Absolutely. It often makes all the difference between keeping and losing your job.
What is a Real Christian?
- Thread starter Bowser
- Start date
I'll say it has the potential to do so.
Political correctness is also often a socially acceptable form of (passive) aggressiveness, manipulation, and exploitation.
The OP doesn't list enough options, I don't think any of the listed ones are relevant for being a "real Christian".
As long as you're not on the receiving end of it, sure, manipulation is great ...
And white becomes black, bad becomes good, wrong becomes right.
It's not like the previous form of language was the "right" one, so any alteration spells doom. Change is inevitable.
But calling that "political correctness" is a tactic from those who benefit from oppression to frighten people away from recognizing the needs of others.
I don't know what you're talking about.
What you seem to be talking about is the idea that people should be kind to other people and not go around insulting other people. Conservatives have labeled this "political correctness" as a term of disparagement.
Conservatives have labeled it such? Interesting. In my experience, it is the leftists and liberals who do so.
It's all about "survival of the fittest," "natural selection" and all that.
Alterations do spell doom, at least for some time, for some people.
In the end, it appears it all comes down to coming to terms with the life-or-death competitive nature of life on earth, and that the competition is taking place on all levels, not just the physical one, but especially the mental one.
And yet we all do, whether we like it or not.
As long as the helper doesn't care whether the person he presumes to be helping is actually being helped or not; as long as the helper doesn't care whether the person he presumes to be helping actually feels helped or not -- yeah, this long, it's nice to talk about "helping others."
To actually help someone means caring enough to see whether that person is really being helped; to actually help someone means caring enough to see whether that person really feels helped -- or whether all that "help" is just a form of exploitation, as it usually is.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
That simply assumes that those doing the manipulating are the superior ones, an elite whose views and attitudes should be normative for everyone else. It assumes that the changes that this self-appointed elite are trying to make are all good and desirable ones. It assumes that they already occupy enough centers of power in government, the media and academia, that they have the necessary control over how the language is used, and consequently how people think. And it assumes that the beliefs and desires of all of the people who are to be manipulated don't count, that these inferior people shouldn't be allowed to think freely for themselves and to conduct their own lives.
Thought control by manipulation of people's language is an utterly totalitarian idea reminiscent of '1984'-style 'Newspeak',
In European history, it was the aristocrats and clerics who considered themselves to be a better sort of person, whose assumed natural superiority supposedly justified their control over both the culture and the crude and child-like common-people. In communist Russia and today's China, it's the Party trying to enforce that kind of control.
Whoever is doing it, whether it's the fundamentalists of the religious-right or the fundamentalists of the loony-left, it's profoundly elitist and undemocratic.
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The fittest humans are the ones best at cooperating with each other. It's why we have the big brain. It's why the question of who's a real Christian even comes up.mtf said:
The most influential and powerful such manipulators of language for the past forty years or so have been the media wing of the authoritarian corporate political faction in the US. Their influence on the public discourse has been profound, including but far from limited to (for example) the restriction of the term "politically correct" to rules of courtesy and accuracy they disparage, and away from rules of dissemblage and inaccuracy they enforce - to their political benefit.yazata said:
Shining example: "Enhanced interrogation", replacing "torture", which was politically forbidden even from factual newscasts reporting on well-documented events.
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Ivan Seeking
Registered Senior Member
I think part of what separates civilized man from wild animals is compassion. But then even wild animals will sometimes protect the injured and young. Are you saying we aren't even as good as wild animals? Where do you draw the line?
Even more to the point, given the context of the thread, are you suggesting that this view is Christian?