Opinion of Political Correctness

[The Mikado]

There's just a little bit of a difference between being polite and considerate and sensitive, and instituting speech codes and unbroachable topics and shaming anyone who transgresses.

This. Obviously you should try to be polite and not intentionally step on people's toes or offend people just to make some stupid point, but there are actual lines where some people go to crazy town because of it.

For instance, I've liked a lot of content from the site Mark Reads. I've spent hours reading a lot of the reviews there, and it's been insightful and entertaining, and all that jazz. If you ever try entering the comment sections, though, be wary that he bans such things as "ableist language." Meaning that if you ever use words like "crazy" or "idiot" or "insane" or "lame" or "mad" and others like them, even in the most casual, innocent way (ex. "I saw this movie last night and it was crazy awesome!") you can be straight-up banned for it. The same principle goes for a lot of the other -isms. That's what people get upset about as being ridiculously over-sensitive and being language and thought policing control freaks.

Well, he may be an idiot, but his house his rules etc.  The thing about this sort of thing is that people try to pass it off as a freedom of speech case when, unless your "politically incorrect" speech involves death threats, the government doesn't give a rat's ass about your comments and will not try to censor you.  You don't have the right to be heard and we have the right to not listen to you, and have the right to scold you or call you out if what you say violates the community standards society has set up over time. 

Today, saying calling someone an idiot is a hateful remark is absurd.  In ten years, society might have come to the consensus that that guy is right and calling someone an idiot is hate speech and might shun you and call you on the carpet for doing so.  That isn't a curtailment of your free speech, that's the rest of society exercising it's free speech and telling you that it doesn't consider your speech acceptable anymore.  You won't go to jail, you won't pay a fine, but society is well within its rights to determine that a certain position or set of words are outside the bounds of civil discourse and shun those who use them.  Your right to speak does not equal a right to force others to listen to content that they don't want to listen to, and they can and will tune you out or try to shame/humiliate you into silence.

[Marokai Backbeat]

I don't disagree on "your house, your rules" even if I personally think it's completely stupid, though if that's what the response to any example of over-sensitivity is then this conversation was never destined to go anywhere to begin with. I don't disagree that most people who complain about "political correctness" are just using it as an excuse to be a**holes, it's just that it doesn't mean no one is ever being over-sensitive, anywhere, ever, or that people don't have occasionally disproportionate reaction to things. (Such as getting people fired over dumb word choices, or, hell, even just being intentionally offensive.)

"Maybe in ten years you'll be wrong" really is a weird response and kind of a conversation-ender, though, so I'm not sure where to even go at this point.

I guess all that I can say is that I just have a problem in general with people telling others they're not allowed to have an opinion (this happens a lot in conversations in particular about gender, race, and sex), or they're not allowed to use certain words to express themselves. I don't come from a place of deep insecurity about these things; if a straight guy wants to level an opinion about the rights and quality of life of gay dudes, he should be allowed to do so. I'll just critique the idea if he wrong about it. The same should go for issues about women or ethnic minorities. Anyone should be allowed to talk about it. If they're wrong or approaching the conversation in a hurtful way that's when you be animated about it.

Like, you talk about how language evolves, how society's standards about how language is used evolves. You're right, which is why when people talk about how World 4 of Demon's Souls is "lame" they're not thinking of people who are crippled and can't walk. These words have evolved colloquially to mean completely different things in modern conversation.

Words like "crazy" have had their definitions stretched so broadly that they can mean completely different things as descriptors depending on their context, but the context is what should matter more than the word itself if you're going to be offended by something. A friend who jokingly calls me "fag" will get me to chuckle, a person on the street who lobs that word at me from afar would make me offended. But if I approached these things by saying "fag is an inherently offensive word with no potential positive use whatsoever, I hereby ban it and will lecture anyone who uses it, regardless!" I am charging that word with rebellious connotations and accomplishing nothing except finding a way to be offended for the rest of my life. Instead of just allowing the negative connotations of that word (or any other) to fade with time, I'm pretty much actively helping people who would seek to use the word to offend.

That's sort of always the irony with the Social Justice-ing going on these days. It's often super self-defeating. By insisting on the strict and well-advertised offensiveness of the words, you're preventing the offensiveness of the word from gradually losing its meaning with time as has happened with so many other words.

[Mechaman]

A self-defeating principle.  For every person crying over somebody saying "f****t" there is someone else who is trying to force state governments to put a Ten Commandments display on their front lawn or there is another person who is trying to get an LGBT film banned in their middle upper class white community.

Though really, I guess it's more accurate to say that conservatives hate PC and only recognize it when it's something they don't like.  And liberals like PC and only recognize it when it's being used to defend something they like.  Both sides don't realize that, like all forms of subtle censorship, it perverts and retards well meaning discourse (though I will not justify just throwing out slurs, any dumb ofay paddy ass who uses the word "n" deserves to be fired from their idiot shock jock job) as it is taken too far.  Yeah I guess some Political Correctness is good for our messed up system, just like some alcohol is okay for alcoholics.

Also, funny that this poll was created on my birthday, haha.

[bore]

I would say that it's gone mad.

[Mr. Illini]

There's a difference between not being an asshole and being strictly politically correct, in my opinion. Getting offended at the words fa**** and ni**** is not being a asshole. Correcting someone for using the terms "white" and "black" instead of "caucasian" and "African-American" are where you cross into political correctness territory.

Like I said, I am politically correct on a lot of things, but I find it that I am just doing it out of common decency rather than holding the line to political correctness.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Not inherently awful, but has gone way, way, WAAAAAY too far.

[politicus]

Not a fan.

[Citizen Hats]

The great bulk of 'political correctness'  is simply a round-about way of telling people not to be jerks.  It is only a thing at-all because people judge other people for being jerks. It's not 'censorship' or gagging or what not, but a negative reaction that speakers get from other people when they say things that are offensive or insensitive. Its primary difficulty for a lot of people is simply that we've socially realized more an more ways in which most of us were being jerks to people without good cause than we had before. That this is an expanding realm is disconcerting to those who like order and fixity to the world. 

Political correctness is nothing more than a form of being socially polite, and most complaints about it are simply dancing around the fact that the speaker is whining about being judged for the content of what they say. 

It's not like this is a one-directional process. Most of us refer to anti-abortion activists as 'pro-life' because it's simply the most courteous way of referring to people who wish to abrogate the bodily integrity rights of women in favor of realizing person-hood for fetuses.  Albertans and Canadian Conservatives regularly judge those from elsewhere who might dare use the historic term 'tar-sands' over the industry-preferred 'Oil-sands', constituting a crude, though unwitting parody of the subject. 

The notion that people should not be judged for the content and form of what they say is madness, the special pleading of those who were earlier inculcating with deprecated terminology aside.