Can We Take Political Correctness Seriously Now? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Take Political Correctness Seriously Now?

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22 pointsdankohn130 comments

relevant pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

This is a complicated topic, but my take is that the downside of political correctness is a potential for a loss of absolute correctness, while the benefit is respect and erring on the side of not doing harm. Those things need to be balanced and we have do decide as individuals and as a culture how we make those trade offs.

There is a huge potential downside from political correctness. When ideas are not allowed to compete on their intellectual merit (because someone finds them offensive), everybody loses.

It never ceases to amaze[1] me that whenever the left gets close to getting their voices heard in any broad sense, you start seeing these sort of polemics attacking them for not practicing absolute tolerance and freedom of speech whenever and wherever they assemble. Yes, there are intolerant assholes on the left, same as with any large group of people, and PC/SJW culture is fucking stupid, no doubt. But compared to our national media in the large, it is small potatoes.

Maybe students are sick to death of the status quo eating their future and wrecking their society and poisoning the Earth. They have grown up in a popular culture totally dominated by a right-wing media machine, wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out, rather than letting them get away with yet another hit piece attacking them on style rather than substance and completely ignoring their message. Look at the coverage of anything from OWS to Ferguson if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb.

[1] depress

> whenever the left gets close to getting their voices heard in any broad sense, you start seeing these sort of polemics attacking them for not practicing absolute tolerance and freedom of speech whenever and wherever they assemble.

A lot of people want to see what happens when this particular culture group gets power. What will they do, how do they behave?

> wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out

So the right wing is preventing anybody from having a conversation—but it's okay because you don't want one anyway?

> if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb

And replace it with what, exactly?

Freedom of Speech is a wonderful thing. Those who oppress it know not it's true beauty.

What is political correctness but censorship?

Slavoj Zizek is probably the philosopher best known for show how political correctness is an overall bad thing for society. His stuff is worth checking out.

I like tuhaybey's take on it (in the comments).

Seeing how the same author has been trying to sound the alarm on political correctness at least since the beginning of this year, it seems unlikely that we'll start taking political correctness seriously any time soon.

Questioning political correctness is the realm of right-wing kooks anyway.

> right-wing kooks

The HN guidelines ask you to edit out name-calling from your comments here, so please do. In this case the last sentence could be eliminated, since that's all it does.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I question political correctness, and I'm right wing. According to you, I must be a kook.

That so intolerant to not tolerant questioning political correctness!

It seems that your first sentence saying is saying that we don't (and won't) take political correctness seriously, and then your second sentence is saying that everyone but right-wing kooks already takes it seriously. I must be mis-reading, but I can't see how.

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