But when the ratio of people offended to people not is 0.0007, I wonder if PC has indeed "gone mad".
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Has political correctness actually gone mad?
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
But when the ratio of people offended to people not is 0.0007, I wonder if PC has indeed "gone mad".
To be honest you could rename a lot of this thread to "Some idiot says something stupid on twitter"
Bear statue to be banned from Welsh town after motorist thought it was real and crashed
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/bear-statue-banned-welsh-town-14822155
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/bear-statue-banned-welsh-town-14822155
Good description!
Jordan Peterson argued this in that infamous interview with Cathy Newman
Bear statue to be banned from Welsh town after motorist thought it was real and crashed
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/bear-statue-banned-welsh-town-14822155
Not sure they should be allowed to drive.
Tbf, that was more 'health & safety gone mad'.
In the UK, we had most of that in the 60s and 70s, maybe not free buses. Life was not very rosy for most. Add in the union domination and you could hardly get a job unless you became a member, so it became like a protected club. You also find there is less income in the Government, so the people providing the national services are poorly paid, houses are maintained poorly. You only have to look at national health. Lovely people, paid shit in comparison to other jobs, no government has enough balls to pay into the health system the money that is needed for both good service and adequate pay. So you end up with fairly poor service (which is not a reflection on the people providing it). Tend to find that politicians are not particularly good at running citizen services so you end up with a lower quality of life.
Not being funny but this is how many decades later? I'd hope we'd have a better idea about how and what to implement to make this work in present times.
Think it still largely holds true today. The cost of providing those things (however warranted) is not insignificant. All parties have bottled it when it comes to raising taxes to cover the costs, largely because they think they will lose the next election, so keeping power is more important than serving the population. It was true then and has been true ever since. I don't follow NI contributions, but when was there a real hike in it. Also have to take into account that the advances through medical research has now increased the number and quality of services that can be provided. Increasing the costs, because they never seem to able to do anything cheaper. It will take a very bold party to stand in front of the electorate and say, I will prioritise, housing, education, health and safety over everything else and I will be raising taxes to x% to ensure they are kept to the highest standard. They will then probably have to say and that means x,y and z will get less help from us for near time future. It will cause all sorts of conflicts as people look at their individual needs, rather than the needs of the population.
I like that, it made me chuckle.
Somewhat on topic...Only learned today that Paul Joseph Watson (infowars), Carl Benjamin (Sargon) and that feckwit who taught his dog how to do a nazi salute all have joined UKIP.
Really drilling home on that Youtube Anti-SJWs != Racist/Xenophobic thing.
That last fecking guy as well makes me laugh considering all the defenders he got saying it was just a joke.
Full Story
Really drilling home on that Youtube Anti-SJWs != Racist/Xenophobic thing.
That last fecking guy as well makes me laugh considering all the defenders he got saying it was just a joke.
Full Story
Animal rights campaigners 'misinformed' about live piglet and lamb racing at pub
ANIMAL rights campaigners who launched a campaign against what they thought was pig and lamb racing at a Dorset event have discovered it's all porkies.
The online campaign attracted almost 15,000 signatures – but protesters were "misinformed" and the actual racing will involve people dressing up as animals.
http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/ne...e_piglet_and_lamb_racing_at_pub/?ref=mr&lp=17
ANIMAL rights campaigners who launched a campaign against what they thought was pig and lamb racing at a Dorset event have discovered it's all porkies.
The online campaign attracted almost 15,000 signatures – but protesters were "misinformed" and the actual racing will involve people dressing up as animals.
http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/ne...e_piglet_and_lamb_racing_at_pub/?ref=mr&lp=17
You’d expect students to be far more open-minded and willing to listen to diverse ideas than the general public. That’s the sort of thing that university should be about. My main take home from that survey is how depressingly close-minded contemporary students seem to be. Over half of them don’t think someone who would argue that religions should be banned shouldn’t even be allowed express that opinion?! Fecking hell...
What's the practical side of this though? You think they deserve a platform to speak at Universities or is this supposed to be some gestapo rounding people up for having the wrong thoughts? Pretty sure 99.9% of people don't approve of the latter.
Practically speaking, I don’t think anyone should be denied a platform to speak just because they express an unpopular or controversial opinion (e.g. all religions should be banned). Whether they deserve that platform is another thing entirely.
Practical issues aside, it’s the mindset that survey reveals which would be my major concern. As I said, I always thought/assumed that students were open-minded and curious people. Shutting down opinions they disagree with - without even hearing them out - seems to be the antithesis of what student life is all about. It’s certainly very different to my own experience of debates on campus, when we regularly heard outrageous opinions from total gobshites and took great pleasure in pulling them apart. If anything, denying them a platform just gives those ideas more power.
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Perhaps that's true (frankly, I think your take requires a twee assumption that the majority of students actually care about anything else than having fun and checking out of university with a 2:1 in whatever subject they picked), but the argument has been that Universities are worse than the general public so it seems a some what odd take to take a poll that shows that that's not the case, and then continue to attack Universities for it anyway.
I honestly haven’t heard that argument. The argument I have heard a lot is that Universities are way less tolerant of challenging/controversial opinions now than they were in the past. “Generation snowflake” and all that stuff.
So you have heard the argument then?
What do you think 'worse' means in that context?
Students are just people (not even young people in many cases). I think that's a stereotype what you're suggesting.
In general though (I'm not sure I can articulate it well right now), there's a balance to be struck between letting any old cnut air their views and banning people willy nilly. I'm all for free speech but I'd probably support banning Nazi's from airing their disgusting views. Why? Because we know their ideology is bullshit - there's no actual debate to be had. If it's a polite discussion (which it won't be), it'll be a slaughter - so there's nothing interesting or insightful to be gained. Otherwise (and much more likely) it will be people screaming at each other in a lecture hall.
That university students are more likely than the general public to refuse to listen to ideas they disagree with?
Which is not an argument I’d ever pay any heed to. It makes no sense at all that students would be more close-minded than older, less educated people.
It's not really about being 'close-minded' though, or 'less tolerant of challenging/controversial opinions than in the past' (tbh I'm struggling to see the distinction you're making there you might have to treat me like I'm thick) that's a conflation that morons like Sam Gyimah are making, but it mischaracterises the debate on campuses. It's more about the effectiveness of debating extremist rhetoric.
You might think that giving them a platform and ridiculing them is the best way to show up those views for what they are, but there's a fairly convincing argument that that is simply what they're after and the sort of vulnerable down and outers they're targeting will take the extremist message out of it and nothing else. People accept the orthodoxy of that view when it comes to extremist Islamic preaching (indeed, Universities are forced to deny those people platforms through prevent), but get squeamish when it gets applied to extremist right wing views. That's really all it comes down to, most people – as that poll shows – seem to accept that there's some topics where nothing gets gained from 'debate', it simply becomes a question of where you draw the line.
I think that’s exactly it. Where do you draw the line? How do you define “extremist right wing views”? Do Germaine Greer’s opinions on transgenderism constitute extremist right wing views? Or Charles Murray’s research on IQ? Far better to have the flaws in their logic exposed in an open forum than giving them the moral high-ground by denying them the right to be heard (or attempting to deny them, anyway)
This is why I was kind of surprised to see you cheering someone being banned for saying (quite politely, as far as I could see) Lukaku has been rubbish at this world cup. And talking nonsense about De Gea, of course. (I didnt actually look at that because, let's be honest, the opinions being expressed were rubbish, and not really worth spending any time on.)
I always thought PC gone mad and generation snowflake and college campus scae stories were about exactly that. If they aren't, how are there multiple national columnists and anchors in the US making a big issue about an under-represented minority within a small minority (college students)? "Chilling effect on freedom of expression"
Anyway, small caveat given the vague wording in the poll: "%age who think it is offensive AND want it banned" probably means they asked the offensive question firs and then polled them alone. TOtal numbers among the student body would probably be <50%.
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That eejit would have fallen firmly in the "doesn't deserve a platform" category! I'm well used to people talking shit about players who I rate but yer man got under my skin for his style of debate as much as his content.
Is that right, though? I definitely have an issue with the "very loud idiots" but I do get the impression that their campaigning generally hasn't been as successful as you'd think from all the fuss their actions generate in the press. It does seem as though the administrators/faculty generally use a lot of common sense in the way they deal with them. This might not be true in the US, mind you...
Aha. Well spotted. That makes the data seem a lot less concerning.
No platforming pops up again?
But that's the point though isn't it? As long as you accept there are legitimate grounds to deny platforms – as the government have thanks to Prevent – then where that line gets drawn is just a legitimate debate to have where people are allowed to have different views.
Not everyone will agree, of course, and some people will think that Greer falls one side of the line whilst others think she falls the other (although I'm far from convinced that story was at all fairly reported in the press, is an openly accessible change.org petition of 300 people really strong proof that 30,000 uni students agreed she shouldn't speak?).
Unless you are going to argue their shouldn't be a line at all then it seems to me just as legitimate for student unions to decide to draw that line slightly further to the left than you would have been comfortable with back in your day, just as it was perfectly legitimate for your cohort to draw it to the right, and just as it is legitimate for different universities to have different lines.
At any rate, as your own link shows, the idea that there is systematic actual no-platforming of simply 'controversial' speakers is a bit of an invention, certainly in the UK, and I'm not sure I've seen any evidence to suggest that anything other than a vanishingly small minority think that Greer – despite what they think of her views – would fall foul of a no-platform for extremism line.
How many layers of idpol are you on, amateur? Behold:
Professions dominated by women tend to pay less than those dominated by men, all else being equal (length and amount of education, requiring similar skill-sets, all that jazz). If I'm not mistaken, when more women enter a male-dominated field, the pay tends to drop. Now, that might just be supply-and-demand. The pool of candidates grow faster than the need for personnel.
Wasn't there a study recently that showed that conservative students push as hard, if not harder, than progressive students to prevent speakers they don't like from speaking at Unis?
In my experience it is the opposite.
Could be wrong but i'm pretty sure it was written or co-written by Richard Pryor wasn't it?