Category Archives: Political Correctness

Ferguson is still in the news. Its a political correctness issue now and its amazing how long the reach is of out-of-control sensitivity.

Ferguson officials are being criticized for using a Humvee in a police program to educate children about the dangers of drugs. Residents told the city council that using a Humvee for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program is insensitive. Police vehicles, including Humvees, were used to restore peace during the protests over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014.

The police chief said the Humvee was chosen because it is an attention-grabber. Good idea, we say.

Should police be banned in Ferguson because they are a reminder of the shooting incident?

Then another concern in Ferguson is about the name of the DARE mascot, called Daren the Lion. The officer who shot Brown was Darren Wilson, who resigned over the shooting death. He was cleared of any wrongdoing. Police Commander Frank McCall says the name is used nationally and has no connection to the shooting.

Whats next? Change the name of Ferguson because the name is a reminder of the protests that occurred after the shooting?

Read more:

Ferguson Political Correctness - The Missourian

Aftonbladet/ZUMA Press/NewscomPewDiePie, the biggest Youtube star you've probably never heard of (especially if you're older than 30), just lost his Disney contracta source of millions of dollars in revenueover allegations of anti-Semitism.

It's an easy, even obvious, storyline for this season of Life as We Know It Right Now, given increasing awareness of the alt-right movement and its penchant for overt pro-Nazi displays. The kids are not alrightthey're flocking to their computers to share Pepe the frog memes and tell jokes about sending Jewish writers to the gas chambers. And on and on.

For many, PewDiePie's downfall will probably feel gratifying: yes, there are limits to how far this sort of behavior can progress. For others, his belated comeuppance is insufficient, and does nothing to address the toxicity of teenage (particularly white) male online culture. In a lengthy essay for BuzzFeed, writer Jacob Clifton laments "that 'edgelords,' the boys and men who group together online for the explicit proliferation of hate speech and misogyny, will almost inevitably keep pushing the line until they end up in a truly dark place."

"This is about understanding what lies beneath this dark side of the internet, and how to stop it," writes Clifton.

But Clifton's essay makes little effort to understand the phenomenon he's describing. And he offers absolutely no advice for how to stop it. Here's how his article ends:

PewDiePie is a symptom of a majority illness, but because he accidentally got rich, we seem content to let the buck stop with him. His downfall feels anti-capitalist, it feels nonconformist, it makes us feel all the things we love to feel when trying to prove we're better than. But the truth is that the soil this stuff grows in is the reality of our country and world, and we will go on encouraging this behavior, and these thoughts, until they bear their fruit.

The reason for that is terrible, and quite simple: because the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage from Gamergate to Anonymous, WikiLeaks to the Fappening, all the proliferating forms of alt-right confusion and rage you couldn't possibly discern from that of even the least radical right is so repugnant that it's nearly impossible to see through. But we won't heal, and they won't heal, if we don't try. Their pain is pathetic, but watch how it spreads.

The reason Clifton doesn't actually offer a solution to this problem is probably because there isn't one: it's just so much broader, and more permanent, than Clifton notes here. Young men have always acted out in unpredictable and frustrating ways: the alt-right is just the current manifestation of "white male rage."

That's not an excuseI'm not saying boys will be boys as if it isn't a problem, because sometimes it is. Rather, I'm saying that boys doing stupid, irksome things has always been a problem. We don't really have any evidence that the problem is getting more substantialand I'd have a hard time believing that the average white male between the ages of 15 and 25 is worse behaved now than he was 50 years ago, given the decline in violence and crime in generalbut we're paying more attention to it now because it's chosen the form of an easy political narrative: ahhh, look at all the Nazi kids who love Trump!

When I was in high school, other boys loved to draw penises on everything. It's a weird fact, but there it is. If you left your notebook unsupervised, even for a moment, you would soon find it covered in dicks. Why a bunch of teenage boysall of whom insisted, loudly and frequently, that they weren't gaywould enjoy drawing pictures of the male reproductive organ mystified me at the time, as it still does today.

Teenage boys are probably still drawing dicks, but they're also writing #MAGA and Build the Wall and creating Pepe memes. Teachers call it the Trump effect, as if young men were perfectly well-behaved until Trump came along. Again, we don't know that bullying has gotten worse, and to the extent we can measure it, schoolyard bullying seems to be falling over time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

It's true that a certain kind of bullyingthe anti-Semitic, pro-Trump, alt-right kindis more noticeable than it was before. We probably shouldn't discount the possible political implications of this. It would be wrong, of course, to pretend that white nationalism isn't making any sort of comeback. But we also shouldn't pretend that the kids are doomed because they currently prefer a different kind of sick humor than they used to. Again, teenagers were always laughing at incredibly inappropriate thingsthat thing just happens to be PewDiePie's awful jokes, at the moment.

This was, essentially, the defense offered by PewDiePiereal name Felix Kjellberg, who made $15 million last year saying dumb things on the internet. Kjellberg is a blond-haired blue-eyed Swede, but as far as I can tell, he's not actually an anti-Semite, Trump supporter, alt-right, member, or Breitbart contributor. He landed himself in hot water because, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, he made as many as nine anti-Semitic jokes in his videos.

The following example is illustrative. There are online services that allow you to pay random people halfway around the world to do or say whatever you want. PewDiePie decided to test one of these services outlong story short, two tribal-looking fellows unfurled a banner that read "Death to All Jews" as PewDiePie exclaims "I didn't think they would actually do it." He recorded both thingsthe incident, and his own reactionand posted in on Youtube.

Funny? Not really. Offensive? Sure. Evidence of deep-seated anti-Semitic animus? Well, that might be a stretch. Here's how PewDiePie defended himself:

Mr. Kjellberg defended himself from criticism in a Jan. 17 video, saying "I think there's a difference between a joke and actual like... death to all Jews. If I made a video saying"Mr. Kjellberg then quickly cuts to a close-up of his face illuminated brightly"Hey guys, PewDiePie here. Death to all Jews, I want you to say after me: Death to all Jews. And, you know, Hitler was right. I really opened my eyes to white power. And I think it is time we did something about this." The video then zooms back out and he adds: "That is how they're essentially reporting this, as if that's what I was saying."

One gathers, if you believe PewDiePie's explanation, that he could have used any edgy statement, like "Bush did 9/11." Why can't anyone take a joke anymore? is the underlying theme.

I'm reminded of the most recent season of South Park (spoilers to follow). One of its main plots involved Gerald Broflovski being unmasked as an internet troll. He enjoys shrieking at people online, telling them to kill themselves, and photoshopping penises over their faces. Why? Because it's funny, he claims. Later, when other trolls try to recruit him into their group, he insists he isn't one of them. What they do to people is horrible and stupidhe's not like them at all. What Gerald does is funny, he claims. Still later, when the villain of the season attempts to troll the entire U.S., Gerald challenges him. Join me, the villain offers Gerald, and together we will troll the world. But Gerald is horrified by the villain's plans and kills him. "Fuck you," Gerald says. "What I do is fucking funny, bitch."

This gagGerald insisting that his actions are fundamentally different because his horrible trolling is funnyperfectly encapsulates the teenage male attitude, and PewDiePie's humor. Stupid, random, shitty things are selectively funny to kids, and always have been. There's no ideology here beyond typical teen nastiness.

Disney, of course, is well within its rights to can PewDiePie for any reasonand not wanting to be associated with Nazi humor is a reason I support. It is not censorship when one private actor refuses to endorse or fund the speech of another private actor. It's just business. We shouldn't treat Kjellberg like a victimof political correctness, or of anything else. Even without Disney and Youtube, he's still a 28-year-old millionaire with a sizeable audience. He can clean up his act and try again.

Nor should we forget the fact that the White House is currently occupied by someone whose foremost advisor was the boss of an online media hub that deliberately and successfully catered to an alt-right audience. I share some of Clifton's concern that "the whiny self-importance and self-indulgence of white male rage" has taken a particularly pernicious form at the moment. But I wouldn't be surprised if it fizzles out on its own and the kids go back to drawing dicks.

More:

PewDiePie: Alt-Right Nazi, Victim of Political Correctness, or Just an Idiot? - Reason (blog)

Don Ashworth, in his column of Jan. 28-29 (Our nation must get the controls under control), is his customary hyperventilating self, e.g. a complex astray when array would work better there and compliance verses law when versus would be more appropriate.

I assume these are mistakes of writer and editor.

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Originally posted here:

'Political correctness' mostly used as epithet - Walton Tribune

Last year, a friend alerted me to an opinion article which included the unusual story of Tim Hunt, a Nobel-Prize winning chemist.

At a conference in Korea, Hunt ventured regrettably outside of his expertise. He complained that having young women in the lab was a distraction. Older men like himself tended to fall in love with them. Moreover, Hunt claimed that girls could not take criticism without crying.

For a great chemist, we see, Hunt makes an awful social commentator. What is striking about the story is what happened next.

The story, as they say, went viral on social media. Someone tweeted the remarks, or uploaded the video online. The next thing he knew, Hunt was being stood down from his role at UCL, Nobel-Prize-notwithstanding.

I found myself reminded as I read this of another unlikely story: the first novel of the Czech author Milan Kundera, The Joke. In this story, the main character vents his discontents with a Stalinist indoctrination camp in a mocking postcard to his girlfriend:

Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

The Party censors intercepted the postcard, and did not find it amusing. Instead, Ludvik gets expelled from university and forced into military service in the mines.

To be sure, the comparison of the two stories is not perfect. Hunt was not sent to a labor camp, and the position he lost was honorary. So, unlike Ludvik, his material wellbeing and that of his family was not directly affectedonly his good name. Hunt was also not joking, as far as anyone could tell.

Tim Hunt, the chemist stood down by UCL for his comments about women and laboratories.

Nevertheless, Hunts story is far from singular in the age of social media.

All around the world, stories of academics, media figures or employees being stood down by their employers after having been subjected to a kind of instantaneous prosecution by social media seems to be one of the signs of the Neuzeit.

For critics on the Right, Hunts and comparable stories show the dark, illiberal heart of what they call political correctness: a censorious culture preventing people speaking their minds on anything to do with matters of race, religion or gender. Many of these same critics (and, on the other side, Bernie Sanders) have also pointed to Mr Trumps ostentatious disregard for such political correctness as one explanation for his 2016 catapult to power.

So whats going on behind the increasing frequency of cases like Hunts: of people losing their jobs for what they have said aloneeven, as in Hunts case, when the words in question neither reflect his professional expertise, nor target any particular individual? Are we entering a new period of social censorship, with dark historical precedents and echoes?

And what is rumbling away beneath the deep sense of grievance that underlies conservative commentators strident charges of political correctness against their opponents?

One role philosophy can play in such divisive debates is to try to clearly show each warring side the reasons of the adversary, and the paradoxes and problems within their own. Such, at least, is what Albert Camus proposed in the midst of the Algerian war in 1956. Camus attempt to restore a climate that could lead to healthy debate might today be tweeted with the hashtag: #tell-him-hes-dreaming.

But not all dreams are bad for being illusory.

Alls fair

For people labelled by conservative commentators as politically correct, their position looks quite different than the polemical tag implies.

What the Right calls political correctness describes the championing of a series of positions associated with the New Left. These positions hinge on the observation that the modern ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity are imperfectly enshrined in countries like Australia, the UK or the US.

Behind the advertised equality of all to trade, real material inequalities are produced and perpetuated, leading to deep divisions of class.

Behind appeals to equality of opportunity, gender inequality hasnt gone away. Its deep bases are revealed, amongst other places (continuing pay differentials also leap to mind) by the gendered nouns in public documents that for a long time simply excluded women from the franchise as in we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal

Beneath the same language of equality, all-too-real inequalities exist between different ethnic and religious groups within pluralist societies like Australia. Lesbian and gay men and women for a long time faced laws that actively prohibited their forms of sexuality.

The New Left argument is that the cultural, economic and social discrimination against women, LGBT and non-anglosaxon members of our communities targeted them specifically on grounds of their belonging to those groups.

As such, it makes sense that a society which would redress these wrongs needs to legislate forms of positive discrimination, likewise targeting these groups specifically.

We should also educate for and enshrine new norms, attentive to the linguistic and other forms of discrimination that for far too long went without saying.

Given this reasoning, people of the New Left are likely to respond with outrage to the imputation that what they are promoting is a new form of waspish, quasi-Stalinist groupthink.

Their question is more likely to be: who could reasonably oppose these reforms, except people who still harbour older forms of prejudice, or feel threatened by the new forms of inclusivity the New Left has championed?

Camus held that philosophers could explain the reasons of adversaries in heated disputes, reopening possibilities of dialogue.

In love and war

There can be little doubt that many people who oppose progressive social reforms like marriage equality do so out of unavowed or avowed hostility to different minority groups.

Some of this group almost certainly are sympathetic to deeply illiberal political positions on the farther Right, and opposed to many of the social and immigration reforms that Australia has undertaken since the 1960s.

But not all people who contest these issues can fairly be so categorised. Many are deeply offended by any imputation that they are unreasonable, sexist, homophobic, racist or Islamophobic for defending conservative causes. Many base their positions on religious traditions with which they deeply identify.

And so we come to the first register of the political correctness charge. The argument goes something like this.

The impulses underlying forms of positive discrimination towards disadvantaged groups may be generous. Their flipside is a paradoxical intolerance towards everyone who disagrees with proposed policies or reforms.

This intolerance, critics allege, is manifest in a tendency to pathologise opponents: arguing as if they were all, equally and deeply flawed or bad people: racists, sexists, fascists, etc.

Rather than arguing the case against opponents of their positions, the politically correct silence them, critics claim. Or, in the age of social media, they spark campaigns that publicly shame them, even when their offences are not grave.

Enter Tim Hunt and company, if not Milan Kundera.

Certainly, there is a touch of the pot calling the kettle black about these complaints. For to call your opponents en bloc politically correct is hardly to celebrate their supple rationality and intrepid independence of spirit.

It remains true that any political sides demonising its opponents is a poor substitute for defeating them in open debate, predicated on a minimum of shared respect for the rules of the democratic game.

And so, the critics of political correctness point to cases on American campuses where activists have not let speakers from the Right speak at all, as opposed to engaging them in debate. For these critics, these shut-outs bespeak a campus craziness that threatens to close the universities to conservative viewpoints altogether.

Student rally against Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopolos scheduled talk at Berkeley earlier this year.

The same critics point to the idea which has currency on some American campuses of trigger warnings surrounding potentially upsetting content for different potential audiences. Such warnings, and the attempt to create safe spaces in which no one could be triggered by upsetting contents, do not promote the free and open exchange of ideas on divisive issues, the critics charge. Debate is not won (or lost) this way. It is shut down before it can begin.

And this, the critics continue, is to give way too much power to wordswhich are not sticks and stones, even in the culture wars. It is also to under-rate the capacity of people to confront and debate difficult content, instead encouraging a culture of victimisation and ultra-sensitivity to verbal and vicarious harm.

Supporters of trigger warnings reply that it is very easy for privileged white males to decide what should and should not be open to free and open debate. Theyve been doing this for centuries.

It is surely for the people whose identities are at stake in potentially disturbing materialfor people of colour, for example, in a text on racial violencesto decide what is and is not disturbing to them.

Lefts and rifts, old and new

This last response points to the deeper philosophical fault-lines underlying the political correctness wars. The positions of the New Left can, and do, take two different kinds of justifications with very different philosophical credentials and histories.

For one, the defence of equal dignity for all persons, no matter from which ethnic, racial, class or gender they hail, is justified precisely by appeal to what is shared between them, regardless of their differences.

Martin Luther Kings famous line expressing the hope that one day, in America, his children will be judged by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin, is a powerful expression of this kind of justification of civil rights reform.

A second kind of justification for New Left positions is very different. This justification is not based in an appeal to common or putatively universal values.

It argues that the modern Wests ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity have, in their history, been used to justify such horrible intolerance and violences against Others that these ideals themselves can no longer be reasonably defended.

Indeed, it is to the extent that particular groups, different from the mainstream, have been unjustly excluded from the communities propounding these ideals that they should be celebrated, and their claims supported.

The preceding opposition, roughly, charts the difference between liberal or socialist, modernist forms of Leftist politics, and post-liberal, post-socialist forms of Leftist politics (roughly, post-modernism).

The modernists appeal to what different groups share is vulnerable to the charge of what Stanley Fish memorably called boutique multiculturalism. The boutique multiculturalist tolerates and defends the rights of minorities only insofar as their ways of living do not harm and discriminate against any others.

The moment that this other culture asserts discriminatory claims or practices illiberal rites (like female circumcision, for instance), this kind of multiculturalists tolerance runs out, and turns into its opposite. Why any of this implies that proponents of this position are in a boutique, Fish does not argue.

The second, postmodernist form of multiculturalism, which defends difference for differences sake, also has its own endemic paradoxes. If we support all different or Other groups on grounds of their difference, without further conditions, we soon find ourselves committed to supporting groups who are different from us, trulybut who express their difference by deep hostility to the kinds of toleration we are extending to them.

Stanley Fish, who coined the contentious term boutique multiculturalism

At this point, we either recoil back into a modernist position, inconsistently; or consistently bite the bullet and end up by supporting deeply illiberal, difference-hostile cultures.

Needless to say, the conservative commentariat have made hay over the last several decades by pointing up examples of this latter paradox, and its potentially disturbing corollaries. They have pushed it at times into extremely contentious claims about the New Lefts supposed support for forms of Islamic fundamentalism, and the like.

This is also where sweeping neoconservative claims about the New Left enshrining an adversary culture opposed to the entire Western civilization have made their way into magazines and opinion pages around the globe.

Inter alia

Let me finish by squaring the circle, and by highlighting that all opponents of political correctness do not identify as on the Right, although almost everyone on the socially conservative Right today probably identities themselves as being opposed to political correctness.

In fact, leading Leftist philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek have both presented scathing criticisms of the postmodern valorisation of difference and Otherness as a dead end for the Left.

What differentiates ieks criticisms of political correctness from those on the Right (I am going to be generous to him here) is that he thinks that, in several senses, political correctness doesnt go far enough.

Political correctness, iek charges, puts the cart before the horse, when it promotes codes of speaking and a series of polite, symbolic gestures respecting the Other which are not matched by real social changes.

Before we attend so closely to what people say, iek contends, we should first redress the real living conditions of disadvantaged people. Only then will what critics call politically correct ways of speaking no longer seem artificial and constrictive (as he thinks they do seem), and become the natural reflection of an expanded social contract.

Liberal American critic Mark Lilla, in a recent piece, has differently called for a post-identity liberalism. To win majorities in democracies, Lilla argues, the Left has to appeal to shared values. To build a platform around celebrating differences ends by dividing without conquering. This is what Hilary Clintons Democrats learned the hard way last year.

If the Democrats are to win back power, after four or eight years of Donald Trump, the politically correct attention to differences sans phrase will need to give way to a new language of shared struggles and ideals.

Stanley Fish might see such an opposition to postmodernist identity politics as a reversion to boutique liberalism. For Lilla, it is a matter of mathematics and hard-minded realpolitik.

Disclosure

Matthew Sharpe works at Deakin University, which is holding a public debate on "Political correctness, free speech in the age of Social Media" on the evening of 23rd February, featuring Peter Baldwin, Adam Bandt, Edward Santow and Maria Rae.

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See the article here:

Words, Tweets and Stones in the "Political Correctness" Wars ... - EconoTimes

Political correctness advances liberal ideologyit is a weapon wielded by radicals to cow conservatives into submission. And the doctrines of political correctness undermine the truth.

According to liberal illogic, individuals who oppose the slaughter of unborn infants obstruct womens rights and reproductive justice.

Intolerant/homophobic individuals who adhere to biblical teachings on gender and sexuality face the wrath of the loving and tolerant LGBTQ lobby.

Americans who believe that government should enforce immigration laws and secure the nations borders are branded as anti-immigrant, xenophobic bigots.

And despite the never-ending stream of Islamic terrorist attacks at home and abroad, those who warn about the potential dangers of Islamic immigration are derided as Islamaphobic.

Notice the theme? Political correctness combats the truth by condemning conservative views and advancing liberal ideology.

Is it anti-immigrant and xenophobic to advocate for the government to secure its borders or to guard against Islamic terrorists? Is it a breach of civil rights to oppose the modern abortion holocaust or to denounce all forms of sexual immorality? No, but holding to any of those views represents a departure from the doctrines of political correctness, and thus, a challenge to liberal ideology.

Until the nation is radically transformed, leftist protestors will likely continue to agitate and unleash their ever-ready arsenal of attacks against those who deviate from the dogma of political correctness. But conservative Americans must refuse to acquiescethey must stand up for the truth:

Amidst a cacophony of politically correct propaganda conservative Americans must counter the lefts radical ideology by speaking the truth.

Alex Nitzberg is a conservative journalist who previously interned at the American Journalism Center at Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Read the rest here:

Political Correctness Propagates Radical Liberalism and Undermines The Truth - Accuracy In Media (blog)

Donald Trump, holding a photo of himself beside, as he might say, a "dog."Sara D. DavisGetty Images

The Republican Convention has barely begun, and the party has already made clear its primary political foe. Of course potshots will be taken at the "mainstream media," liberals and Hillary Clinton. But what did several of last night's convention speakersfrom Duck Dynasty 's Willie Robertson to Real World 's Sean Duffyregard as the real enemy? Political correctness.

You might have heard: America is plagued by "political correctness run amok." We were told this by Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, when he tried to defend his old boss for tweeting an anti-Semitic Internet meme depicting a Star of David atop a pile of cash. The origins of that meme were recently discovered to be a message board of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who presumably agree with Lewandowski. After all, they titled their message board, "Politically Incorrect."

We were told by Republicans, after the hideous, hate-fueled mass shooting by an ISIS-idolizing lunatic in Orlando, easy access to guns was not even partly to blame. Then what was? Political correctness! According to the logic of a top NRA official, who was widely parroted by Republican lawmakers, the Obama administrations political correctness prevented anything from being done about the shooters racist ramblings.

When the elephant ate its own tail, and members of his own party panned Trump for exploiting the tragedy with offensive and egomaniacal tweets, we were told the criticism was misplaced. The real culprit? We cant afford to be politically correct anymore, said Trump.

Political correctness has been a whipping boy of the right wing for decades, and lately Trump is cracking the whip with abandon. He recently told a group of evangelical leaders that they shouldnt pray for President Obama because We cant be politically correct and say we pray for all of our leaders, because all of your leaders are selling Christianity down the tubes. (Never mind that Trump places prayer within the scope of self-interested transactions.) Remember his response to Fox host Megyn Kelly when she asked him about his temperament after calling some women dogs and fat pigs? It was : I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. After being skewered by all sides for racist comments about a federal judge? We have to stop being so politically correct in this country.

If you're like many Americans, you might have been persuaded political correctness is one of our country's primary problems. Trump badly wants you to believe this, but you'd be wrong to do so. Trump is effectively positioning himself as the anti-PC candidate. Whereas Hillary Clinton thinks and speaks in the strategicand sometimes subtlelanguage of diplomacy, Trump explicitly proposes himself as undiplomatic and politically incorrect. In doing so, he is cheapening and polarizing our political debates and, more important, he is making our country less safe.

You might think politicians speak in too much coded language, designed to cloak their true positions and to avoid offending everyone. But lets be clear: The opposite of political correctness is not unvarnished truth-telling. It is political expression that is careless toward the beliefs and attitudes different than ones own. In its more extreme fashion, it is incivility, indecency or vulgarity. These are the true alternatives to political correctness. These are the traits that Trump tacitly touts when he criticizes political correctness. And these are the essential attributes of Trumps candidacy.

This is not the first time our political discourse has been crass. When he traveled to the United States fifty years after the nation gained its independence, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a vulgar turn of mind among American journalists. Journalists back in France often wrote in an eloquent and lofty manner but, according to Tocqueville, the typical American journalist made an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals. Sound familiar? This vulgarity might have been characteristic of that eras journalists, who brazenly competed for readers and hadn't yet developed common standards of professionalism and ethics. But it wasnt characteristic of the types of Americans who sought the nations highest political office.

Trumps vulgarity is so vivid, in part, because it contrasts so starkly with Barack Obama's civility and cool-headedness. I predict that the more Trump debases our political climate with his brand of political incorrectness, the more we will come to appreciate the qualities our president embodies. Regular Obama critic David Brooks recently praised the president for his ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance. Yet when the president challenges us to disagree without being disagreeable and to be careful not to conflate an entire religion with the hateful ideology that seeks to exploit and debase that religion, we watch as his detractors accuse him of political correctness.

You probably heard the accusations: Obama is pussyfooting around the phrase radical Islam because hed rather protect the feelings of terrorists rather than the lives of Americans. Or something like that. On one hand, the intense scrutiny on the presidents language reveals a conspicuous lack of substantive criticism of the presidents foreign policy. As President Obama wondered aloud in a recent press conference, What exactly would using this label accomplish? Would it make ISIL less committed to killing more Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? Of course not. It is, as the president said, a distraction a political talking point, not a strategy.

But on the other hand, we are wise to focus on the language used in the critically important issue of knowing who our enemies are and who they are not. This is an issue that has the greatest political consequences. It is a political issue on which we need to be correct . And yet in that press conference, the president himself dismissed political correctness, underscoring the concepts status as a universal pariah, even as he defended his terminology. Obama explained, the reason that I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with defeating extremism.

Just as no serious firefighter would actually fight fire with fire, we cant fight the extremist language of foreign adversaries (and the insecurity and simplemindedness that propel it) with our own extremist language, insecurity and simplemindedness. It would be geopolitically incorrect, if you will, to do so. It would alienate our allies and motivate our adversaries.

After all, as conservative foreign policy expert Eli Lake has pointed out , our biggest allies in the Middle East are people in countries, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose brand of Islam strikes American sensibilities as "radical." After special forces raided his compound, Osama bin Ladens notebooks revealed that al Qaeda recruiting activities were disabled because, according to Bin Laden, Obama administration officials have largely stopped using the phrase the war on terror in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims. Nothing would help ISILs recruiting strategy more than an American president lumping togetherrather than drawing a distinction betweenterrorists and the worlds billion and a half Muslims.

Conservatives might tell us Obama is politically correct and Trump tells it like it is. But when it comes to the debate over the phrase radical Islam, Obama is playing chess and Trump is playing dodge ball. If politics is about strategy, political correctness is arming oneself with a sound strategy while political incorrectness is strategic recklessness.

Many on the left think conservatives demonize political correctness because they resent having to suppress their own prejudices. That might be true for some. But as someone who teaches a college class on political rhetoric, Ive come to appreciate that anti-PC attitudes are part of a longer tradition of suspicion toward carefully calibrated language. Throughout history, our species has tended to distrust people who have a knack for political oratory. Part of this stems from the fact that most people are not good public speakers at the same time most people have an affinity for people who are like them. This is something psychologists call homophily," and is the reason so many of us tend to want to vote for somebody we'd "like to have a beer with" rather than someone smarter than us.

Conservative politicians who criticize Obama and political correctness understand that eloquence is often perceived less as a mark of intelligence and personal style and more as a product of artifice and self-indulgence. This is why they can muster up the backhanded compliment that Obama is a good speaker or a gifted orator.

Why do we hate political correctness so much? Our suspicion of sensitive political language goes back to ancient Greece, when the sophists got a bad rap for going around Athens training wealthy kids to become more talented speakers so they could win votes or dodge prison time. Plato famously distrusted rhetoric, although his student Aristotle would rehabilitate its reputation as an essentially virtuous endeavor. Political correctness, in which public officials are careful to avoid language that alienates or offends, requires a certain type of expressive competence. In the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has critiqued this expressive competence while being wholly unequipped with it.

But political correctness is a longstanding American tradition and a deeply rooted value. Our countrys founders placed a premium on the ability to persuasively articulate opposing viewpoints. They rejected government censorship precisely because they trusted individuals could and would regulate themselves in our proverbial free marketplace of ideas. They didnt prohibit offensive speech because they believed truth lost its vigor unless confronted with falsehoods, and tolerance lost its social acceptance unless it could stand in contrast with ugly prejudices. They knew the value of an idea laid in its ability to gain favor in debates, which should be, in Supreme Court Justice William Brennans words , uninhibited, robust, and wide-open. Trump can say what he will about Muslims and Mexicans, but thoughtful journalists and pundits can and should say what they will about Trump.

If you are one of the many Americans who think political correctness is a detriment to politically vibrant debates in this country, you have it all backwards: People who use politically correct language arent trying to stifle insensitive speech. Theyre simply trying to out-compete that speech in a free and open exchange.

Every time Trump says something thats ugly or false and then claims political correctness is the big problem this country has and something we cant afford, hes basically blaming this free marketplace itself. He's petulantly arguing with the umpire. Hes blaming you and methe publicfor exercising the freedom to decide which ideas are good or bad. In the end, many of you dont like or want what hes peddling. You reject his racist tirades and narcissistic antics. You support common-sense gun legislation which would help prevent another terrorist hate crime like the one that occurred in Orlando. You reject praying for political leaders based on those leaders' party affiliations. And you don't think women deserve to be compared to "pigs" or "dogs" by people seeking our country's highest office. I happen to think you're correct, politically.

Mark Hannah was a staffer on the John Kerry and Barack Obama presidential campaigns and is the author of the new book The Best Worst PresidentWhat the Right Gets Wrong About Barack Obama . He teaches at NYU and The New School.

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Political Correctness Is An Absolute Must | Time.com

Letter to the editor: Political correctness has influenced minds Post Register Inherent in the output of some of the favored, perennial guest writers, is how much political correctness has influenced the minds of many. Much of the radicalism that has attended the election is based on programmed ignorance and/or misinformation in ...

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Letter to the editor: Political correctness has influenced minds - Post Register

This organization thinks protesters against the Dakota Pipeline can save their "sacred" environment by polluting the land with garbage, burning tires and cars, and killing cattle. Enough said about that.

On the ACLU opinion of HB 1425, a bill for an act to protect the rights and privileges granted under the United States Constitution: First, Muslim is not a race, and Islam is not a religion. It is a political and military ideology. So spare me the discrimination talk.

The fact that the ACLU is against 1425 proves they have never read the Quran or any other Islamic text and know absolutely nothing about 1,400 years of Islamic history or Sharia.

The tactic of the Muslim Brotherhood (a subversive terror organization that supports Hamas) is Civilization Jihad (invasion through migration). Their strategy (goal) is replacing our laws with Sharia.

Every time we give in to Islam's demands such as providing a prayer room or taking pork off a menu, we are accepting Sharia. It has already started. In other words, by making our Constitution worthless, it takes fewer of them to change our country into an Islamic State.

Yes, the war in the Middle East is now on our own soil and we do not even realize it. Their biggest weapon is not terrorism, it is our ignorance.

The Muslim Brotherhood invented islamophobia spurred on by political correctness. Now we have a new sheriff in town and he is throwing political correctness in the garbage. I suggest the ACLU support HB 1425 or keep silent. See how similar ignorance is destroying Europe from within.

Willem lives in Moorhead.

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Letter: Political correctness has endangered our safety | INFORUM - INFORUM

Citing cost and the availability of cheap space at the landfill in which to bury toxic materials, Casper City Council voted on Tuesday to effectively end its legally mandated electronic waste recycling program.

Council rejected a five-year contract with Electronic Recyclers International, based in Aurora, Colorado, despite a city ordinance passed in 2009 that bars Casper from dumping electronic waste in its landfill.

It probably started as a feel-good measure, said councilman Chris Walsh. If we stop, it can go in our lined landfill.

Electronics can contain lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc and brominated flame retardants, the website states. When electronics are not disposed of or recycled properly, these toxic materials can present problems.

Walsh and other council members cited the annual $57,400 cost of the five-year contract, despite solid waste division manager Cynthia Langstons clarification that the city would pay that amount only under the worst-case scenario.

It looks to me like were spending $57,000 on a measure thats more politically correct than it is necessary for us, Walsh said. Over the term of this contract, were going to save a quarter million dollars.

Langston had clarified at councils pre-meeting that the actual payment would likely be around $25,000 per year.

This story has been condensed. Find the original story in the Casper Star-Tribune or on trib.com.

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Slamming 'political correctness,' Casper scraps recycling program for electronics - Casper Star-Tribune Online

In an astoundingly ignorant and heavy-handed display of putting urban political correctness ahead of rural jobs, Gov. Kate Brown last week dictated that the citizen members of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission reverse their January decision that gave commercial fishermen a minimally fair share of the Columbia Rivers salmon allocation.

Addressing commissioners as if they are misbehaving children, Brown told Chairman Michael Finley the commission majoritys acknowledgment of reality is not acceptable and that I expect the commission to acquiesce to her interpretation of the facts by April 3.

The commission agreed at a meeting on Friday in Tigard to take up the issue in March.

Many of the most important facts are not in dispute: Former Gov. John Kitzhabers dictated abandonment of decades of carefully nuanced salmon policy has not worked. Kicking commercial fishermen off the Columbias main stem as of Dec. 31, 2016, as Kitzhabers plan called for, is manifestly unjust and will hurt the economy of Clatsop County and other fishing-dependent communities.

Fish and Wildlife Commission members are in an infinitely better position to judge the ineffectiveness of salmon policies than is the governor. They know that alternatives such as seine nets operated from boats and the shore have been a clear disappointment. Off-channel locations where nets might be deployed to catch only hatchery fish are in short supply. State legislators and agencies have failed to keep financial promises to fishing families.

The commissions former chairman was enthusiastic in applauding the January vote to back away from a rigid deadline to transition gillnets off the river. Salmon gillnets, in modern usage, are not the walls of death railed against by the governors urban friends, but are instead carefully crafted to catch a strictly limited number of hatchery salmon. Time, area and gear restrictions including live recovery boxes for any accidentally caught naturally spawning salmon limit impacts on wild fish.

In truth, the anti-gillnetting drive has never been about conservation, but about salving tender Portland sensitivities while delivering more salmon to recreational fishermen, especially those affiliated with the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, which owes its existence to fat-cat Texas oilmen.

Browns interference in this matter is a prime example of why some Democrats now struggle to connect with working people. Yes, all Oregonians want recreational fishing to prosper. But by rejecting any compromise on behalf of hardworking commercial fishermen, Brown places herself solidly against jobs for struggling rural voters. We all should remember that come Election Day.

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Editorial: Brown puts political correctness above jobs - Daily Astorian