Liberating Intolerance

[blainn]

Remember Political Correctness?  It was so 90s, so silly, and based in developing "sensitive" terms that didn't accept culturally-based "norms" as moral points of reference.  Everyone made fun of such silly terms as "vertically challenged," and "differently abled," and the whole thing faded away, right

Comments

[che]

Okay, so first of all, all people should have equal protection and feel a degree of safety in their homes and persons. Attacks, intimidation, vandalism or whatever else came from this as a "backlash" against people who are perceived to have donated money or time or encouraged people to do so was, and remains, wrong.

However, while it does not excuse it, we must, as a society, come to understand that a wrong was also done to a group who, albeit through a legitimate legal process, was denied a right. Just as laws have been used down through time and around the world to disenfranchise a minority population, it continues in our day in age, the most recent site being California, Florida and Nevada.

I do NOT believe that it is possible to disagree on the point of people's rights being denied civilly. I believe that people in favor of Prop 8 and other similar bills are in favor of taking rights away from people and are not too far off from people who would deny rights along racial lines, gender lines, or any other inherent condition that may be used as an arbitrary system for sorting people out into A's and B's.

My issue with your original post is that you paint this as if it's the same as as simple disagreement over budget policy or a school levy. This is an issue of human rights, and it isn't about PC.

Your characterizations of Marcuse's work is somewhat over simplified. He claims that in order for true tolerance to work, we must adopt a discriminatory form of intolerance, where we do not permit repressive intolerance. So it would be an intolerance of someone's right to say "nigger" in a racially discriminatory way because of the perceived harm it does to society at a whole.

It really doesn't have an arbitrary "wrong" or "right" position, but elects to be intolerant of words and phrases used to be intolerant. Racial slurs, words that objectify women, or rob them of a degree of respect and / or perceived power, such as "babe", "darling", and so on.

You're attempting to apply of societal theory to the actions of a group that you freely admit is a minority. ("I am well aware that the self-appointed punishers of this "incorrect" behavior are an overly vocal minority...")

Your critique of PC is correct, in my opinion, in the idea that the PC we're forced to learn in corporate retreats or in sensitivity training is not productive, but merely serves to divide the country further down, and takes the things we say that could be considered intolerant are sequestered to back rooms and offices, we look over each shoulder before we tell that joke...however, your clumsy attempt to seemingly apply your own world view to Marcuse's writings misses out on the idea that it wasn't about hurt feelings. I'm sure Marcuse would be fine with calling short people "short" and fat people "fat", what he advocated was a change in language that was designed to be intolerant and robbed people of an equal footing. An interesting side note is that if we were to follow his ideas, we would apply a very authoritarian flavor to our democracy.

There is a very quick and cursory critique of your main, original points. I'm sure you will forgive a lack of scholarly citation of my points, seeing as you make numerous factual claims in the original post with no clear citations.