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But seriously...
paranoidwriter: However, as Flyboy failed to offer any opinion of his own on of PC (etc) or the issues surrounding the term, or even any indication of such, for me giving him a definition was made that much harder than it already is.
Political correctness is a myth. It is a pejorative term used to give the impression that people who act or speak out against racism, sexism, homophobia, or class snobbery a) have the whip hand, and b) are censorious, unreasonable, petty, extremist killjoys. It is a sophisticated linguistic weapon in the arsenal of newspapers, politicians and other propagandists. Many purported examples of political correctness turn out upon investigation to either be entirely reasonable (unless one favours sexism, racism, etc) or apocryphal.
As Haus says:
There is in fact no central force for political correctness, nor any complete and coherent definition. It exists conceptually as a nebulous but vast conspiracy which can be blamed for any number of things that people would like to do not being entirely acceptable. It is surprising, however, just how many things that appear to be crushed under the hand of this numinous force are actually not only still done, but done all the time.
toksik: it was kinda pointless, but then i wasnt even sure why fly asked for it in the first place.
in thread, anyway.
next time you want someone to jump through hoops, mr boy, could it be done by PM?
paranoidwriter had responded to criticisms of the advert in question by stating we may be dangerously close to PC Hell on this one. In addition to the above, in my experience 'political correctness' is a term which is usually employed in a deeply poorly thought-out way* - otherwise, why would so many people who identify as generally being liberal, left-leaning, tolerant, etc, use such a tool of reactionaries so freely? It has therefore become my policy to ask anyone who uses the term what they mean by it, in the hope that it will cause them to rethink the term, amongst other things, and because one day, somebody may give me a decent answer. Hasn't happened yet, though. I wasn't asking just for sport, as you seem to imply, but I won't hold that against you as the tone of my post may have read as genuine rather than sarcastic gleeful enthusiasm.
(*Specifically, it relies on unthinking acceptance of certain ideas commonly propagated through the media, for example the idea that when the media accuse someone of "playing the race card" as paranoidwriter refers to, the media can be trusted to have impartially and accurately identified an instance in which someone has claimed racism exists where it does not...) |
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