Has political correctness actually gone mad?
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
I sometimes think that what pushes people to dig their heels in over silly stuff like this is the feeling that society is constantly telling us how the act more and more. It's a kind of self-righteous resilience to this overbearing feeling that we're always one comment away from committing the horrible crime of causing offence.
I mean my day to day life has never been affected by any examples of "PC gone mad", but it's easy to get your back up over some stories because you end up thinking "What would I do in this situation?" and realize how quite easily you could be the bad guy for a misused pronoun.
I had a thought today. People that want equality for all, regardless of any factor whatsoever etc. I am guessing none of these people work in any organisations? They are all freelance. Surely - because what would they make of performance assessments, people getting varying bonuses / promotions based on other human's instincts etc?
Do I really have to tell an adult that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are different aims?
Thanks for the personal cheapshots!
Anyway, but surely one is simply a means to the other?
Anytime, Paz. They'll keep coming.Thanks for the personal cheapshots!
Anyway, but surely one is simply a means to the other?
Just... no? Good lord. Right, stay with me here. If me and you each have 50 quid and we both put it on United to win their opening league game, and I get better odds than you, that is unequal opportunity. If we both have equal odds and you back United to win, I bet on us losing, then Martial scores five goals in injury time to seal a united victory, you have a better outcome but we had equal opportunity.
equality doesn't mean a retired mechanic having a go at bypass surgery, it means all people getting a good, fulfilling education, healthcare, legal parity with all others and enough pay to live a decent life regardless of their job
Tbf equality of outcome is an aim of some left wing policies. Closing the gender pay gap would be one obvious example.
How can you get enough pay regardless of the job? Surely the job you have is key in determining how much pay you get?
Equality of outcome = communism
Equality of opportunity = meritocracy
Equality of opportunity = meritocracy
Enough isn't the same as equal either. Check out minimum wage.
I thought the pay gap thing applied to equal jobs, essentially same work same pay (if that can be determined). So more about fairness. The quota concept is a prime example of equality of outcome.
There were always two sides. Even in a politically incorrect world, there were those who would say they were politically correct. Then we had this push for political correctness....and now we see more political incorrectness. But what we are talking about is ethics and the fact Politics is tied into it means that ultimately we are the outcome. We either gain 'freedom' or it's taken away. That's the danger of giving everything a label. It does not encourage individuality. In general people are programmable and that is more interesting then anything for me. We live in a system of crash boom because of tax that is added on with not enough money in circulation to pay off the debt and so I think the idea of political correctness is foreign to most people because they have accepted a system designed or engineered to screw you regardless. For every pound you put into a bank, how much can they lend? It's a system that's abhorrent and is by definition politically incorrect but people don't really notice or care? Who knows..
It’s actually illegal to pay men and women differently to do the same work. The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference in median salary between the sexes (or is it genders now? feck knows) for all jobs in a company or country.
Illegal sure but it‘s not like it can be easily proved. Got the term wrong then, apologies! Skimmed through a Guardian article about the gender pay gap and somebody complained about the showing lack of equality of opportunity... thinking about it the deciding factor seems to be the mechanisms that drive promotion/hiring and whether or not they are biased against women in an unfair way. Hard to measure though
Which I can't see being much else than some kind of rat race in practice. Equality of opportunity is also a fiction, as one's social skills, education and career chances are widely influenced by the social environment one is born into. There's a fundamental difference between abstract equality of opportunity (according to law) and actual social reality.
True. Equality of opportunity is more of an ideal, an aspiration, rather than an actual state of being - certainly not a state we have achieved at this point. Though we've come a long way in that direction.
You can also make a case that it has its own downsides. That part of the reason some people feel so disaffected right now is because they are told we live in a meritocracy, and if their lives are shit its because they lack talent to get on in life.
Either way the point I was making was equalities of opportunity and outcome are very different, fundamentally different. And that true equality of opportunity would be a pure, unadulterated meritocracy.
I'm coming more and more around to the idea of UBI. You can't get more equal than paying every citizen a grand a month. It also helps address the opportunity imbalance by giving a safety net for people who would otherwise be living hand to mouth to save some money to set up a business, get some more training/qualifications or just have some breathing space to work out what they want to do with their lives.
It'll gradually be inevitable with automation. A lot of big companies increasingly won't need as many workers as they did before...and so people will either need to share jobs part-time or deal with systemic unemployment. The problem with everyone being unemployed, of course, is that the companies improving their efficiency through automation won't be able to sell their goods to people if they can't afford them. Hence why it makes sense.
Most countries could probably afford it as well if they got their priorities in-check.
I’m currently listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast where he interviews a bloke called Andrew Yang about UBI and he makes a really compelling case for it. In the US context anyway.
Yeah exactly, opportunity. We all have the SAME opportunity however it is up to us to actually achieve it. And as we've seen, it's up to society to make sure people have those oppurtunities and also the education and skills to actually achieve their fullest potential. It's not a fiction, what you've described is a fact.
UBS(Universal Basic Services)seems far better than UBI
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ome-citizens-social-housing-ucl-a7993476.html
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/igp/...hes-uks-first-report-universal-basic-services
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ome-citizens-social-housing-ucl-a7993476.html
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/igp/...hes-uks-first-report-universal-basic-services
Doesn't solve the problem that unemployed/poor people won't buy the shit that companies with automated processes produce for them. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea but I don't think it will be enough.
The report makes it sounds cheap enough that you can do both
that's only a problem for the shareholders so feck them
All right then, I think I get how you meant it. Only thing I'd add is that I understand both "equal opportunity" and "meritocracy" as merely fictive ideals that can't be actually reached in reality. To me, they are ideological representations of social conditions that work in a very different way.
Sorry, but I don't understand that part: The first half seems to disagree, the second half to agree with what I wrote.
Last edited:
Yeah ideal we should have both and so we finally get around to doing a bit of communism but I think to get a usable UBI(And not something that keeps us alive for the sole purpose of buying amazon products)then we would need UBS, which isn't that difficult as lot this is in todays Labour Party.
No but you will have to explain it to Paz.
In fact don't waste your time as he always "argues" like this.
It is a brilliant idea as long as we can transition to it without too much drama. It would also save multi-millions of dolars in the administration of social benefits - simplification of benefit types and no need to means test stuff. Also no need to investigate and prosecute people who claim $50 too much due to misreporting casual work while signing on and the like.
I hope UBI does come into place one day. I would love to stop working.
It really doesn’t. In fact it seems like an almost unworkable idea. Just an even more bloated version of the current welfare state. Communism by another name.
Last edited:
I'd be tempted to move to whichever country has this. I don't need it but I have young family members who might.
This concept of equality of opportunity v equality of outcome is quite interesting. A few years back there was a documentary on tv which showed, that despite being illegal, ageism, still exists in the recruitment industry. They set-up 2 people. One a young lady fresh out of university who graduated with the relevant degree for a certain position in marketing. & the other was a man in his mid 50's who also had the same qualification, but his cv showed a long history of success & achievements. The recruitment agency, who sought out professional people, not only invited the young woman for an interview, but she also got the job. The older guy didn't even get the chance of an interview. Is that unfair ?, or do some think it's just 'equality of opportunity' ?
This is something that can go both ways though - quite often fully-qualified university graduates will struggle to find work because companies will want someone with experience. The caveat is, of course, it's incredibly difficult to get experience when companies are only wanting to hire someone who already has it. And getting unpaid experience isn't always an option for people from poorer backgrounds who can't afford to give up their time for free labour.
You could almost think of it like a football team - typically the older, more experienced and already talented player is the one who should be favoured, but sometimes a team will invest in the future, aware new players need to start somewhere. And a myriad of other factors could've affected this. Perhaps the guy had a tendency to jump from firm to firm. Perhaps the woman's interview was just genuinely very good.
Granted - I'll admit ageism is definitely still prevalent, and I've seen it happen on plenty of occasions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to try and eliminate it to the greatest extent we can though.
Free healthcare for all, public housing, free education, free buses, nationalised railways and utilities is all part of the current UK Labour Party platform. It's hardly commusim but a more up to date social democracy.
Also I'm no sure where your getting this bloated welfare state from as at least in the UK(Although I'm pretty sure it's worse in Ireland)the welfare state is today at it's weakest it's ever been.
We will all need it eventually as more and more jobs are automated .
I found, that as someone who was in a profession, a lot of the recruitment agencies who dealt with professional people were/are run by young people. Now I remember quite vividly when I was in my late 20's/early 30's thinking that anyone in their 50's was knocking on death's door & should be put out to grass. It does make me wonder therefore whether there is a kind of subconscious discrimination that plays a part in the thought process in the minds of these younger folk. So whilst ageism is illegal in much the same way it's illegal to discriminate based on things like gender, colour etc, it's very difficult to actual prove it exists. Of course, the big curve ball for those who do lean heavily towards their young counterparts when making a decision on who's most suitable for a certain job, is that one day there's a good chance they could be in a position when they're in their 50's & competing with people who are right out of university. Be interesting to see how that turns out for them.
My response to your first point would be to say that the older guy was probably also once in a position whereby he didn't have the experience when he applied for a lucrative job. Maybe he lost out to someone who had the experience he lacked, which meant he might have had to take a lesser job & build up his experience & reputation that way. It's something I had to do. Besides, the one big advantage the young girl had over the older bloke was time. She had plenty of it, he didn't. Me personally, I don't believe equality of opportunity exists for certain sections (the older generation) of society.
Saw this on twitter
To which the top reply seems to be
To which the top reply seems to be
31k likes on the original, 18 (not 18k) likes on the stupid reply...
Edit - a positive reply has 100 likes, many others have 50. A contradictory one to this has 380.
My point is that there are people who seem to be offended by this. Not the only comment along these lines as well