Daily Archives: June 17, 2016

Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct), commonly abbreviated to PC,[1] is a term which, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures which are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

The term had only scattered usage before the early 1990s, usually as an ironic self-description, but entered more mainstream usage in the United States when it was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times.[9][10][11][12][13][14] The phrase was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind,[4][6][15][16] and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[4][6][17][18] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization, multiculturalism through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school and university curricula.[4][5][17][19]

Commentators on the left have said that conservatives pushed the term in order to divert attention from more substantive matters of discrimination and as part of a broader culture war against liberalism.[17][20][21] They also argue that conservatives have their own forms of political correctness, which are generally ignored by conservative commenters.[22][23][24]

The term "politically correct" was used infrequently until the latter part of the 20th century. This earlier use did not communicate the social disapproval usually implied in more recent usage. In 1793, the term "politically correct" appeared in a U.S. Supreme Court judgment of a political lawsuit.[25] The term also had occasional use in other English-speaking countries.[26][27]William Safire states that the first recorded use of the term in the typical modern sense is by Toni Cade Bambara in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman.[28][clarification needed] The term probably entered use in the United Kingdom around 1975.[8][clarification needed]

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase "politically correct" was associated with the dogmatic application of Stalinist doctrine, debated between Communist Party members and American Socialists. This usage referred to the Communist party line, which provided for "correct" positions on many political matters. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s,

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

In March 1968, the French philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted as saying: "a political thought can be politically correct ('politiquement correcte') only if it is scientifically painstaking", referring to leftist intellectuals attempting to make Marxism scientifically rigorous rather than relying on orthodoxy.[29]

In the 1970s, the New Left began using the term "politically correct."[30] In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too." Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."[4][30][31] As such, PC is a popular usage in the comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, which then was followed by the term ideologically sound, in the comic strips of Bart Dickon.[30][32] In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality.'"[33]

Stuart Hall suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:

According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!"[34]

Critics, including Camille Paglia[35] and James Atlas,[36][37] have pointed to Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind[15] as the likely beginning of the modern debate about what was soon named "political correctness" in higher education.[4][6][16][38] Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the "assault on...political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." [39] According to Z.F. Gamson, "Bloom's Closing of the American Mind...attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'."[40] Prof. of Social Work at CSU Tony Platt goes further and says the "campaign against 'political correctness'" was launched by the book in 1987.[41]

A word search of six "regionally representative Canadian metropolitan newspapers", found only 153 articles in which the terms "politically correct" or "political correctness" appeared between 1 January 1987 and 27 October 1990.[12]

The October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein is described as influential in the term's development.[11][13][14][42][43] At this time, the term was mainly being used in academic contexts: "Across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities."[9]Nexis citations in "arcnews/curnews" reveal only seventy total citations in articles to "political correctness" for 1990; but one year later, Nexis records 1532 citations, with a steady increase to more than 7000 citations by 1994.[42][44] 7 months after the October article, in May 1991 The New York Times had a follow-up on the topic, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena:

What has come to be called "political correctness," a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.

The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S.[5][45] Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct".[17] In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush used the term in his speech: "The notion of politica
l correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits."[46][47][48]

After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US.[5] It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in culture and political debate more broadly, as well as in academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination."[5][clarification needed] Similar critical terminology was used by D'Souza for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as "canon busting").[5][49][not in citation given] These trends were at least in part a response to multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics, with movements such as feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. That response received funding from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded several books such as D'Souza's.[4][17]

Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."[3]

During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think-tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies especially in the context of the Culture Wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. Roger Kimball, in Tenured Radicals, endorsed Frederick Crews's view that PC is best described as "Left Eclecticism", a term defined by Kimball as "any of a wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought from structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analyst to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism."[18][39]Jan Narveson wrote that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are merely political, steamrolling the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting..."[2]

In the American Speech journal article "Cultural Sensitivity and Political Correctness: The Linguistic Problem of Naming" (1996), Edna Andrews said that the usage of culturally inclusive and gender-neutral language is based upon the concept that "language represents thought, and may even control thought".[50] Andrews' proposition is conceptually derived from the SapirWhorf Hypothesis, which proposes that the grammatical categories of a language shape the ideas, thoughts, and actions of the speaker. Moreover, Andrews said that politically moderate conceptions of the languagethought relationship suffice to support the "reasonable deduction ... [of] cultural change via linguistic change" reported in the Sex Roles journal article "Development and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Attitudes Toward Sexist/Nonsexist Language" (2000), by Janet B. Parks and Mary Ann Robinson.[citation needed]

Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality against people whom the right-wing do not consider part of the social mainstream.[4][20][51][52][53][54][55] Commenting in 2001, one such British journalist,[56][57]Polly Toynbee, said "the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user", and, in 2010 "...the phrase "political correctness" was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer..."[56][57][58][59] Another British journalist, Will Hutton,[60][61][62][63] wrote in 2001:

Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism by levelling the charge of "political correctness" against its exponents they could discredit the whole political project.

Glenn Loury described the situation in 1994 as such:

To address the subject of "political correctness," when power and authority within the academic community is being contested by parties on either side of that issue, is to invite scrutiny of one's arguments by would-be "friends" and "enemies." Combatants from the left and the right will try to assess whether a writer is "for them" or "against them."

In the US, the term has been widely used in the intellectual media, but in Britain, usage has been confined mainly to the popular press.[65] Many such authors and popular-media figures, particularly on the right, have used the term to critique what they see as bias in the media.[2][17] William McGowan argues that journalists get stories wrong or ignore stories worthy of coverage, because of what McGowan perceives to be their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending minority groups.[66] Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom", used the term to blame newspapers for adopting language use policies that he thinks tend to excessively avoid the appearance of bias. He argued that political correctness in language not only destroys meaning but also demeans the people who are meant to be protected.[67][68][69] Authors David Sloan and Emily Hoff claim that in the US, journalists shrug off concerns about political correctness in the newsroom, equating the political correctness criticisms with the old "liberal media bias" label.[70]

Jessica Pinta and Joy Yakubu caution against political incorrectness in media and other uses, writing in the Journal of Educational and Social Research: "...linguistic constructs influence our way of thinking negatively, peaceful coexistence is threatened and social stability is jeopardized." What may result, they add as example "the effect of political incorrect use of language" in some historical occurrences:

Conflicts were recorded in Northern Nigeria as a result of insensitive use of language. In Kaduna for instance violence broke out on the 16th November 2002 following an article credited to one Daniel Isioma which was published in This Day Newspaper, where the writer carelessly made a remark about the Prophet Mohammed and the beauty queens of the Miss World Beauty Pageant that was to be hosted in the Country that year (Terwase n.d). In this crisis, He reported that over 250 people were killed and churches destroyed. In the same vein, crisis erupted on 18th February 2006 in Borno because of a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in Iyllands-posten Newspaper (Terwase n.d). Here over 50 people were killed and 30 churches
burnt.

Much of the modern debate on the term was sparked by conservative critiques of liberal bias in academia and education, such as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education;[4] and conservatives have used it as a major line of attack since.[5] University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate connect speech codes in US universities to philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They claim that speech codes create a "climate of repression", arguing that they are based on "Marcusean logic".[relevant? discuss] The speech codes, "mandate a redefined notion of "freedom", based on the belief that the imposition of a moral agenda on a community is justified", a view which, "requires less emphasis on individual rights and more on assuring "historically oppressed" persons the means of achieving equal rights." They claim:

Our colleges and universities do not offer the protection of fair rules, equal justice, and consistent standards to the generation that finds itself on our campuses. They encourage students to bring charges of harassment against those whose opinions or expressions "offend" them. At almost every college and university, students deemed members of "historically oppressed groups"--above all, women, blacks, gays, and Hispanics--are informed during orientation that their campuses are teeming with illegal or intolerable violations of their "right" not to be offended. Judging from these warnings, there is a racial or sexual bigot, to borrow the mocking phrase of McCarthy's critics, "under every bed."[72][relevant? discuss]

Kors and Silverglate later established the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which campaigns against infringement of rights of due process, rights of religion and speech, in particular "speech codes".[73] Similarly, a common conservative criticism of higher education in the United States is that the political views of the faculty are much more liberal than the general population, and that this situation contributes to an atmosphere of political correctness.[74]

Jessica Pinta and Joy Yakubu write that political correctness is useful in education, in the Journal of Educational and Social Research:

Political correctness is a useful area of consideration when using English language particularly in second language situations. This is because both social and cultural contexts of language are taken into consideration. Zabotkina (1989) says political correctness is not only an essential, but an interesting area of study in English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This is because it presents language as used in carrying out different speech acts which provoke reactions as it can persuade, incite, complain, condemn, and disapprove. Language is used for communication and creating social linkages, as such must be used communicatively. Using language communicatively involves the ability to use language at the grammatical level, sociolinguistic level, discourse and strategic levels (Canale & Swain 1980). Understanding language use at these levels center around the fact that differences exist among people, who must communicate with one another, and the differences could be religious, cultural, social, racial, gender or even ideological. Therefore, using language to suit the appropriate culture and context is of great significance.

Groups who oppose certain generally accepted scientific views about evolution, second-hand tobacco smoke, AIDS, global warming, race, and other politically contentious scientific matters have said that PC liberal orthodoxy of academia is the reason why their perspectives of those matters have been rejected by the scientific community.[75] For example, in Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm (1999), Prof. Edward J. Steele said:

We now stand on the threshold of what could be an exciting new era of genetic research.... However, the 'politically correct' thought agendas of the neoDarwinists of the 1990s are ideologically opposed to the idea of 'Lamarckian Feedback', just as the Church was opposed to the idea of evolution based on natural selection in the 1850s![76]

Zoologists Robert Pitman and Susan Chivers complained about popular and media negativity towards their discovery of two different types of killer whales, a "docile" type and a "wilder" type that ravages sperm whales by hunting in packs: "The forces of political correctness and media marketing seem bent on projecting an image of a more benign form (the Free Willy or Shamu model), and some people urge exclusive use of the name 'orca' for the species, instead of what is perceived as the more sinister label of "killer whale."[77]

Stephen Morris, an economist and a game theorist, built a game model on the concept of political correctness, where "a speaker (advisor) communicates with the objective of conveying information, but the listener (decision maker) is initially unsure if the speaker is biased. There were three main insights from that model. First, in any informative equilibrium, certain statements will lower the reputation of the speaker, independent of whether they turn out to be true. Second, if reputational concerns are sufficiently important, no information is conveyed in equilibrium. Third, while instrumental reputational concerns might arise for many reasons, a sufficient reason is that speakers wish to be listened to."[78][79][80][81] The Economist writes that "Mr Morris's model suggests that the incentive to be politically correct fades as society's population of racists, to take his example, falls."[79] He credits Glenn Loury with the basis of his work.[78][relevant? discuss]

"Political correctness" is a label typically used for left-wing terms and actions, but not for equivalent attempts to mold language and behavior on the right. However, the term "right-wing political correctness" is sometimes applied by commentators drawing parallels: in 1995, one author used the term "conservative correctness" arguing, in relation to higher education, that "critics of political correctness show a curious blindness when it comes to examples of conservative correctness. Most often, the case is entirely ignored or censorship of the Left is justified as a positive virtue. ... A balanced perspective was lost, and everyone missed the fact that people on all sides were sometimes censored."[22]

In 2003, Dixie Chicks, a U.S. country music group, criticized the then U.S. President George W. Bush for launching the war against Iraq.[82] They were criticized[83] and labeled "treasonous" by some U.S. right-wing commentators (including Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly).[23] Three years later, claiming that at the time "a virulent strain of right wing political correctness [had] all but shut down debate about the war in Iraq," journalist Don Williams wrote that "[the ongoing] campaign against the Chicks represents political correctness run amok" and observed, "the ugliest form of political correctness occurs whenever there's a war on."[23]

In 2003, French fries and French toast were renamed "Freedom fries" and "Freedom toast"[84] in three U.S. House of Representatives cafeterias in response to France's opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. This was described as "polluting the already confused concept of political correctness."[85] In 2004, then Australian Labor leader Mark Latham described conservative calls for "civil
ity" in politics as "the new political correctness."[86]

In 2012, Paul Krugman wrote that "the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which unlike the liberal version has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order."[24]

Some right-wing commentators in the West argue that "political correctness" and multiculturalism are part of a conspiracy with the ultimate goal of undermining Judeo-Christian values. This theory, which holds that political correctness originates from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as part of a conspiracy that its proponents call "Cultural Marxism", is generally known as the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory by academics.[87][88] The theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in a Lyndon LaRouche movement journal.[89] In 2001, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote in The Death of the West that "political correctness is cultural Marxism", and that "its trademark is intolerance".[90]

In the United States, left forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for censorship, with Time citing campaigns against violence on network television as contributing to a "mainstream culture [which] has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the p.c. police", even though in John Wilson's view protests and advertiser boycotts targeting TV shows are generally organized by right-wing religious groups campaigning against violence, sex, and depictions of homosexuality on television.[91]

In the United Kingdom, some newspapers reported that a nursery school had altered the nursery rhyme "Baa Baa Black Sheep" to read "Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep" and had banned the original.[92] But it was later reported that in fact the Parents and Children Together (PACT) nursery had the children "turn the song into an action rhyme.... They sing happy, sad, bouncing, hopping, pink, blue, black and white sheep etc."[93] This story was widely circulated and later extended to suggest that other language bans applied to the terms "black coffee" and "blackboard".[94]Private Eye magazine reported that similar stories had been published in the British press since The Sun first ran them in 1986.[95]

Political correctness is often satirized, for example in The PC Manifesto (1992) by Saul Jerushalmy and Rens Zbignieuw X,[96] and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1994) by James Finn Garner, which presents fairy tales re-written from an exaggerated politically correct perspective. In 1994, the comedy film PCU took a look at political correctness on a college campus.

Other examples include the television program Politically Incorrect, George Carlins "Euphemisms" routine, and The Politically Correct Scrapbook.[97] The popularity of the South Park cartoon program led to the creation of the term "South Park Republican" by Andrew Sullivan, and later the book South Park Conservatives by Brian C. Anderson.[98] In its Season 19, South Park has constantly been poking fun at the principle of political correctness, embodied in the show's new character, PC Principal.[99][100][101]

The Colbert Report's host Stephen Colbert often talked, satirically, about the "PC Police".[102][103]

In Hong Kong, as the 1997 handover drew nearer, greater control over the press was exercised by both owners and the Chinese state. This had a direct impact on news coverage of relatively sensitive political issues. The Chinese authorities exerted pressure on individual newspapers to take pro-Beijing stances on controversial issues.[104][105][106]Tung Chee-hwa's policy advisers and senior bureaucrats increasingly linked their actions and remarks to "political correctness." Zhaojia Liu and Siu-kai Lau, writing in The first Tung Chee-hwa administration: the first five years of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said that "Hong Kong has traditionally been characterized as having freedom of speech and freedom of press, but that an unintended consequence of emphasizing political 'correctness' is to limit the space for such freedom of expression."[107]

According to ThinkProgress, the "ongoing conversation about P.C. often relies on anecdotal evidence rather than data".[108] In 2014, researchers at Cornell University reported that political correctness increased creativity in mixed-sex work teams,[109] saying "the effort to be P.C. can be justified not merely on moral grounds but also by the practical and potentially profitable consequences."[108][clarification needed]

The term "politically correct", with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But, across the country the term "P.C.", as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.

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Political correctness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The thought police are watching you. Back in the 1990s, lots of jokes were made about political correctness, and almost everybody thought they were really funny. Unfortunately, very few people are laughing now because political correctness has become a way of life in America. If you say the wrong thing you could lose your job or you could rapidly end up in court. Every single day, the mainstream media bombards us with subtle messages that make it clear what is appropriate and what is inappropriate, and most Americans quietly fall in line with this unwritten speech code. But just because it is not written down somewhere does not mean that it isnt real. In fact, this speech code becomes more restrictive and more suffocating with each passing year. The goal of the thought Nazis is to control what people say to one another, because eventually that will shape what most people think and what most people believe. If you dont think this is true, just try the following experiment some time. Go to a public place where a lot of people are gathered and yell out something horribly politically incorrect such as I love Jesus and watch people visibly cringe. The name of Jesus has become a curse word in our politically correct society, and we have been trained to have a negative reaction to it in public places. After that, yell out something politically correct such as I support gay marriage and watch what happens. You will probably get a bunch of smiles and quite a few people may even approach you to express their appreciation for what you just said. Of course this is going to vary depending on what area of the country you live in, but hopefully you get the idea. Billions of dollars of media programming has changed the definitions of what people consider to be acceptable and what people consider to be not acceptable. Political correctness shapes the way that we all communicate with each other every single day, and it is only going to get worse in the years ahead. Sadly, most people simply have no idea what is happening to them.

The following are 20 outrageous examples that show how political correctness is taking over America

#1 According to a new Army manual, U.S. soldiers will now be instructed to avoid any criticism of pedophilia and to avoid criticizing anything related to Islam. The following is from a recent Judicial Watch article

The draft leaked to the newspaper offers a list of taboo conversation topics that soldiers should avoid, including making derogatory comments about the Taliban, advocating womens rights, any criticism of pedophilia, directing any criticism towards Afghans, mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct or anything related to Islam.

#2 The Obama administration has banned all U.S. government agencies from producing any training materials that link Islam with terrorism. In fact, the FBI has gone back and purged references to Islam and terrorism from hundreds of old documents.

#3 Authorities are cracking down on public expressions of the Christian faith all over the nation, and yet atheists in New York City are allowed to put up an extremely offensive billboard in Time Square this holiday season that shows a picture of Jesus on the cross underneath a picture of Santa with the following tagline: Keep the Merry! Dump the Myth!

#4 According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is illegal for employers to discriminate against criminals because it has a disproportionate impact on minorities.

#5 Down in California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed a bill that will allow large numbers of illegal immigrants to legally get California drivers licenses.

#6 Should an illegal immigrant be able to get a law license and practice law in the United States? That is exactly what the State Bar of California argued earlier this year

An illegal immigrant applying for a law license in California should be allowed to receive it, the State Bar of California argues in a filing to the state Supreme Court.

Sergio Garcia, 35, of Chico, Calif., has met the rules for admission, including passing the bar exam and the moral character review, and his lack of legal status in the United States should not automatically disqualify him, the Committee of Bar Examiners said Monday.

#7 More than 75 percent of the babies born in Detroit are born to unmarried women, yet it is considered to be politically correct to suggest that there is anything wrong with that.

#8 The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) initiated an aggressive advertising campaign earlier this year that included online videos, billboards, and lectures that sought to raise awareness about white privilege.

#9 At one high school down in California, five students were sent home from school for wearing shirts that displayed the American flag on the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo.

#10 Chris Matthews of MSNBC recently suggested that it is racist for conservatives to use the word Chicago.

#11 A judge down in North Carolina has ruled that it is unconstitutional for North Carolina to offer license plates that say Choose Life on them.

#12 The number of gay characters on television is at an all-time record high. Meanwhile, there are barely any strongly Christian characters to be found anywhere on television or in the movies, and if they do happen to show up they are almost always portrayed in a very negative light.

#13 House Speaker John Boehner recently stripped key committee positions from four rebellious conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is believed that this purge happened in order to send a message that members of the party better fall in line and support Boehner in his negotiations with Barack Obama.

#14 There is already a huge push to have a woman elected president in 2016. It doesnt appear that it even matters which woman is elected. There just seems to be a feeling that it is time for a woman to be elected even if she doesnt happen to be the best candidate.

#15 Volunteer chaplains for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department have been banned from using the name of Jesus on government property.

#16 Chaplains in the U.S. military are being forced to perform gay marriages, even if it goes against their personal religious beliefs. The few chaplains that have refused to follow orders know that it means the end of their careers.

#17 All over the country, the term manhole is being replaced with the terms utility hole or maintenance hole.

#18 In San Francisco, authorities have installed small plastic privacy screens on library computers so that perverts can continue to exercise their right to watch pornography at the library without children being exposed to it.

#19 You will never guess what is going on at one college up in Washington state

A Washington college said their non-discrimination policy prevents them from stopping a transgender man from exposing himself to young girls inside a womens locker room, according to a group of concerned parents.

#20 All over America, liberal commentators are now suggesting that football has become too violent and too dangerous and that it needs to be substantially toned down. In fact, one liberal columnist for the Boston Globe is even proposing that football should be banned for anyone under the age of 14.

The rest is here:

20 Outrageous Examples That Show How Political Correctness ...

Political correctness has replaced British Politics! News panel

Just a note to point out that the global financial meltdown we are experiencing now can be placed fairly and squarely at the feet of political correctness and social engineering - courtesy of the now ruling Democratic Party in the USA. While this fact is well known over there, you won't hear it mentioned in the UK, beyond Gordon Brown's mumble "..global financial crisis ... started in America...". Perhaps someone should ask him how and why it started in America! You don't believe me? Read about it and watch a video here

If you agree with what you read here, please help civilisation by linking to this site whenever and wherever you can. After all (to paraphrase Edmund Burke) for political correctness to triumph it only requires that sensible people do nothing!

Have you ever stopped to wonder why 40% of people don't bother to vote anymore? Have you ever stopped to wonder why, which ever party is in power, nothing ever gets any better? Have you ever stopped to wonder why all the three major political parties in the UK have broadly the same policies? The answer is simple - political correctness. This left wing ideology has very cleverly, and by stealth, replaced British politics. The PC Brigade effectively hold a gun to the head of political parties - none of the main parties now dare suggest any policy that is not politically correct otherwise the PC Brigade will label them the 'nasty' party. Witness the Conservative party policy U turns. In a desperate effort to lose their 'nasty' party label they have become Blue Labour, a slightly diluted form of New Labour!

So we now have the three main parties all occupying the same small piece of 'centre ground'. Many people don't vote on the grounds that it is pointless - you will get the same whoever wins. Some people don't vote because they realise that politically correct policies are what has got us into this mess in the first place.

Other people don't vote because they realise that career politicians are a self seeking, corrupt bunch of freeloaders who they wouldn't trust to run their whelk stall while they were on holiday. Notice that I say career politicians - this is the new breed of politicians that haven't ever entered the real world of work. They have left school, gone to university and then blagged a job as a 'research assistant' to a MP before realising that with most of our laws now made abroad, the job was such a well paid doddle that they could do it themselves. They have never had to hold down a proper job, they have no management or other skills, hold no real political views and tend to migrate to whichever party looks most likely to win power. To survive in this fantasy environment all you need to do is to be politically correct. You can read more about this, the political parties and how the New Labour ministers got there under Politicians/ Parties on the navigation bar.

So what is political correctness, how did it start and how did it become so successful? Political correctness is first and foremost an attack on free speech, clear thinking and discussion. Political correctness is perpetrated by the left in politics as a cover for their flawed ideology - a sort of cultural Marxism. By cloaking their strange ideas under the cover of not wishing to offend anyone (which naturally appeals to peoples' better nature), they try to bypass debate and give a 'received wisdom' which must not be questioned. And anyone who disagrees with this 'received wisdom' must therefore be a really nasty person and deserves to be ostracised by their peers. This peer pressure is instrumental in enforcing and expanding political correctness.

For example, if you question whether unfettered immigration into this country is necessarily a good thing or perhaps whether immigrants should be health checked, then you must be a nasty bigoted 'Little Englander'. Come on everyone - shout him down with cries of 'racist'. Of course, only the hard of thinking could be drawn into this charade - anyone with an ounce of common sense can see right through it.

So how did it all start? Political Correctness started in a think tank (called The Frankfurt School) in Germany in 1923. The purpose was to find a solution to the biggest problem facing the implementers of communism in Russia. Why wasn't the wonderful idea of communism spreading? Read the short history here, the full history and purpose here or watch a 22 minute documentary here.

The Frankfurt school recommended (amongst other things):

Sound all too familiar? Yes - Great Britain 1997 onwards......

The basic idea is to make the country wholly dependent on the State. By the dumbing down of education, the creation of huge state sector employment and large scale immigration, New Labour has effectively created a captive audience to vote for them or Blue Labour, should the Conservatives actually get back into power.

If the Conservatives did get back into power, nothing much would change. David Cameron has already shown his true politically correct credentials many times but none so shamelessly as when he sacked the well respected Patrick Mercer, just for speaking the truth. Patrick Mercer wasn't being a racist, he was just commenting on how in Army life you get picked on if you have some different feature whether it is black skin, ginger hair, being fat or just lazy. My Father did me a great service many years ago when pointed out that 'sticks & stones would break my bones but names would never hurt me'. Thanks for instilling some common sense in me, Dad!

But of course, political correctness has made common sense a thing of the past. If you catch a burglar in your house then it's probably best to help the poor soul by carrying your possessions to the front door lest he should trip up and hurt himself and it's you that end up in court!

After all, you won't get much help from the Police, who have been effectively neutralised by the fast tracking of university graduates whose only experience of life has been obtained in the liberal atmosphere of education. Probably best not to complain to them about their lack of attendance when your car has been vandalised or you will probably get a letter back from a Superintendent pointing out that vandals are victims as well (read it here). And just in case any real policemen still exist, the Politically Correct Brigade has turned the Police Force in on itself by claims of institutional racism.

If they do actually succeed in getting a villain into court (only 1 for every 100 crimes committed) then the Magistrates hand out such lenient sentences (as laid down by the very Politically Correct 'sentencing advisory panel') that there is no deterrent. If you do end up in prison (extremely unlikely as New Labour have deliberately refused to build anything like enough new places) the prison officers are told to call you by your first name and not say anything that may upset you! As your cell is now your home, you are allowed to smoke there but Prison Officers who want to search it for drugs now have to give you 30 mins notice of their visit so that they don't put themselves at risk from the smoke oh and also to give you enough time to move your drugs elsewhere. Just in case you do get bored, you can keep yourself amused by repeatedly taking the prison governor to court over trivial matters that you think violate your human rights (no pornography etc) - all paid for by lega
l aid!

Travellers can descend upon your area, dump old cars and shit everywhere with impunity. You try doing it in your front garden and see what happens! They are allowed to bypass the normal planning controls that are so strictly enforced on the rest of us and cost local councils hundreds of thousands of pounds in court cases and clean-ups. Who pays? Why you do of course - just check your council tax bill!

Illegal immigrants (if caught) are rarely deported. Those that are deported are just the more honest ones who don't know how to play the system or haven't been coached by the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns which is funded by your lottery money! Oh and have you got a long way to come to get here? Why not hijack an airliner for the trip? Don't worry, we will still let you stay!

Would you like a black coffee? NO! You can't say that! It's coffee without milk and Local Authorities spend a fortune of our money on making their employees attend courses on Newspeak and Diversity training!

Our British humour has suffered badly. We can't tell jokes anymore in case it's considered racist or it upsets anyone. Don't these Politically Correct people realise that the clue is in the word "joke",which my dictionary quite rightly defines as "something said in fun or jest" or "to say something in fun or teasing rather than in earnest?"

Try organising an event or trip and you find yourself tied up in the endless red tape created by the Health & Safety Executive. These people are all part of the 'Nanny State' (state control) which insists in sticking its nose into every aspect of our lives and telling us how to live it!

Just in case there is anyone left in the country that might still be enjoying themselves - let's ban smoking, fox hunting and let feminists launch a totally unfounded attack on men as rapists.

That is the sad state of the UK today. But overwhelmed by their own success with political correctness, the left have something else just as sinister up their sleeve so they can expand their power and control over us even more - the Great Global Warming scam! Same methodology - an idea to appeal to peoples' better nature - let's save the planet - and the same way of enforcing it by peer pressure. Just watch what happens to any scientist who breaks ranks or disagrees - they get the same treatment that Galileo got from the medieval church. David Bellamy was the first I think. It takes a brave man (or a self sufficient one) to come out against these things publicly when you know your future livelihood may be at risk.

Politically correct people can't stand reality or see that things have evolved to be as they are for good reasons. Politically correct people remind me of ostriches - they bury their heads in the sand and then proceed to talk out of the only orifice that still remains above ground.

So don't let anyone fool you that political correctness is just about being "nice to people", tolerant and treating them with proper respect. That's called good manners. Political correctness has been deliberately designed to subvert free speech, debate and common sense, replacing these with a ruthlessly enforced set of left wing ideas. Far from being tolerant, politically correct people are the most intolerant of all people and have the worst manners. They refuse to debate subjects (as their views don't stand up to the most elementary scrutiny), preferring just to scream abuse at you.

To read more about how political correctness has replaced British politics and how it affects specific subjects, just select them on the sidebar. In case you get too depressed doing so, I have included some lighter reading as well.

This site will highlight absurd incidents of political correctness wherever they may occur. If you see some insane occurrence of Political Correctness or agree / disagree with anything you read on here then please send me an email info@politicallyincorrect.me.uk - but I reserve the right to publish them.

Read more from the original source:

Political correctness - the awful truth

Wikipedia Commons - Credit: Michael Vadon

You cant watch television these days without hearing people talk about political correctness. The term is constantly used and misused to many ends. Donald Trumps campaign revels in the idea of a need to be rid of political correctness and not-so-subtly proposes that this concept is destroying America. His message is clear. If we want to make America great again, we need to ignore the liberal agenda that bars us from offending anyone and ignores the truth. Political correctness is the reason why people no longer speak their minds and is to blame for the surge of Mexican immigrants destroying America. The danger of this refreshing idea that we need to stop being politically correct is it became a kind of code-speak for racism and bullying. Trump claimed that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, that John McCain wasnt a hero because he was captured, and compared Ben Carsons temper (also a champion of political incorrectness) to child molestation. However inane and unfounded in fact Trump is, his blatant disregard of political correctness is a large part of his popularity that has lasted much longer than any reasonable person would have assumed was possible some months back.

But Trump is for the crazies and the nave. I still believe if he goes against Hillary in the general election, itll be the most devastating blow to the Republican party, since Watergate, if not ever. Most of the semi-rational minds in his party agree with this assessment. In spite of this, Trump has locked onto two key ideas are that are too powerful to ignore. Firstly, that the government is bought and sold by corporations and secondly, that political correctness is a cancer on the heart of America and the modern world. When I speak of political correctness, I dont believe in blaming Mexican immigrants for the decline in American greatness, or the right to call women pigs judged solely by the merits of their bone structure, but I do believe political correctness is making honest discourse more and more difficult, if not impossible.

When I began thinking about how I would address this topic, I wanted to relate Trump to the sentimental narratives in the culture that the older white male demographic was fed up with. Things that I agree and disagree with to varying degrees, like the new ideal that there needs to be a term called cis gender to relate to the 99.7% of the population that is not transgender and whether, or whether or not it is racist to place minority actors in subordinate roles to white characters (taxi drivers, maids, etc.) in television and film. I wanted to explore whether Effie, the producer on Project Greenlight, was crazy for freaking out about a black man cast as a limo driver in the very bad movie they were producing. Then I wanted to counterbalance that point with Aziz Ansaris brilliantly funny, ideologically sound depiction of a childhood where all the Indian characters were racist caricatures on Master of None. How could we find the balance in society without limiting the freedom of the artists making the movies?

I was interested in the ridiculous notion that movies should not be judged on their aesthetic merits, but on their ideological aims. Specifically, I wanted to tackle the absurd notion that the internet was aghast at Quentin Tarantino when he said in an interview profile by Bret Easton Ellis that Selma should have won an Emmy, comparing the Martin Luther King biopic to a TV movie, and compare that to the fury aimed at Francine Prose sixteen years ago for making the shocking statement that Maya Angelous heavily metaphor-laden prose was bad writing. And then came Paris.

In the grand scheme of things, does anyone really care that self-important filmmakers usually win awards over better filmmakers? It no longer felt all that important to discuss the aesthetic merits of a few heavily lauded minority writers and filmmakers (some good and some bad). I know that its not racist to have aesthetic problems with 12 Years a Slave or Schindlers List (or any film for that matter), because I look at films in a nuanced way the general population doesnt care to. I know it is un-American to not let someone have a poor opinion about a movie tackling social issues. Then I came to the conclusion that the very levers that make it racist to criticize a fairly good movie about Martin Luther King also are to blame for the fact it is considered racist by some to criticize Europe opening its doors to 60,000,000 refugees.

I know that social progress comes with some speed bumps, as people navigate the politically correct means of delivering messages. One day you can say something one way and the next, only a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner can say it. I get it. America has a long history of racism, sexism and has been fairly horrible to most if not all minorities at some time or another and this horrifyingly continues to this day in spite of the best intentions of the majority of Americans. In our attempt to improve this undignified treatment of everyone excepting white males with money in their pockets, we need to alter language to ensure we dont hurt each other quite as much. For the most part this is a good thing. The problem with political correctness is that it tends to ignore nuance and truth in the service of not hurting feelings.

Generally these little hiccups that disallow opinions are not so important. The problem with political correctness broadly is that people cannot criticize anything or anyone in a disadvantaged situation, for fear of going against the corporatized politically correct narrative. Sometimes when I defend Israel, I feel like Im living in 1984. This is part of the reason Israel gets blamed for everything going on in Gaza, instead of Hamas and the other neighboring Arab nations, and it is entirely the reason that the backward Fundamentalist Muslim beliefs of hundreds of millions of the nearly two billion Muslims in the world get a free pass. We have been conditioned to believe that criticizing anything to do with a minority is fundamentally wrong. The forward thinking people have also been trained to believe that any idea coming from the right is entirely wrong. Again, a lack of nuance.

As a child of the 90s, I was indoctrinated with political correctness from an early age. One day in third grade, we were led into an assembly where we heard the thoughts of a well-meaning person Upper Middle Class woman explaining prejudice to my mostly-white Upper Middle Class Connecticut elementary school. We heard a woman consider what it was to be politically correct and why it was necessary not to call black people black. Instead, we were supposed to say African American. We were told discrimination was wrong. Towards the end, she kind of lost track of her argument and went on a soliloquy about judgment. How we should be prejudiced in our decision-making. That it was necessary to prejudge things from our experience. She gave the example of buying a car and not buying an English car because the prejudiced opinion was that those cars often had engine failure and a boatload of others problems. However, we should not make the same judgments about people.

In spite of all a lot of the other nonsense she was spewing, she was right. Individuals should always be given the benefit of the doubt. It is patently wrong to prejudge them. However, it is not patently wrong to examine the ideologies that influence these people. When we look at Paris, we should remember that Fundamentalist Islam is responsible for the death of Charlie Hebdo last year and 129 more last week. We cant
blindly follow the liberal agenda that it was a heroic act to allow tens of millions of Muslims, many of whom have been infected with Fundamentalist ideology, into Europe and expect everything to run smoothly. We cannot let our well-meaning liberal intentions confuse us into blindly accepting cultures that oppress people and endanger the freedoms we fought so hard to attain and are still fighting for. As much as I would like to help those being oppressed by ISIS, if we do not look at the world realistically for fear of offending people, what values of freedom will we be fighting for?

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Political Correctness - Blogs - Jerusalem Post