Seeing how the same author has been trying to sound the alarm on political correctness at least since the beginning of this year, it seems unlikely that we'll start taking political correctness seriously any time soon.
Questioning political correctness is the realm of right-wing kooks anyway.
The HN guidelines ask you to edit name-calling out of your comments here, so please do. In this case the last sentence could be eliminated, since that's all it does.
I'm pretty disappointed you guys are missing all my jokes. Someone got called out for name calling in a discussion about the problems with political correctness!
Ah, I see. My sarcasm detector wasn't calibrated well enough.
But HN does have guidelines against name-calling. None against any particular ideas, though. HN "censors" harsh attitudes and personal attacks, not ideas that are "unacceptable". So it's not particularly like political correctness.
They aren't, but I've seen you call out users in the past basically for making a joke that you either didn't catch or that you didn't think was funny enough to justify the impropriety that went along with it. I wouldn't say it's a big problem or anything, but it does happen.
People love to imagine that their uncivil and unsubstantive comments have value, and therefore that we must be against them for ideological reasons (e.g. political correctness). But that is self-flattery. It's really just that such comments lower the signal-noise ratio.
Flip all the ideological bits and none of this changes. For example, replace "right-wing" with "left-wing" upthread and that comment would be just as uncivil; replace "the PC crowd" in your own comments with whatever the opposite construct is and they would be just as unsubstantive.
I'm not arguing the comment was uncivil, I'm pointing out the irony that a comment was deemed politically incorrect on a story about the problems of political correctness.
I get the HN crowd thinks very highly of itself, but that doesn't change the irony of these comments!
The idea that anybody here would moderate HN for "political correctness" is Martian to me. Only someone who doesn't know us could imagine that.
There is no "HN crowd"; that's just a rhetorical construct people use to implicitly place themselves above others. Since you're commenting here, you're a part of HN as much as anyone else is.
It seems that your first sentence saying is saying that we don't (and won't) take political correctness seriously, and then your second sentence is saying that everyone but right-wing kooks already takes it seriously. I must be mis-reading, but I can't see how.
Stop blaming it on the right. I'm left, and I agree that this shit needs to fuck off. Identity Politics is the worst bunch of assholes that I'd quite like to not be lumped in with.
This is a complicated topic, but my take is that the downside of political correctness is a potential for a loss of absolute correctness, while the benefit is respect and erring on the side of not doing harm. Those things need to be balanced and we have do decide as individuals and as a culture how we make those trade offs.
There is a huge potential downside from political correctness. When ideas are not allowed to compete on their intellectual merit (because someone finds them offensive), everybody loses.
It never ceases to amaze[1] me that whenever the left gets close to getting their voices heard in any broad sense, you start seeing these sort of polemics attacking them for not practicing absolute tolerance and freedom of speech whenever and wherever they assemble. Yes, there are intolerant assholes on the left, same as with any large group of people, and PC/SJW culture is fucking stupid, no doubt. But compared to our national media in the large, it is small potatoes.
Maybe students are sick to death of the status quo eating their future and wrecking their society and poisoning the Earth. They have grown up in a popular culture totally dominated by a right-wing media machine, wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out, rather than letting them get away with yet another hit piece attacking them on style rather than substance and completely ignoring their message. Look at the coverage of anything from OWS to Ferguson if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this. It's helpful to read the following to find out what this site is looking for in comment threads:
> whenever the left gets close to getting their voices heard in any broad sense, you start seeing these sort of polemics attacking them for not practicing absolute tolerance and freedom of speech whenever and wherever they assemble.
A lot of people want to see what happens when this particular culture group gets power. What will they do, how do they behave?
> wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out
So the right wing is preventing anybody from having a conversation—but it's okay because you don't want one anyway?
> if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb
Slavoj Zizek is probably the philosopher best known for show how political correctness is an overall bad thing for society. His stuff is worth checking out.
38 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 87.0 ms ] threadQuestioning political correctness is the realm of right-wing kooks anyway.
The HN guidelines ask you to edit name-calling out of your comments here, so please do. In this case the last sentence could be eliminated, since that's all it does.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But HN does have guidelines against name-calling. None against any particular ideas, though. HN "censors" harsh attitudes and personal attacks, not ideas that are "unacceptable". So it's not particularly like political correctness.
As for jokes on HN, there isn't much to add to what scott_s said a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.
The downvotes are telling you that they're not funny.
People love to imagine that their uncivil and unsubstantive comments have value, and therefore that we must be against them for ideological reasons (e.g. political correctness). But that is self-flattery. It's really just that such comments lower the signal-noise ratio.
Flip all the ideological bits and none of this changes. For example, replace "right-wing" with "left-wing" upthread and that comment would be just as uncivil; replace "the PC crowd" in your own comments with whatever the opposite construct is and they would be just as unsubstantive.
I get the HN crowd thinks very highly of itself, but that doesn't change the irony of these comments!
There is no "HN crowd"; that's just a rhetorical construct people use to implicitly place themselves above others. Since you're commenting here, you're a part of HN as much as anyone else is.
This is a complicated topic, but my take is that the downside of political correctness is a potential for a loss of absolute correctness, while the benefit is respect and erring on the side of not doing harm. Those things need to be balanced and we have do decide as individuals and as a culture how we make those trade offs.
Maybe students are sick to death of the status quo eating their future and wrecking their society and poisoning the Earth. They have grown up in a popular culture totally dominated by a right-wing media machine, wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out, rather than letting them get away with yet another hit piece attacking them on style rather than substance and completely ignoring their message. Look at the coverage of anything from OWS to Ferguson if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb.
[1] depress
Are you like a crazy delusional person?
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this. It's helpful to read the following to find out what this site is looking for in comment threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
A lot of people want to see what happens when this particular culture group gets power. What will they do, how do they behave?
> wholly owned by the ruling class and which has successfully kept the Overton window so damned narrow we can hardly have a conversation anymore. It is completely understandable that they would want journalists to get the fuck out
So the right wing is preventing anybody from having a conversation—but it's okay because you don't want one anyway?
> if you're curious why the left wants to tear the national media limb from rotten limb
And replace it with what, exactly?