Political Correctness

The Cult of Niceness

The Cult of Niceness by Bruce Frohnen –
More than twenty-five years ago, in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom pointed out that college students in the United States had become very “nice.” Students in general did not want to offend anyone and there was a constant concern to protect one another’s feelings. Bloom meant this as a half-hearted, even backhanded compliment at the time. It should not be seen as any kind of compliment any longer. In fact, niceness has become the enemy of excellence in our universities, and its pervasive role is setting up our young people and our society for failure and an especially venal form of soft despotism.

“Niceness” is a rather shallow set of habits and attitudes more concerned with comfort than engagement, ease than excellence, contentment than striving to do one’s best. It was and is the perfect complement to our contemporary liberal insistence on “tolerance” as the chief virtue. Tolerance, after all, means simply allowing others to do and/or say what we may not like. [Read more…]

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Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day Bolsheviks

Political Correctness, Progressivism, and Present Day BolsheviksExcerpts from multiple posts by Fr. Johannes Jacobse in the comments section of “It’s a Brand New Age” blog post. Some edits made to transform multiple individual comments by Fr. Jacobse into a cohesive stand-alone article. Special care was taken to preserve the original meaning of the author.

– Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Political correctness is the cultic aspect of Liberalism and Progressivism mostly because it attempts to control thought through language. It’s Orwell, but on a deeper level Dostoevsky and even Nietzsche. The markers are easy to spot especially the cruder terms — racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, white privilege — anything to shut down discussion and censure thought. Language is used promiscuously, laced with moral opprobrium and other self-justifying blather. It’s intimidation, like the Brownshirts or Bolsheviks.

The corruption of language is both a cause and effect of the moral inversion [Read more…]

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Nebraska School: Stop Calling Students Boys or Girls to be ‘Gender Inclusive’

Homosexual Tyranny Gay Takeover of America by Deena Winter –

A Lincoln middle school staffer gave teachers training documents advising them not to use “gendered expressions” by calling students “boys and girls” or “ladies and gentlemen,” but to instead use more generic expressions like campers, readers, athletes or even purple penguins to be more “gender inclusive.”

A handout called “12 easy steps on the way to gender inclusiveness” advised teachers to avoid separating students by gender, but instead by birth dates or preferences. For example, they could ask students whether they prefer skateboards or bikes, milk or juice, dogs or cats, summer or winter.

“Always ask yourself, ‘Will this configuration create a gendered space?’” said Step 1 of the handout.

Or they could “Create classroom names and then ask all of the ‘purple Penguins’ to meet at the rug,” the handout said. [Read more…]

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Half Baked: UC Berkeley’s Diversity Machine Loses Its Mind

Cupcakes diversity half-baked by Heather Mac Donald –

Tuesday’s now infamous affirmative-action bake sale at the University of California at Berkeley is unlikely to dissuade Governor Jerry Brown from signing a bill that would reintroduce race and gender preferences into the state’s public universities. It has nevertheless served one useful function: it has clarified just what Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity does for his whopping $194,000 annual salary.

Berkeley’s College Republicans wanted their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” to serve as a counterweight to a phone bank erected on the campus’s main thoroughfare, where students could call Brown and urge him to sign the preference-reinstating legislation, Senate Bill 185. Like other anti-affirmative-action bake sales on college campuses over the last decade, the College Republicans’ sale priced items according to the race and gender of the customer: whites paid $2 for a pastry, with Latinos paying $1 and blacks 75 cents, while women got a 25-cent discount on all items. [Read more…]

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Is Owning a Pet Discriminatory?

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –

Do you own a pet? Well if you say you do, you are a purveyor of prejudice. At least that’s what some so-called “leading academics” are saying.

You see, according to the Rev’d Professor Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, we shouldn’t even use the word “pet,” because the phrase is demeaning to animals.

Instead, we should call a Labrador Retriever a “Companion animal.”

And please, don’t use the word “owner.” That’s demeaning to pets—I mean, to companion animals—as well. Instead, call yourself a “human carer.”

Ay-yi-yi. What’s another phrase for a “leading academic”? [Read more…]

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Secularists, or Just Anti-Christians?

Christian Persecution Secularists by Keith Riler
The liberal activists we know as secularists do not behave as broadly as the term might imply. When held to their own standards of tolerance and fairness, these focused meddlers fail because, in truth, secularists are just anti-Christians. The intriguing question is why.

First, are secularists particularly hostile to Christianity? A recent study indicated a marked bias against Christians by university faculties. These faculties are a good proxy for secularists in general. Among other unsurprising findings, the study observed:

[…] political liberalism is the dominant ideology on college campuses, especially in the social sciences and humanities. This study demonstrates that this political ideology is not benign. Indeed, it may be connected to a hostility and prejudice about a major religious group in America.

[Read more…]

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Political Correctness: Morality’s Poison Pill

10/2/2010 – Greg Halvorson –
There is much talk, and much to say, about what ails America, but one problem, certainly, is political correctness, which along with “tolerance” has become entrenched in daily life. Tolerance and its cousin diversity have become hegemonic in society, a dominant narrative which undermines dialogue with respect to truth. It’s one thing to be civil and to strive for compassion, and quite another to deem it offensive to judge behavior, regardless of whether that judgment is sound.

Eric Holder called us “a nation of cowards,” and as much as it pains me, I agree (don’t tell anyone!). His use of “coward” is telling because not only is it politically incorrect, but it describes what politically correct citizens become. We are cowards, both in our discussion of race, as he specified, and our discussion of life… When it comes to truth, we shrink from dialogue, cowering beneath “tolerance” as a personal badge. [Read more…]

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Free Speech Lawsuit: NYC Bans ‘9/11 Images’

8/10/2010 – Pamela Geller –
It seems that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg invokes certain freedoms only when they serve his 2012 agenda — and freedom of speech is not high on his list. Doing away with term limits wasn’t enough (which is why we are still suffering under his no-salt, no-trans-fat regime). He is now widening his ayatollah-like power-grab to imposing blasphemy laws (Islamic sharia laws) on the secular marketplace. Bloomberg’s frenzied Ground Zero mosque push may have inspired al-Azhar clerics to oppose the Ground Zero Mosque, calling it a “a zionist plot.”

Last month, I signed a contract with CBS Outdoor to run a “Preservation of Ground Zero” bus ad campaign. The campaign was paid for in full.

Here is the ad I submitted:
Preservation of Ground Zero
[Read more…]

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The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President

American Thinker | by James Lewis | Jan. 28, 2010

You don’t pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn’t a secret. That’s why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected. [Read more…]

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“Notional” Security

Townhall | by Thomas Sowell | Jan. 12, 2010

The latest “screw-up” that let a man with explosives get on a plan on Christmas day is only part of a larger laxness and irresponsibility when it comes to national security. This administration pays lip service to national security and gives out with a lot of rhetorical notions that makes it notional security instead of national security.

The Muslim major who was arrested for the murders of American soldiers at Fort Hood had left so many clues to his hatred of this country that all you had to do was count the dots, without even connecting them, to see where he was coming from. But for a fellow officer to alert higher authorities to the danger would have meant risking damage to his own career moreso than to that of Major Nidal Hasan. [Read more…]

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