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This is something interesting that I observe. I find that I see more stories on the news about certain groups of people complaining or protesting something that one person said or did because they found it to be "offensive" or "insensitive." I think that if those people didn't like what they said, they can simply ignore them. I mean, what happened to free speech and being able to freely express your opinions about things without people getting riled up over some phrase or term that someone used?
I'd like to know what your take on this is.
Last edited by CancerianMoonPrincess; 06-16-2011 at 12:22 AM..
Frankly, I would like to take the people concerned with "PC" and put them on a floating island in the ocean where they can happily live in a nanny state -- and let the country go back to normal .
All political correctness has done is given lawyers more money in their pockets and given people more excuses to use for whatever failures they have experienced in their lives.
In Western Europe, there's been a move away from PC since the noughties kicked in (well, since 9/11 kicked it, that is). Nonetheless, there is still wáy too much of that crap playing. And all it does is creating resentment and anger among the "silent majority".
Actually this is what I meant by more sensitive. I meant more sensitive in terms of being easily offended.
We haven't gotten more sensitive. People aren't "more" offended by offensive stuff, they just know that now they can use PC and throw a tantrum to get you to shut up, so they do it.
This is something interesting that I observe. I find that I see more stories on the news about certain groups of people complaining or protesting something that one person said or did because they found it to be "offensive" or "insensitive." I think that if those people didn't like what they said, they can simply ignore them. I mean, what happened to free speech and being able to freely express your opinions about things without people getting riled up over some phrase or term that someone used?
I'd like to know what your take on this is.
Freeom of speech is a great thing and politcal correctness has gone waaaay overboard. BUT, tell me to just ignore them when someone like the Phelps family shows up to tell grieving family members their son or daughter killed fighting for this nation is burning in hell and I have a hard time ignoring them. There are limits to freedom of speech, your rights end when they step on mine or harm others.
FYI, Love the your Handle, also ruled by the same force of nature, born on 7/7
Casper
In a lot of ways I think we've become hypersensitive. For example, when I was totally blind--couldn't see a truck 3 feet away from me--people still thought I was "visually impaired" because they called me "visually impaired" in an attempt to soften the term I had given them--"blind". This was actually misleading in a lot of ways because people were under the impression I could see more than I could. It wouldn't seem like it would matter, but when a taxi is picking you up, there's a big difference between "blind" and "visually impaired." A visually impaired person might see the cab come up to them--a blind person won't. The taxi driver would need to come up to the blind person. So in some ways, being so PC can make life more difficult because it stifles communication rather than facilitating it. In scenarios like this, communication is important.
The same would happen with deafness. Now in this case, I wasn't even totally deaf. I could hear a very little. But my hearing was impaired to a point that I couldn't understand speech, not even with hearing aids. If I introduced myself as "hearing impaired," people would just try to yell in my ear (didn't work). When I introduced myself as "deaf," people understood that I needed tactile methods of communication (tactile sign language, braille, or print-on-palm).
If you think about it, terms like "dual-sensory impaired" that I have heard to describe deaf-blindness are either vague or don't give the listener a clear idea of the person's vision or hearing loss. "Dual-sensory impaired" could refer to an impairment of any two senses, and a lot of other terms like "hearing impaired/vision impaired" are misleading when the person has a total loss of one or both senses. That's why I advocate using terms that actually describe the condition someone has while letting people show their sensitivity through their actions instead of their words.
Some PC terminology is just too long and cumbersome to say. For example, in the disability rights movement, many people advocate "person first" terminology. That is, instead of saying a blind person or a paraplegic person, you would say a person with blindness or a person with paraplegia. That's all well and nice but that's just too many syllables. It's perfectly possible to convey an attitude of treating a blind or paraplegic person as a person first, but having to use those long terms over and over again is just inconvenient. In fact, I would say that the people that treated me the most like a person first and not a disability first were the people who called me "deaf-blind". Because they knew exactly the nature of my hearing and vision loss, they knew how to deal with it, and it was then a non-issue, and we could just hang out as people instead of having to pull the topic of disability into every interaction.
Last edited by nimchimpsky; 06-16-2011 at 07:06 AM..
Have we as a society become more sensitive because of political correctness??
I'm offended at the mere suggestion
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