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the longer this thread goes the less i know what it is about.
once upon a time, there was a strange community of academics that began talking about pc as a way of expressing the sense they acquired that they were not allowed to say certain things because those things were understood as offensive. if the brave new world is supposed to be about diversity, they reasoned, then i should be able to be a nimrod. i should be able to say stupid things, i should be able to objectify others, i should be able to be a bore. but i feel shackled now because i am made self-conscious about these stupid things and i kind of miss them. so i am oppressed. boo hoo.
once upon another time, later, after this particular wave of self-pity had dissipated and that strange community of academics had dispersed into other communities of academics, conservative talk radio hosts latched onto the category of pc and began to recycle it. they began talking about pc as a way of expressing the sense they acquired that they were not allowed to say certain things because those things were understood as offensive. if the brave new world is supposed to be about diversity, they reasoned, then i should be able to be a nimrod. i should be able to say stupid things, i should be able to objectify others, i should be able to be a bore. but i feel shackled now because i am made self-conscious about these stupid things and i kind of miss them. so i am oppressed. boo hoo.
i dont know what is being discussed here. i am not sure that anything is being discussed here. so there is a bit of decorum. so people do not say exactly as they like every time they post. so writing is not speaking. where is the problem? if this were a board in which it was possible that everyone could tell anyone to fuck themselves and that became the norm, the same problem would obtain for those who did not find it interesting to see a debate that would start with a premise and be followed by a series of posts in which people told each other to fuck themselves. there is this gang, one might say, that runs the show and requires that everyone tell everyone to fuck themselves.
the meaninglessness of the term pc is such that it could be applied in that case just as accurately as it might be applied in any other case.
there are ways of thinking and writing that obtain for lots of folk here that i do not find to be particularly interesting, but that's just an effect of who happens to participate in the community. i dont find it to be offensive, i dont find it to be anything, really. it just is. i suppose i could say that the assumption that you actually can talk about who you are in a space like this is a form of political correctness. i suppose i could say that the illusion that words refer to experience directly is a form of political correctness. but it'd do nothing so say as much: the category doesn't describe anything and no function is served by using it--unless i wanted for whatever reason to set up a case for my own victimization at the hands of some unorganized, invisible de facto conspiracy. which is all that the term does.
so what are we talking about again?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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