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Keep it clean and simple. What is PC culture? What influences and defines it? How is it affecting people and their ideas? What have been good outcomes of PC culture? What have been bad outcomes of PC culture? What is the future of PC culture? What should PC culture do in the future? Discuss.

Edit: I'm not referring to portable computers I'm talking about "Political Correctness."

For clarification: do you mean politically correct culture or personal computing culture? Or are you trying to be cute by being deliberately vague?

I'm sick of people throwing the phrase "politically correct" around. Far too many of the people who complain about people being offended by minor things are offended by minor things themselves. Conservatives who complain about liberals being offended are offended by violence or gay people on TV, and liberals who complain about conservatives being offended are offended by a lack of diversity on TV. Same shit, different viewpoints.

The far left and far right are the same really.
They are both racist/sexist/etc. but for different, irrational, reasons.

One popular PC thing I don't understand is calling everyone with dark skin "African American". Do… people not understand that having dark skin doesn't make someone African American? Unless they, or their parents, were born in Africa and moved to the US, then they aren't African American…

Honestly, I'm just tired of people complaining about the radical liberal left in general. Personally, I have my own take on the Horseshoe Theory --here's a diagram for reference:

Basically, I feel like most of the "Western" portion of the internet already agree that the extreme right is crazy, but I hypothesize (and I could be wrong) that a good portion of these people don't believe that the same holds true for the extreme left, so they try and raise awareness of it.

And while I'm all for pointing out holes in logic, it's done so frequently and with unnecessary emotional baggage attached to it. For example, it wouldn't make sense to act with scorn or pity when explaining the faulty logic someone uses when they "prove" 1=0 by using variables so that you aren't as likely to spot the division by zero.

In my own potentially flawed observations, the frequency and unnecessary passion associated with the dispelling of illogical arguments asserted by the extreme left imply a fixation on the "symptoms" of the repeated lapses in logic they point out, rather than the "disease" itself.

Going back to horseshoe theory, both groups are very much alike in the ways that make them a headache, almost to the point that the actual fundamental beliefs around which their arguments are formed are just something they happened upon, rather than a belief one cultivates through careful introspection and observation. It's almost like a mirror-- for every dumb thing one of the extreme sides do, there exists an analogous one on the other side.

For example, the extreme right's analogy of political correctness would be conservative correctness which means deliberately choosing words and phrases like "unborn infant" instead of "fetus" or "homosexual" instead of "gay" and the lack of a "Merry Christmas" from Starbucks that offended a large portion of the extreme right is also another good example. That's not to say that any of these words or phrases is always better than another, since context plays a huge role in which words we use are most useful and appropriate. But just like the extreme left's hyper political correctness (since I figure a minimal level of political correctness means choosing not to use racial slurs, which wouldn't be an extremist sort of thing if it was a personal choice to do so) it isn't logic or context that determines word choice, it's rhetoric.

And I believe it's this fanatical attitude, on both sides, which motivates these extremists to risk such leaps in "logic" (or force themselves into denial of any flaws in their logic) which is the "disease" I mentioned earlier, and what should really be the focus. I believe that would promote calm, rational behaviors as desirable over the passionate, overzealous behavior which what was opposed in the first place. It would also mean less distractions from political arguments (ones that aren't constructive to the debate at hand, at least) among non-extremists, since the focus would be extremism, and the actual party identification would be understood as serving little purpose.

Now, I realize that there are a number of flaws in my argument, but I think I've already wasted everyone's time enough with this post and will try not to inconvenience everyone further by trying to defend it. I guess I'll just throw it out into the world, unprepared, and let it fend for itself.

Where being PC gets us:

All PC means to me anymore is "publicly complaining". The news sucks it up because they get to bandwagon on it and in all it only hurts culture and freedoms of speech. I mean yeah I can agree with some of the ideals of the movements, but once you start bandwagoning on them, they start becoming "give me more privilege" movements. It's quite frankly disgusting and tiresome.

Clarion University forced to cancel play after playwright demands white students be replaced with Asians. The school, which spent ~$15 grand on costumes and staging including $500 for the play's rights, which had no contractual obligation to respect the Asian playwright's insistence that only Asians be cast, rolled over in the face of potential PC outcry and agreed to cancel the show.

{ Marilouise Michel, Clarion University professor of theater and the play’s director, explains what she was told.

“On Monday afternoon, I received an email from the playwright telling me that he demanded that we recast the show with Asian actors or shut down our production,” she said.

The playwright cited “ethnic composition.”

“We don’t have a large population of Asian students at the university,” Michel said. “We opened our auditions to all of the students at the university.”

The playwright, out of New York, never saw any rehearsals, just promotional tweets of the actors. All of the six actors were white with the exception of one biracial student. Calls to his agent went unanswered. }

PC Culture is how you can get a high school play shut down for casting too many white kids, not because you intentionally cast them because of their skin color or in place of minorities who auditioned, but because a Korean saw pictures of the cast on Twitter and decided to employ the race card.

Can you imagine if they told him to go screw? "Racist high school play refuses to cast Asian actors" etc etc. Would have been the Next Great Controversy, there'd be an article about it on the front page three days later.

I'll just update the title because I got confused too.

political correctness will be the downfall of western civilization.

im not kidding.

this entire PC tyranny over what is ok to say and what is ok to think is violating free speech and is an abomiation.

its already starting to have devestating influences, people losing their jobs, their public image ruined. because they said something not fitting with political correctness.

and if we won't have counter-movement soon, western culture is going to collapse on itself.

im dead serious we need to do something about this.

Pretty much this.

But there are counter movements. Unfortunately, /pol/ is probably the loudest and most recognized at the moment.

^ Have you seen the response to white student unions being set up on facebook which literally, word for word, copy and paste descriptions from other minority student union pages but change racial terms to "white" and "European-American"? Police are investigating in some states, universities have threatened to expel what are obviously groups of racist white supremacists when they're uncovered, etc etc.

Word for word. & in some cases even removing the more aggressive calls to action features on black student union pages. If these white people tried to hold a demonstration on any campus they would be immediately arrested. Imagine a white student union stomping through a library screaming WHITE LIVES MATTER! WHITE LIVES MATTER! DO YOU FUCKIN KNOW THAT WHITE LIVES MATTER YOU BLACK BITCH??

Those people were defended at Dartmouth. The administrators apologized to the BLM group because there was negative press coverage.

The thing is I'm never really offended. I just don't really feel like anything offends me. Political correctness goes too far though.

Chill. Where did I say I supported BLM or groups like that? Or that I thought it was tolerable that shit like that is allowed to go on.

I thought I made it clear that PC culture is stupid as hell.
But apparently thats not enough for some reason.

Eh I don't really care as long as they're not telling me how to refer to myself. If you get offended by something I say directly to you, then that's fine, feel free to call that out, although I may not deal with your shit if you're particularly anal about it.

I do have a problem with people who try to shut other people up with it though, but I honestly don't think that's the majority of people.

Uhhhhh what?

You mentioned counter-protests and said the most recognized atm was /pol/, I asked if you'd heard of the white student unions popping up as counter protests over the past few weeks. I was adding on to your post, not arguing against it.

Honestly, I have trouble imagining that the White Student Unions don't consist primarily of coordinating /pol/ users

They also consist of people who are tired of white people telling white people they're basically worthless shit and should be ashamed of their identity.
People don't like to feel bad, especially about something they cant control

That's not political correctness though, that's just stupid people saying bullshit because they think that if they reverse the tables blindly across an entire group of people that it will instantly heal everything.

It is pretty embarrassing though when not only I have to lecture those folk about my long and well documented family history to prove my family never owned slaves, but to correct them on basic facts about the history of slaves in the United States in general. I find myself more frustrated by these people's complete lack of logical thinking and education on their own history than anything.

The problem with /pol/ is you don't know if they are being serious, or making a statement. And there is a good chunk of them that are genuinely racist, highly xenophobic, etc. It's unfortunate, because in the court of public opinion, it's hard to distinguish between what is an expression of free-speech for the sake of doing so, as in activist side of /pol/ and genuine hatred of other people, which is also implied by /pol/.