Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English."
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
Please engage with ideas on their merits rather than by reading through the author's tweets until you eventually find something unfashionable and unrelated.
Engaging ideas on their merits isn't the same as engaging them in a vacuum.
What is inaccurate about the claims. The English are an ethnic minority in London. That is a fact. You can say oh Englishness isn't the same as the Ethnic English, but to do that you are stripping English people of their ethnic identity and their culture.
> nobody says he shouldn't have the right to make such claims
Yes, please do believe that. Lots of them. It may shock you but in much of the world there isn't free speech. Imagine that. Do you think in China you can go around criticizing the government?
> people have less tolerance for such inaccurate and unfunny claims and will call him to task for such nonsense is a bit silly
No, they are claiming the speech itself is unsafe and trying to cancel people. There is a huge difference which you don't seem to get. And it's not silly. It's primarily about intimidation and fear that if you say the wrong thing you will lose your job, get cancelled, ect. Tolerance to intolerance is not tolerance.
I sometimes wonder, do people who think like you actually know how many people died in the so called "cultural revolutions" around the world (such as in China and Russia) which happened during just the last century. It's in the tens of millions. Intellectuals and dissidents rounded up to be killed or put in gulags. People forced to pledge loyalty to causes and leaders and to be re-educated.
The cultural revolution leaders in our country have already started to get rid of any kind of meritocracy (racist tests they claim). UC schools functionally banned the tests just recently. My brother was telling me that UCSF med school removed standardized testing from its admissions and in one year the Asian population went from 60% to 20%. Across academia now your ability to get in will be based on your ability to show how you contribute to the goal of diversity (via skin pigmentation of course).
But I guess to some it's all silly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
63% of London was born in the UK. You mean white English, I presume? Even there, they're a plurality.
That’s pretty clearly not true, though the boundaries of that ethnicity will be perceived differently by different people.
“The English people are a nation and an ethnic group native to England who speak the English language, and share a common history and culture. The English identity is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Angelcynn ('family of the Angles').”
Notice the reasoning that person gives for calling Murray a racist. Among other things, because he refuses to call some other bloke called Robinson a racist.
If 'who said it' and 'what views do they hold' is more important than what they're actually saying, then we've become post-rational, and well on our way back to less open and enlightened culture.
When considering something John Cleese said, one can consider where John Cleese has gone in the 3 years since he said it.
In Cleese's case, our understanding of his idea of "political correctness" is informed by his subsequent exiting of the UK because he feels London is "no longer English."
Those subtleties of messaging can certainly indicate affiliation.
But that's exactly what I'm saying. If that's become more important than the actual arguments, were headed down.
Would you mind clarifying the difference between the two for me? It sounds an awful lot like we're talking about thought crimes.
"What they technically said" are the words that were actually used. "What they actually said" are the likely intended meaning, since (as I'm sure you would agree) any given moderately-complex sentence could have a number of interpretations, especially in different contexts.
"We must protect our people" is a sentence of five simple words, but has a radically different meaning when spoken by: * A warlord invading another country * A fighter resisting an invasion * A doctor speaking about medical treatment
In this case, the OP is probably making the (reasonable) point that a speaker who has previously made overblown claims about the racial composition of a country, and has demonstrated xenophobia, can be reasonably assumed to also be on sketchy evidential grounds in his claims about political correctness
It generally indicates that you don't have a rational refute to the argument.
But arguing that previous miss-steps invalidate current arguments is irrational.
Of course he has a point. We should absolutely resist creating thought crimes and police states, but we should also prohibit hateful action.
We can do both, sensibly. Shouting about every slippery slope on the way doesn't help anyone.
That's a weird, centuries-late complaint about the natural consequence of world-spanning empire.
You can't just colonize half the world without getting anyone else’s culture in your capital.