slug.com slug.com
0 1

Fresh off the American twitter press. Seems like America is gay AF. Welcome to postmodernist unreality.

Are you factually correct, or politically correct?

“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world. It is characterized by an amalgam of both sentiments and beliefs that cannot be easily catalogued, though terms like 'progressive,' 'emancipators or 'liberationist' serve to describe it. Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies— leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular. A prevailing spirit is one of intolerance and a grim orthodoxy, precisely caught in the phrase "political correctness.” ― Peter L. Berger

“Political correctness is a war on noticing.”
― Steve Sailer

............................

Political Correctness origins... from the book Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)

The history of political correctness is more complex, first emerging in Communist terminology as a policy concept denoting the orthodox party line of Chinese Communism as enunciated by Mao Tse-Tung in the 1930s. This we may call the hard political or literal sense. It was then borrowed by the American New Left in the 1960s, but with a more rhetorical than strictly programmatic sense, before becoming adopted and current in Britain. It is essentially a modern coinage by a minority, deriving from politically correct, dating from about 1970.

“Fascism” has followed the same semantic pattern, being transformed from its strict Italian political origins to its broader sense of dictatorship and conformity. Roger Scruton has a notable essay on the topic in Untimely Tracts (1987). Today both “Puritan” and “Fascist” are, of course, highly critical terms. Paul Johnson defined political correctness as “liberal fascism” (cited in Kramer and Kimball, 1995, p. xii).

As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.

Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.

From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.

One feature of political correctness has been the replacement of cultural élitism by relativism. This is not entirely a bad thing. The days are certainly over when writers could describe themselves, as T. S. Eliot famously did, as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Yet Eliot’s damning comment on “the indomitable spirit of mediocrity” (from his 1949 play The Cocktail Party, Act I, scene ii) surely applies to much modern culture.

As early as 1936, incidentally, George Orwell first referred scathingly to a ‘Mickey Mouse universe’. Today we experience the “Disneyfication” of everything. Moreover, Roger Scruton has recently identified what he calls “absolutist relativism,” pointing out the “deeply paradoxical nature of the new relativism. While holding that all cultures are equal and judgment between them absurd, the new culture . . . is in the business of persuading us that Western culture, and the traditional curriculum are racist, ethnocentric, patriarchal, and therefore beyond the pale of political acceptability” (Scruton, 2007, p. 84).

Political correctness became part of the modern lexicon and, many would say, part of the modern mind-set, as a consequence of the wide-ranging public debate which started on campuses in the United States from the late 1980s. Since nearly 50 percent of Americans go to college, the impact of the controversy was widespread. It was out of this ferment that most of the new vocabulary was generated or became current. However, political correctness is not one thing and does not have a simple history. As a concept it predates the debate and is a complex, discontinuous, and protean phenomenon which has changed radically, even over the past two decades. During just that time it has ramified from its initial concerns with education and the curriculum into numerous agendas, reforms, and issues concerning race, culture, gender, disability, the environment, and animal rights.

Linguistically it started as a basically idealistic, decent-minded, but slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features, thereby undoing some past injustices or “leveling the playing fields” with the hope of improving social relations.

It is now increasingly evident in two opposing ways. The first is the expanding currency of various key words (to be listed shortly), some of a programmatic nature, such as diversity, organic, and multiculturalism. Contrariwise, it has also manifested itself in speech codes which suppress prejudicial language, disguising or avoiding certain old and new taboo topics. Most recently it has appeared in behavioral prohibitions concerning the environment and violations of animal rights. As a result of these transitions it has become a misnomer, being concerned with neither politics nor correctness as those terms are generally understood.

Political correctness inculcates a sense of obligation or conformity in areas which should be (or are) matters of choice. Nevertheless, it has had a major influence on what is regarded as “acceptable” or “appropriate” in language, ideas, behavioral norms, and values. But “doing the right thing” is, of course, an oversimplification. There is an antithesis at the core of political correctness, since it is liberal in its aims but often illiberal in its practices: hence it generates contradictions like positive discrimination and liberal orthodoxy.

The origins are in many ways the strangest feature. “Political Correctness is the natural continuum of the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.” So wrote Doris Lessing in the Sunday Times (May 10, 1992), continuing in this vein in her trenchant essay “Censorship” (2004), which is quoted among the epigraphs above.

“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
“Yes, Dimitry, it is. But it is politically correct.”

“The point of Political Correctness is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself. (The Rise of Political Correctness)”

“Tacit collaboration by millions who bite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. ”

― Angelo Codevilla (The Rise of Political Correctness)

She was unambiguous and certainly right: political correctness first emerged in the diktats of Mao Tse-Tung, then chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic, in the 1930s. But over half a century later it had mutated, rematerializing in a totally different environment, in an advanced secular capitalist society in which freedom of speech had been underwritten by the Constitution for two centuries, and in American universities, of all places. As Christopher Hitchens acutely observed: “For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech” (in Dunant, 1994, pp. 137–8).

Far from being a storm in an academic inkwell, political correctness became a major public issue engaged in by a whole variety of participants including President George Bush (briefly), public intellectuals, major academics, and journalists of all hues and persuasions. Some claim that the debate was a manufactured rather than a natural phenomenon, and that political correctness started as a chimera or imaginary monster invented by those on the Right of the political spectrum to discredit those who wished to change the status quo. These matters are taken up in chapter 2 “The Origins and the Debate.” The fact is that the debate certainly took place. Exchanges were often acrimonious, focusing on numerous general issues of politics, ideology, race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, the curriculum, freedom of expression and its curtailment and so on.

This work attempts a detailed semantic analysis of how the resources of the language have been deployed, especially in forms of semantic engineering and the exploitation of different registers, both to formulate the new agendas, values, and key words of political correctness and to subvert them. A whole new semantic environment has come into being, through creation, invention, co-option, borrowing, and publicity: a representative sample of this new world of words includes lookism, phallocratic, other, significant other, sex worker, multicultural, herstory, disadvantaged, homophobic, waitron, wimmin, differently abled, to Bork, physically challenged, substance abuse, fattist, Eurocentric, Afrocentric, demographics, issue, carbon footprint, glass ceiling, pink plateau, and first people, as well as code abbreviations like DWEM, PWA, HN, and neo-con.

These are not simply new words, in the way that Shakespeare’s incarnadine, procreant, exsufflicate, be-all and end-all, unmanned, assassination, and yesterdays were original forms four centuries ago. They are more like Orwell’s artificial coinages in Newspeak, for instance, thought crime, joycamp, and doublethink. Many are of a completely different order of novelty, opaqueness, and oddity, several of a character aptly described by the doughty Dr Johnson two centuries ago as “scarce English.” The reaction of the uninitiated, and many of the educated, to this strange new galaxy of word formations or, some would say, deformations, is like that described by Edward Phillips in his New World of Words: “Some people if they spy but a hard word are as much amazed as if they had met with a Hobgoblin” (cited in Baugh, 1951, p. 260). That was in 1658, when new words of classical origin were still not welcomed as potential denizens, but rather regarded with suspicion as dubious immigrants disturbing “the King’s English” (as it has been called since 1553).

Language theoretically belongs to all, but is often changed by only a few, many of them anonymous. Resentment at interference or sudden changes in the language has a long history. It started in the sixteenth century with the Inkhorn Controversy, a contretemps about the introduction of alien classical vocabulary, or hostility at semantic innovation of the kind Phillips satirized. In the long run most of these “hard words” as they were originally called, have been accepted. But it has been a very long run. Political correctness is still a relatively new phenomenon, and the serious or general acceptance of these words is still a matter of debate.

Let us briefly consider a fairly recent focused linguistic intervention, the attempt by feminists to alter or enlarge the stock of personal pronouns and to feminize agent nouns like chairman in order to diminish the dominance of the male gender, traditionally upheld in the grammatical dictum that “the male subsumes the female.” Proposals for forms such as s/he were successful in raising consciousness, but produced few long-term survivals.

Forms like wimmin and herstory became objects of satire, while the extensive replacement of man by person aroused some strong reactions: “I resent this ideological intrusion and its insolent dealings with our mother (perhaps I should say ‘parent&rsquo😉 tongue,” wrote Roger Scruton (1990, p. 118). Scruton’s mocking parody “parent tongue” is a response we shall see replicated many times in reactions to politically correct language. Nevertheless, some new forms like chairperson and spokesperson have managed to establish themselves.

Another comparison can be made with radical political discourse. Communism attempted to establish a whole new ideological discourse by means of neologisms like proletariate, semantic extensions like bourgeois, and by co-opting words like imperialist and surplus. Hard-line Communists still call each other “comrade” and refer to “the workers,” “the collective,” “capital,” and the “party line,” terms which are regarded by outsiders (who now form the majority) with irony and humor. For the days and locales when Communists could impose semantic norms on populations have long disappeared. They do however survive and eveolve today in contemporary identity politics.

There are three characteristics which make political correctness a unique sociolinguistic phenomenon. Unlike previous forms of orthodoxy, both religious and political, it is not imposed by some recognized authority like the Papacy, the Politburo, or the Crown, but is a form of semantic engineering and censorship not derivable from one recognized or definable source, but a variety. There is no specific ideology, although it focuses on certain inequalities and disadvantaged people in society and on correcting prejudicial attitudes, more especially on the demeaning words which express them.

Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.

In these respects political correctness has a very different dynamic from the earlier high-profile advocates of, say, feminism or black consciousness in the USA. The feminists of the second wave, such as Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Gloria Steinem, and Susan Sontag, were highly articulate, individual, and outspoken controversialists who did not always agree with each other, characteristics shared by Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. By contrast, the anonymous agenda-manipulators of political correctness are more difficult to identify. These features make the conformity to political correctness the more mysterious.

Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right. Much play was accordingly made about the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, their “ownership” and their proper application.

In addition to these contemporary issues, it is important to recognize both a historical and a moral dimension, that is, to be aware that political correctness is not an exclusively modern manifestation. Accordingly, it is enlightening to consider some earlier forms of changing orthodoxies and their semantic correlatives, as well as the moral imperatives which these changing orthodoxies have generated. In many ways there has been a continuing dialectic between political orthodoxy and dissent since the sixteenth century, virtually since the invention of printing. Reflection shows that political correctness of one sort or another has been a feature of English society for centuries, certainly since the English Reformation, the first major political change which was not an invasion.

"Paradoxically, political correctness manifested itself rapidly and most strongly, not in political parties, but on university campuses; not in the closed societies of Eastern Europe, but in free Western societies, especially in America, the only country in the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.

Politically correct language is the product and formulation of a militant minority which remains mysteriously unlocatable. It is not the spontaneous creation of the speech community, least of all any particular deprived sector of it. Disadvantaged groups, such as the deaf, the blind, or the crippled (to use the traditional vocabulary), do not speak for themselves, but are championed by other influential public voices.

Political correctness is based on various idealistic assumptions on how society should be run, and how people should behave towards each other.

However, a society is necessarily made up of individuals and groups, with different histories, manners, cultures, needs, and expectations. Furthermore, the two societies with which we are mainly concerned, the United States and Britain, are essentially multicultural, as opposed to say, Japan. America was multicultural from the beginning, although the political history has generally emphasized the interests of the white race. The British Isles previously contained the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy and the kingdoms of the Picts, the Scots, and the Irish, subsequently evolving into four independent nations: although the political concept of “Great Britain,” dating from 1704, gave a nominal sense of national unity, there were numerous minorities. The arrival of Commonwealth immigrants from the late 1950s was the beginning of a radical social change. In many ways the impulse behind political correctness in its essential sense of respect derives from an awareness of multiculturalism.

The primary idealistic assumption is that of equality. This is stronger in the American ideology, underpinned by the proposition that “All men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence, 1776) than in the British political scheme, which has no written constitution; accommodates monarchy, ranks of nobility, and a class system, admits deference, accepting the more realistic and practical notion that all are equal before the law. A major problem, as always, is how to achieve “equality,” that is, to redress historical inequalities, at a particular moment in time.

As political correctness has become more fashionable, so it has become less clearly defined, as is typical with such phrases when their currency broadens. It now covers a whole range of individual, social, cultural, and political issues, and topics as diverse as fatness, appearance, stupidity, diet, crime, prostitution, race, homosexuality, disability, animal rights, the environment, and still others. It has taken on the characteristics of a buzzword, becoming a fashionable phrase without a clear meaning, but one which nevertheless invokes certain clear responses, hostile or positive, depending on context. It is a semantic sign of orthodoxy with not one, but several party lines.

Obviously, not all of these listed issues are of equal social importance, especially in terms of values and morality. Yet often they are accorded similar weight and seriousness. Indeed “diversity,” one of the new key terms in the vocabulary, is stretched to accommodate this range of social problems and agendas.

From its first manifestations in America, political correctness has had a double agenda, being a combination of freedom and constraint. The “political” aspect involved opening up new cultural horizons, but “correctness” brought conformity in accepting new agendas, new limits on freedom of expression, and a general avoidance of certain controversial topics.

The same opposing qualities are encapsulated in the formulations “progressive orthodoxy” and “positive discrimination.” In his survey of 1992, Paul Berman gave a dismal picture of “an atmosphere of campus repression”

On a broader front, Kenneth Minogue argued that “European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness – some people even deny that it exists – but it is a manacle round our hands” (Minogue, 2001).

More condemning is the view of P. D. James: “I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism” (Paris Review, 1995).

— Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)

.........................................

Roger Scruton made a key observation, which is that feminist understood, they cannot win in direct competition with men, so in a sneaky way they saw opportunity in hijacking the language of the society and turning it into a political weapon.

"As far back as 1949 the seminal feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir made this programmatic recommendation: “Language is inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices . . . Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don’t have to break it or try a priori to make it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good” (1972, p. 123)."

And indeed they tried to do this with sex and gender. "During the 1970s American feminists seized on the idea of gender as a social construct, and used it to hide the truth about sex as a biological destiny. By replacing the word “sex” with the word “gender” they imagined that they could achieve at a stroke what their ideology required of them – to rescue sex from biology and to recast it as a complex social choice." (December 2002/January 2003, p. 1)

This led to the creation of a monster. Trans movement which now is the enemy of the very same feminists that created it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the danger of letting politically ambitious people play with language. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Krunoslav 9 Mar 18
Share
You must be a member of this group before commenting. Join Group

Be part of the movement!

Welcome to the community for those who value free speech, evidence and civil discourse.

Create your free account

Recent Visitors 8

Photos 11,776 More

Posted by GeeMacMexico admits it is a hotbed of drug trafficking, but not of drug use, according to its top politician.

Posted by JohnHoukReprising ShadowGate Documentaries: With Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukLest YOU Are Brainwashed to be Happy in an Age of Transformation Tyranny: Videos & Commentary to Refresh YOUR Memory to at Least Awaken Personal Resistance! SUMMARY: An examination of saved videos...

Posted by Weltansichtwell....doggies

Posted by MosheBenIssacMetoo in action

Posted by JohnHoukDr.

Posted by JohnHoukConnecting the Dots! Some AI Truth – What Used to be “Playing God” is Really “Playing Devil” SUMMARY: … Satan – the foe – has only one delusional recourse: Brainwash human souls ...

Posted by JohnHoukMy Intro to Documentary, ‘Let My People Go’ SUMMARY: Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukMedical Tyranny – A Look at mRNA Danger & COVID Bioweapon Exploitation SUMMARY: Medical Tyranny has become a fact of life that the brainwashing Dem-Marxists, RINOs and Mockingbird MSM work hard ...

Posted by JohnHoukDr.

Posted by JohnHoukIrritated With Transformation Yet?

Posted by JohnHoukVOTE TRUMP – Overcome Dem-Marxist/RINO Lies – Video Share SUMMARY: The first batch of shared videos reflects VOTE-FOR-TRUMP in the midst of Dem-Marxist/RINO government LIES.

Posted by JohnHoukA Look at Mike Benz, THEN Tucker Ep.

Posted by JohnHoukLooking at ‘The Great Setup with Dr.

Posted by JohnHoukEnlightening Videos of a Corrupted Society SUMMARY: … The thing is, TYRANNY today has become very multifaceted in how the socio-political infection of CONTROL has crept into the one-time Land of ...

Posted by JohnHoukMedical Tyranny Liars A Look at CDC, Big Pharma, MSM & Social Media Cartel Owners SUMMARY: I like the Natural News Anti-Medical Tyranny stand.

  • Top tags#video #youtube #world #government #media #biden #democrats #USA #truth #children #Police #society #god #money #reason #Canada #rights #freedom #culture #China #hope #racist #death #vote #politics #communist #evil #socialist #Socialism #TheTruth #justice #kids #democrat #evidence #crime #conservative #hell #nation #laws #liberal #federal #community #military #racism #climate #violence #book #politicians #joebiden #fear ...

    Members 9,397Top

    Moderators