From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Mon Mar 04 2002 - 08:15:39 MST
>From: Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
>>Brian D Williams
>>Have fun leaping to wrong conclusions and erroneous judgements
>>about people do you?
>It's true that the way I framed that comment made it sound like an
>accusation of bigotry against Brian, which I certainly don't
>regard as justified. Apologies to those who took it that way.
Thanks for clarifying.
>>No I simply mean it was over done, it clearly wasn't a random
>>distribution, but the hand-picked signature of the reverse
>>discrimination protocol known as "affirmative action".
>>Thus defined as "politically correct".
>The trouble is, as we've all discussed previously, there are
>different ways of reading that phrase. Most here seem to find it
>quite transparently acceptable: a scornful way to characterize
>mealy-mouthed euphemism, masked special interests, Nanny Statism,
>etc. I, like many non-Americans, read it as a code for annoyance
>at any disruption of the privileges of the status quo. In the
>extreme, it links up with terms like Feminazi ( = woman determined
>to join with other women in defending herself against individual
>and structural oppression) and others I won't even cite because
>some here would be offended by their very appearance. So when the
>word is bandied about, it can *look* like a moderately
>sophisticated version of a redneck shouting hatefully at everyone
>he despises. Brian is surely not one of those people; I wish,
>then, that he and others would avoid using terms that carry this
>connotation to at least some of the people in the room.
I'd be happy to take suggestions for new terms as long as they are
accurate.
It is common in this country these days to be labeled as a racist
for arguing against political correctness, or any well intentioned
but completely wrongheaded liberal idea.
Take affirmative action, it's idea was to redress past wrongs
committed by others, but it's very application means committing new
wrongs in the process. Not satisfied with merely committing this
wrong, it was pressed into service to coercively implement another
wrongheaded idea, that a balance of minorities in any situation was
desirable.
Fairness means being fair to all.
>And beyond that is the fact that fiction, even mass market debased
>fiction like the Star Trek franchise, is *made up*, and not
>obliged to be *demographically representative*. If you wish to
>have variety and vigor and conflict in your mise en scene, what
>better way to do it than by choosing characters in those positions
>who in our world might *not* just yet have attained such status?
>[And so on; boring lec2ture mode truncated.]
Yes, it is just T.V., my point was that by promoting what I
consider a very bad idea, and doing so in a so completely
transparently artificial way, I disliked, and rarely watched the
show, while I was borderline addicted to the previous shows.
Brian
Member:
Extropy Institute, www.extropy.org
National Rifle Association, www.nra.org, 1.800.672.3888
SBC/Ameritech Data Center Chicago, IL, Local 134 I.B.E.W
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:12:45 MST