Has political correctness actually gone mad?

afrocentricity said:
Hello, the Internet is there for those of you who want to look at beautiful women. ;)
Who gives a feck? They can do what they want.
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They can, but don't you think also having a beauty competition is fine? Don't think it has to be mutually exclusive.
 
KirkDuyt said:
Can't an inner beauty pageant coexist with a beauty pageant. Why is it so wrong to judge people on the way they look SOME TIMES. It's not like we think the way we look is irrelevant. There's a reason the diet section of a bookstore is as big as it is. Tonnes of people go to the gym weekly to look the way they do. What about people with a relatively low IQ and no real achievements to speak of. Are they not allowed to feel good about themselves for being beautiful?

Also having a contest that's about brains and inner beauty is fine, but does it ever occur to anyone ever that some women actually enjoy competing in a beauty pageant and are proud to be named the most beautiful? Is there anyone in the world who, when called handsome, pretty or good looking, gets mad and tells someone to feck off? (honest question, I wouldn't know)
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People just dont have enough respect for the ancient tradition of pageantry.
 
KirkDuyt said:
They can, but don't you think also having a beauty competition is fine? Don't think it has to be mutually exclusive.
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There are loads of beauty contests aren't there?
I'm baffled why your average guy would give a feck.
 
afrocentricity said:
There are loads of beauty contests aren't there?
I'm baffled why your average guy would give a feck.
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I don't honestly, I've never watched a beauty pageant in my life.

It's just this, "you can't judge people on the way they look" shtick that bothers me. People really really care about the way they look. The "the way we look" industry makes billions of dollars. 8 out of 10 commercials are probably somehow tied to something that improves the way we look. Can't we just own up to the fact that we judge people on the way we look.

Also, I'm a contrarian dickhead who likes to rant about things :)
 
I've never watched a beauty pageant. I wonder if most of the viewers aren't female actually. If you look at women's magazines most of the pictures in them are of women, so it might be the same with beauty contests as well.
 
I don't care about beauty pageants any more than I will about 'inner beauty' pageants... But this concept of 'inner beauty' is pure bullshxt. As if anyone could measure and put a score to someone else's morals, conduct and thoughts.

It's going to be one huge exercise in hypocrisy, even more so then the botox/surgeon festivals they replace.
 
Do not diddle kids, it's no good diddling kids!
I wouldn't do it with anyone younger than my daughter
 
Jippy said:
Those beauty pageants with toddlers and the like are just creepy.
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It's funny they always have a middle aged man on the judges panel. And it's often them and others who fund the comps. If costs to enter but they hand out plastic trophies.
 
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Ian Reus said:
It's funny they always have a middle aged man on the judges panel. And it's often them and others who find the comps. If costs to enter but they hand out plastic trophies.
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Those always seem super-camp though. Spray-tanning kids and the like is plain weird. I think Louis Theroux did a programme on it and the scarily pushy mums behind the girls.
 
Jippy said:
I missed the 'thou shalt not call someone by their preferred name' commandment.
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I sometimes think that what pushes people to dig their heels in over silly stuff like this is the feeling that society is constantly telling us how the act more and more. It's a kind of self-righteous resilience to this overbearing feeling that we're always one comment away from committing the horrible crime of causing offence.

I mean my day to day life has never been affected by any examples of "PC gone mad", but it's easy to get your back up over some stories because you end up thinking "What would I do in this situation?" and realize how quite easily you could be the bad guy for a misused pronoun.
 
I had a thought today. People that want equality for all, regardless of any factor whatsoever etc. I am guessing none of these people work in any organisations? They are all freelance. Surely - because what would they make of performance assessments, people getting varying bonuses / promotions based on other human's instincts etc?
 
Member 5225 said:
I had a thought today. People that want equality for all, regardless of any factor whatsoever etc. I am guessing none of these people work in any organisations? They are all freelance. Surely - because what would they make of performance assessments, people getting varying bonuses / promotions based on other human's instincts etc?
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Do I really have to tell an adult that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are different aims?
 
Member 5225 said:
Thanks for the personal cheapshots! :)

Anyway, but surely one is simply a means to the other?
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Anytime, Paz. They'll keep coming.

Just... no? Good lord. Right, stay with me here. If me and you each have 50 quid and we both put it on United to win their opening league game, and I get better odds than you, that is unequal opportunity. If we both have equal odds and you back United to win, I bet on us losing, then Martial scores five goals in injury time to seal a united victory, you have a better outcome but we had equal opportunity.
 
equality doesn't mean a retired mechanic having a go at bypass surgery, it means all people getting a good, fulfilling education, healthcare, legal parity with all others and enough pay to live a decent life regardless of their job
 
Silva said:
equality doesn't mean a retired mechanic having a go at bypass surgery, it means all people getting a good, fulfilling education, healthcare, legal parity with all others and enough pay to live a decent life regardless of their job
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How can you get enough pay regardless of the job? Surely the job you have is key in determining how much pay you get?
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Tbf equality of outcome is an aim of some left wing policies. Closing the gender pay gap would be one obvious example.
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I thought the pay gap thing applied to equal jobs, essentially same work same pay (if that can be determined). So more about fairness. The quota concept is a prime example of equality of outcome.
 
There were always two sides. Even in a politically incorrect world, there were those who would say they were politically correct. Then we had this push for political correctness....and now we see more political incorrectness. But what we are talking about is ethics and the fact Politics is tied into it means that ultimately we are the outcome. We either gain 'freedom' or it's taken away. That's the danger of giving everything a label. It does not encourage individuality. In general people are programmable and that is more interesting then anything for me. We live in a system of crash boom because of tax that is added on with not enough money in circulation to pay off the debt and so I think the idea of political correctness is foreign to most people because they have accepted a system designed or engineered to screw you regardless. For every pound you put into a bank, how much can they lend? It's a system that's abhorrent and is by definition politically incorrect but people don't really notice or care? Who knows..
 
Javi said:
I thought the pay gap thing applied to equal jobs, essentially same work same pay (if that can be determined). So more about fairness. The quota concept is a prime example of equality of outcome.
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It’s actually illegal to pay men and women differently to do the same work. The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference in median salary between the sexes (or is it genders now? feck knows) for all jobs in a company or country.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
It’s actually illegal to pay men and women differently to do the same work. The gender pay gap is calculated as the difference in median salary between the sexes (or is it genders now? feck knows) for all jobs in a company or country.
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Illegal sure but it‘s not like it can be easily proved. Got the term wrong then, apologies! Skimmed through a Guardian article about the gender pay gap and somebody complained about the showing lack of equality of opportunity... thinking about it the deciding factor seems to be the mechanisms that drive promotion/hiring and whether or not they are biased against women in an unfair way. Hard to measure though
 
Adebesi said:
Equality of outcome = communism
Equality of opportunity = meritocracy
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Which I can't see being much else than some kind of rat race in practice. Equality of opportunity is also a fiction, as one's social skills, education and career chances are widely influenced by the social environment one is born into. There's a fundamental difference between abstract equality of opportunity (according to law) and actual social reality.
 
Synco said:
Which I can't see being much else than some kind of rat race in practice. Equality of opportunity is also a fiction, as one's social skills, education and career chances are widely influenced by the social environment one is born into. There's a fundamental difference between abstract equality of opportunity (according to law) and actual social reality.
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True. Equality of opportunity is more of an ideal, an aspiration, rather than an actual state of being - certainly not a state we have achieved at this point. Though we've come a long way in that direction.

You can also make a case that it has its own downsides. That part of the reason some people feel so disaffected right now is because they are told we live in a meritocracy, and if their lives are shit its because they lack talent to get on in life.

Either way the point I was making was equalities of opportunity and outcome are very different, fundamentally different. And that true equality of opportunity would be a pure, unadulterated meritocracy.
 
I'm coming more and more around to the idea of UBI. You can't get more equal than paying every citizen a grand a month. It also helps address the opportunity imbalance by giving a safety net for people who would otherwise be living hand to mouth to save some money to set up a business, get some more training/qualifications or just have some breathing space to work out what they want to do with their lives.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I'm coming more and more around to the idea of UBI. You can't get more equal than paying every citizen a grand a month. It also helps address the opportunity imbalance by giving a safety net for people who would otherwise be living hand to mouth to save some money to set up a business, get some more training/qualifications or just have some breathing space to work out what they want to do with their lives.
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It'll gradually be inevitable with automation. A lot of big companies increasingly won't need as many workers as they did before...and so people will either need to share jobs part-time or deal with systemic unemployment. The problem with everyone being unemployed, of course, is that the companies improving their efficiency through automation won't be able to sell their goods to people if they can't afford them. Hence why it makes sense.

Most countries could probably afford it as well if they got their priorities in-check.
 
Cheesy said:
It'll gradually be inevitable with automation. A lot of big companies increasingly won't need as many workers as they did before...and so people will either need to share jobs part-time or deal with systemic unemployment. The problem with everyone being unemployed, of course, is that the companies improving their efficiency through automation won't be able to sell their goods to people if they can't afford them. Hence why it makes sense.

Most countries could probably afford it as well if they got their priorities in-check.
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I’m currently listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast where he interviews a bloke called Andrew Yang about UBI and he makes a really compelling case for it. In the US context anyway.
 
Synco said:
Which I can't see being much else than some kind of rat race in practice. Equality of opportunity is also a fiction, as one's social skills, education and career chances are widely influenced by the social environment one is born into. There's a fundamental difference between abstract equality of opportunity (according to law) and actual social reality.
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Yeah exactly, opportunity. We all have the SAME opportunity however it is up to us to actually achieve it. And as we've seen, it's up to society to make sure people have those oppurtunities and also the education and skills to actually achieve their fullest potential. It's not a fiction, what you've described is a fact.
 
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