If nothing else this political season, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson to an extent, should be owed a debt of gratitude. This does not translate to a blanket endorsement of all their ideas, however. Without them, would the matter of "political correctness" have truly been brought into the open? More particularly, what it has turned into. And how it has affected society in a negative and potentially dangerous way.
It's akin to multiculturalism, a good idea run amok, until it becomes more important to achieve than the havoc it creates. The divisive concept of identity politics. Leave it to intellectuals enamored by theory to completely misjudge the reality of humankind.
It's also akin to issues like human rights, where the idea and aspiration is kidnapped on the international level by abusers, using it as a political sword and shield.
So why this post?
I was surfing and led to this video of John Cleese, and his apt words, "If people can't control their own emotions then they have to start trying to control other people's behavior."
and from that to this from George Carlin:
Of course, it's easy to find more like these. But since they expressed the point quite well, after I watched I decided to make this post and here it is.
It goes beyond the infantile, sincere belief there should be "safe spaces,"
however, particularly in matters of expression. Too often it has become a
safe space to practice intolerance. The Yale Halloween costume episode comes to mind, but there is also the insidiousness when it is used to justify academic boycotts, or quash speech and stigmatize. Kirsten Powers's recent book, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, is replete with examples of wrongful behavior.
Perhaps the need to control comes from a fear that people, hearing something else, might actually see a different truth, one based in reality, and to realize hypocrisy going on in the form and practice of repressive tolerance, a construct of critical theory. But that's a topic for another time.
