Wisecrack, a reasonably well-known Youtube channel with over 1.2 million subs, posted a video recently, "Does Political Correctness WORK?" In it, they lament the effect words have on people who hear them, discussing, essentially, that hurtful thoughts, whether intentional or not, stand a chance of impeding peoples' ability to perform, or that they're "violent", because people don't feel good afterword. Well, that's only part of the story. Someone told me the other day that "Being anti-"PC" as an excuse to be a racist sexist piece of shit". My response was "being pro-PC is an excuse to be a racist, sexist piece of shit. Underclasses can become ruling classes." This kind of statement is met with hostility in the vid, so here's a fuller explanation.
The question isn't "Does Political Correctness Work/Help", it's "are politics correct?"
If an issue is framed with the idea of permanent, unchanging underclasses, like women and nonwhite people, that framing contributes to stereotype threat just as much as the insulting bloke in a bar, and if someone is convinced that they, and everyone else in their class, should constantly monitor for threats to their feelings just as warily as threats to their lives, it's counterproductive to their growth beyond those stereotypes. It also encourages them to respond in just as hostile a fashion to their "attackers" as their attackers do them, even lumping people who share characteristics with these "threats" together, resulting in rhetoric like "die cis scum", "fuck crackers", or "kill all white people" (see literally any contentious tag on Tumblr for more info), and bar similar speech from public platforms.
This doesn't help, and it's the consequence of using models like Wisecrack did in their video. A acts on B, and where there are no chain reactions to the supposed good of of this alleged "correctness". It's what's seen that PC advocates cling to, not what's unseen, and that makes it just as dangerous as being brash, rude, and hurtful, if not more, as all one needs to do is identify with the victims, in order to be one in the eyes of all PC onlookers. And to lump a white person in dreads along with calling someone a cunt? Not a healthy way to start discourse - and ample evidence of my point.
If a nonwhite person being offended by a white person's hairstyle is something that can be perceived as a response to an attack on the nonwhite person, and that is considered a rational impetus for some measure of action, there is no victim but the white person. If we live in a society where someone can be stopped from being "offensive" simply on the merit of being a member of a traditionally "offensive" class, then the inmates have run the asylum. Being PC isn't a virtue, and it doesn't matter if it works or not; being kind is a virtue, and one that can be accomplished without being PC at all -- as evidenced any time someone from a "non-minority" class gives something complimentary only to be treated as an oppressor for not understanding how it insults someone else's culture.
And the vid is decidedly narrow in focus, only going after how we engage with one another, in day-to-day dealings. But the PC culture goes well beyond that, inching its sensitive tendrils into art, media, games, and a host of other things. It deems certain subjects wrong for television, and demands censorship of daytime cable; it deems certain actions wrong for video games, and demands games be banned from stores, and even countries ; it says music is so violent it causes school shootings, and demands only edited versions available to young people. Well, art isn't about that, it's about unlimited expression, and to quell that is to disguise a psychopathic, controlling mentality as being nice.
Ricky Gervais once put it relatively well, when he said "[In] art – you're allowed to be a complete fascist. There's no 'what about me', it doesn't matter; I don't care about you, there's just, you do your own program, I'm in charge of this. There should be no compromise in art. [Art is] guilt-free truth." Marilyn Manson has been accused of being responsible for everything from cultish sacrifices, to the Columbine shooting. Louis CK once said he enjoyed Daniel Tosh's comedy, only to find out days later that the entire world assumed he defended rape because he said it during the Tosh rape controversy. He joked about what he read, quipping "[They said] I'll never watch your show again... you're a rape apologist, because I said 'hi' to a guy."
So why is PC so mainstream? We don't need any muscle to figure this out. Academia and culture is riddled with cockroaches that would contaminate discourse with verboten subjects and "microaggressions", so numerous that waking up without permission from a bureau could be considered the oppression of a horde of unknown people. South Park's famous episode "Stunning and Brave" isn't total fiction; if you step out of line, you can be fired, censored, ostracized, and assaulted, and even if you don't leave these invisible boundaries, you could very well be too close to someone who is, and treated with an overt case of guilt by association. And if you dare speak out against it, good luck competing in a world where accepted institutions are the ones churning out this population of barbed dandelions.
This is insane. Why should this sort of thought policing be allowed a millisecond in the sunlight? The answer: it shouldn't.
Political correctness is trash, and a poor cultural counterfeit for actual politeness and civility. If people want to be kind, that's laudable, and something that ought to be encouraged, but if you want to force your idea of politeness onto the world, and you benefit from it in the slightest way, you're the new overlord, and you've created the problem you claim to prevent, leaving a new set of classes for you to belittle, demean, and control in your smoking wake.
Fuck you.
Bio for reposts (contact me first if you want):
Jeremiah is an angry anarchist, and the founder of TimeToFree.US. He spends his time going for long walks, overdosing on caffeine, and being a menace to echo chambers and authoritarians. He's writing books, and producing music right now, before it's illegal.
