Has political correctness actually gone mad?

NinjaFletch said:
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but I would not be surprised to find out that for years PETA had been funded by all sorts of people who wanted to make the animal rights movement look completely ridiculous.
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No, Ingrid Newkirk and others around her genuinely believe no publicity is bad publicity. They will stay in the news no matter what. They also do some decent undercover work and outreach and so do save many animal lives but they are such an easy target to hate, PETA may even be a net harm to the whole movement.

http://www.michaelspecter.com/2003/04/the-extremist/

Nutritionally, peta has a point. Yet alcohol abuse has become such a serious problem on college campuses that the ad enraged thousands of people. "It's an irresponsible, recycled publicity stunt that literally puts cows before kids. It's appalling," Wendy Hamilton, the president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said. "For Christ's sake, lighten up,'' Newkirk replied, when I asked her about the campaign. "We simply said that milk is so pathetic that there are even more nutrients in beer. madd should be happy–they got more press than they ever could have hoped for. We didn't know they would come after us, but I am glad they did. We are always disappointed when people don't come after us.''
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Naked women also play a central role in peta's demonstrations and advertisements, and if a political organization can be said to have a muse, then the actress Pamela Anderson is peta's. In March, she appeared on a gigantic new billboard in Times Square, wearing three strategically placed lettuce leaves. ("People enjoy sex,'' Newkirk explained. "It's a big part of human nature. So we appeal to that as often as we can. And who could ask for anyone better than Pam? People drool when they look at her. Why wouldn't we use that? We need all the drooling we can get.")
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Newkirk loved the notoriety, and still does; jousting with the media thrills her. "We are complete press sluts,'' she told me. "It is our obligation. We would be worthless if we were just polite and didn't make any waves." On several occasions during our interviews, she asked if I was looking for any particular kind of quote or theme. I didn't understand what she meant, so she explained: "Well, you know, that Reuters reporter was so thrilled when I told him my position on hoof-and-mouth disease. Don't you need something like that, too?" (Two years ago, when an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease terrified Europe and forced farmers to kill millions of animals, Newkirk made no effort to hide her delight. "I openly hope that it comes here,'' she said. "It wouldn't be any more hideous for the animals–they are all bound for a ghastly death anyway….It will bring economic harm only for those who profit from giving people heart attacks and giving animals a concentration-camp-like existence.")
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That raises the question of whether peta's shock tactics and abrasiveness might be so unsavory that they offend many of the very people the group wishes to attract. One day, I put that question to the philosopher Peter Singer, whose book "Animal Liberation" (1975) is often credited with inspiring the modern animal-rights movement; Newkirk told me that it persuaded her to start peta. "Publicity is a tactic that has worked well for them,'' Singer said. "Ingrid constantly risks offense, but she seems to feel it does more good than harm." In fact, Newkirk seems openly to court the anger even of people who share her views. "I know feminists hate the naked displays," she told me. "I lose members every time I do it. But my job isn't to hold on to members, as much as I'd like to–it's to get people who just don't give a damn about this issue to look twice.'' The truth is that extremism and outrage provide the fundamental fuel for many special-interest groups. Nobody ever stopped hunting because the National Rifle Association supports assault weapons; many of those who oppose abortion are appalled that people in their movement commit acts of violence, yet they are not appalled enough to support abortion. The same is true with peta, and Newkirk knows it; a vegan isn't going to start eating meat or wearing fur simply because she disapproves of a naked calendar.
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Edit: her will
While the final decision as to the use of my body remains with peta, I make the following suggested directions:

a. That the "meat" of my body, or a portion thereof, be used for a human barbecue, to remind the world that the meat of a corpse is all flesh, regardless of whether it comes from a human being or another animal and that fleshfoods are not needed;

b. That my skin, or a portion thereof, be removed and made into leather products, such as purses, to remind the world that human skin and the skin of other animals is the same and that neither is "fabric" or needed;

c. That my feet be removed and umbrella stands or other ornamentation be made from them, as a reminder of the depravity of killing innocent animals, such as elephants, in order that we might use their body parts for household items and decorations;

d. That my eyes be removed, mounted and delivered to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency as a reminder that peta will continue to be watching the agency until it stops poisoning and torturing animals in useless and cruel experiments;

e. That my pointing finger be delivered to Kenneth Feld [the owner of Ringling Brothers] or to a circus museum, to stand as the "Greatest Accusation on Earth" on behalf of the countless animals who have been deprived of all that is natural and pleasant to them, abused and forced into involuntary servitude for the sake of cheap entertainment.
 
On an animal rights forum, this was the reaction:

It was a planned media stunt so they could get on radio taking about bacon giving you aids and how smart pigs are, or some shit. Already, hundreds of animal rights and vegan folk in Tassie have signed a letter rebuking peta, as the outright hostility they've experienced as a result of this hasn't helped them be effective with their existing campaigns.

The locals [activists] are furious. They've spent years building a positive profile down there, getting involved in discussions with government, running more successful adoption programmes than those funded by the tax payer, developing rapport with the media. It's frustrating for them to have some unknown Canadian model pull out an embarrassing brain fart like this from afar. Peta have no presence down there, leave it alone.
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The fact they have to publicly reject such twaddle at all is a pretty dire statement in itself.
 
http://www.thecrimson.com/column/wo...implistic-social-justice-warrior/?page=single

The comment-ors who have the best rated comments on this article believe that women are privileged, gingers have it worse than minorities, and there is no privilege due to race, only due to class (and at the same time these people hate Marxism).

So, what side can be picked here? SJWs or MRAs?

On to a specific case: that paragraph about Divest Harvard stinks. I can imagine they aren't a very popular body among administrators. One of them pulled a stunt by sitting in front of the president's office, she now had a choice: talk to this group or arrest them. She made the choice, and they got their result. What was wrong with this? That arrest could not have harmed the cause of divestment from fossil fuels companies, which is undoubtedly an important issue for progressives (and for humanity, but who cares about that.)
 
berbatrick said:
So, what side can be picked here? SJWs or MRAs?
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Are they really the opposing side here? I thought MRA stood for mens rights activists? Surely they're a single issue group, while the SJWs perceive themselves as battling against a whole array of different -ism's?

Anyway, I would always favour people who argue on the side of social justice over the opposite extreme, on the basis that they're basically well intentioned. Their failing is taking reasonable concerns way too far.
 
horsechoker said:
I think the Alt-Right is the opposition to SJWs rather than MRAs who are single issue.
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Yeah, that makes sense. The Alt-Right seem to be generally terrible people. So it's easy to work out which side is the less offensive. Even if the lot of them are tiresome.
 
I didn't want to use that word since online gatherings of alt-right users are usually heavily neo-Nazi.*

I mean, there's legitimate criticism of many ultra-liberals, and I really liked the examples at the start of that article about assumptions based on race, but the rest of the article put me off and after digging deep enough the comments were just ugh.

*Edit: including proper Protocols of the Elders of Zion style anti-semitism.
 
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Pogue Mahone said:
Yeah, that makes sense. The Alt-Right seem to be generally terrible people. So it's easy to work out which side is the less offensive. Even if the lot of them are tiresome.
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I wouldn't side so much with the SJWs, social justice is a Noble cause but their intentions will lead to some pretty bad things such as the segregation of men and women and different races, the censoring of speech to avoid offending people etc. The alt-right is a polar opposite but still acts in much the same way, claiming to be for free speech but dismissing any ideas that aren't their own and generally acting in a loud abhorrent manner whenever witness them on YouTube or on the Internet whereby they call everyone and everything a ****. They are the opposite to SJWs yet they have so much in common in how they behave.

Someone I consider to be for social justice but not an SJW in Bernie Saunders.

This is an SJW

 
horsechoker said:
I wouldn't side so much with the SJWs, social justice is a Noble cause but their intentions will lead to some pretty bad things such as the segregation of men and women and different races, the censoring of speech to avoid offending people etc. The alt-right is a polar opposite but still acts in much the same way, claiming to be for free speech but dismissing any ideas that aren't their own and generally acting in a loud abhorrent manner whenever witness them on YouTube or on the Internet whereby they call everyone and everything a ****. They are the opposite to SJWs yet they have so much in common in how they behave.
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How does that work? Surely they're against segregation? Hence the drama about gender stereotyping with public toilets?

But yeah, it's weird the way both extremes have so much in common. A complete inability to even consider alternative opinions, for starters.
 
You don't have to be alt right to think that SJWs are bigoted and hysterical. Not to mention intellectually bankrupt.

I don't like the concept of social justice either. Rather like this take on it: By prefixing the adjective "social" to the concept of justice the result is a destruction of proper justice and a perversion of true social concern.
 
Mrs Smoker said:
Guy actually lost a job.

But here's a kicker, she actually sent the video to Lyft thinking it would help her side. Reinstated back to work after that.

Quite the rage inducing video thou.
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It's been quite a week for SJW meltdowns, this was also uploaded to Facebook by the woman filming

 
My God she's horrendous.

Fits with a lot of what I think is behind all this new wave of political correctness. It's all about getting as much attention as possible. Whether by getting retweets on Twitter or likes on the youtube video she planned on posting. I don't even think assholes like her genuinely care about cultural appropriation or whatever the feck was bothering her there. They just want to be noticed. Yet more evidence that social media is cultivating a generation of narcissist, inconsiderate, irrational and attention-seeking giant babies. At both ends of the political spectrum.
 
The most amazing aspect is how warped these girls perception of reality has become. Obviously they're both rich spoiled daddies girls who crave attention, but they genuinely believed that by posting these videos they'd be lavished with praise and sympathy from the internet at large.

That's what happens when you spend too long inside an echo chamber full of morons, otherwise known as a gender studies class.
 
hobbers said:
The most amazing aspect is how warped these girls perception of reality has become. Obviously they're both rich spoiled daddies girls who crave attention, but they genuinely believed that by posting these videos they'd be lavished with praise and sympathy from the internet at large.

That's what happens when you spend too long inside an echo chamber full of morons, otherwise known as a gender studies class.
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Yeah. Like I said. She's awful. Still think it's a lot less offensive and bothersome than making rape threats because of "ethics in gaming journalism" though.
 
So I heard on a podcast today that the gender pay gap is misleading. When they say a woman warns 70 cents to the mans one dollar it's actually because men work longer hours and do more dangerous jobs. Any truth in this?
 
LuisNaniencia said:
So I heard on a podcast today that the gender pay gap is misleading. When they say a woman warns 70 cents to the mans one dollar it's actually because men work longer hours and do more dangerous jobs. Any truth in this?
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In discussions of the gender-pay gap, there’s one counter-argument that comes up a lot: The gap isn’t real, because after adjusting for the different types of jobs men and women tend to have, the gap shrinks to single digits. And so, the argument goes, men and women aren’t paid the same amount of money because they are choosing to go into different professions, and the labor market rewards their choices differently. In other words: unequal work, hence unequal pay.

There’s a lot of truth to this: Men and women do tend to choose different careers, so much so that researchers have a term for it: “gender occupational segregation.” And because of this occupational sorting, the most commonly mentioned figure of the gender-gap debate—that an American woman only earns 79 cents for every dollar a typical American man makes—is indeed too simple.

But the occupational differences explanation, when presented without caveats, is also problematic. "The story is a lot more complicated than that,” says Elise Gould, an economist and the co-author of a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute about gender and compensation. “We wanted to disentangle the question of 'choice' and what's happening between two workers that are sitting right next to each other in a cubicle … What's going on behind that in terms of cultural norms, expectations, work-family balance—all the different components that might lead women to be in certain kinds of jobs differently than men.”

Researchers often control for certain variables if they suspect that those variables might be exaggerating the size of an effect. In the case of the pay gap, economists often adjust their data to compensate for the fact that, for example, men are overrepresented in high-paying computer programming jobs, and women are overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. These adjustments lead to numbers that stand as good estimates of how big a pay gap would be if men and women were represented in equal numbers in each profession. There are usually other variables that researchers control for, too; geography, experience, and job titles are other variables with known effects, so filtering them out from the numbers is a step toward isolating the effects of gender on pay.

But the striking thing is that even after adjusting for so many factors, there’s still a statistically significant pay gap. (Pay-gap skeptics often note that the gap shrinks after taking these factors into account, but it’s supposed to—those statistical adjustments were intended to create a more definitive, standardized measurement.) The fact that a gap remains at all after such adjustments shows that the problem defies any simple explanation. As Robert Hohman, the CEO of Glassdoor, wrote a few months ago in Fortune:

Factoring differences in education, experience, age, location, job title, industry and even company, our latest research reveals that the “adjusted” gender pay gap in the U.S. amounts to women earning about 94.6 cents per dollar compared to men. It is remarkable that a significant gap persists even after comparing male-female worker pay at the job title and company level.
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hobbers said:
I don't know about that. Rape threats are pretty much the most vile thing that a lazy internet troll can think of. But it's still just that, trolling. It's also something that feminists have started specifically aiming for, since they can play the victim and get more media coverage.
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It must be the highlight of their day. And also, poor men, it was the provocative comment that forced them to threaten rape, and the girls really wanted the threat anyway.
 
Had to look up what MRA meant, good lord it never ceases to amaze how ridiculous people can be :lol:
 
Ubik said:
Had to look up what MRA meant, good lord it never ceases to amaze how ridiculous people can be :lol:
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I was so innocent just 6 months ago. Now I know SJWs, MRAs, *****, the alt-right, and have seen but don't understand based and kek.
 
hobbers said:
You don't have to be alt right to think that SJWs are bigoted and hysterical. Not to mention intellectually bankrupt.

I don't like the concept of social justice either. Rather like this take on it: By prefixing the adjective "social" to the concept of justice the result is a destruction of proper justice and a perversion of true social concern.
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Amen.
 


Saw the above clip and thought of this thread. 20ish years old apparently.
 
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12...ernment-to-determine-what-should-be-censored/

Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored
The Associated Press reports today from Jerusalem that “the Israeli government and Facebook have agreed to work together to determine how to tackle incitement on the social media network.” These meetings are taking place “as the government pushes ahead with legislative steps meant to force social networks to rein in content that Israel says incites violence.” In other words, Israel is about to legislatively force Facebook to censor content deemed by Israeli officials to be improper, and Facebook appears eager to appease those threats by working directly with the Israeli government to determine what content should be censored.
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Mrs. May, the Protector.

Theresa May hits out at universities 'safe spaces' for stifling free speech

Theresa May has hit out at universities for implementing "safe space" policies amid concerns that self-censorship is curtailing freedom of speech on campuses.
The Prime Minister said it was "quite extraordinary" for universities to ban the discussion of certain topics which could cause offence.
She warned that stifling free speech could have a negative impact on Britain's economic and social success.
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Pogue Mahone said:
They just want to be noticed. Yet more evidence that social media is cultivating a generation of narcissist, inconsiderate, irrational and attention-seeking giant babies. At both ends of the political spectrum.
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This is beautiful. The most perfect description Ive heard.
 
Fair play to her.

"students who are offended by opposing views are not yet ready to be at university" - not a truer word spoken.
 
berbatrick said:
Speaking of opposing views at universities:

Suspension of controversial Palestine class at UC Berkeley sparks debate
The university argued that the course, which studied Palestine ‘through the lens of settler colonialism’, was anti-Israel and antisemitic
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/uc-berkeley-israel-palestine-class-suspended-decal
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I mean it probably was. If it's anything like Universities here, their is serious anti-Israel sentiment that crosses into anti-semitism. A whole course about Israel and Palestine was probably infested with hate
 
Swaters16 said:
I mean it probably was. If it's anything like Universities here, their is serious anti-Israel sentiment that crosses into anti-semitism. A whole course about Israel and Palestine was probably infested with hate
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The whole thrust of the PC debate has been how entitles juvenile leftists are stifling debate with "safe spaces". Here is another example of a body with slightly more power than students doing exactly the same, to the kind of debate they don't like. But this will never be called political correctness, nor do the right-wing free-speech advocates seem upset by this (other than the anti-Semitic right I assume).

To expand on this,
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...rsity-prevent-no-platforming-academic-freedom

On Wednesday, the prime minister, Theresa May, condemned the idea of safe spaces in answer to a parliamentary question. Yet the main reason British universities have been wrestling with the issue of free speech is the duty imposed on them by the government’s counter-terrorism legislation Prevent – introduced by the Home Office while she was home secretary, which in its outrageous original version asked academics to be spies on, and censors of, even non-violent “extremism” (never properly defined). So she May be for free speech, or May be not.
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The easy-to-sensationalise and foolish attempts by liberal students to stifle debate get headlines, but institutional power remains as big a threat to genuinely free speech.


Edit: on the specific question of the Israel-Palestinian course:

At UC Berkeley, where student activists launched the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, a group of Jewish professors have called on administrators to reinstate the course. They argued that critics are misrepresenting the class and that the university was stifling academic freedom in response to demands from Israel advocacy groups.

Regarding the notion that “any reference to settler colonialism is anti-Semitic”, the professors wrote: “This claim is patently false, a recent innovation on the part of those seeking to suppress open intellectual inquiry on Zionism, Israel, Palestine, and the occupation. A great number of publications, many emerging from within the State of Israel, have considered settler colonialism to be a proper framework for studying the area.”

Michael Burawoy, a sociology professor who signed the letter, said it was obvious that the university was concerned about losing funding in the wake of the backlash: “This was an arbitrary administrative intervention brought about by pressure.”

Bazian added that he felt the situation was particularly unfair to Hadweh and the 28 students enrolled in the course. “I’m completely saddened.”
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berbatrick said:
The whole thrust of the PC debate has been how entitles juvenile leftists are stifling debate with "safe spaces". Here is another example of a body with slightly more power than students doing exactly the same, to the kind of debate they don't like. But this will never be called political correctness, nor do the right-wing free-speech advocates seem upset by this (other than the anti-Semitic right I assume).

To expand on this,
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...rsity-prevent-no-platforming-academic-freedom



The easy-to-sensationalise and foolish attempts by liberal students to stifle debate get headlines, but institutional power remains as big a threat to genuinely free speech.


Edit: on the specific question of the Israel-Palestinian course:
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This isn't really comparable. The issue here is an alleged lack of balance in an educational curriculum. Not the same thing as refusing to let certain people speak or banning entire subjects or phrases for fear of being triggered.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
This isn't really comparable. The issue here is an alleged lack of balance in an educational curriculum. Not the same thing as refusing to let certain people speak or banning entire subjects or phrases for fear of being triggered.
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But that is what has happened at Berkeley, is it not? All the cliches about being ready for university unless you can hear opposing views, etc: don't they apply here too?
 
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