Was about to post this, good stuff from Chait as per. A worrying trend (happening in the UK as well).
Has political correctness actually gone mad?
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
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Rather than trying to be politically correct, why not just try to be simply correct?
The article above has a quote "Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender." What exactly is a political pluralism and how is different from legal pluralism? And how exactly did the autor equate what's happening in college to 'political correctness'. It simply is a case of a particular community claiming to be racially prejudiced. Nothing at all to do with politics, per se. Try to be correct, not politically correct. And politics is not the right platform to decide what is right and what is not.
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That's bang on the money. Exactly what this thread was intended to question.
That's a standard response to this sort of thing and impossible to answer. You don't expect me to give an actual number, do you?
Suffice is to say it's blown up enough to be widely reported on in most (if not all?) major media outlets. Which obviously reflects some sort of critical mass in terms of outraged masses. It's sufficiently poorly judged that you'd expect it to blow up a little. Something along the lines of "oops, what were they thinking?" wouldn't bother me at all. It's the fact so many people (and it's clearly a lot of people) that take it so damn seriously which makes me die inside a little.
Re context. There's a bit more in this image (and probably even more in the actual catalogue)
I don't see how that context makes it any less bad.
On the issue of numbers. A quick search on Twitter suggests that there are less than 10 people using the #boycottbloomingdales hashtag which gives a vague idea of how few people actually are blowing this out of proportion (I'm not saying that people have to be using that hashtag to be outraged but I bet that there is no more than a few dozen showing actual outrage and not just commenting on something as people to about far more inane things on Twitter. Plus people love to criticise a large corporation.
As for the news... it's classic churnalism isn't it? When you see it next to headlines like "David Mitchell and his wife Victoria Coren enjoy a stroll with their baby daughter ahead of long-awaited Peep Show comeback" it kind of puts things into perspective.
The issue I have with this thread is that I don't think people getting unnecessarily outraged is something that is even close to being unique to the cause of political correctness (that is a thing right?) Just in the past week we've had people getting outraged over a politician not bowing his head enough at a memorial and some sort of apparent outrage about Starbucks cups not being Christmassy enough (both blown up more by the media than the general public). I wouldn't put either of those in the category of political correctness.
There are just silly people out there, and no particular set of beliefs or motivations can lay claim to not being completely free of idiots or knob heads - they will just project their knobheadiocy onto whatever they believe and do.
In this particular case though, I definitely think the biggest idiot in the situation was whoever gave the final approval to the advert.
Am I missing something here?
I think it means you are a racist.
Nah, I just forgot to delete that line.
Article I posted previously, I think: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html
Great read.
"After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned. Some of its expressions have a familiar tint, like the protesting of even mildly controversial speakers on college campuses. You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, who has criticized Islam (along with nearly all the other major world religions). Or when protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Also last year, Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.
At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses. Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional."
Good grief.
Similar stuff from Helen Lewis from the New Statesman regarding feminism and specifically trans issues - http://www.newstatesman.com/politic...-row-over-banning-germaine-greer-really-about
Political pluralism and legal pluralism are entirely unrelated. Political pluralism is the acceptance of diversity of opinions or beliefs in a society, while legal pluralism is having different legal systems in a single state/country. The protestors at Yale are a perfect example of his problem with the disciples of political correctness. The individuals are decrying a professor who dared to express her belief that halloween costumes are not inherently racist. The protestors have attempted to silence the professor and her husband because they take offense from the email and the suggestion that other could wear cultural costumes without being racists/offensive. Then, they attempt to shout down the husband who shares many of their beliefs but also believes in the sanctity of freedom of speech and the protection of that right within academia. He is on their side in confronting issues of racism and injustice, but they refuse to allow for freedom of speech and seek to force their stringent beliefs on everyone else through various means. With the advent of social media, there have been numerous witch hunts over things that are trivial (like the astrophysicist wearing a shirt with pinup art on it to a press conference) or unintentional.
wow.
Men Without Hats were banned from playing in the interval too.
The copycat protests now going viral.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/u...t-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/u...t-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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I'm so glad I'm not in college now.
After reading up on these college protests......
You make very good points here Sham, particularly in pointing out that the Christmas cup fools are essentially the right's equivalent to the Yale/UMissouri kids. I also fully agree that I'm not comfortable tainting all this behaviour with the phrase "too much PC", which implies that the PC we originally had was somehow suspect in some way as well. So I should make clear that I'm speaking only and specifically of the examples in American higher education - I don't remember seeing much of this when I was in England, in fact I specifically remember the master of my college suggesting to my face, and not as a joke, that being "Chinese" (I'm Singaporean) I needed to be watched more carefully by my professors as I posed a cheating risk. Which I didn't particularly appreciate.
The kids in Yale/UMissouri (and now apparently elsewhere as well) cannot reasonably be described as a few silly people. They're organized, they're effective, and they're getting "results", not just in the obvious form of scalps, but more importantly, of changing the entire culture of discourse in higher education. The commentary from insiders, professors and students alike, makes it clear that they pose a serious threat to effective teaching. Their logic appears to be gaining ground, to the point where an actual professor thinks nothing of laying hands on her own students in her belief that her feelings outweigh his rights. That's a problem, and it needs to be called out. More speech is going to be the only cure to these people.
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Oh man.
I'd be fuming. It's nerve wrecking reading this stuff, let alone watching it unfold around you in classes and the like...
I don't know whether the examples given in this thread make me want to laugh or put my face through my desk. I think I need a safe space. Mods?
EDIT: And I don't mean ban me
EDIT: And I don't mean ban me
...
Bingo. That's what I was getting at. In the absence of war, invent one. Fwiw, I suspect this is also true for some of the crusading about race, as well as gender.
And they will celebrate their masters degrees.
As awesome as riffing on political correctness is, there are some serious concerns being brushed under the carpet here. I think.
Education and the surrounding college experience at many American colleges and universities is such that if you're not white, and male to a lesser extent, chances that you'll feel left out and marginalized are much higher. And that's not totally by design. Institutions will bend to the will of the majority. HBCUs are welcoming and nurturing to African Americans for this very reason. But I digress.
An average minority (mostly black/hispanic) student feels marginalized and unwelcome in a space that is supposed to be the making of him or her. And this is without the passive to aggressive actions of racism and discrimination that we've heard on the news recently. There was a video a few months ago of frat students on a bus singing, "hang them from a tree". Even if I think they were just drunk retards going a bit too far, imagine how that comes across to a student trying to get on and live in such a space. It plays on your psyche. Professors are mostly white men. Humanities course material is mostly eurocentric, except you deliberately go down a certain academic path. Each seems insignificant, but it's like straws on the camel's back.
This does not negate the right of free assembly or free speech, or the valid concerns about censorship. Colleges and universities should be places where everyone can speak their mind without fear of retaliation, expulsion or dismissal. And I think students who have legitimate grievances are eroding the high ground they stand on by insisting such principles do not matter. They actually do. A Wesleyan College newspaper was shut down because of an editorial that had a measured critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah, that'll convince more people of the legitimacy of your movement. Plus in the real world, you can't shut down voices that say things you don't agree with, otherwise Rush Limbaugh would be out of a job by now.
The concerns these students are complex and years in the making, and I don't see things changing overnight. The tactics used aren't the most pleasant or efficient, but they have drawn attention to this, so it will be interesting to see future developments at Yale, Mizzou, and other colleges in the country. I thoroughly enjoyed my college experience at a majority white college, never saw any instances of racism (a noose was left at the Black Students Center a few years after I graduated) or felt unwelcome. Then again, between pursuing an engineering degree and wasting countless hours on the Caf, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
Education and the surrounding college experience at many American colleges and universities is such that if you're not white, and male to a lesser extent, chances that you'll feel left out and marginalized are much higher. And that's not totally by design. Institutions will bend to the will of the majority. HBCUs are welcoming and nurturing to African Americans for this very reason. But I digress.
An average minority (mostly black/hispanic) student feels marginalized and unwelcome in a space that is supposed to be the making of him or her. And this is without the passive to aggressive actions of racism and discrimination that we've heard on the news recently. There was a video a few months ago of frat students on a bus singing, "hang them from a tree". Even if I think they were just drunk retards going a bit too far, imagine how that comes across to a student trying to get on and live in such a space. It plays on your psyche. Professors are mostly white men. Humanities course material is mostly eurocentric, except you deliberately go down a certain academic path. Each seems insignificant, but it's like straws on the camel's back.
This does not negate the right of free assembly or free speech, or the valid concerns about censorship. Colleges and universities should be places where everyone can speak their mind without fear of retaliation, expulsion or dismissal. And I think students who have legitimate grievances are eroding the high ground they stand on by insisting such principles do not matter. They actually do. A Wesleyan College newspaper was shut down because of an editorial that had a measured critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah, that'll convince more people of the legitimacy of your movement. Plus in the real world, you can't shut down voices that say things you don't agree with, otherwise Rush Limbaugh would be out of a job by now.
The concerns these students are complex and years in the making, and I don't see things changing overnight. The tactics used aren't the most pleasant or efficient, but they have drawn attention to this, so it will be interesting to see future developments at Yale, Mizzou, and other colleges in the country. I thoroughly enjoyed my college experience at a majority white college, never saw any instances of racism (a noose was left at the Black Students Center a few years after I graduated) or felt unwelcome. Then again, between pursuing an engineering degree and wasting countless hours on the Caf, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
Well said.
That's what frustrates me most about these people, that they're doing tremendous harm to a (mostly) good cause. And you're right, we can't lose sight of the fact that it is a good cause.
To be fair, adex, engineering is quite possibly the most sexist, male dominated discipline in the university system.
I probably agree with the gist of what you're saying but just wanted to riff on engineers.
I probably agree with the gist of what you're saying but just wanted to riff on engineers.
True. We're fair game for riffing, especially in school.
There were only 3 girls in my engineering class for 4 years, and we had too much homework to chase the hot Humanities chicks on the weekend
True. We're fair game for riffing, especially in school.
There were only 3 girls in my engineering class for 4 years, and we had too much homework to chase the hot Humanities chicks on the weekend
Are you inferring that the Engineering "chicks" weren't attractive enough to chase?
Also, it's 2015. How can you even contemplate using a word as derogatory as "chicks"?
I'm going to protest outside Nial's house until you're banned.
This being offended lark is almost too easy.
Seeing as we're all taking the piss out of engineers, one thing I noticed as a student is that you'll never get a denser concentration of heavy metal fans per square metre than in an engineering lecture.
This may not hold true in America.
This may not hold true in America.
Some moron left a noose hanging on a tree at Duke last February/March and obviously the campus went nuts. It's a pretty fair assumption that the person doing it was racist, but it turned out to be an international student from India who was making some off-color joke about hanging out and didn't get the significance of the noose in the US. Recently there have been some racist/homophobic vandalism incidents that have drawn attention.
More broadly regarding your point, I think some of the feeling of marginalization by minorities is often related to groups self-segregating. At a school with fairly sizable minority populations, it was always noticeable that many social groups were monochromatic. My group of friends was always pretty diverse so issues of race were discussed openly. De facto segregation happens throughout America in neighborhoods, schools, etc., but colleges should be one place where it's more integrated. While it is in terms of living arrangements, socially large parts of it are not. I would guess that childhood environment has a sizable effect on what a person's social group is like. Most of my friends who are minorities grew up in areas that were either diverse or pretty predominantly white.
The most isolated group is probably the fobby Chinese students because they seem to exclusively speak Chinese outside of situations where they must speak English.
Are you inferring that the Engineering "chicks" weren't attractive enough to chase?
Also, it's 2015. How can you even contemplate using a word as derogatory as "chicks"?
I'm going to protest outside Nial's house until you're banned.
This being offended lark is almost too easy.
This is actually spot on. I remember being in an empty lecture room with the lecturer and a few others because Black Sabbath was performing in town that same day.
This is actually spot on. I remember being in an empty lecture room with the lecturer and a few others because Black Sabbath was performing in town that same day.
It does depend on which school you're talking about and which type of engineering. At Duke you'd end up with about 75% Asian/Indians in a BME lecture. For the others, it would still be accurate.
Fairly accurate for Canada, too.
I would put these as the negatives that are directly attributable to political correctness. The definition you mention for political pluralism is just the definition of pluralism, nothing to do with any political side of it. But then I agree that the perceived insults and faux moral outrages are becoming more and more common.
That is true, and again, I think that is just the natural order of things. Young people will necessary gravitate towards comfort zones comprised of fellow students, because as much as I had friends across different races and origins, it felt so good when I could revert to, um, slang, when I attended a BSA meeting. The onus is on college presidents and administrators to help mix things up, and help facilitate environmnts where every one feels comfortable, AND exchange ideas and perspectives, so that everyone leaves with a greater understanding of what cultures on the other side face. Well, according to the Mizzou students who got the president out, that didn't happen over there.
I never could figure out the Asian American students. Most of them at least. Very studious. Aced the classes. But couldn't find their way to the bar if you handed them a GPS. And they stuck to themselves. You know it's yielding results when the average Asian American high school student has to score several hundred points higher than a white high school student in the SAT to stand a chance of admission to college.
They are possibly the most unfairly affected by affirmative action and diversity quotas. Their ancestors came to the US in usually tough conditions, but they worked obsessively to achieve a better future for themselves and their kids. Now they are punished for their success, pretty much treated the same as white in these race privilege discussions. Which just shows you legitimate and credible all the privilege talk is.
Agreed.
Man, this thread brings back memories. I just dug through my old documents for my SATs. 2360 SAT I, 800 World History, 780 US History. No offers. feck.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. It really annoyed me at the time, but I've come to realize it's true - there is value in cultural diversity in the university experience. It sucks that certain groups get penalized for it, but if the college as a whole is better off for the quota system, there's not much to be said about it. It's just something they've got a right to do.
I'm against the quota systems, per se. It only serves to enhance the differences.
I was wait-listed at my state's school of science and math because I was a white dude. The two girls (Korean and black) who got in had lower grades, lower test scores, and fewer extracurricular activities. I didn't think anything of it until the black girl said it was probably because I was male and white (even though I was a first generation college student). They called eventually asking if I still wanted to come, but I'm glad I didn't go. None of my friends who did got into "elite" schools despite being ridiculously smart. Although I would have gotten a much better education there and probably done better early on in college. The school's diversity weighting system was apparently changed the next year because they admitted like 5 white dudes from my school. All of the kids who went there before me were basically doctors' kids.I'm not against affirmative action as long as it doesn't put those admitted under it in an unfair situation (i.e. kids from terrible schools who won't be able to cope with the work). Certain schools admit unqualified applicants for athletic reasons despite the fact that they are not prepared for college.
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