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David
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Nov 10, 2016 03:54PM
According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2014, 42 percent of Americans believe the world was created by God in 7 days about 4,000 years ago. This belief goes together with a belief that the Bible is God-inspired and true. So they are obliged to swallow the Bronze Age view that rape is a property crime against the father if the woman is unmarried, or the husband if she is married. And they consider that the Presidency of the United States is not an office that should be held by a woman. An extraordinary percentage of these people voted for Trump.
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Why in this age of encouraging equality and all that goes with it are people labelling others more and more. The best person for the job should be just that,. Being a man or woman, whatever colour you are born with is something you have no control over so why should one particular facet of a person count above or below an other. The idea of voting for a woman just because she is a woman is so wrong though.
Some interesting discussion in the Telegraph, one commenting that the Democrats and various political elites said exactly the same things about Ronnie Reagan when he wonMind you it also pointed out that Ronnie had probably given more thought to the political underpinnings than most politicians :-)
Reagan was governor of California though so he had more of a shoe-in than Trump. I didn't realise until recently just how big an economy or population California has.
Bigots are the one minority it is socially acceptable to be prejudiced against.
Lynne (Tigger's Mum) wrote: "Reagan was governor of California though so he had more of a shoe-in than Trump. I didn't realise until recently just how big an economy or population California has."and he apparently ran it pretty well, but it didn't stop the Democrats calling him to stupid to have his finger on the button.
I suspect one problem that the democrats had in this election is that they've vilified all previous Republican presidents or hopefuls, so why should anybody who's lived through that take any notice of them this time?
David wrote: "Bigots are the one minority it is socially acceptable to be prejudiced against."Poor, poor, bigots!
Would some kind soul please light a candle for the racists and the homophobes...?
Michael Cargill wrote: "David wrote: "Bigots are the one minority it is socially acceptable to be prejudiced against."Poor, poor, bigots!
Would some kind soul please light a candle for the racists and the homophobes...?"
names are labels that you apply to people you wish to dehumanise and can therefore destroy. By labelling them, perhaps as fascists, marxists, jews, homophobes then you rob them of all humanity and they can therefore be destroyed without any qualms of conscience as they are merely a blot of the face of the brave new humanity that your policies create.
And what is wrong with calling a racist a racist, or a homophobe a homophobe?Look at that Christian couple who owned that hotel. Backed up by various Christian groups, they've spent thousands on legal fees because they want to discriminate against homosexuals.
This isn't a case of smug liberals shouting down anyone who disagrees with them, they are literally arguing with the law of the land in order to maintain their bigotry... and they have the support of others.
Why is it wrong for me to call them homophobes when their actions and their words prove it?
its divide and rule then. I agree Michael that those people acted against the law of the land but it becomes more and more complicated when you throw in the religious belief defence. We have to decide whether law trumps (sorry for the pun) religion or vice versa. Also some religions seem to have priority over others. I'm not arguing for either, merely observing.
I am inclined to pity such people because what they are actually engaging in is panic. Their panic is a reaction to life, which is only comprehensible to them by setting hard boundaries of understanding and rejecting anything outside their narrow confines as abnormal and not quite human.
We all shape our own world and our understanding of it through our choices of what to believe and what we see.
This allows them to discriminate against all that they do not understand or cannot fit within their frame. Most of us do it in some form or other. But the driver of it is fear of living or of seeing it in other ways.
You can control and understand what is inside safe boundaries, but what runs out of control is dangerous. It's all fear in one form or another.
Just fear.
We all shape our own world and our understanding of it through our choices of what to believe and what we see.
This allows them to discriminate against all that they do not understand or cannot fit within their frame. Most of us do it in some form or other. But the driver of it is fear of living or of seeing it in other ways.
You can control and understand what is inside safe boundaries, but what runs out of control is dangerous. It's all fear in one form or another.
Just fear.
Thats more or less what we were saying at home this morning. The boxes and boundaries that the pollsters were putting voters in gets more and more. It's simplistic I know but why can't we just be people. I personally think talking about the Latino or black vote is racism as well so Clinton for me was targeting groups in what is accepted as a positive way but is still racism. They were people voting. Positive discrimation is still discrimination.
Michael Cargill wrote: "And what is wrong with calling a racist a racist, or a homophobe a homophobe?"Just because it is a currently an acceptable prejudice doesn't make it any less of a prejudice. Calling them names is still calling them names.
To villify people for one aspect of their character - or, more accuraely, a perceived, prescribed or presumed aspect of their character - is the very definition of prejudice and bigotry.
David, in the past you have moaned about political correctness and how we are not allowed to call a spade a spade.Yet here you are insisting that we should be sparing the feelings of those who want to discriminate against homosexuals because they don't want to upset their non-existent deity.
It is intellectually lazy to say that our prejudice against their prejudice is the same thing. Is it wrong for me to accuse an SS Guard of antisemitism as I watch a film clip of him tossing a Jewish corpse into the oven at Auschwitz?
Michael Cargill wrote: "And what is wrong with calling a racist a racist, or a homophobe a homophobe?Look at that Christian couple who owned that hotel. Backed up by various Christian groups, they've spent thousands on ..."
Strangely quite a few gay activists support the bakers, among the Peter Tatchell
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/...
Michael Cargill wrote: "It is intellectually lazy to say that our prejudice against their prejudice is the same thing. Is it wrong for me to accuse an SS Guard of antisemitism as I watch a film clip of him tossing a Jewish corpse into the oven at Auschwitz? ..."yes, it is.
How the hell can you know what was going through the mind of a conscript (Because a fair proportion of SS men were conscripts) who's just obeying orders to stay alive
I said the hotel owners, not the bakery owners.And whilst it may well turn out that the SS guard isn't actually an anti-semite, it certainly isn't wrong to accuse him of being so on balance of the available evidence.
Michael Cargill wrote: "David, in the past you have moaned about political correctness and how we are not allowed to call a spade a spade."Exactly. Which is why I am being consistent here.
Political correctness is about censoring, blocking and condemning the opinions and beliefs of those who do not agree with the current fashionable worldview of the PC minority.
Re Auschwitz. Since the Nazi final solution was the culmination of the period of eugenics that started way back with Malthus and went on with a great deal of support from the left and right of the political spectrum, it is quite possible that the putative guard of yours would regard your prejudice in favour of what he saw as he inferior races as just as disgusting, inhuman, strange, illogical and perverse as we now regard his views.
Judging the past by today's standards without taking into account the historical context is always tricky.
You aren't being consistent at all, because you rail against the so-called SJW/PC crowd who tell you the things you are saying are offensive. If you want to be able to "say it how it is" then it works both ways.Political correctness is just a phrase used by people who can't accept that some things simply aren't socially acceptable any more. For the most part it doesn't even exist.
And you've dodged the SS guard question. The historical context of the Holocaust is that the rest of the world was horrified by it and the Nazis went to incredible steps to hide what they were doing, so even by the standards of 1944 it wasn't remotely acceptable.
How about Peter Sutcliffe? If I call him a sociopath, does that somehow make me just as bad as he is?
Orwell imagined 'Newspeak' as an attempt to make the unacceptable inexpressible by changing the language. 'Political Correctness' seems to have the same objective. For the first half of the 20th Century, 'Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism' pervaded much political thought on both sides of the Atlantic. 'Political Correctness' has driven it from polite discourse, but it has never gone away. And now it's surfaced again, with the forthcoming Brexit and President Trump. Simply labelling its adherents as racists helps deny them a public platform, but has no impact on their core beliefs, and their votes are worth the same as everybody else's in a democracy.
Michael Cargill wrote: "I said the hotel owners, not the bakery owners.And whilst it may well turn out that the SS guard isn't actually an anti-semite, it certainly isn't wrong to accuse him of being so on balance of th..."
why do you have to accuse him? You know nothing of him, you've merely seen a short clip of film
Michael Cargill wrote: "You aren't being consistent at all, because you rail against the so-called SJW/PC crowd who tell you the things you are saying are offensive. If you want to be able to "say it how it is" then it wo..."As David says above pollitical correctness is a sort of version of Newspeak. At least that is the definition I use. If you want to use a different defintion that is up to you, but it does seem to go some way towards explaining why you either misunderstand or don't understand the point I am making.
Yes, it is an over-simplification, but I - for one - haven't got the time or inclination to arse around with caveats, exceptions, definitions, exclusions and so on.
The vast majority of arguments and disagreements, especially on the web, do seem to revolve around people using different defintions of a word and then arguing from that definition, while their oppnents argue from a differnt definition. This is why most arguments on the web get nowhere, achieve nothing and waste so much of people's time.
I haven't dodged the question, its just that my answer doesn't fit the narrative you are trying to construct. You see his view as prejudice and he see's your view as prejudice because prejudice is subjective depending on circumstances, and both internal and external factors.
That subjectiveness - that you seem to regard as a mere inconvenience or curiosity of quaint people who do not share your outlook - is what underlies all this and leads to more of the injustice that its - no-doubt well-meaning - proponents hoped to iradicate.
Anway, a better approach in situations like this is simply to reverse the original question and see if we get the same answer, and if not, why not.
So, imagine a devoutly religious couple go into a gay bakers and order a cake with something like 'homosexuality is an obomination against god's word' - or something like that written on it.
Would the bakers have to make the cake - even though it goes against everything they beleive in - or not. If not, why not?
Michael Cargill wrote: "How about Peter Sutcliffe? If I call him a sociopath, does that somehow make me just as bad as he is? ..."You've also missed the point, the individual Peter Sutcliffe has been judged by a court, there's a recognised appeal procedure if he felt it was not a fair trial, and he has been found guilty.
Whether he is a sociopath is technically a medical diagnosis, I don't know how he was described at the trial, but it strikes me as highly probable.
What I object to is judging other people someone has never met, about whose individual lives they know little and whom they lump together with others who appear to them to share a common characteristic which they disapprove
David wrote: "Orwell imagined 'Newspeak' as an attempt to make the unacceptable inexpressible by changing the language. 'Political Correctness' seems to have the same objective. For the first half of the 20th Ce..."indeed I've seen comments over the last couple of days that 'political correctness' seems to have been one of the things which added to the straw that broke the camel's back
David wrote: "Michael Cargill wrote: "You aren't being consistent at all, because you rail against the so-called SJW/PC crowd who tell you the things you are saying are offensive. If you want to be able to "say ...'homosexuality is an obomination against god's word'
Would the bakers have to make the cake - even though it goes against everything they beleive in - or not. If not, why not?"
Because it's grammatically incorrect, there is no such thing as an 'obomination' though interestingly a Freudian would probably suggest you had conflated it with the outgoing lame-duck US President.
"Political Correctness" is what racists and bigots and power hungry people call it when people with a conscience call them out on their socially unacceptable behavior. Racism and bigotry and all those other behaviors are ultimately destructive to society as a whole. Sure, they are not destructive to the racist, because it is not his/her race that is being attacked. They feel threatened by something they disagree with. As a result, they attack it. I suppose that is human nature.But just because it is human nature doesn't makes it right. Sometimes depending only on instinct is destructive. If we attack people who are a part of our society just because they are different then what does that say about our society?
It goes right back to cherry-picking the laws we want to follow or the parts of the Bible or the Koran or the Torah or any other religious document, and then ignoring the rest of it because it doesn't fit what we want to believe.
That being said, in a democracy everyone has a voice. We can't suppress the opinions of racists and bigots without suppressing free speech. If the majority of the people in that democracy are racists and bigots then that is how that democracy will take shape. Unfortunately, I believe those people can eventually destroy that which they are trying to protect because they are denying the freedom of others. Once we go down the road of denying freedom to one then we run the risk of losing all of our freedoms.
Political correctness is vastly overstated as to its prevalence. There is no doubt that some local councils of a Left persuasion initially tackled language as not being politically neutral (which it isn't) and gradually governments of either stripe sort of came to an acceptance of this. But there was never a formal rolling out of this to the wider population through diktat (apart from certain fairly recent legislation against incitement), as far as I know hate speech is not a crime in the UK and certainly not in the 1st amendment US, unless it falls foul of the incitement legislation as likely to provoke or lead to (criminal) violence. That is not to say the general society expectation is that we don't use offensive terms when referring to certain groups in society, but this has never been an across the board campaign. People would really only rub up against it when dealing with certain government bodies. You can argue that the expectation was for such values to spread through osmosis, but who ever seriously believes in the efficacy of that? That's like the greatest myth of the trickle down of wealth.
David, you dodged the SS guard question by answering a completely different question. Even if antisemitism was acceptable, it is still antisemitism. Therefore, accusing the guard of being antisemitic when he is doing something like that is perfectly fine.And no, a homosexual baker wouldn't have to bake a cake that said "homosexuality is an abomination against god's word" any more than he would have to bake a cake that said "Happy birthday."
Marc wrote: "Because it's grammatically incorrect, there is no such thing as an 'obomination' "Excellent point well made.
[Sigh]
Michael Cargill wrote: "David, you dodged the SS guard question by answering a completely different question. Even if antisemitism was acceptable, it is still antisemitism. Therefore, accusing the guard of being antisemit..."You still don't get it.
So the bakers would be found guilty, fined then and have their livelihoods destroyed by social media as well then - presumably.
No, and neither would the baker who refused to make one that simply said "Happy Birthday."
Marc wrote: "as far as I know hate speech is not a crime in the UK..."it really depends on how you define 'hate speech'. I wouldn't like to be definitive either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_sp...
Regardless of the actual definition of hate speech, it is, and should be, protected as free speech. You cannot be, and should not be arrested, for hate speech in the U.S.. If someone wants to be a racist and make racist comments, let them have at it. We don't have to agree with it or listen to it. We shouldn't ignore it. We should stand up to it. Not with violence, but with education.It is when people begin taking action against other people purely out of hatred, that is illegal. That's the problem. People begin taking action because their hatred and anger become extreme. It will only stop when people rise out of ignorance and fear: ignorance of how other people think and live and the fear of losing a way of life.
Roger wrote: "People begin taking action because their hatred and anger become extreme. It will only stop when people rise out of ignorance and fear: ignorance of how other people think and live and the fear of losing a way of life. ..."which ironically we've seen in a somewhat moderate version after the Brexit vote and perhaps in a more violent version after the Trump vote.
When you have an inward looking group who regard themselves as the elite, they do suffer from ignorance and fear in exactly the way you've described
The thing that worries me about this hate crime legislation is that the victim only has to perceive fear and action can be taken. It's not a civil tort either it's a crime.
The Internet infantalises debate.Demographically, Brexit voters are more rather than less likely to be:
- Unwaged (including pensioners)
- Older
- Uneducated (independently of the age factor)
- Not South Easterners, Scots or Northern Irish.
After I have pointed this out, at least one person on this thread will accuse me of categorising Brexiteers as stupid, and will parade their Bash Street Secondary Modern 3rd Prize for Raffiawork in front of me as proof to the contrary.
I will then be accused of being a member of the out of touch metropolitan elite.
Chance would be a fine thing.
"Wogs begin at Calais"
"The lazy nig-nogs in Bongobongoland are really sorry that we left"
"9/11 was an Israeli Black Op"
"7/7 was a British Black Op, and furthermore it never happened"
"Hitler had the right idea about the Jews"
"The Prophet Mohammed was a camel-humping paedophile"
"India was lucky that we took control of it. We united the country and eliminated thugee"
"The office of President is too important to be held by a woman"
"So-and-so is gay? Oh yuck, I once spent a night under the same roof as him."
I have heard people say all these things, and would not have to look far to find whole web-sites devoted to the views expressed above.
Simply labelling the speakers racist, anti-semitic, sexist or homophobic accomplishes nothing.
Neither does debating with them. Views such as these stem from authorities that are beyond the reach of logic.
But they must still, in my opinion, be challenged.
Though the best outcome that we can hope for is that by shining the light of reason in their general direction we discourage the conversion of others to their views.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378...interesting article and it rings true with the sort of stuff I've come across on facebook
Did anyone hear Trump on his foreign policy today. Th bits I heard were reasonable and made sense to me.
'Smug' came up a fair bit during Brexit, usually from people who didn't like experts.
Michael Cargill wrote: "'Smug' came up a fair bit during Brexit, usually from people who didn't like experts."the guardian doesn't use the word smug, but the two articles gell nicely together
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
Even if it's true, it'll be that very same working class who suffer the most.Their man may have won, but they're the losers.
Lynne (Tigger's Mum) wrote: "Did anyone hear Trump on his foreign policy today. Th bits I heard were reasonable and made sense to me."apart from the fact that he seems to favour nuclear proliferation, weighing up a return to the deterrent era, a balance of terror you mean?
In theory I would support America rolling back its foreign interventions, but unfortunately their recent history of just the opposite has left vacuums in parts of the world that cannot just be left to resolve themselves.
Michael Cargill wrote: "Even if it's true, it'll be that very same working class who suffer the most.Their man may have won, but they're the losers."
so what, they were the losers anyway, and Clinton wasn't ever going to help them. Her husband didn't and Obama hasn't
The reason you throw over the board is that you've discovered the game's rigged against you and you've not got a chance of doing anything but losing under the rules
I didn't hear all of it and missed the nuclear proliferation. I heard the non intervention in the Middle East regarding forcing democracy on them preferring them to want to emulate the west rather than imposing it by force. At least he's not going to emulate Obama with that ridiculous staring down at Putin performance. I would have cheered if Putin had kneed him amidships.
Again in theory i would support an American pullback. Sadly Russia & China would all too eagerly jump into the void
Lynne (Tigger's Mum) wrote: "I didn't hear all of it and missed the nuclear proliferation. I heard the non intervention in the Middle East regarding forcing democracy on them preferring them to want to emulate the west rather ..."His middle east policy does sound like Obama
I got that on FB today. He makes some very valid points.
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