say with this?" and then we were supposed to give a uniform answer.
Even though we didn't actually read any text by same author where the author would actually say what he wanted to say with this or that.
We were, in fact, taught to project, to speculate (gossip!) and then to impose our opinion on someone else and present it as theirs, and if we did it in a way that pleased the teacher, we got a good grade. And we all wanted a good grade, of course.


It seems that many people grew up with this kind of literature teachers. So it is understandable that they are used to stereotype like this in regard to literature and films and continue to do so.
I think much of our social discourse is build on and around such generalizations. Generally, we are raised to interpret books and films in an ideologically charged manner - even though this is never clearly stated as such.