Political Correctness

What I meant to say is that unwillingness to consider different opinions is a normal fact of human psychology, because a sense of normalcy is necessary for sanity. The real issue is that no one wants to deal with this maturely, instead opting for the postmodern method of embracing it.

Fuck. Spell checker has ruined me.

But who creates those norms? imo the reigning form of political correctness is a form of medicalised political control. The 'oppressed' subject is reduced to a neglected psychiatric patient with a vague, incurable PTSD like affliction that can only be managed by experts. If the subject disagrees with the treatment, things can get ugly.

Norms don't come from nowhere, nor they represent the authentic 'will of the oppressed', norms are historical, created with an end in mind and with a particular type of subject in mind. Much of the framework of 'identity politics' comes from post 68 maoist third worldism, ESALEN group therapy and the works of for profit 'diversity consultants', like Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.

The norms are created now in a crude democratic way via the internet. Like anything it can be taken too far see Tumblr. But for the most part it's been, I don't conform to society's very narrow definition of what's good, I mind my own business and don't hurt anyone so I demand to not be marginalized.

Also who decides what constitutes an expert, capitalism is at the root of all this. These PTSD experts only treat the symptoms like good porkies. Fuck those experts, there only there to patch you up just enough to be exploited again.

that's not really what zizek said, you're just regurgitating the stupid clickbait title of a youtube video of him. it's not """totalitarianism,""" its the product of a modern Left that has no idea what to do with itself. because class has basically removed itself from mainstream left discourse, all we can see is a problem inseparable from an economic solution, such as race inequality, trying to correct itself without an economic answer. as a result, we get a bunch of focus on racism's external products, such as racist discourse, without any feasible way of dealing with them outside of 'talking nice.' political correctness is the castrated left in its purest form.

in reality, at least personally, i think 'politically correct' is really just a weird way of talking about the way new forms of everyday manners are being created. political correctness is not a problem, the issues it takes attention away from are.

and so taking everybody's sensibilities in to account at all times becomes an impossible ideal.
Language policing and political correctness is also often used as a rhetoric tool. Asserting your own ethos and tarnishing your opponent, rendering his arguments void. In extreme cases such as "progressive" stacking it aims to silence your opposition completely.
I'm not saying that assholes shouldn't be called out, but this OCD like fixation on "correctness" is, dare I say it, toxic.

Excuse me, but I did watch the video so I know what he means. But gotta get that sweet clickbait on the post as well amirite

If somebody wants to lynch you for being politically incorrect that's their problem. If somebody has the power to lynch you because you're politically incorrect that's your problem.

I remember back during the Bush years when I was in middle school I thought Bill Burr was cool and funny because he didn't care about political correctness. Now I'm an adult and hating it now a Trumpvoter/reactionary thing which just ends up validating

Also I remember David Lynch having a really good bit in an interview talking about how terrible political correctness is but whenever I try and look it up I just get that sniffing attention-whore faggot zizek talking about Lynch and pc.

*validating the pc police.

U can shoot me down but is this David Lynch ? youtube.com/watch?v=77M2e3APoXk&list=FLjs49UVsRWaX8UFBisjx7bQ

And don't disrespect the sniffer

no

no

So on and so on

I don't like saying epithets because I feel like all it does is weaken my arguement. Also, it seems right wingers are always the first to resort to ad hominem and other low blows in substitution of an actual argument. So by avoiding epithets I've become what I hate and am now a Nazi, right?

'political correctness' had become a secular theology among the liberal classes. a pessimistic theology with no concept of redemption. it had to go under eventually.

viewpointmag.com/2017/05/17/the-birthmark-of-damnation-ta-nehisi-coates-and-the-black-body/

2008-2016 liberal cultural criticism combined political correctness with a fawning appreciation of 'pop culture' and a general depreciation of everything else. This was the era of 'poptimism'. 'thinkpieces', 'prestige TV', and the 'woke' popstar. a new breed of consumeristic 'identity politics' was brought into being. In a way, the aesthetic of our recent past is a late capitalist spin on soviet socialist realism. The spectacle of progress was for the most part hollow and illusory, a cover for accelerated social disintegration. It's a generational thing. You learn to hate that which is imposed on you.

Political correctness has never resulted in Tyranny. Partly because people have 4 million and 1 definitions of the term.

Anti-fat shaming has not led to a fat dictatorship.
Feminism hasn't resulted in the first matriarchy empire.
Anti-racism hasn't led to an ethnic cleansing of whites.
Allowing Trans in bathrooms hasn't led to a gender confused monarchy.

All of the supposed bad outcomes of "political correctness" are slippery slopes, but the results in reverse have actually happened in real life. Right wing political correctness has already resulted in dictatorships and people losing their lives and people just generally being worse off. Stop crying and embrace the current year.

This is what I believe, fite me

Probably Utopia tbh

Ok
ALLAH AKBAR

People use political correctness as an excuse for being reactionary faggots far too often.
This goes in both ways, being for or against it.

It's not fucking impossible give me a fucking break. It's pretty simple for me, I just deconstruct the root cause of the alienation/PTSD.

Most people will give you a pass if you in good faith attempt to be sensitive to the big ones, race, sex, sexual orientation, indigenous status.

This it impossible meme is almost always parroted by pol because they are clinging on the small sphere of influence they used to have, namely defining pop culture.

and it's not about being sensitive for me, it's about learning from my enemy. If fascists and neo liberals are using idpol successfully you god damn better believe I'm learning all about it.

Instead of crying about how it hurts my pussy feelings that I have to extend the shallowest bit of empathy to people I never bothered thinking about before

Has anyone ever been insulted by a Marxist as a "Class reductionist"?

I thought the whole point of Marxism was that all struggle could be reduced to class struggle.

Handicapped people have no God!!!!!!

The only time I see it's appropriate to be against political correctness is when it obscures class consciousness.

I rarely see that criticism leveled at it though, most of the time people are against it cause muh feels.

I just think it's designed to obfuscate and not fix social problems

If we make it not okay to say "Nigger" and "Faggot", blacks and gays will be closer to social equality. I'm against political correctness because I see it as punting the ball on social change.

If we start saying People of Color the oppression will seem less bad. We give police officers bodycams (that they have to turn on) and we don't have to reform the legal system, the laws, the structure of the police force or the general system that made "Nigger" "Faggot" and "Tranny" offensive.

That was a nice article. Few things though.

If Coates' thinking is that whites have to decide to stop being racist themselves isn't that actually pretty accurate if most civil rights 'victories' ended with the white ruling class deciding they'll give them what they want? Reforming rather than real revolution?

If anything I'm more inclined to see his nihilism as a result of our soul-sucking system and that makes me look on him and his way of thinking with pity. Not as a dangerous fool arguing for inaction but a sad guy expressing his apocalyptic nihilism in the face of 'it all' and the powerlessness it makes him feel.
At least until the article started talking about his reparation activism. That stuff is pretty retarded and makes him look very foolish.

edensauvage.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/the-poverty-of-left-wing-activism/

Political correctness, or rather the fact that it's popular, is a symptom. In modern political, at least until recently, the only real question was who to tax how much for what. And a leftwinger, confronted by this framework will either give up, seek to supersede it (eg. communism) or comply. PC is the acceptance of everything related to capitalism and the material reproduction of society. They are allowed to play with all the switches regarding culture and social life, confronting (seemingly) controversial issues, which produces a reaction from the more conservative side of society, and in turn just creates a chain of mutual reinforcement. The issue is of course, that their controversial feeds are "lower" forms of rebellion, but with strong reactions. It can be compared to a teenager getting a tattoo or a piercing - basically it only irritates the immediate surrounding, but exactly because of that, the reaction of experienced as more intensive. Individually saying one has a problem with capitalism on the other hand, is far less "attractive", since most of the time nobody would bother saying anything, except if you were to have a especially nosey ancap nearby. Most people dismiss this as a futile rebellion against the enternal, individual contrarianism or just lack of experience/privilege. But we know better, seeing that capitalism is the absolute foundation of society, a mass social movement gets a disproportionally larger reaction than the pronoun-issue. But as long as this movement against capital can't establish itself, it won't - or to out it this way, political correctness, the symptom of the weakened left, will dominate our discourse and the image of the left, as long as we deny the primacy of class - establishing this, is the first blow against capitalism and it's dark-siblings of Political correctness/Identity politics! This is also why I believe liberal-leftists want to insist of class being just one among the other "struggles" in life.

Class reductionism is the stupidest fucking thing I've had a leftist say to me

that's precisely the narrative the establishment wants to promote, that all those civil right victories were a product of the elites' goodness and magnanimity. When in reality, the elite was forced to make concessions because their power was threatened by popular discontent and mass mobilisations. The 60s were a time of violent change and power realignments, a time far more dark and uncertain than that which the sunny images handed down to us by pop culture would suggest.

youtube.com/watch?v=hM0CBfwI_Ck

Is "class reductionism" reducing everything to class or reducing the importance of class?

reducing everything to class

I've heard that the reasoning for giving in to MLK's civil rights was similar to FDR's new deal being used as a means to quell revolutionary intent. So it was the white ruling class deciding "we'll go with the nicer option to calm them down". Today I feel like the ruling class has gotten even better at handing us even less and less while still making us feel like we have 'victories'. All to avoid anything close to easing our materiel conditions.
So basically I still feel like Coates' completely feeling based reaction to the black struggle is justified in a way. There's also the fact that emancipation was a decision that was ultimately made by a white president to serve his won ends.

lmao what an asshole

It's fucking stupid. Policing speech is hugely counterproductive. If someone is espousing harmful or stupid ideas, the appropriate response is to let them spout those ideas and then proceed to argue against them. You don't destroy a bad idea by suppressing it, you destroy it by bringing it out into the open and establishing exactly why it is a bad idea.

Political correctness does not help quash bad, harmful ideas - it helps propagate them, either by driving the idea in question into the shadows where it can propagate beneath the notice of the people who are best equipped to dismantle it with arguments, or by shielding already-propagated bad ideas from criticism and therefore preventing them from ever being meaningfully challenged.

Reducing everything to class, because "All war is class war" is not a credo of Marxism when we have Nazi masturbation fantasy!!!!!!!

Which I'm explicitly not doing, since I didn't deny other struggles, but just point out that due to the nature of class being tied up with production, and therefore also the material reproduction of society itself, that it's a more "sensitive" issue. Every IdPol struggle could be overturned, patriarchy -> matriarchy, hetronormativity -> homonormativity, etc. (I'm know it's not their goal, but that's not my point) and capitalism could still exist in a comparable form, since non of it's actions rely on any of these identities. But of the opposite, I'm at least sceptical.

Just to emphasise: I'm not saying that each struggle is basically caused by capitalism (via. we'll address those issues "after the revolution", etc.) but just that the form of their conflict is influenced by capitalism. Addressing the issues of womens rights is different when the role of the woman is to reprodu daily life at home for capitalism to function, when compared to a socialist society, where this role isn't needed in the first place.

I'm all for being polite with people you care about, but beyond that full freeze peach. Punch my face if you are so offended, but don't go running to the some higher power to defend your own ego.

Silly namefag, those are precisely the people I am free to be 'impolite' to. Politeness is for dealing with strangers.

I'm willing to bet the impoliteness is confined to a narrow band of acceptable behaviors and statements. You can grossly question your straight male friend's sexuality all day long for instance, but you can't express honest doubt about his self destructive behavior or relationships, unless they pass a certain threshold.

Actually I've thought of that.
You see imagine it as a spectrum from 'stranger' to 'acquaintance' to 'casual friend' to 'close friend' to 'significant other' and with many inbetween. With a stranger you'll have no capital with which to question their own lives or offend them while expecting these things to not have obvious repercussions (like getting smacked in the face). And like you said a friend will be more open to crudeness in humor but still less open to you questioning their life decisions. But a wife, for example, will have nearly every form of impoliteness open to them. At least I'd hope you'd be able to discuss anything with your wife.

That's how I organize my own relationships with people at least.

the world of late capitalism is inhabited entirely by strangers and alienated beings. That's why our codes of social behaviour are so impersonal and alienating.

PC wants to uphold a particular image of the world, a sanitised image completely detached from the harsh realities of capital and state power.

PC is a consumer product.

Well of course. All of our human interactions, be they congenial or hostile, take time away from the production and consumption of commodities. The more we devise systems to smooth out these kinks and streamline socially necessary interaction, the more time we will have to produce and consume commodities.

Well said.

Sad.

It's authority you can get people to *desire* to have. It's perfect for every greedy authoritarian.

what social norms aren't totalitarian?
I can't do a lot of things that don't directly harm anyone without immediately becoming a social pariah
that said, political correctness is a symptom of the impotence of the liberal left in dealing with the social antagonisms continuously generated by capitalism and just different groups people having to live with each other (especially under competition for resources)

i think mocking Holla Forums for being autistic is apropos

Political correctness, in regard to politeness and respect, certainly poses many dangers (censorship, conformity, passive aggression, dishonesty, alienation, etc.) as others have said, but I think PC holds a special and exceptionally evil danger unique to it.

As hints, one of PC's flaws is its vague, fluctuating, and potentially limitless boundaries, as exemplified in the terrifying relativist maxim that "offense is taken, not given".

This gives license for people to arbitrarily take offense to anything, ascribe any sort of meaning to any expression, and ultimately lash out to destroy anyone on a whim with little or no provocation. The perfect excuse for any flavor of totalitarianism, but its sociopathic effects on individuals are even worse.

As PC becomes a social institution in and of itself, its practitioners demand victims regardless of whether there is anyone to fight, so they will periodically choose random sacrifices from among their own to be swarmed and mauled as a pure demonstration of power and fear. Resistance is not expected, since under PC any protestation of innocence is taken only as the most damning proof of guilt.

Damn that's cold

If anything, black america's material conditions have worsened considerably, specially since the Great '08 Mortgage Swindle, which disproportionately targeted black families.That explains why elites have been doubling down on symbolic anti racism, 'representation' and racially themed pop culture manufacturoversies. Civil Rights are totally detached from the material world and transplanted to the realm of the spectacle. Elites are unwilling to face the elephant in the room: that is capital and state power.

Pc is fucking retarded once you have to deal with idpol loonies.
I kid you not, words that are correct or not change on a daily basis, and it depended on whom they want to punish among their ranks.

"I bark at my friends to keep them in line"

...

Capitalist social regulations tend to become commodities in their own right. That Healing from Toxic Whiteness training is 500$ a weekend

Yeah, yeah. Delude yourself that it's not some asshats banning words for shits and giggles.

Gc*qte

Three Men in a Boat
Jerome Klapka Jerome
Chapter XV
Pleasures of Friendship