What does it mean to be politically correct?

Oooh touchy topic, don't know if it'd be PC to give a response

orourkeda wrote: »

It means being a pussy who will lie or dilute their comments rather than express their true feelings on a subject for fear of offending a person or group that they probably don't like anyway. It's quite cowardly in a way.

Terms such as n*gger and f*ggot are regarded as politically incorrect. But yes anyone who doesn't use them is a coward:rolleyes:

IMO political correctness is the clinical and measured way of interacting with people.

Obviously more appropriate to politicians where different interpretations of something they say can lead to different diplomatic situations.

We can offend each other on the internet because there is little short or long term loss to us as individuals but politicians live and die by what they say in the short or long term so sometimes they need to be so precise as to rule out all interpretation or so vague that they can refute any interpretation.

Also a hidden element of it will be to bait an opponent into political incorrectness and therefore savage their credibility should they fall for it.

PC - refers to someone who is full of bullsh1t, spineless, lacking a true opinion and afraid to express an honest opinion to their peers. We all will hold opinions that will rightly or wrongly upset others, such is life. We cannot all agree on everything, all the time. To do so would render us all 'Borg' like.

A neutral description of political correctness would explain that it's a mindset which seeks to minimise offence. Some non-neutral people so far have derided it as nonsense for cowards. With the greatest of respect, that's cowardly nonsense.

Being PC - and I'm going to point out right now that the vast majority of "PC" has nothing to do with preposterous fringe ideas like "herstory" - involves recognising that the words we use can hurt other people, and trying to minimise that hurt by using less loaded words. Additionally, it sometimes involves a recognition that the words and phrases we use tend to colour our thinking of a particular thing. Saying that the George is filled with shirtlifters and poofs allows us to think of it in purely derogatory terms: saying that the George is a gay bar is simply a statement of fact, and means we're less likely to associate gay bars with negative undertones - not just us, but the people who hear us speak.

Hearing people laugh at PC and treat it as a universally bad thing is one of the few socially acceptable things that really f**ks me off. It started as a serious effort to improve relations between people, and barring a diversion in the 1980s which has since been treated as the sum total of the legacy of the idea of PC, it's done a damn good job of it. You don't get to say kike, or spic, or the infamous N word anymore without being made immediately aware of how repulsive a mindset the use of those words indicates you possess. It's because of PC that jokes about "nig-nogs" are no longer used as cheap laughs on TV. It's because of PC that something like Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech couldn't happen today. It's because of PC that people think about the words they use and their power to hurt other people. What the flying f**k is wrong with that?

Not starting threads like this...