Has political correctness actually gone mad?

On an animal rights forum, this was the reaction:

It was a planned media stunt so they could get on radio taking about bacon giving you aids and how smart pigs are, or some shit. Already, hundreds of animal rights and vegan folk in Tassie have signed a letter rebuking peta, as the outright hostility they've experienced as a result of this hasn't helped them be effective with their existing campaigns.

The locals [activists] are furious. They've spent years building a positive profile down there, getting involved in discussions with government, running more successful adoption programmes than those funded by the tax payer, developing rapport with the media. It's frustrating for them to have some unknown Canadian model pull out an embarrassing brain fart like this from afar. Peta have no presence down there, leave it alone.
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http://www.thecrimson.com/column/wo...implistic-social-justice-warrior/?page=single

The comment-ors who have the best rated comments on this article believe that women are privileged, gingers have it worse than minorities, and there is no privilege due to race, only due to class (and at the same time these people hate Marxism).

So, what side can be picked here? SJWs or MRAs?

On to a specific case: that paragraph about Divest Harvard stinks. I can imagine they aren't a very popular body among administrators. One of them pulled a stunt by sitting in front of the president's office, she now had a choice: talk to this group or arrest them. She made the choice, and they got their result. What was wrong with this? That arrest could not have harmed the cause of divestment from fossil fuels companies, which is undoubtedly an important issue for progressives (and for humanity, but who cares about that.)
 
berbatrick said:
So, what side can be picked here? SJWs or MRAs?
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Are they really the opposing side here? I thought MRA stood for mens rights activists? Surely they're a single issue group, while the SJWs perceive themselves as battling against a whole array of different -ism's?

Anyway, I would always favour people who argue on the side of social justice over the opposite extreme, on the basis that they're basically well intentioned. Their failing is taking reasonable concerns way too far.
 
I didn't want to use that word since online gatherings of alt-right users are usually heavily neo-Nazi.*

I mean, there's legitimate criticism of many ultra-liberals, and I really liked the examples at the start of that article about assumptions based on race, but the rest of the article put me off and after digging deep enough the comments were just ugh.

*Edit: including proper Protocols of the Elders of Zion style anti-semitism.
 
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Pogue Mahone said:
Yeah, that makes sense. The Alt-Right seem to be generally terrible people. So it's easy to work out which side is the less offensive. Even if the lot of them are tiresome.
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I wouldn't side so much with the SJWs, social justice is a Noble cause but their intentions will lead to some pretty bad things such as the segregation of men and women and different races, the censoring of speech to avoid offending people etc. The alt-right is a polar opposite but still acts in much the same way, claiming to be for free speech but dismissing any ideas that aren't their own and generally acting in a loud abhorrent manner whenever witness them on YouTube or on the Internet whereby they call everyone and everything a ****. They are the opposite to SJWs yet they have so much in common in how they behave.

Someone I consider to be for social justice but not an SJW in Bernie Saunders.

This is an SJW

 
horsechoker said:
I wouldn't side so much with the SJWs, social justice is a Noble cause but their intentions will lead to some pretty bad things such as the segregation of men and women and different races, the censoring of speech to avoid offending people etc. The alt-right is a polar opposite but still acts in much the same way, claiming to be for free speech but dismissing any ideas that aren't their own and generally acting in a loud abhorrent manner whenever witness them on YouTube or on the Internet whereby they call everyone and everything a ****. They are the opposite to SJWs yet they have so much in common in how they behave.
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How does that work? Surely they're against segregation? Hence the drama about gender stereotyping with public toilets?

But yeah, it's weird the way both extremes have so much in common. A complete inability to even consider alternative opinions, for starters.
 
Mrs Smoker said:
Guy actually lost a job.

But here's a kicker, she actually sent the video to Lyft thinking it would help her side. Reinstated back to work after that.

Quite the rage inducing video thou.
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It's been quite a week for SJW meltdowns, this was also uploaded to Facebook by the woman filming

 
My God she's horrendous.

Fits with a lot of what I think is behind all this new wave of political correctness. It's all about getting as much attention as possible. Whether by getting retweets on Twitter or likes on the youtube video she planned on posting. I don't even think assholes like her genuinely care about cultural appropriation or whatever the feck was bothering her there. They just want to be noticed. Yet more evidence that social media is cultivating a generation of narcissist, inconsiderate, irrational and attention-seeking giant babies. At both ends of the political spectrum.
 
hobbers said:
The most amazing aspect is how warped these girls perception of reality has become. Obviously they're both rich spoiled daddies girls who crave attention, but they genuinely believed that by posting these videos they'd be lavished with praise and sympathy from the internet at large.

That's what happens when you spend too long inside an echo chamber full of morons, otherwise known as a gender studies class.
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Yeah. Like I said. She's awful. Still think it's a lot less offensive and bothersome than making rape threats because of "ethics in gaming journalism" though.
 
So I heard on a podcast today that the gender pay gap is misleading. When they say a woman warns 70 cents to the mans one dollar it's actually because men work longer hours and do more dangerous jobs. Any truth in this?
 
LuisNaniencia said:
So I heard on a podcast today that the gender pay gap is misleading. When they say a woman warns 70 cents to the mans one dollar it's actually because men work longer hours and do more dangerous jobs. Any truth in this?
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In discussions of the gender-pay gap, there’s one counter-argument that comes up a lot: The gap isn’t real, because after adjusting for the different types of jobs men and women tend to have, the gap shrinks to single digits. And so, the argument goes, men and women aren’t paid the same amount of money because they are choosing to go into different professions, and the labor market rewards their choices differently. In other words: unequal work, hence unequal pay.

There’s a lot of truth to this: Men and women do tend to choose different careers, so much so that researchers have a term for it: “gender occupational segregation.” And because of this occupational sorting, the most commonly mentioned figure of the gender-gap debate—that an American woman only earns 79 cents for every dollar a typical American man makes—is indeed too simple.

But the occupational differences explanation, when presented without caveats, is also problematic. "The story is a lot more complicated than that,” says Elise Gould, an economist and the co-author of a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute about gender and compensation. “We wanted to disentangle the question of 'choice' and what's happening between two workers that are sitting right next to each other in a cubicle … What's going on behind that in terms of cultural norms, expectations, work-family balance—all the different components that might lead women to be in certain kinds of jobs differently than men.”

Researchers often control for certain variables if they suspect that those variables might be exaggerating the size of an effect. In the case of the pay gap, economists often adjust their data to compensate for the fact that, for example, men are overrepresented in high-paying computer programming jobs, and women are overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. These adjustments lead to numbers that stand as good estimates of how big a pay gap would be if men and women were represented in equal numbers in each profession. There are usually other variables that researchers control for, too; geography, experience, and job titles are other variables with known effects, so filtering them out from the numbers is a step toward isolating the effects of gender on pay.

But the striking thing is that even after adjusting for so many factors, there’s still a statistically significant pay gap. (Pay-gap skeptics often note that the gap shrinks after taking these factors into account, but it’s supposed to—those statistical adjustments were intended to create a more definitive, standardized measurement.) The fact that a gap remains at all after such adjustments shows that the problem defies any simple explanation. As Robert Hohman, the CEO of Glassdoor, wrote a few months ago in Fortune:

Factoring differences in education, experience, age, location, job title, industry and even company, our latest research reveals that the “adjusted” gender pay gap in the U.S. amounts to women earning about 94.6 cents per dollar compared to men. It is remarkable that a significant gap persists even after comparing male-female worker pay at the job title and company level.
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hobbers said:
I don't know about that. Rape threats are pretty much the most vile thing that a lazy internet troll can think of. But it's still just that, trolling. It's also something that feminists have started specifically aiming for, since they can play the victim and get more media coverage.
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It must be the highlight of their day. And also, poor men, it was the provocative comment that forced them to threaten rape, and the girls really wanted the threat anyway.
 
Had to look up what MRA meant, good lord it never ceases to amaze how ridiculous people can be :lol:
 
Ubik said:
Had to look up what MRA meant, good lord it never ceases to amaze how ridiculous people can be :lol:
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I was so innocent just 6 months ago. Now I know SJWs, MRAs, *****, the alt-right, and have seen but don't understand based and kek.
 
hobbers said:
You don't have to be alt right to think that SJWs are bigoted and hysterical. Not to mention intellectually bankrupt.

I don't like the concept of social justice either. Rather like this take on it: By prefixing the adjective "social" to the concept of justice the result is a destruction of proper justice and a perversion of true social concern.
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Amen.
 


Saw the above clip and thought of this thread. 20ish years old apparently.
 
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12...ernment-to-determine-what-should-be-censored/

Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored
The Associated Press reports today from Jerusalem that “the Israeli government and Facebook have agreed to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.” These meetings are taking place “as the government pushes ahead with legislative steps meant to force social networks to rein in content that Israel says incites violence.” In other words, Israel is about to legislatively force Facebook to censor content deemed by Israeli officials to be improper, and Facebook appears eager to appease those threats by working directly with the Israeli government to determine what content should be censored.
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Mrs. May, the Protector.

Theresa May hits out at universities 'safe spaces' for stifling free speech

Theresa May has hit out at universities for implementing "safe space" policies amid concerns that self-censorship is curtailing freedom of speech on campuses.
The Prime Minister said it was "quite extraordinary" for universities to ban the discussion of certain topics which could cause offence.
She warned that stifling free speech could have a negative impact on Britain's economic and social success.
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Pogue Mahone said:
They just want to be noticed. Yet more evidence that social media is cultivating a generation of narcissist, inconsiderate, irrational and attention-seeking giant babies. At both ends of the political spectrum.
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This is beautiful. The most perfect description Ive heard.
 
berbatrick said:
Speaking of opposing views at universities:

Suspension of controversial Palestine class at UC Berkeley sparks debate
The university argued that the course, which studied Palestine ‘through the lens of settler colonialism’, was anti-Israel and antisemitic
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/uc-berkeley-israel-palestine-class-suspended-decal
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I mean it probably was. If it's anything like Universities here, their is serious anti-Israel sentiment that crosses into anti-semitism. A whole course about Israel and Palestine was probably infested with hate
 
Swaters16 said:
I mean it probably was. If it's anything like Universities here, their is serious anti-Israel sentiment that crosses into anti-semitism. A whole course about Israel and Palestine was probably infested with hate
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The whole thrust of the PC debate has been how entitles juvenile leftists are stifling debate with "safe spaces". Here is another example of a body with slightly more power than students doing exactly the same, to the kind of debate they don't like. But this will never be called political correctness, nor do the right-wing free-speech advocates seem upset by this (other than the anti-Semitic right I assume).

To expand on this,
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...rsity-prevent-no-platforming-academic-freedom

On Wednesday, the prime minister, Theresa May, condemned the idea of safe spaces in answer to a parliamentary question. Yet the main reason British universities have been wrestling with the issue of free speech is the duty imposed on them by the government’s counter-terrorism legislation Prevent – introduced by the Home Office while she was home secretary, which in its outrageous original version asked academics to be spies on, and censors of, even non-violent “extremism” (never properly defined). So she May be for free speech, or May be not.
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The easy-to-sensationalise and foolish attempts by liberal students to stifle debate get headlines, but institutional power remains as big a threat to genuinely free speech.


Edit: on the specific question of the Israel-Palestinian course:

At UC Berkeley, where student activists launched the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, a group of Jewish professors have called on administrators to reinstate the course. They argued that critics are misrepresenting the class and that the university was stifling academic freedom in response to demands from Israel advocacy groups.

Regarding the notion that “any reference to settler colonialism is anti-Semitic”, the professors wrote: “This claim is patently false, a recent innovation on the part of those seeking to suppress open intellectual inquiry on Zionism, Israel, Palestine, and the occupation. A great number of publications, many emerging from within the State of Israel, have considered settler colonialism to be a proper framework for studying the area.”

Michael Burawoy, a sociology professor who signed the letter, said it was obvious that the university was concerned about losing funding in the wake of the backlash: “This was an arbitrary administrative intervention brought about by pressure.”

Bazian added that he felt the situation was particularly unfair to Hadweh and the 28 students enrolled in the course. “I’m completely saddened.”
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berbatrick said:
The whole thrust of the PC debate has been how entitles juvenile leftists are stifling debate with "safe spaces". Here is another example of a body with slightly more power than students doing exactly the same, to the kind of debate they don't like. But this will never be called political correctness, nor do the right-wing free-speech advocates seem upset by this (other than the anti-Semitic right I assume).

To expand on this,
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...rsity-prevent-no-platforming-academic-freedom



The easy-to-sensationalise and foolish attempts by liberal students to stifle debate get headlines, but institutional power remains as big a threat to genuinely free speech.


Edit: on the specific question of the Israel-Palestinian course:
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This isn't really comparable. The issue here is an alleged lack of balance in an educational curriculum. Not the same thing as refusing to let certain people speak or banning entire subjects or phrases for fear of being triggered.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
This isn't really comparable. The issue here is an alleged lack of balance in an educational curriculum. Not the same thing as refusing to let certain people speak or banning entire subjects or phrases for fear of being triggered.
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But that is what has happened at Berkeley, is it not? All the cliches about being ready for university unless you can hear opposing views, etc: don't they apply here too?
 
Here's the course syllabus for what it's worth. Done in the right way it could be an interesting exercise, though knowing how these things can go there's an obvious anti-Zionist agenda to the program. But the idea that it's somehow antisemitic is obviously ridiculous:

Course Description:

This 1-unit lecture and discussion-based course will examine key historical developments that have taken place in Palestine, from the 1880s to the present, through the lens of settler colonialism. First, by utilizing a comparative approach and engaging with existing scholarship, we will gain a broad understanding of settler colonialism. Second, we will explore the connection between Zionism and settler colonialism, and the ways in which it has manifested, and continues to manifest, in Palestine. Lastly, drawing upon literature on decolonization, we will explore the possibilities of a decolonized Palestine, one in which justice is realized for all its peoples and equality is not only espoused, but practiced.

Course Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of this course, students will have: -

* Been introduced to Palestine’s history from the 1880s to the present -
* Acquired a basic understanding of settler colonialism as a distinct colonial formation, as it has been implemented in various settings, and as it relates to Palestine
* Developed a set of vocabularies specific to the colonial and settler colonial analytics -
* Gained the analytical skills necessary to ground research on Palestine and its history -
* Learned to express oneself using this history and these concepts and vocabularies -
* Researched, formulated, and presented decolonial alternatives to the current situation
 
hobbers said:
Problem in all of these cases is the ideologue professors who are incapable of teaching about something by presenting more than one side of the argument. Palestine-related and gender studies the two most obvious examples, non-biased versions of these course do not exist anywhere.

That Palestine course would probably be really interesting if presented by someone impartial.
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I don't have much of a problem with professors who don't try to hide their position. I have taken a course on this conflict at an Israeli university, and on day one our professor introduced himself to the class as a 'committed Zionist'. But it was never a big problem as he made sure to teach the historiography from all sides and invite discussion on it, even as he made it clear which arguments he tended to favour himself. In this case though it seems the decision has already been made to associate Zionism with 'Settler-Colonialism' in advance of any discussion on the matter, which makes the entire framing of the discussion potentially problematic in the wrong hands.
 
Can't be arsed trawling back through the thread to December when the row broke out, but Jay Rayner was talking about 'food appropriation' and a load of Ohio students protesting that badly made foreign dishes served as 'authentic' is apparently the most offensive thing. Ever. Unless of course, you don't serve them every night, like the black bloke moaning about the lack of fried chicken on a Sunday.

http://nypost.com/2015/12/18/pc-students-at-lena-dunhams-college-offended-by-lack-of-fried-chicken/
 
Jippy said:
Can't be arsed trawling back through the thread to December when the row broke out, but Jay Rayner was talking about 'food appropriation' and a load of Ohio students protesting that badly made foreign dishes served as 'authentic' is apparently the most offensive thing. Ever. Unless of course, you don't serve them every night, like the black bloke moaning about the lack of fried chicken on a Sunday.

http://nypost.com/2015/12/18/pc-students-at-lena-dunhams-college-offended-by-lack-of-fried-chicken/
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Maybe this is how vegans win their war. I'm offended there is meat on campus, get it out of my sight.
 
Made me chuckle the way blacks, Japanese, Vietnamese and hindus all managed to get offended by the crappy canteen. Speaking of 'cultural (mis)appropriation', one of my local colleagues gets irrationally angry about the fact that the pub near the office serves a naan bread with Thai green curry, as does my wife about the fact that kedgeree, the veggie Indian dish, is served with smoked haddock in it here.
 
This one has has a bit of both cultural appropriation and blackface (or body in reality).

Disney pulls children's costume for new Polynesian princess film Moana from its stores and apologizes for the 'brownface' outfit
  • Disney has stopped selling a children's costume of the character Maui in the upcoming animated film Moana
  • The costume used brown fabric to depict the character's darker skin tone
  • Many were outraged, calling the outfit 'brownface'
  • Some also said it was disrespectful to Polynesian cultures where tattoos are sacred
  • Moana was initially hailed for featuring the first-ever Polynesian Disney princess and the first princess without a romantic interest
389C025200000578-3798362-image-m-6_1474378591415.jpg

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...Moana-stores-apologizes-brownface-outfit.html
 
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