Where Political Correctness Went Wrong

Post Reply New Topic

Lol, well, you mean your model of this situation and what to do about it fails.

This is one of those areas where I stand strongly with Sam Harris - both on free will (really the utter fiction of it) and our need to throw what he very artfully described as a 'hangover from Calvinism' out the window. Pretty much all of the assumptions that religion has lead us toward regarding how the human being works are turning out to be nonsense. I know that at least a few times Sam had some really good hour or longer discussions on the fiction of free will and when he went at this point he gave the example of Charles Whitman - a guy who we would think, just from the surface, was an utterly vile person and who we'd completely condone the destruction of, and then the story completely changed when we find out that the guy had a massive brain tumor - he wasn't himself, couldn't be himself, and what he'd become was an accident of what biology gone rogue can do to a person. Sam's following argument was like this - everyone alive in our culture is some version of that, typically with much better outcomes, but the overall idea is that where we end up, who we end up as, etc.. is not a morality story - it's a biology story. Yes, the software we run in our heads and the quality of it can be a boon to our well-being, sometimes that's enough, sometimes the biology's so bad that it'll never be enough, and still other times we're around such deranged people and having our scaffolding tuned by such decrepit conditions that there's little to no hope of turning out well.

I think that's the case that really needs to be made. For whatever reason our culture, and really lots of cultures around the world, won't touch that one even if its completely true. It's the right's equivalent lunacy of the left's desire to come up with feminist theories of glaciology, quantum mechanics, etc.. to undermine the white cis-male oppression of the founders of these fields and overturn completely adequate observations with BS. I think really your problem is red-states is much less about the rich hating the poor, I really think that's a secondary effect of them being in an evangelical culture. I mean, I'm sure that when times are really hard and it has to be dog-eats-dog strategies like fundamentalist Christianity and Islam have a ruthless pragmatism that brings the achievers to the top, causes the weak to die, and it's a larger scale version of the kinds of dramas that take place within our own bodies as certain micro-biomes destroy older, beat-up, and less healthy ones. At our culture's current stage of development though that's an impediment and one that we really need to put behind us.

That's where I have to say that I'd say that my relative 'conservatism' might come from - ie. I think Mother Nature and the way she's built is a lot like the queen vampire from Bordello of Blood. She's a ruthless maniac that just doesn't care how we feel, whether our lives go great or whether we go screaming our heads off in agony down a whirlpool into a black hole and die there. Nature itself is more cut-throat and pragmatic than some of the worst Republicans you can think of.

Back to my point - I think we need a cultural revolution where we throw the Manichean BS completely out the window. Good vs. evil, in group vs. out-group? No! $%^& Zoroaster and the horse he road in on! We need to wring that out of our culture. Can we have spirituality? Sure. In fact - I find, especially if your life is difficult, if you don't have some organized way of checking in with yourself and getting your conscious/subconscious stuff congruent you'll be in a really bad way.

So that's the first step - throwing out the bad code. Something that can be done concurrently, and I think it already is being tried in places like Washington (I posted an article to my Facebook a few years back) is they need to set up some minimal tiny-houses, sort of 'habitat for humanity' type villages, for the homeless. I agree with you that they need shelter and that, when you're under the stress of living on the street, especially when odds are relatively zero that you can do much to just reinsert yourself into society, work a job from a homeless shelter (if anyone would hire you in that state), let alone with a mental illness being able to compete in today's marketplace. I mean heck, I'm in a position where my IQ's in the mid 120's, I went to school and graduated highest honors, I'm 37 and living with my parents. I had to fight tooth and nail just get past that ridiculous 'everyone wants experience and no one wants to give it'. Then you find out when you get there that people are sloppy, lazy, the newer you are the more of a super-hero fix everything for $15 an hour you need to be, and they'll drop you just as fast as they picked you up all the while giving you glowing reviews on your work - essentially you're cannon-fodder.

Some type of real and meaningful dialog needs to be had about all of that and what it means in terms of utterly debunking the morality = success, failure is immorality mythology. We need to challenge that side of the social structure all the while really proving that there are better ways to think about the world, life, existence, etc. that are far more practical and solve a lot of the problems that are unsolvable right now for no other reason that we absolutely refuse to bring the right tools to the job.

So what do you do when people bring out the "Well yeah, but the bible says..." blah blah blah blah, they're sinful people doing bad things and they need 'tough love' to grow up and be responsible - you stare off into space patiently while they say that, let them vent it out, and pick up right where you left off - with the facts - as if you were just waiting for the cloud of white noise to drift overhead and pass.

I think the problem that leftists and progressives have with that idea is that they're not patient, demand very fungible results, and they're more willing to go destructive - like Antifa or the postmodernists of the Marxist flavor - than they are willing to really push the facts against the fairy-tales. The fairy-tales have to go because they're toxic and they're not helping our culture. No, we don't need nihilism and I find it really sad that people often say "Well, you have the choice between Manichaean old-time religion and nihilism, purposelessness, and the insatiable urge to masturbate all day". Lol, no, that's just terrible observation of reality as well as a very foolish interpretation of what religion, faith, etc.. can actually be - ie. they've got a very limited scope of experience and it shows when they say things like that.

I know that was probably WAY more information than you needed but I didn't think my response would make a lot of sense unless I properly couched it in my understanding of what's going on in the world, what's going wrong with or cultural software, and I still stand by one particular principle - you have to obey the truth. To invent one lie in hopes that it'll circumvent another lie is very expensive, deleterious to social health, and leaves us just as bad off or worse than just fighting, even for years, for the actual truth to prevail over fancy.




I agree - we have a lot of BS in our culture, we believe a lot of BS, and it shows when people try to get reasonable things done and it fails because everyone has a right to their own facts.




What I don't think you understand about rich people is that they're people who've been honed through their lives to work like maniacs, it's a game to them, they enjoy it, and quite often they don't know how to do much else. We all struggle to find purpose, for some people being a CEO and working 60-70 hours a week and having the weight of a company on your shoulders is the spice of life. They've also, like all of us, been fed heaping spoonfuls of Manichaean dogma. Sure, they're waking up (at least I'd say most entrepeneurs are less cold-asleep than most politicians), and at the same time we're really not sure what to tell these people that's a right and just cause for them to abdicate their funds.

I think all we can really do with the rich is promise two things - a) they should be wealthy for what they're able to achieve or what they're able to organize from other people's talents and abilities (that's a much harder skillset to pull of than most people realize). Then b) we need to talk about civic responsibility - ie. the money needs to flow to keep the economy healthy and vibrant. With the responsibility of success comes certain ground rules for managing the money you've accrued. I think we need to get away from the idea of money as 'mine-mine-mine!' to be something that's really everybodies, something that those who are good custodians and growers of assets deserve to have more custody over, but at the end of the day they are part of a team - everyone who works for them is part of that team, every man, woman, and child who's submitting to the will of our society and not blowing this up or going on killing sprees in the streets over what society's doing to them - they deserve to at least have their basic needs looked after.

(edit: I think that's actually a really good buzz-phrase idea: money belongs to no one, everyone and anyone who has it is simply a custodian of society's money - which they earn the right to have more of with good stewardship.)

I think that's always been the confusion in capitalism - ie. a tendency toward a very naive grasp on what societies are, what makes them function, and what the responsibilities are of those who can accrue a lot. Yes, with that added weight you'd probably find fewer CEO's wanting to work the crazy hours, get rich, and do all of that other stuff but then again I think there are better ways to do this than putting this on people directly. You have think-tanks, in the accounting world the scandals have brought the accounting world (literally) together enough to form an IASB or international standards board. I easily think the same thing could happen here in terms of people actually working through the economics, seeing what needs to happen, setting up ground rules on what needs to be done with money to keep it circulating humanely, and from there you can work out a better social contract for all involved.

I get that all of that might sound like pie-in-the-sky to some people but here's the problem with that - it's the ONLY option I can see that will yield good result. The rest, especially gonzo social activism and fighting falsehoods with falsehoods, will just give us a totalitarian state and a worse society. The only option is strenuous but at the end of the day I think the more people who actually choose that option the more feasible it will become and eventually, as the narrative of reason keeps getting looped, people will start to actually tune in and such ideas can become a movement.

Moral of the story - don't give up on logic and reason. It's the only guardian angel we have.

For years I just thought PC was changing words to be less offensive and getting rid of things like Christmas decorations or changing the words Christmas to family for Christmas trees and getting rid of certain humor or changing TV shows and it would ruin it for everyone else because of sensitive people.

Now it seems to have evolved to being nice to people and considerate and it's something as*holes use when they are forced to be polite and not insulting which they like to hide behind the word honesty to be an as*hole. Also something they use when they don't want to be compassionate for others or empathetic. I was raised to be open minded and polite. I think people who like to be insulting and judgmental and have no passion are not very nice people and they will be the ones who will whine about political correctness when they are called out on their rudeness or their meanness. I have to ask how hard is it to just be nice to people? Do people really lack this skill they find it so exhausting? Why isn't it an impairment then if they find it so hard? Oh that's right because they are rewarded for their behavior and it doesn't hold them back or keep them from functioning. They are capable of being nice or otherwise they wouldn't be able to hold a steady job and they would always be getting fired and always be getting meanness from other people and lack of respect and always getting into fights and conflicts with others so they are capable of being nice but just choose to not to be. But when they go online, they say whatever the hell they want because they just don't care while in real life they put on the nice mask.

You didn't offer any criticism, you went straight to ad hominem.



Yes, your comment was completely absent nuance.

Here's a suggestion, though I'm already certain which option you'll choose. If you're interested in discourse, put the required effort in to hold up your own side. If you're just here to troll, carry on as you have been since you joined the site.

Back to deflection? I want to promote a more open, direct, concise debate.

Through trolling, ad hominem and facile semantics?

Seemingly, then, the problem is that you lack the necessary ability to realise your desires. Sadly we may never know what productive notions you might otherwise have brought to the table.

If you want to be perceived as a troll, carry on trolling. If you don't, then cease. It's your choice, your time and your life, jr.

Perhaps I'm not clever enough to appeal to imaginary consensus.