On Political Correctness
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Furniture said:
And so it follows that reading the comments is often counter-productive, as the posters tend to follow their confirmation bias, and if one is not careful, reading the comments may taint one's own perception of the actual article itself.
Brad Sallows
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Tyler Cowen, writing for Bloomberg, has some thoughts about PC - that it is not helping "the left" the way some think it might.
daftandbarmy
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COLONEL TIM COLLINS: How can our chubby, drug-addled and right-on Army protect us from our enemies?
Instead of imposing stricter discipline, it has put 96 soldiers on diet pills, while eight have been given liposuction. This lame official response tells you all you need to know: the British Army has been infected with the crippling disease of political correctness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6299067/COLONEL-TIM-COLLINS-chubby-drug-addled-right-Army-protect-enemies.html
Instead of imposing stricter discipline, it has put 96 soldiers on diet pills, while eight have been given liposuction. This lame official response tells you all you need to know: the British Army has been infected with the crippling disease of political correctness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6299067/COLONEL-TIM-COLLINS-chubby-drug-addled-right-Army-protect-enemies.html
Colin Parkinson
Army.ca Myth
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Put all the fat soldiers on point, so they can provide cover for the fit ones in the back....
daftandbarmy
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AbdullahD said:
I dunno... back in my day there were always a few chubbies kicking around too. If for no other reason than a formal excuse to kick them out, these new, easier but universal 'FORCE' type tests are a good idea.
And there's no moral outrage like the moral outrage that is emitted from retired Colonels/ Generals, whose pensions are now being safely paid into their bank accounts monthly
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In Canada this PM would be lynched, brought back to life, sued, and banished forever:
Australian PM says women shouldn't rise 'on the basis of others doing worse'
Scott Morrison speaks at an International Women's Day event Friday
Thomson Reuters · Posted: Mar 08, 2019 7:13 AM ET | Last Updated: an hour ago
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told an International Women's Day breakfast in Perth on Friday that he wants to see women rise, but not at the expense of others.
"We're not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up. That's not in our values," he said.
"And that is true about gender equality, too. We want to see women rise. But we don't want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse. We want everybody to do better, and we want to see the rise of women in this country be accelerated to ensure that their overall pace is maintained."
More at link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/australia-pm-international-women-s-day-1.5048210
Australian PM says women shouldn't rise 'on the basis of others doing worse'
Scott Morrison speaks at an International Women's Day event Friday
Thomson Reuters · Posted: Mar 08, 2019 7:13 AM ET | Last Updated: an hour ago
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told an International Women's Day breakfast in Perth on Friday that he wants to see women rise, but not at the expense of others.
"We're not about setting Australians against each other, trying to push some down to lift others up. That's not in our values," he said.
"And that is true about gender equality, too. We want to see women rise. But we don't want to see women rise only on the basis of others doing worse. We want everybody to do better, and we want to see the rise of women in this country be accelerated to ensure that their overall pace is maintained."
More at link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/australia-pm-international-women-s-day-1.5048210
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Bumping this because I stumbled across a quote that demonstrates that nothing is new under the sun.
"These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty."[2]
Pope Leo XIII November 1899 - perturbed about a press leak on draft opinions about schooling in America that landed in the middle of the discussion about the Manitoba Schools Question - a hot topic in Canada, Britain and the US.
"These dangers, viz., the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world, have so wrapped minds in darkness that there is now a greater need of the Church's teaching office than ever before, lest people become unmindful both of conscience and of duty."[2]
Pope Leo XIII November 1899 - perturbed about a press leak on draft opinions about schooling in America that landed in the middle of the discussion about the Manitoba Schools Question - a hot topic in Canada, Britain and the US.
daftandbarmy
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Chris Pook said:
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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daftandbarmy said:
Easiest to do when one is a twin. But in all seriousness.... that's kind of part of the way our brains actually work. So many things are immediately percieved as being binary that we tend to overlook the fact that most of those.... are actually Boolean.
Whether we like it or not, a human being's brain is a networked collection of cellular switches which are constantly sending and recieving signals with information. Or in other words... we're organic computers drivng around machines of meat and awkwardness. A brain which is unable to do as Fitzgerald's quote infers is quite simply dead.
daftandbarmy
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Thanks for the share Chris Pook:
Toppling Colston’s statue was an act of intolerance
As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to 'idolatrous' monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British protesters are now waging war on historical statues that they claim are 'hurtful' to ordinary people.
It was the glee with which they tore down Colston's statue that was most unnerving. They yanked him down and started cheering and screaming as they stomped on his head. He was then taken to the nearby harbour and thrown in the Avon river. Another rousing cheer.
It was as if evil had been defeated. As if this mere monument, this bronze entity, was a malevolent, corrupting force, and as if its disposal into the river was a liberatory moment. It really did bring to mind the wide-eyed fervour with which Isis members destroyed the first-century Lion of Al-lāt in Palmyra, again on the basis that the monument was hurtful, offensive, counter to their belief system.
Today's woke Taliban might describe things as 'problematic', while the actual Taliban and other Islamist movements prefer to call things 'haram', but it amounts to the same thing: ugly history and offensive representations must be destroyed.
The Islamist mob and the PC mob both come across as Year Zero movements, devoted to cleansing public space of hateful, reviling, scurrilous material lest anyone's soul be corrupted, or mind offended, by encountering these wicked depictions. Both are given to the policing of speech, the banning of books, and the erasure of representations of the past.
The idea that the tearing down of Colston's statue was a reckoning with the historic crime of slavery is especially ridiculous. Britain has had its reckoning with the horrors of slavery. The entire West has. I bet you could not find a single person in this country who thinks slavery was anything other than an abomination.
We learn about the evils of slavery in school. There are museums devoted to the crimes of slavery. Popular culture has frequently depicted slavery in all its horror in recent years. Everyone knows how immoral slavery was. There is something deeply patronising in the idea that we all needed to witness the performative iconoclasm of the woke Taliban in Bristol yesterday in order to understand how terrible slavery is. Believe it or not, British people are not racists biting at the bit for the return of slavery.
The question is: where will it end? Colston lavished money on Bristol. He funded alms houses, schools, hospitals. Some of these institutions are still standing. Tear them down? After all, they were built with the blood money of a slave trader.
Of course, there is already a campaign to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College, Oxford. People are eyeing up the Westminster statue of Cromwell, persecutor of the Irish and of Catholics more broadly. Some students in Manchester are agitating against plans to erect a statue to Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral on the basis that Gandhi expressed anti-black views. And of course there's the great prize: Churchill. His statue in Westminster was defaced with the word 'racist' yesterday.
This intolerant urge to morally cleanse the public sphere is potentially endless. It is ludicrous too. Cromwell may have done bad things to the Irish but he also faced down a tyrannical king and made England a republic. Gandhi may once have expressed racist views towards African people but he also helped to liberate India, giving rise to the largest democracy on earth. Churchill held some very questionable views and oversaw a decaying empire that was frequently cruel. But he also helped to defeat the greatest criminals in human history: the Nazis.
Guess what? History is complex; people are complex. The effort to purify the past, to separate historical figures into categories of Good and Evil, is an infantile disorder. Our cities are living history. Public space is a patchwork of the historical events and ruptures that made our nations. When we walk through the streets we see monuments to the soldiers, political leaders, rebels and artists who made our society what it is, some of whom will have done bad, some of whom will have done good, and some of whom will have done a bit of both.
The PC desire to sweep these representations away is immature, intolerant, undemocratic and philistine. The woke Taliban are a menace to history and reason.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/toppling-colston-s-statue-was-an-act-of-intolerance?fbclid=IwAR2zMmrYllP-XpXLK4Hl840xknifO6fD-HL2-OzmgGXGSGOkP89Fa5mXInM
Toppling Colston’s statue was an act of intolerance
As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to 'idolatrous' monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British protesters are now waging war on historical statues that they claim are 'hurtful' to ordinary people.
It was the glee with which they tore down Colston's statue that was most unnerving. They yanked him down and started cheering and screaming as they stomped on his head. He was then taken to the nearby harbour and thrown in the Avon river. Another rousing cheer.
It was as if evil had been defeated. As if this mere monument, this bronze entity, was a malevolent, corrupting force, and as if its disposal into the river was a liberatory moment. It really did bring to mind the wide-eyed fervour with which Isis members destroyed the first-century Lion of Al-lāt in Palmyra, again on the basis that the monument was hurtful, offensive, counter to their belief system.
Today's woke Taliban might describe things as 'problematic', while the actual Taliban and other Islamist movements prefer to call things 'haram', but it amounts to the same thing: ugly history and offensive representations must be destroyed.
The Islamist mob and the PC mob both come across as Year Zero movements, devoted to cleansing public space of hateful, reviling, scurrilous material lest anyone's soul be corrupted, or mind offended, by encountering these wicked depictions. Both are given to the policing of speech, the banning of books, and the erasure of representations of the past.
The idea that the tearing down of Colston's statue was a reckoning with the historic crime of slavery is especially ridiculous. Britain has had its reckoning with the horrors of slavery. The entire West has. I bet you could not find a single person in this country who thinks slavery was anything other than an abomination.
We learn about the evils of slavery in school. There are museums devoted to the crimes of slavery. Popular culture has frequently depicted slavery in all its horror in recent years. Everyone knows how immoral slavery was. There is something deeply patronising in the idea that we all needed to witness the performative iconoclasm of the woke Taliban in Bristol yesterday in order to understand how terrible slavery is. Believe it or not, British people are not racists biting at the bit for the return of slavery.
The question is: where will it end? Colston lavished money on Bristol. He funded alms houses, schools, hospitals. Some of these institutions are still standing. Tear them down? After all, they were built with the blood money of a slave trader.
Of course, there is already a campaign to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College, Oxford. People are eyeing up the Westminster statue of Cromwell, persecutor of the Irish and of Catholics more broadly. Some students in Manchester are agitating against plans to erect a statue to Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral on the basis that Gandhi expressed anti-black views. And of course there's the great prize: Churchill. His statue in Westminster was defaced with the word 'racist' yesterday.
This intolerant urge to morally cleanse the public sphere is potentially endless. It is ludicrous too. Cromwell may have done bad things to the Irish but he also faced down a tyrannical king and made England a republic. Gandhi may once have expressed racist views towards African people but he also helped to liberate India, giving rise to the largest democracy on earth. Churchill held some very questionable views and oversaw a decaying empire that was frequently cruel. But he also helped to defeat the greatest criminals in human history: the Nazis.
Guess what? History is complex; people are complex. The effort to purify the past, to separate historical figures into categories of Good and Evil, is an infantile disorder. Our cities are living history. Public space is a patchwork of the historical events and ruptures that made our nations. When we walk through the streets we see monuments to the soldiers, political leaders, rebels and artists who made our society what it is, some of whom will have done bad, some of whom will have done good, and some of whom will have done a bit of both.
The PC desire to sweep these representations away is immature, intolerant, undemocratic and philistine. The woke Taliban are a menace to history and reason.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/toppling-colston-s-statue-was-an-act-of-intolerance?fbclid=IwAR2zMmrYllP-XpXLK4Hl840xknifO6fD-HL2-OzmgGXGSGOkP89Fa5mXInM
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Altering the historical record to better match modern sensibilities is probably even more dangerous than altering one's own memories to better match one's current beliefs. While I greatly enjoy the wit in the statement that there are no problems that cannot be solved by the proper use of high explosives, the fatal flaw is that removing a problem is completely different from solving a problem, and in fact only leaves a large hole - either literal or metaphorical.
Eaglelord17
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Xylric said:
One small thought for you, who do you think wrote the historical record? The answer is the victor.
The historical record was never a 'true' representation of what happened because the victor has no incentive to paint themselves in a bad light. What a 'true' representation is will never be achieved thanks to human flaws but that doesn't mean we can't get closer.
For example we now look at WWI differently than we did just after that war, when it was still shaping the world. The original account of it was big bad Germany allied with Austria-Hungary and they caused the war and all its evils. Now we look at it differently, being a combination of historical grievances, technological advancements, nationalistic sentiments, attempts to build empires, and attempts to prevent empires from being built.
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Eaglelord17 said:
I despise the whole "History is written by the Victors" idea, because it is so easy to misunderstand. I'm one of the rare sorts of historians who study not only the historical record, but the history *of* the historical record. One of the most valuable artifacts ever recovered from the earliest parts of history was certainly something which would never have been written by the "Victor." In fact, it's something that we see brought into being on a daily basis in the modern era - a complaint letter.
So to answer your question, I think that the authors of the historical record are simply those who were lucky enough to have their writings survive long enough to be discovered by future generations. There were a number of Egyptian mummies who are now world-famous simply because their enemies tried to completely destroy all memory of them. Since their tombs ended up completely forgotten, they were thus left unraided, and contained everything we would ever need to know about who those particular mummies were.
In all honesty, the biggest problem I have with the idea of history being written by the victors is the simple reality that the writing of history is a continuum. It is a never ceasing endeavour. It is a deeply evidence-based science, which basically means that if the Victor's history distorts the details sufficiently, then all credibility the Victor may attempt to claim will be lost as time progresses. Hence, my original point still stands. Altering the historical record is simply not possible without mass murder.
daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
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Xylric said:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
OldSolduer
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daftandbarmy said:
And we are near that now.
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