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Right, sorry, serious now. Flowers, I understand your confict-aversion, but either we accept that people on Barbelith are basically to be treated as equals, both to ourselves and to each other, and thus held to standards both of behaviour and of intellect to which we would like to hold ourselves, or we (or at least I) have to change our relationship to the Board. If any members of al Qaeda or armed policemen who feel basically sanguine about shooting innocent people appear on Barbelith, I am pretty sure they will get a fair bit of snark. In the meantime if we start letting sloppy thinking proliferate, t3h terrorists have won.
PW, it's nice that you apologise, but I think we're falling into a cycle here, which goes, basically:
PW: x
Other: not-x
PW: Why are you saying not-x? You're being very rude.
Other: I just don't think x.
PW: Am I not expressing x well enough, or are you just being difficult?
Other: I understand x as you express it, and don't agree with it.
PW: GAAAAAAGH
(pause)
PW: (by Private Message) I'm very sorry I went GAAAAH.
(everyday business resumes)
PW: y
Other: not-y
PW: GAAAAAAAAGH! And you didn't even apologise reciprocally for your obvious culpability last time, when I did!
I'd like to try to head that off now, yeah?
Now, back on Political Correctness.
I'm skipping some of your early work, here, because I think it ties in with issues we'll come to later, but I'll summarise it as "Britain used to be a place where racism, sexism and homophobia were commonly expressed, and as a result of Political Correctness this is no longer the case. However, now that the heavy lifting has been done by Political Correctness, it is now counterproductive, and a process of polite and constructive dialogue with those who continue to harbour sexist, racist and homophobic views is the way forward."
I think almost every posit there is open to question, but I hope that's a reasonable summary.
So, back onto the topic of the Greenpeace ad:
To a large extent this is the "artist's" responsibility. But even so (much as we are were doing here) it is far better to discuss why or even why not such "texts" are considered offensive, rather than slating them, deleting them, or any other such form of silencing.
You seem consistently to be confusing "slating" with "silencing". It doesn't seem to me that any opinion expressed in this thread has affected whether that advert exists or whether it is available. If anything, it has increased awareness and the gross amount of discussion it is getting. Essentially: There's a link at the top of the thread. Click it. Advert still there. Likewise, your early example of "PC Hell" involved not one of your friends being "silenced", but one of your friends being criticised and compelled to justify a statement they made. You seem to be treating, as you seem to treat people on Barbelith disagreeing with you, as if this was some act of silencing.
It is not.
You left Barbelith, rather impolitely, and have returned without consequence or complication two days later. If you are being silenced, it is being done singularly ineptly. Since the moderators of Barbelith have the power to delete posts, and that power is not being exercised, I find your claims of censorship rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea of "censorship".
The Open Source movement draws a distinction between free as in free speech and free as in free beer that might be instructive here. If somebody stands outside your door and screams abuse for five hours solid, it might be suggested that your right to live wiithout harrassment (a Civil Liberty, if you like) has a competing claim against their freedom to say what they want, how and when they want it. You're speaking of Civil Liberties as a capitalised monad as you are Political Correctness, which I think neglects to understand the complexities inherent in both.
The reason being that that even though the racist prat was spouting crap I didn't agree with, he was forced into a dialogue and so (at the very least) I understood his POV and his children knew both that there were people out there who didn't agree with Daddy, and that some of them weren't trying to silence Daddy and therefore don't indirectly support Daddy's views.
Could you explain exactly how "trying to silence Daddy" equals "indirectly support Daddy's views"? Only, it seems to me you have made an enormous and very unwise mental leap here, possibly based on the preceding enormous and unwise mental leap "censorship (in your rather broad definition of the term) only makes things worse in every possible way)". MIght one not instead say, for example:
his children knew both that there were people out there who didn't agree with Daddy, and that some of them were soft-soaping while discussing his racist beliefs, and therefore were demonstrating that whether or not to hold racist views was pretty much a matter of taste and certainly nothing to get too worked up about?
This may simply be a question of taste in one's approach, rather than right or wrong answers - you're assuming that your behaviour is the gold standard, which may or may not be true but is not self-evident, and I think that's a big hurdle to overcome but one which leads to a lot of very useful results.
Now, moving on to "PC".
Earlier in this post, I talked about the many connotations attached to the term PC. For the sake of my argument, let us for now say the actual denotation of PC is: "an acceptable language and code of conduct agreed upon by the majority and intended to benefit society as a whole; relying on an unwritten set of "golden" rules which each citizen should use and encourage the use of, if they wish to adhere to aforementioned majority."
I'd raise a question, before we go any further, about the usefulness of the term "code of conduct", which seems to be, as ibis has mentioned, an uncomfortable straddle between the ideas of convention, guidance and law. For example, all-female selection lists for constituencies are described as PC, aren't they? Children not being allowed to play on the swings for fear of legal action? PC. Soft policies on immigration? Political correctness gone mad. Bakke versus the University of California? The first step down the road to our current lamentably PC universities. I don't think it's possible when constructing a definition of PC to ignore the many situations in which it is used that have at best a profoundly tangential connection to language or conduct and a strong connection to law or practice, which I think this definition is confused about. This leads us on to:
If I've been clumsy with my sentence structure (etc), and mislead you in anyway then I apologise. But couldn't PC (which we still haven't defined) be seen to have had an affect on all spheres of society, legal, governmental, the private sector, etc. I'm not a lawyer but I'll bet that at the very least employment law in the UK has changed since the 80's because of what we might call changes attitudes and the influence of PC.
Where "code of conduct" and "law" become confused to the point where I think this definition, before we move on to whether it usefully describes an actual phenomenon, is holed below the waterline internally. If you mean to include law into the idea of the "code of conduct", then PC describes pretty much everything. However, at that point we lose the idea of the "unwritten rules". Also, it kind of doesn't make sense. The reason employment law has changed throughout this century is not to recognise the adherence of all to an unwritten code agreed upon by the majority as intended to benefit society as a whole, but because employers were precisely not adhering to what was felt to be in the interests of society as a whole, because they were not compelled to do so. We can talk about the market, here, and the way in which it advances and retards the cause of social justice, but I think that would take us further away from our subject.
Which subject is, of course, political correctness. In the thread I linked to earlier, somebody defined political correctness as:
Because anyone who is being politically correct in the way I described probably has some insecurities about their own sense of other groups/creeds/sexualities/etc and should be concentrating on dealing with those issues - Unfortunately, it often follows that, in line with their own insecurities and the resultant benchmark they set for themselves, they arrogantly expect others to tow the same line, else these others are fair game for accusations of being racist/homophobic/etc. But that's just not fair, because 'hushing' the perceived problems of others in the way they do their own, isn't necessarily the best way to deal with these problems.
At the time, I noted that what that was saying could be unfolded as:
If somebody calls an action I do not believe to be racist or homophobic racist or homophobic, they must be wrong, because I do not believe that action to be racist or homophobic. However, they cannot simply be, in my opinion, mistaken. They must be insecure about the fact that they are in fact secretly racist or homophobic. This insecurity is expressed through political correctness. So, anyone and anything that I call politically correct is in fact not just wrong, but also secretly racist or homophobic, and insecure about it.
This is not quite what you seem to be saying, but in some way's it's not far off. Instead of "secretly racist or homophobic", you're saying that challenging racism or other ism of your choice in a way you don't approve is actually indirectly supporting it - that is, that to do so is functionally advancing the cause of racism or homophobia - but the effect is much the same - the language of "hushing" above can be equated to the oft-repeated metaphor of the band-aid.
Now, you have subsequently created a distinction between "good PC" and "bad PC". Good PC, in essence, is the application of codes of language and conduct in a way of which you approve - for example, not calling people bent black bastards. So far so good. "Bad PC" is the application of etc in ways you don't approve of, such as "censoring" (scare quotes) your friend for his innocuous and humorous Hitler funny. However, the good PC must come from within - if you attempt to engage with somebody else who is calling somebody a bent black bastard in a manner that is not polite and respectful, you are in fact supporting censorship and thus indirectly supporting racism through your application of bad PC, just as you would be if you attempted to engage with somebody making an innocuous and humorous Hitler funny in a manner that was not polite or respectful. However the laws that have come into being as a result of PC have been important and useful protections of (not sure here - presumably either civil liberties or something else not infringing civil liberties) ...
Hang on. Let's call a halt for a second. PW, quick question. Until this thread, had you ever thought about something "Hey, what a great bit of Political Correctness there. That was really Politically Correct, in a totally bang-on fashion". Only I find - and we've been through this a good few times on Barbelith - that people often suddenly start speaking halfway through these discussion of Political Correctness as one might of, say, feminism - it has achieved lots of valuable and useful things, but is now in danger of going too far (just to be clear, the house in no way means this to reflect on or invite a discussion of PW's views on feminism).
However, feminism is a very different animal - one can, for example, point to feminist organisations, histories of the development of feminism through its proponents, feminist thinkers, books of feminist thought and so on. I would be surprised if one could do the same with Political Correctness. Indeed, many of the achievements of "good" Political Correctness might before this example have been attributed to, say, social justice or good manners or the development of a multicultural society, or any number of other lowercase elements. Indeed, the only books intimately involved with Political Correctness one might be likely to find are joke books presenting hyperbolic representations of Political Correctness gone mad.
So, posit:
It suits the right wing for Political Correctness to exist as a monolithic conceptual entity, and for that entity to be seen as something that menaces fluffy and good things like equality and freedom of speech.
Since the media is largely controlled by right-wing interests, it is pretty easy for the media regularly to tell us that behaviour that is disapproved of by the owners off the media is "Political Correctness gone mad".
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.
(bootnote: It is also interesting that the people who do these things can them both feel and claim that they have made a brave stand against Political Correctness, without actually being punished or risking punishment for it in any way. If Political Correctness were such a force in the land, for example, surely Garry Bushell or Richard Littlejohn would be regularly jailed rather than financially rewarded for their violations of it? Many people talk a lot about politically correct censorship, but seem singularly untroubled by it.)
You may feel this level of discussion is pedantry, but unfortunately you've cited very big and very complex ideas and I feel duty-bound to point up some of what seem to me to be the complexities therein. If you feel unwilling to engage with them, I understand that but I hope that you do so in a way that does not involve denigrating the usefulness of discussing complex ideas or the people who do so. |
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