Political correctness

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I know it's great to be humble and try to get along with ever one even if you don't agree but to much political correctness makes the world really dull and boring, I am saying there should be a balance, I was shocked when i went to australian topix it's like a war,

http://www.topix.com/world/australia

See what I mean way to out of control this is what's going through peoples minds

I HATE, and I mean HATE Political Correctness.

I couldn't be PC even if I tried. It's just not who I am. It's quite disconcerting to see how everyone is terrified to "step on the toes" of others, as if they are walking on eggshells in fear they may awaken a fire-breathing dragon. If you don't like me or my views, tell me it to my face! I can handle myself; I'm an adult. Stop with this senseless cuddle-fest.

With that said, I cannot stand when people try to disprove someone/make someone look bad by using falsehoods. If you want to debunk something, use FACTS, not egregiously false remarks!

i dont get the point,was this arcticle about anyway and how was it policicaly incorect.maybe i got the link wrong

Being PC is about showing respect for another human being...

you may not be able to keep up with the terminology, or as an AS individual be able to interpret when you should use PC terms... but there is no reason to not show respect to others

You really shouldn't say that

It has its uses.

For example, it is accurate to say that black people have naturally curly hair, but it's politically incorrect to say, "I love black people's hair!"

And it's politically incorrect to say "black people" but I don't think that many people are actually offended by it since we refer to Caucasians as White and people from China, Japan, or Korea as Asian whereas people from India are Indian and people from the Middle East excluding Israel are Arab, whereas people from Israel are just Israeli.

But it's still a bit offensive if you call people from South or Central America "brown."

...Yeah. It's annoying as crap, but you just need to know what not to say.

It's how culture changes. The basis for each person's decisions about how to behave or what to say exists on this continuum:

Convention ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Specifics (Reasoning? I don't know what to call this)

The former would be something like "I'm going to say her hair looks nice because it's what you say."
The latter would be "I know her personally and in this situation it's best to tell her that because I can expect her to react in xyz way."

Political correctness is somewhere in the middle. It's an attempt to turn something that a few people have reasoned out into convention. It's not yet conventional, so a lot of people don't know or accept the new "rule", and so they chafe at being criticized for breaking it, understandably. It's also no longer perfectly specific: it's been generalized. Political correctness might say "a white person should never contradict a nonwhite person about whether there is racism in a particular environment, because the nonwhite person will have experienced it directly and the white person will not", but it's still possible that in some specific situation the white person has actually observed more and noticed more. However, since there was a situation a lot of people encountered where white people would make statements like "there is no more racism" to people who were experiencing racism, there was a desire to get that piece of information out. A specific individual might not be annoyed by it, but for those who were annoyed to be heard, it had to be generalized.

I should probably point out here that these "rules" have nothing to do with laws or censorship, just manners and the ways that people figure out what those around them feel and want. Knowingly breaking them is not being rebellious, it's being mean (unless you know in that situation the other person would not be hurt) and plenty of people use them in reverse, to be deliberately offensive.

Pretty silly for aspies to complain about political correctness when as far as I can tell we're trying to use this mechanism ourselves. Some people have a message to get out: say, "people with AS should be accepted as we are and accommodated" or "Autism Speaks doesn't speak for me", and this message is necessarily generalized and simplified. Some people with AS want a cure, and some have no problem with Autism Speaks, but the message is streamlined in hopes the mainstream culture will pick it up and add it to their bank of "conventional wisdom": Wouldn't life be better for us if it was common knowledge that, say, people should not expect eye contact from us? It may not be true of 100% of us, but it would make life easier for most of us.

Political correctness can be useful but I find it often is used to get away with whatever you want, and then hide behind it when people criticize you.

Saying "Autism Speaks doesn't speak for me" is not a generalized statement. Saying "Stop generalizing us and dehumanizing us" is not the same thing as generalizing. :I

I also hate being PC. I like to say things the way it is. I do my best to be tact but I am still honest about it. I also think people trying to redefine terms is also being PC. I also think trying to change terms confuses people. African Americans are not always black for one but yet I know it's supposed to mean black person but if someone says they are African American, people will assume black. If someone decides to be PC about someone being fat by saying they are a big person, that doesn't tell me anything. Big people are not always fat. Big person can also mean tall or very muscular.

Believe it or not PC does have it uses. Saying "police officer" is better then "Policeman." Same as saying "firefighter" instead of "firefighter."

If you're trying to get the message out that Autism Speaks is misrepresenting autistic people, that requires a generalization. NTs will either have their image of that organization tarnished because of what they believe Autistic people as a group think of it, or go on assuming it is good.

"Accepted as we are and accommodated"is not "Stop generalizing us". It's an alternative to "cure us": "don't assume we want to be cured, accommodate our differences instead". It's unlikely to get through in a very nuanced form: either NTs will believe it is correct/polite to assume an aspie they've just met wants to be cured, or to assume they don't. That's what is lost when something becomes conventional wisdom: it is never nuanced. EVERYONE is generalized.

For instance, because it's a matter of PC (new generalization) vs. tradition (old generalization), men don't know whether it's "correct" to hold the door for me or not - but that doesn't mean they ask me, a stranger, what I'd prefer. They make the call based on how traditional or progressive they want to be, based on a generalization about what women want ("women want chivalry" or "women don't want to be treated as if they're incompetent"). If they know me, they might ask, but then it's moving from the cultural to the individual.

I politely disagree. Pc is what makes us civilized. If people spoke their minds, it would be an insensitive world.

This is what I meant in the previous post. To show respect. Pc is a constant reminder that we cannot say bad things about other people, and in that sense keeps us in line.

I think we should say "firefighter, And not "firefighter. dont want to insult them