4/01/2010

On political correctness

Let's talk about political correctness. Political correctness is the most unprincipled, unintellectual stance I know of. Political correctness hates free speech.

Ultimately it's a tool to transfer power from 'oppressor' to 'oppressed'. Who's oppressed? Whoever you decide should gain power. Who is oppressor? Whoever you decide should lose power. The way power is taken: intimidation though incoherent guilt tactics. Whoever has PC-defined power is assumed to be guilty. All people are treated as members of stereotypical groups, fitting under either the 'privileged' group (whose motives must be suspicious), or 'underprivileged' (whose motives must be championed). Never mind that humans are individuals, and may bristle at being place in these groups, as though they can't achieve a thing through their own efforts. Everything is systemic to a PC person; all phenomena pre-explained through categorical lenses.

The hallmark of a PC mindset is obsession with defining what words mean, as well as which words are acceptable, and which are not. (This is a microcosmic example of a life of grandstanding on which actions are acceptable and which are not.) Their arguments hinge on obsessively defining each term so that there is no way they can lose the argument. PC persons are deathly afraid of how someone else might use words, and so eagerly pounce on and distort word definitions - so that they have the 'agreed upon' meaning.

They tragically think that 'bad' words in and of themselves create actual dangerous thoughts and trigger 'wrong' emotions (even though linguistic and psychological experiments have long shown this to be false -- thoughts are independent of speech; also, emotion centres of our brain evolved before the speech centres did) - and thus they see 'bad' words as weapons and spend their lives worrying about the 'harm' mere words may do. Their solution is to prevent people from doing any harm by controlling what they say (as a false shortcut to control what they do). They think that if only we ban meaningless token words like 'fag, retard, honky, wop', that everything will be well on its way to being ok. But in reality new words will pop up overnight to replace them as tokens of intolerance (example: 'retard' a few decades ago was the politically correct word to use!). They think that genetically-ingrained human emotions and attitudes such as hate and racism can actually be eradicated by a delicate use of words.

-Non PC-thug

No comments: