I respect your opinion alot Moe . I know that you generally try to look at things from more than one side , but at least on the issue of obesity , can we get a little more real???

Politically correct terms were not created for obesity because overweight people were wounded from being told that "they were fat' or that "they needed to lose weight". The PC terms were created because there was commonly ,a string of unsavory words which, typically followed the word fat. eg "fat and useless", "fat and stupid", "fat and sloppy" etc. You should hear some of the ugly attacks that women are subjected to just from the weight they struggle to lose a few weeks after giving birth . Society is very partial when it comes to the flaws they will harshly condemn.

How come chain smokers never adopted the societal label of " weak, foul-smelling, and pathetic dumb-azzes", who have just as little self control as some overweight people do? Is puffing away on cancer sticks year after year more holy than shoving one too many pies down one's throat? Is there a competition between who looks better in their coffin?

so what you're saying is that peoples own insecurities is the reason for all the PCness? i don't care if someone calls me fat, lazy stupid because i know none of that is true...things being said only bother people if there's some truth to whats being said...maybe people should worry more about themselves and less what others are saying/thinking... but you have a point... it would offend smokers as well because it is true...

No Moe. People's insecurities are NOT the reason for all the PCness. People's HUMANITY is the reason for the PCness and we are quick to condemn others harshly until it hits US close to home. Like when your overweight teen-aged daughter who you sent to 5 fat-camps comes home crying because her teacher called her fat and useless in front of the rest of the class. Or if the high school coach called your gay son a fag*ot rapist. You can be as strict as you want to be Moe, but we are all human and somehow when our kids or people we love get condemned in that way for their flaws or in some cases over who they can't help being, somehow we magically see the virtue in sensitivity and civility

sorry, i disagree... is it the gays sons problem or is it the coaches problem for saying these things in the first place? what is the PC term for fag*ot rapist? what you're talking about is malice, not PCness... people with weak minds and insecurities let non PC things bother them... if a child is fat, then it's the parents fault for making them fat... the human body isn't designed like a walrus, that needs these layers of fat, it's designed for warmer climates and as hunters...

the "education" you talked about earlier should be directed at the people with the insecurities, not the rest of the world

what,in the 1th Amendment do you all not understand?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/


No, there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment


By Eugene Volokh May 7, 2015 Follow @volokhc

I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with “hate speech” in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for “fighting words” — face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn’t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. (And, notwithstanding CNN anchor Chris Cuomo’s Tweet that “hate speech is excluded from protection,” and his later claims that by “hate speech” he means “fighting words,” the fighting words exception is not generally labeled a “hate speech” exception, and isn’t coextensive with any established definition of “hate speech” that I know of.)

The same is true of the other narrow exceptions, such as for true threats of illegal conduct or incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct (i.e., illegal conduct in the next few hours or maybe days, as opposed to some illegal conduct some time in the future). Indeed, threatening to kill someone because he’s black (or white), or intentionally inciting someone to a likely and immediate attack on someone because he’s Muslim (or Christian or Jewish), can be made a crime. But this isn’t because it’s “hate speech”; it’s because it’s illegal to make true threats and incite imminent crimes against anyone and for any reason, for instance because they are police officers or capitalists or just someone who is sleeping with the speaker’s ex-girlfriend.

The Supreme Court did, in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), uphold a “group libel” law that outlawed statements that expose racial or religious groups to contempt or hatred, unless the speaker could show that the statements were true, and were said with “good motives” and for “justifiable ends.” But this too was treated by the Court as just a special case of a broader First Amendment exception — the one for libel generally. And Beauharnais is widely understood to no longer be good law, given the Court’s restrictions on the libel exception. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) (rejecting the view that libel is categorically unprotected, and holding that the libel exception requires a showing that the libelous accusations be “of and concerning” a particular person); Garrison v. Louisiana (1964) (generally rejecting the view that a defense of truth can be limited to speech that is said for “good motives” and for “justifiable ends”); Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps (1986) (generally rejecting the view that the burden of proving truth can be placed on the defendant); R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992) (holding that singling bigoted speech is unconstitutional, even when that speech fits within a First Amendment exception); Nuxoll ex rel. Nuxoll v. Indian Prairie Sch. Dist. # 204, 523 F.3d 668, 672 (7th Cir. 2008) (concluding that Beauharnais is no longer good law); Dworkin v. Hustler Magazine Inc., 867 F.2d 1188, 1200 (9th Cir. 1989) (likewise); Am. Booksellers ***’n, Inc. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323, 331 n.3 (7th Cir. 1985) (likewise); Collin v. Smith, 578 F.2d 1197, 1205 (7th Cir. 1978) (likewise); Tollett v. United States, 485 F.2d 1087, 1094 n.14 (8th Cir. 1973) (likewise); Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies 1043-45 (4th ed. 2011); Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Law, §12-17, at 926; Toni M. Massaro, Equality and Freedom of Expression: The Hate Speech Dilemma, 32 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 211, 219 (1991); Robert C. Post, Cultural Heterogeneity and Law: Pornography, Blasphemy, and the First Amendment, 76 Calif. L. Rev. 297, 330-31 (1988).

Finally, “hostile environment harassment law” has sometimes been read as applying civil liability — or administrative discipline by universities — to allegedly bigoted speech in workplaces, universities, and places of public accommodation. There is a hot debate on whether those restrictions are indeed constitutional; they have generally been held unconstitutional when applied to universities, but decisions are mixed as to civil liability based on speech that creates hostile environments in workplaces (see the pages linked to at this site for more information on the subject). But even when those restrictions have been upheld, they have been justified precisely on the rationale that they do not criminalize speech (or otherwise punish it) in society at large, but only apply to particular contexts, such as workplaces. None of them represent a “hate speech” exception, nor have they been defined in terms of “hate speech.”

For this very reason, “hate speech” also doesn’t have any fixed legal meaning under U.S. law. U.S. law has just never had occasion to define “hate speech” — any more than it has had occasion to define rudeness, evil ideas, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn but that does not constitute a legally relevant category.

Of course, one can certainly argue that First Amendment law should be changed to allow bans on hate speech (whether bigoted speech, blasphemy, blasphemy to which foreigners may respond with attacks on Americans or blasphemy or flag burning or anything else). Perhaps some statements of the “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech” variety are deliberate attempts to call for such an exception, though my sense is that they are usually (incorrect) claims that the exception already exists.

I think no such exception should be recognized, but of course, like all questions about what the law ought to be, this is a matter that can be debated. Indeed, people have a First Amendment right to call for speech restrictions, just as they have a First Amendment right to call for gun bans or bans on Islam or government-imposed race discrimination or anything else that current constitutional law forbids. Constitutional law is no more set in stone than any other law.

But those who want to make such arguments should acknowledge that they are calling for a change in First Amendment law, and should explain just what that change would be, so people can thoughtfully evaluate it. Calls for a new First Amendment exception for “hate speech” shouldn’t just rely on the undefined term “hate speech” — they should explain just what viewpoints the government would be allowed to suppress, what viewpoints would remain protected, and how judges, juries, and prosecutors are supposed to distinguish the two. Saying “this isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech” doesn’t, I think, suffice.

Malice is not whipped out of thin air Moe. No one haplessly wakes up hating or mistreating a particular group. Malice is a sentiment that is often CULTIVATED from strategically and CONSISTENTLY linking specific words with specific images over time.

Why have commercials evolved to feature interracial couples or men doing the laundry , or women in the work place when advertising a product? A large part of that is geared toward evolving people's perceptions and behaviours, as it pertains to certain fixed constructs that we previously held. We are only fooling ourselves if we don't acknowledge some co-relation between evolving images, TERMS used to describe certain images and people's consequent attitudes and behaviors towards these concepts whether positive or negative.

And I don't want to shock you too much by saying this, but when you said "the "education" that I talked about earlier should be directed at the people WITH the insecurities, not the rest of the world...

I challenge you to move to a location, where "people with insecurities" DO NOT exist. You will find yourself hitch-hiking right back to the land where the rest of us suckers live because ALL of us have insecurities and flaws ... which means that none of us should be exempt from an education in compassion and civility.

I have observed that many of the people who curse political correctness often have never belonged to any of the groups that are commonly condemned or victimised by the wider society at large... which gives them as balanced of a view on this matter as the view George Bush caught of the Hurricane katrina victims as he hovered over them in his plane.


I also couldn't help but notice that you haven't really addressed the concept of "BALANCE" which I attempted to bring to the table.

Why not title groups of people with terms that are tempered with dignity ,while educating them about the harsh consequences of dumb choices/actions? And why don't we also come up with checks and balances to minimize the abuse/exploitation of civility practices ?

But who wants to consider the the precept of BALANCE, when we can spend the next 50 years in yet another societal debate that gets us nowhere, and engaging in the age- old hobby of SELECTIVE STRICTNESS.

We can argue for or against any issue until the cows come home, but a society is shaky at best without BALANCE.

I have a problem with the entirety of the Political Correctness mess.

I grew up in the heart of the thing, and watched as a lot of it was built up.

But since I study history with a dedication to learning what ACTUALLY happens, rather than to learn how to play games in the present, I discovered that the "political correctness" game is vastly older than modern critics pretend, and that the term PC itself, is only a relatively recent label for it.

The study of the DISCIPLINES of writing History, includes something which we usually call HISTORIOGRAPHY. That's the study of how over time, peoples often change their minds about what story they want to tell each other about the past and the present. Sometimes the changes made are towards more honesty and accuracy, but often it is instead towards more self-delusion or political convenience.

What we today call "political correctness" is, as the OP alluded to earlier, more than one thing. It is, in fact, much like any conceptual tool that humans decide to use to try to improve the world for themselves, in that many people picked it up, intending to apply it forthrightly for the sake of positive improvement of our overall existence, but just as many others, immediately saw opportunity to gain personal advantage by MISusing it.

Unfortunately, the current day fight AGAINST Political Correctness, has followed that exact same pattern. The moment someone began to oppose the idea of having a "right" and a "wrong" label for people, others saw an Right especially, to declare oneself to be Politically INCORRECT. This is all too often, not for the sake of returning to expressing oneself accurately, as it is to hide, or worse ignore, those who are returning to playing games of prejudice and oppression.

My admonition to everyone here is:

pay attention to the exact details, whenever people use ANY popularized slang term, such as Political Correctness. Before you leap either to support OR oppose them, sort through what they are saying, and take OUT the whole game of one upmanship which the use of the term entails.

You will, if you are honest and careful in your listening, find both instances where someone is claiming to BE politically correct, but are actually making false positive or negative generalizations about someone or something...

and you will ALSO find plenty of instances where someone is claiming to OPPOSE political correctness, but the rest of what they say is again, a general and false sweeping generalization about someone or something.

An excellent example of the MISUSE of opposition to PC, is in the discussion of racial prejudice vis a vis President Obama. Lots of people who declare that Political Correctness is a horrible thing, while criticizing Obama, want to use that opposition in a self-blinding way so as to completely ignore the fact that there ARE indeed, a LOT of people who hate Obama first, because he IS black, or who claim that he was only elected BECAUSE he is black. They use "Anti-PC" to be INACCURATE about the subject at hand, rather than to discuss it honestly. They essentially push the idea that recognizing that racism IS still an element of human society, is just an act of old fashioned Political Correctness, and should therefore be ignored entirely.

This is no different a failure, than those at the other end of the political spectrum, who want to pretend that misusing the idea of Equality as a tool to rig up INEQUALITIES, is a brave or wise thing to do.

In short, it can be just as much an act of supporting Political Correctness, to make a big fuss about how much you OPPOSE it, as it is to SUPPORT it directly.

black has little to do with anything anymore... he's a terrible president and a lying dormant muslim... you're just feeding the insecurities of minorities that wanna think that whitey is still out to get them by saying that liberal crap...

This question is a spin off from a thread posted a few days ago. How do you feel about the current trend towards Political Correctness? It has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives. People are no longer short. They are vertically challenged. Cleaners are now Sanitary workers. Racial/ethnic groups have stricter specifications as to how they should be titled, and the list goes on and on. Has the political correctness movement been a great step towards sensitivity and humanity? Or has it compromised our ability to be honest? Has this movement gone too far? Is there a happy middle ground?

politically correct, to me, appears to be a term used by some people to deflate others who don't share their opinion or choose the same words to express it


I believe that there is a line between 'constructive' which is a contribution given to aid in improving something

and 'rude/inconsiderate/asinine' which is a contribution given to assert ones superiority over another


I think it is humane , in most instances, to refrain from speaking AT another person with words that they have informed you offend them

it is also humane, to understand the culture , context, and intent of a person who is speaking to us to understand whether our sense of 'offense' is an overreaction to the intent


..the compromises; between being honest without being an inconsiderate prick and between not offending with words but also being willing to consider the actual intent before taking it offensively

are difficult to make and such skills are fading along with logical thinking,,,

You've misread what I said. I didn't say he was a good President. Recognizing that some people are criticizing him only because he's black, doesn't prevent you from ALSO looking squarely at his many mistakes, and pointing them out for what they are.

And there is STILL zero evidence that he is Muslim, that's another example of sticking with a convenient lie, which I grew up watching the Left do all the time. I didn't like it when they did it, and it's just as bad when the Right does it.

All lies that people tell themselves, damage their ability to make intelligent rational decisions, and to take positive actions to solve problems.

As long as people play games with themselves, and pretend to know things that they have no proof for, no matter how many times they say "I hate Political Correctness," they will still screw the pooch on dealing with the real world.

.you have no proof thats why "some" people are saying those things, but here you are spreading it like it's the truth...it's your idea of why people are criticizing him... the fact is, you have no idea whats going on in other people heads, you're just listening to the other liberals saying that and jumping on board..


so who's pretending now?

Well, you are pretending to read and understand what I say, for one. You still clearly have not done so.

Malice is not whipped out of thin air Moe. No one haplessly wakes up hating or mistreating a particular group. Malice is a sentiment that is often CULTIVATED from strategically and CONSISTENTLY linking specific words with specific images over time.

Why have commercials evolved to feature interracial couples or men doing the laundry , or women in the work place when advertising a product? A large part of that is geared toward evolving people's perceptions and behaviours, as it pertains to certain fixed constructs that we previously held. We are only fooling ourselves if we don't acknowledge some co-relation between evolving images, TERMS used to describe certain images and people's consequent attitudes and behaviors towards these concepts whether positive or negative.

And I don't want to shock you too much by saying this, but when you said "the "education" that I talked about earlier should be directed at the people WITH the insecurities, not the rest of the world...

I challenge you to move to a location, where "people with insecurities" DO NOT exist. You will find yourself hitch-hiking right back to the land where the rest of us suckers live because ALL of us have insecurities and flaws ... which means that none of us should be exempt from an education in compassion and civility.

I have observed that many of the people who curse political correctness often have never belonged to any of the groups that are commonly condemned or victimised by the wider society at large... which gives them as balanced of a view on this matter as the view George Bush caught of the Hurricane katrina victims as he hovered over them in his plane.


I also couldn't help but notice that you haven't really addressed the concept of "BALANCE" which I attempted to bring to the table.

Why not title groups of people with terms that are tempered with dignity ,while educating them about the harsh consequences of dumb choices/actions? And why don't we also come up with checks and balances to minimize the abuse/exploitation of civility practices ?

But who wants to consider the the precept of BALANCE, when we can spend the next 50 years in yet another societal debate that gets us nowhere, and engaging in the age- old hobby of SELECTIVE STRICTNESS.

We can argue for or against any issue until the cows come home, but a society is shaky at best without BALANCE.

People make up PC terms all the time, we can't keep up. Just because someone doesn't use the PC terms, doesn't make them disrespectful. Those that want to be disrespectful, won't care about PC terms anyway.


Does the the impartation of law in the world eradicate lawlessness altogether? Do laws even eradicate ALL attitudes towards lawlessness? No . They do not. What political correctness serves to do ,( as does the law) , is to set a PRECEDENCE of basic respect for OTHER'S lives , their property and their general welfare, and they also impute punitive action to discourage the execution of unlawful or insensitive acts. Without the law , and without political correctness, Many more people would be thinking selfishly, disregarding the rights and feelings and others.

BUT...

The problem with political correctness is that it has GONE TOO FAR, as have most commendable concepts. And as with all abused concepts, checks and balances need to be put in place for the abuse to stop.

There are 3 common things I have noticed about people who dont find any value in political correctness.

1. MOST of them have never belonged to groups that are universally ridiculed /scorned by the wider society on a daily basis and therefore have litle idea how painful that experience is

2 . Most of them are people who stress the importance of brutal honesty but are only brutally honest and strict about SELECTIVE offenses.They often complain about the violence of muslim extremists or crimes of minority races, but they seldom or never address the brutality of slavery at the hands of white masters or the mass killings under hitler or any white authorities . Nor do they address the strange coincidence of famous serial killings and cult movements that have been substantially caucasian related crimes. How come the mass shootings in schools by caucasian young men seldom ever get mentioned in these threads on mingle - threads that are supposedly devoted to brutal honesty . Why is brutal honesty so specifically targeted in one area and not on others? Why are the people who are brutally honest about obesity, condemning overweight people for their lack of indiscipline when chain smokers are seldom ever scorned or condemned for their foul smell and lack of discipline to quit their cancer sticks?

3. They generalise about any given group ie condemning one group as all good or all bad which is unfair and dishonest.

Lets face it.

The people who condemn political correctness and lobby fir brutal honesty are mainly brutally honest about topics that suit them conveniently. That honesty that they gloat about is often ONE SIDED

And many people who lobby for complete political correctness are also inclined to be one sided. They defend offences executed by certain groups who are explouting political correctness which is also wrong and inexcusable.

It turns out that the people for political correctness and the people against it have one main thing in common. They are both extreme , unbalanced and unfair.