Is political corectness helpful?
Political correctness supposedly exists as a synonym for being polite to whoever you are conversing with. In an age where hate-speech laws dominate the west, is this really the case or is it just an excuse for censorship?
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In my opinion, being polite is nice, but when these laws just hinder expression by forcing people to speak a certain way for fear of being fired or even being jailed for posting an obvious joke, I believe that it is just a way for governments to prevent dissent by deeming whatever is being uttered as a form of racism, sexism or any other -ism. What is even more surprising is that even the mainstream media and major figure heads like Totalbuiscuit, who I really like support this, even if the transgression is, again, a silly meme. CNN even went so far as threaten to dox a memer because Trump retweeted his meme .
Maybe some of these jokes/memes are distasteful, but at worst they only deserves to be ignored. So in my opinion, no, it is not helpful but a seemingly nice form of censorship.
Couldn't agree more, and many other countries seem to be following suit. My home country of South Africa is no exception and it seems that pretty much all of the political parties have been accusing anyone they don't agree with as being racist.
I think an important factor enabling this is the media, who always go crazy when these allegations are made and wildly exaggerate the facts to support their majority audience's opinions. People read and watch things that support and enforce their opinion regardless of the underlying facts. I think this may be the most underrated threat to humanity as we know it.
Yeah, any dissenting opinion is immediately classed as racist or something similar in the west. And I include South Africa in that as "the west" is more the countries that supposedly hold personal freedom and human rights as the cornerstone of their societies. And the only country that seems to be immune from this nonsense is Japan.
Political Correctness is a marketing spin to disguise speech and thought control.
Precisely my point. And I find it so weird that some people go so far as imprisoning people for memes in the name of enforcing "politeness".
Lately, even me, a citizen 'nobody', I'm afraid to freely express myself on social media. Not because of fear of any government (I rarely post about politics anyway) but because of angry/judgmental or whatever you wanna call them fellow social media users. Therefore, sometimes I can't help but wonder: Do we really have democracy and freedom of speech? Or do we live in fear of being characterized as sexists, racists and fascists even when we make a simple innocent joke? Thanks for this post Sebi, and the picture is so much to the point...
I like politics, so you might see some more posts like this.
In my opinion political correctness has gone way too far. The perpetually offended people seem to always claim jokes are all sorts of -ism's. Sure it's not always government that does it, but major international corporations with more power than small countries do, and sometimes I think that`s worse. All this does is make people fear and police their speech where everything becomes bland and vacuous. And I for one, do not want that!
I know you do and I'm expecting more, obviously! I'm not so much into politics, but I do wanna have some idea to be able to stand and offer even a basic opinion on things happening in this world I also live in.
But about all this...I thought, in Europe at least (maybe excluding Russia-?-) the Communism was over...it is sad and unfortunate to see it's probably still there but in another form... :/
I think it's getting worse. The guy there in my post is from Scotland. In Germany you can`t say anything about nazis or deny the holochaust, which I agree, are stupid things to do, but definitely not worthy of jailing people. The only barrier to free speech that I support is direct calls to violence. Otherwise, anything goes as far as I'm concerned.
I didn't know that about Germany... Good God.... !!! Yes, direct calls to violence, threats etc are totally understandable but.... And then we talk about Russia and China. Well if in Germany that's the case, what do we expect?!
I don't know what to expect other than it's bound to get worse. That's why I'm making these posts. To inform people and maybe open some eyes so we don't become communist, or similar, again.
Good job ;) In Sebi we trust ;) :D
Haha! You crazy!
I wouldn't go that far. I certainly don't know what the solution is, but I DO know that censorship is definitely not one of them.
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