Tag Archives: Political Correctness

Posted in Literature

Tagged Laura Ingalls Wilder, Political Correctness

“Ole Miss Goes Bananas”: Dear Parents, How’s This For A $40K A Year Education? by Tyler Durden

Posted on September 3, 2017 | 1 comment

An errant banana peel brings a campus fraternity event to a snowflake screaming halt. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

What new college campus PC outrage could top ESPN’s decision to remove an Asian announcer named Robert Lee from calling a UVA game? One might reasonably think, impossible! But campus snowflakes have done it again, and this time it’s a single discarded banana peel which sent a college fraternity event hosting campus “leaders” into meltdown and general panic.

As one prominent columnist put it, “Ole Miss Goes Bananas” – we truly wish this was merely an over the top parody featured in The Onion, but unfortunately the triggered victims’ tears are all to real. The Daily Mississippian broke the story this week, which quickly went viral:

This weekend, leaders from Ole Miss Greek life convened upon Camp Hopewell in Lafayette County for a three-day retreat designed to build leaders and bring campus closer together. The retreat was cut short Saturday night, however, after three black students found a banana peel in a tree in front of one of the camp’s cabins.

The students shared what they found with National Pan-Hellenic Council leaders, sparking a day’s worth of camp-wide conversation surrounding symbolism, intended or not. In the midst of the open and sometimes heated discussion, senior accounting major Ryan Swanson said he put the banana peel in the tree when he could not find a trashcan nearby.

The offending fruit peel in question.

That’s right, a random discarded fruit peel ultimately led to the cancellation of an entire weekend event “designed to build leaders” which instead ended in “tears and frustration” as organizers “didn’t feel safe”. And then of course came the inevitable university action plans, flurry of letters exchanged, and sensitivity meetings. Bleary-eyed and shaken students had to text friends and family to come pick them up early (sounds like Kindergarten carpool pick-up time).

To continue reading: “Ole Miss Goes Bananas”: Dear Parents, How’s This For A $40K A Year Education?

Posted in Collapse, Education, Horseshit

Political Correctness Claims a Victim… by Bill Bonner

Posted on June 25, 2017 | Leave a comment

You would think if you had a billion dollars in the bank you wouldn’t much care what anybody thought about you and you’d do and say as you damn well pleased, within the limits of the law. Apparently that’s not the case. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:

DUBLIN – Poor David Bonderman.

He said the wrong thing. He should be ashamed of himself.

We’ll come back to him in a minute…

Stroll Through the Park

In the meantime, if you want to enjoy summertime as it should be, take a walk through St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin on a sunny day in June.

Yesterday, young people lounged on the grass… taking off shirts and hiking up skirts to get the sun on their skin. Lovers walked arm in arm around the pond. Children kicked balls… old people sat on benches reading.

And your editor strolled with his son.

Warm, sunny weather is rare in Ireland. But when it happens in midsummer, the result is spectacular. The sun rises at 5 a.m. and doesn’t go to bed until 10 p.m. The flowers love it.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said the younger one.

“Yes, hard to beat.”

“Our family is Irish, isn’t it?”

“Yes…”

“I wonder why they left.”

“Oh… Ireland was not always such a pleasant place. Even as late as the 1970s, there were areas in the west that were desperately poor. Children went to school without shoes. And some of the schools had outdoor plumbing.

“Then when the country joined the euro in 2001, it got access to credit at low German rates. That’s when the building boom started. By 2007, property prices had risen to the point that the Irish – on paper – were the richest people in Europe.

“Our family missed the whole cycle. We went from being one of the poorest families in Ireland to being one of the poorest families in Maryland.”

PC Hysteria

Back in the USA…

There is practically a subgenre in public commentary explaining how political correctness has gone too far.

To continue reading: Political Correctness Claims a Victim…

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized

The Dirty Secrets of Socialism (Or, The Purpose of Political Correctness), by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on December 31, 2016 | Leave a comment

By definition, if there is politically correct speech, there is also politically incorrect speech. And if “politically incorrect” sounds like something out of a totalitarian regime, there are reasons for that. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

Parents of college-age children are finally catching on to the cultural Marxist PC scam. Cries of “insensitivity” every time a conservative or libertarian speaker appears anywhere near a college campus; “safe rooms” equipped with play dough, soft music, and videos of frolicking puppies; the endless accusations of “racist/sexist/homophobe” aimed at all non-leftists on campus; and widely-publicized episodes of vulgar, ignorant, x-rated, “students” screaming their heads off at conservative campus speakers have exposed the real purpose of political correctness: censorship of any and all non-Marxist ideas. It’s not about fighting racism, sexism, etc.; it’s about censoring the ideas of freedom.

Today’s college students have been –and are being – trained to be intolerant, totalitarian-minded, communist thugs. All for a mere 50 grand a year at even mediocre institutions of “higher education.”

This all began after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s. Socialists never give up on their dream of ordering their fellow human beings around, plundering them with taxes, and enriching themselves in the process. Very few of the twentieth-century socialist ideologues ever admitted that they were disastrously wrong, or apologized for providing aid and comfort to the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Instead, they and their intellectual descendants have worked tirelessly to invent a virtual socialist reality – at least in the minds of America’s youth – while censoring all dissenting opinions. Socialism’s dirty secrets must never be revealed to America’s youth, lest they revolt against the giant lying machine known as “higher education.” (There are a few exceptions, of course, but most of academe is now dominated by the totalitarian, cultural Marxist Left).

To continue reading: The Dirty Secrets of Socialism (Or, The Purpose of Political Correctness)

Posted in Civil Liberties, Morality, Philosophy, Politics

Tagged Cultural Marxism, Political Correctness

Universities’ war against truth, by Roger Scruton

Posted on July 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

This article contains an interesting insight about the connection between people’s level of certainty, the language they use, and the language they’re afraid to use. From Roger Scruton on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

Having beliefs and expressing them is no longer tolerated and the contagion is spreading

Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain, and this reluctance is revealed in their language. In any matter where there might be disagreement, they will put a question mark at the end of the sentence. And to reinforce the posture of neutrality they will insert words that function as disclaimers, among which the favourite is ‘like’. You might be adamant that the Earth is spherical, but they will suggest instead that the Earth is, ‘like, spherical?’

Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable. Indeed, even calling them ‘beliefs’ is slightly suspect. The correct word is ‘opinions’. If you try to express your certainties in a classroom today you are apt to be looked at askance, not because you are wrong, but because of the strangeness of being certain about anything and the even greater strangeness of wanting to impart your certainties to others. The person with certainties is the excluder, the one who disrespects the right we all have to form our own ‘opinions’ about what matters.

However, as soon as inclusiveness itself is questioned, freedom is cast aside. Students seem to be as prepared as they ever were to demand that ‘no platform’ be given to people who speak or think in the wrong way. Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them. The greatest sin is a refusal to end each sentence with a question mark.

As with so many changes in our language and culture in the past 25 years, the aim is to discover, and also to forbid, the hidden forms of discrimination. Almost every belief system that in the past seemed objective and important is now dismissed as an ‘ism’ or a ‘phobia’ so that those who stand by it are made to look like ideological fanatics.

In the 1970s, when feminism began to make inroads into the public culture, the question arose whether there were not, after all, radical distinctions between the sexes, which explained why men were successful in some spheres and women in others. Feminists rebelled against that idea. As a result, they invented ‘gender’, which is not a biological category but a way of describing malleable and culturally changeable characteristics. You cannot choose your sex, perhaps. But you can choose your gender. And that was what women were doing — redefining femininity so as to lay claim to the territory formerly monopolised by men. Thereafter, biology was removed from the picture and gender put in its place.

To continue reading: Universities’ war against truth

Posted in Education

From Protesting Vietnam to Demanding “Safe Spaces” – What Happened to America’s College Kids? by Michael Krieger

Posted on November 8, 2015 | 1 comment

Another disturbing article on what’s happened to America’ colleges. Be sure to click the link and watch the video at the end. You won’t believe the shrieking, screaming creature is a Yale student. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

I grew up hearing stories of protest. About those years, a decade or so before I was born, during which America’s youth rebelled against the prevailing establishment, and forever changed the nation’s course in some meaningful ways.

Of course, many of you will accurately state that not much about the imperial state has actually changed since those days of protest, and that in fact, the out of control abuse of power both abroad and at home has gotten far worse in the subsequent decades. I will concede this point, but want to add a caveat. Certain things really did change, particularly with regard to racial discrimination in these United States. Not to say things are perfect, but to discount the significant gains achieved in this regard would be unfair.

Nevertheless, as far as the “shadow government” is concerned, not much has changed. Other than the fact that the status quo learned important lessons from those years of rebellion, and was forced to operate even more secretly than it did before. As an example, the military-industrial complex learned that it couldn’t have genuine journalists running around war zones after images taken in Vietnam shocked the nation and helped turn popular sentiment against it. As such, reporters in war zones these days are nothing more than propagandists and imperial shills. Indeed, increasingly effective propaganda and a captured corporate media has probably been the single most important tool used by the shadow government to maintain and consolidate control over all these years. In a nutshell, people have been dumbed down, as well as mentally and emotionally castrated, to the point of being almost unable to rebel against anything of real importance.

Which brings me to the point of this post. The reason I brought up the civil disobedience and activism of the 1960’s, is because it did at least represent a true conflict with that generation’s status quo, and it did in fact attempt to tackle some of the pressing issues of power, justice and freedom that existed at the time. This is in stark contrast to what passes as “activism” on college campuses today, which essentially amounts to “pro-censorship” students vigilantly defending an entirely invented and unconstitutional right to “not be offended.” Whereas the 60’s movements, for all their failings, were at least ostensibly about freedom (of the mind and body), today’s college movements are strikingly focused on shackling the mind, and turning campuses in unintellectual, zombie-filled wastelands.
Of course, while someone like myself might be tempted to just laugh off such infantile and pathetic “activism,” it is in fact one of the most dangerous trends facing modern American society. You’d think that a culture in which the most vibrant source of college activism centered around the defense of a non-existent right to not be offended, would be one where all other issues of national import had been successfully addressed.

To continue reading: What Happened to America’s College Kids

Posted in Academia, Civil Liberties, Other Views

Tagged Colleges, Free Speech, Political Correctness

Good Little Maoists, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 1 comment

James Howard Kunstler confront campus political correctness run amuck. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is, higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive across American life these days. But in promoting the official suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide, disgracing its mission to civilized life.

To continue reading: Good Little Maoists

Posted in Academia, Culture, Other Views

Tagged Political Correctness, US Universities

The Future Costs Of Politically Correct Cultism, by Brandon Smith

Posted on July 16, 2015 | 1 comment

From Brandon Smith, at alt-market.com:

I rarely touch on the subject of political correctness as a focus in my writings, partially because the entire issue is so awash in pundits on either side that the scrambling clatter of voices tends to drown out the liberty movement perspective. Also, I don’t really see PC cultism as separate from the problems I am always battling against: collectivism and the erasure of the individual in the name of pleasing society. Political correctness is nothing more than a tool that collectivists and statists exploit in order to better achieve their endgame, which is conning the masses into believing that the group mind is real and that the individual mind is fiction.

Last year, I covered the PC issue in my article “The Twisted Motives Behind Political Correctness.” I believe I analyzed the bulk of the issue extensively. However, the times are changing at a pace that boggles the mind; and this is by design. So, it may be necessary to square off against this monstrosity once again.

In order to better examine the true insanity of what many people now term “social justice warriors,” I must study a few aspects of that strange movement separately. First, let’s take a brief look at the mindset of your average social justice circus clown so that we might better understand what makes him/her/it tick.

Rebel Without A Legitimate Cause

I spent several years (up until 2004, when I woke up from the false paradigm madness) as a Democrat. And before anyone judges that particular decision, I would suggest they keep in mind the outright fascist brothel for the military-industrial complex the Republican Party had become at that point and remains to this day. Almost every stepping stone that Barack Obama is using today to eradicate the Constitution was set in place by the Bush dynasty, including the Authorization Of Military Force, which was the foundation for the National Defence Authorization Act and the legal precedence for indefinite detention without trial of ANY person (including an American citizen) accused of terrorism by the president of the U.S., as well as the use of assassination by executive order and the implementation of mass electronic surveillance without warrant.

But, hell, these are real issues — issues that many of my fellow Democrats at the time claimed they actually cared about. Today, though, liberal concerns about unconstitutional actions by the federal government have all but vanished. Today, the left fights the good fight against flags on the hoods of cars from long-canceled television shows and battles tooth and nail for the “right” of boys wearing wigs and skirts to use the girl’s bathroom. Today, the left even fights to remove the words “boy” and “girl” from our vocabulary. Yes, such noble pursuits as these will surely be remembered as a pinnacle in the annals of societal reform.

To continue reading: The Future Costs Of Politically Correct Cultism

Posted in Culture, Other Views, Politics