1984 question

That seems awfully harsh. The entire purpose of political correctness was simply to make people more sensitive to each others' differences and be aware of how their words can affect other people. Granted, it can and has been misused many times. But to call it censorship or say its comparable to Newspeak is an exaggeration at best.

Newspeak was all about making concepts impossible. Attempts to redefine negative words, like racial or homophobic slurs, are about turning a negative into a positive. And taking offense at certain words - like midget, "deaf and dumb", retarded, or spaz - hardly equates with restricting people's freedom of speech or thought.

It also ignores how PCness has been used as a whipping post by bigots and ultra-conservatives time and time again to justify their positions. After all, has it not always been the position of the Aryan Nation, the National Organization for Marriage, and the Religious Right that they and their values are under attack? Of course, and the hypocrisy of it has always been transparent.

The purpose of newspeak was to erase a thought. If you can't signify it, you can't think it. I think this is absolutely the aim of political correctness, to force people to change their thinking. Some thoughts should change. But the way we have historically changed minds in the West has been through argumentation, that way we know not only what is right to think, but why it's right. Argumentation acknowledges free will. The problem with newspeak is that is forces a change by overriding free will. It mechanically alters thought without addressing the interior states from which those thoughts arise. Even if we took away all the ways of signifying race, gender, etc; that would not necessarily alter the physical twinge of aversion a person experiences; only good arguments can do that.

A lot of the terms used in politics/political correctness qualify not as "newspeak", which is almost a stripping down of language, but more as "doublespeak", which over complicates or even euphemizes simple things, in my opinion.

Wow... So actually this is a bunch of people defending their right to say whatever insulting slur that they want and jumping on the first who says the opposite? Wow! I never thought I would find this here. After all, I came here to see if this was about a book...

Political Correctness is putting my interpretation of your words above your meaning.

If I don't like what I want you to have said, I call what you did Hatespeech.

P.C. is the essence of being against freedom of expression.

P.S. The funniest rhetoric I hear these days is against the Tea Party. I'm not a member but once you get past all the bile expended against them, you see people who want a balanced budget and for government to stick by the rules governing it. Wow, how awful.

Yes, I'm sure one can pick out objectionable rhetoric by some on that side. I can compile a similar dossier on the blowhards on the left. The point is what they truly want, truly act on, and not what *I* or anyone caricatures them as. Who wants the government to behave according to the constitution? Who wants to violate that constitution for their immediate political and electoral benefit? Where has that led the world in the past?

Press "Like" and exit your brain.

I think in some ways PC has gone towards Newspeak territory. In principle PC isn't terrible or even anti free speech. Being a little more sensitive towards our differences isn't a horrible idea.

But like with everything, it has it's "extremists." People bending over backwards to not insult anything and everything leads to restrictive thoughts and expressions.
We often decry hate filled speech and positions/opinions as politically incorrect, but to me that's almost like a band aid, rather than a solution.
Instead of hiding behind PC we ought to encourage frank and open discussion. It may lead to some uncomfortable topics or even horrible words. But if we can find out why people have the opinions that they do. Then maybe we can find a way to offer different perspectives and perhaps even get someone to think twice about calling someone a slur. Well absolute best case scenario, at least. Not saying it will necessarily work. But it's a good baby step.

Simply brushing a person off as "Politically Incorrect" doesn't make that person particularly inclined to listen to your side of the story. Granted the same is true of a person being called a slur. But I digress.

I'm not saying people ought to go around spewing hate speech or throwing slurs at people in public just because they want to (isn't that against the law anyway? Inciting hate/violence? Hate speech? Can you even call barring that in public being PC?)

But if the PC crowd is all about inclusiveness then it may be a good idea to prove it and let "unpopular" or even Politically Incorrect opinions be expressed. If only to encourage a debate.

The purpose behind newspeak in George Orwell's novel “1984” is ingenious. The true meaning behind Newspeak is to reduce the thought process of the people in Oceania. This is because if people can’t think or describe things, they can’t revolt and have thoughts about going against the party or Big Brother. With this in mind, the people of Oceania are scared of committing “thoughtcrimes” and committing a “crimethink”. If any of the people do this, they will be punished, being that there shouldn’t be any bad thoughts related to the party. This punishment is witnessed through Syme, an intelligent man working on the new Newspeak dictionary. Unfortunately, he was becoming to intelligent, and because of this the party had to get rid of him. He vanishes very soon after this was realized by the party. Being to smart is Oceania is too dangerous. Therefore, the goal is to shrink the words and make rebellion almost impossible because the mere idea of it vanishes.

Political Correctness is absolutely a form of Newspeak. Its fundamental premise is that "undesirable" opinions can be eradicated by making it impossible to express them. It frequently goes hand in hand with Doublethink: patently absurd assertions that are "explained" as being politically correct and, therefore, factual. It appears the ultimate end of Political Correctness is to redefine words so that they cannot be "misused", and to redefine such basic concepts as "true", "false", "good", "bad", "right", "wrong", etc. Ultimately, if "true, right, good" are defined as "what is politically correct", then it is double-plus self-contradictory to say that PC is ungood.
Political Correctness argues Majority Rule over the Rights of the Individual and thus, the rule of the Mob over that of Law. Collective Oligarchy is when the Party becomes a personless entity: the rule of all by none.

Saneseeker wrote: "Is Political Correctness a type of Newspeak? Here in the UK it constantly reduces the language to meaningless platitudes..."

Hey, it gets even *worse*...

I was at a rally on the Crapitol steps a couple of years back, and witnessed a (rather one-sided, since one party just went on continuously without pause) "debate" between a big old bearded redneck and a hideous little frog of a woman. There was a stream of noise that might be called speech issuing forth from her mouth, comprised of one hackneyed leftist platitude after another in rapid succession, and - I am not making this up - her delivery had the exact rhythm and tonal quality of a quacking duck.

I stood there mesmerized for about 30 seconds, realizing that I was actually hearing Orwell's "Duckspeak" - live in prime time.

Political correctness isn't about being sensitive to others-- that's politeness. Political correctness is an attack on traditional values that has its roots in Marxism. It's a tyranny of cry-babies and perpetual victims who often go out of their way to find something to be offended about.

In the UK recently we saw a man arrested for quoting Winston Churchill. "A candidate in the European elections has been arrested after making a speech quoting from a book by Winston Churchill about Islam." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknew...

In America, we have schools banning the display of American flags because it might offend Mexicans.

"Fearing that "Mexican" students might commit violence, school administrators required that students wearing American flag shirts remove them, or turn them inside-out."

Also note: "in response to the white students’ flag-raising, one Mexican student shouted "f*** them white boys, f*** them white boys." When Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez told the student to stop using profane language, the student said, "But Rodriguez, they are racist. They are being racist. F*** them white boys. Let’s f*** them up." Yet some of my (assuredly white American) commenters claim that these violent anti-American racists are somehow the true victims! Liberalism is truly a form of mental illness. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives...

ETA: Links

The PC Insanity is only getting worse. Another great example of political correctness run amok is the handling of Muslim rape gangs by the UK authorities in Rotherham. The authorities ignored at least 1400 underage white English girls being sexually exploited by Muslims for years out of fear of being perceived as "racist". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknew...

English Islamophilia also promoted the rape of English men and women in the recent Libyan Army training scandal. Ah, diversity enriches us all. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...

ETA2: In the comments, I mentioned the UCSB "Porn Professor" who attacked a young girl for daring to display pro-life materials in UCSB's laughably named "Free Speech Zone". There's good news for once. The liberal academic's violent attempt to suppress others' rights has rightly led to criminal charges and a civil suit. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/11/07/...