Trying to pin point when political correctness got so bad

I know PC has been around forever but I say in the last 5 years it really started to get crazy way before Trump although his effect has made it much worst now. Do you think the rise of social media played a part of it? It seems like it could of especially when people would lose their jobs over a tweet and it wouldn't even have to be anything racist it would just be something the boss didn't agree with so people got nervous and started being very careful what they put out on social media just a theory of mine. I don't remember PC this bad back in the 00's. So it must of started to get worst in the early to mid 2010's is my guess what do you think? when did it get so bad can you put a year on it?

Political correctness hasnt gotten much worse over the years, it's just much easier now to not only see things that offend you, but also easier to see people complaining about being offended. It is basically the same as it always was, we just get to see a lot more useless opinions than ever before.

Define what classifies as political correctness?

Also, I see the same ammount of PC whining as I did now as I did back then. The only difference is that we have a greater access to opinions, so we see more people getting offended over dumb crap.

And differing definitions of what passes as politically correct (which varies from year to year, for group to group).

This is a good point. It's kind of like how all these Nazis seemed to come out of nowhere in the last few years, when really they have always been around and there aren't that many of them.

With the announcement of Resident Evil 5.

social media

I'm going to say 2015 when the USA introduced a law that allows the government to monitor internet use then all the PC laws came out in a lot of countries like England and Canada. SJW came out with 3rd wave feminism and Then Mass immigration which made people upset, then all the crime they brought with them. Then the governments don't charge them for the crime or its a slap on the wrist. PC culture is a lot worse then it was because they actually have some power now before it was video games cause violence and no one listen, now its let's teach the children about transgender's in sex ed and they do it.

Social Media played a huge part in bringing groups together and a whole bunch of cascading affects that have happened political that affect the populous from left vs right, mass immigration and free speech.

@npiet1: Your whole tirade was seriously lifted right out of Fox News. I hope your 65 years old, otherwise...wow.

I'm 25. What's wrong with what I said? The issues today aren't like the issues of the past. No it wasn't I don't watch fox or anything. I just read the news from multiple sites to get the compete news.

Political correctness is not any worse, people are just bigger assholes these days. The anonymity of the internet has brought out the worst in us.

I view political correctness not as some uptight moral code, but as a simple standard of behavior, a "bar"; if you're constantly under the bar, you're pointing it out as a negative when really you're just a piece of shit.

And of course, every action has a reaction; so the more assholes there are out there, the more people (so-called SJW's) there are calling them out on their antics instead of letting it slide because, hey, it happens infrequently (not any more).

Tired of "political correctness"? Then stop being a dipshit.

Who deicides this "bar" though?

We do

I like to think of it as an average morality sort of scale. It's not any one person or group of people.

Let's take "dead baby jokes" for example. I think we can universally say they are terrible, but what the hell on occasion they can be funny. Let's apply a general morality scale to it though:

• if you tell no dead baby jokes, that's fine
• if you tell an occasional dead baby joke, well you might get some frowns, but you might also get some laughs
• if you break the ice with strangers by telling dead baby jokes, most would agree that's not right
• if you tell multiple dead baby jokes every day, you might have a problem with your sense of right, wrong, and what's appropriate.

Obviously you'll have outliers who will say "No dead baby jokes are ok!" or "You can't tell enough dead baby jokes!" but for the most part I think the "bar" I mentioned earlier is this big grey area between those two.

It's not really that hard if you don't think about it too much. Just don't be an asshole.

The problem is, groups the media and so on want you to think about it. They polarize you, force you to take a stance (when you don't need to take one), and so forth. They make you think too much about it. They get you to make threads like this that have no answer. They turn you into a puppet. Why? To sell ads.

@mrbojangles25: agreed 10/10 well thought out answer.

To answer the question...

Back in 2013 when Depression Quest lead to the whole Gamergate cult forming resulting in the current culture war... oh wait
Back in 2009 when Tropes vs Women in Video games was first released and Anita accused everything of being sexist... oh wait
Back in the War on Terror in 2003 where some stores would actually rename things like french fries to freedom fries because of france's opposition to the war... oh wait
Back in 1979 when Life of Brian was released... oh wait
Back in 1974 when D&D was released... oh wait
Back in the McCarthy era and the red scare... oh wait
Back in the roaring twenties when capitalists ordered mercenaries to open fire at protestors... oh wait
Ever since we had blasphemy laws where criticizing religion could get you locked up or punished... oh wait
Ever since our leaders decided to beat up or punish in any other way, for having the "wrong" opinion. There, finally!

They bring poverty, not crime. When you factor out variables like poverty, their crime rates are very similar to what we have.

And refugees often suffer deportation. Just look at what denmark is doing right now.

PC culture is a lot worse then it was because they actually have some power now before it was video games cause violence and no one listen

And before video games it was D&D, rock, metal, comics, commies. There will always be a scapegoat.

PC culture was SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful back then.

, now its let's teach the children about transgender's in sex ed and they do it.

Providing medically accurate information in sex ed is... politically correct?

@Maroxad: mass immigration doesn't bring crime? Tell that to the 20% rape increase

https://wjla.com/news/inside-your-world/crime-stats-show-increase-in-violence-against-women-in-sweden-after-refugee-crisis , google no go zones Sweden. Look at the statistics yourself. Im all for immigration but it needs to be at a steady rate or your going to get racism on both sides.

I'll give you the pc culture hasnt really changed a whole except for media alienating their audience for PC culture. Rock and roll told PC culture F U, now artist get in trouble for using another cultures out fit or hair style.

It's not medically accurate. Prove to me that gender is a social construct. Every time I ask for this no one can. Prove that transgenderism is normal and that it happens in other species. (don't use the clownfish, it's DNA is programmed to do that.) Prove what use it has from an evolutionary stand point. Even homosexuality has answers to all these but transgender does not.

As someone LIVING in sweden, I can assure you, those no-go zones are fear mongering and a myth.

The increase in rape, has to do with sweden redefining what rape means, that is what caused the increase of crime stats. As have been told by EXPERTs repeatedly. Yet, because it is politically incorrrect to do so in nationalist and right wing circles, that *important* piece of info is often left out. Just like how it is politically incorrect among left wing circles to point out that refugees do have higher crime rates.

Gender dysphoria has nothing to do with gender being a social construct, in fact, the entire thing would fall apart if gender was just a social construct. Gender dysphoria is simply when someone with a male brain has a female body or has a female brain in a male body. And this has been proven with autopsies. It's much harder to diagnose gender dysphoria in animals than it is in humans. There is no evidence that it has an evolutionary advantage, but a lot of things don't. The human body is complex, and things can easily go wrong. Just look at how many genetic diseases there are out there that come with no advantage whatsoever.

http://transascity.org/the-transgender-brain/

Increase of pro-transgender sentiments and information out there has nothing to do with a rise of political correctness or shifting cultural attitudes as much as it is that we have a much better understanding of condition.

Also, on the topic of genetics, genes work like on/off switches. We dont know why gender dysphoria is a thing, but we do know that it exists.

@Maroxad: can you use a sauce that's not an obviously bias. Im pretty sure I've read the papers from them and they never mention their subject size which is something every other paper does and very important. Ive read paper that say gender dysphoria is cause by a hormone issue at an age between 7-10 but the subject size was only 10. so it's not very accurate.

@npiet1: LOL no-go zones???

People are still claiming these exist?

I’ll bet you still believe comet pizza has a basement too.

@Baconstrip78: wtf is a comet pizza?

Attack the information in the source. NOT the source itself. I didnt call you out for using a Sinclair link. Not that it was needed though.

But if you insist.

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/85/5/2034/2660626

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2754583/

Gender Dysphoria is not a myth. It is medically accurate. Hence there is nothing wrong with it being taught in the sex ed. Especially as around 0.5% of all americans (I cant speak for sweden) have it.

@npiet1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

I blame social media. You take small fringe groups who had a small voice and amplify it times a million. It spreads like herpes to the masses and gets some traction.

I think the formation of echo chambers by moderators/admins and the algorithms (for search engines and social media) that show us only what we want to see, in combination with the newspapers slowly escalating their clickbait tactic and desire to see conflict, led to the problems of the moderation of speech and the silencing of opposition/deplatforming we see today.

Apparently Patreon is no longer sustainable because of their desire for political censorship? I heard something like that.

No, not really the point. Thanks for putting words in my mouth, though.

Sorry. I wanted to edit it, a lot, and immediately removed it because I'm running out of time to type and I was not happy with what I wrote. It was much too mean. I was going to poke you because you made it sound like SJW or PC have a positive meaning, which is not really in line with the way these terms are typically used. But I think what you were getting at is that some people are called SJW just when they're trying to do the right thing, or that some things are considered to be PC when someone is just trying to be friendly, not necessarily with ill intent, to make discussion impossible or to hide the truth. Mislabeling is definitely something that's prevalent today in this age of misinformation.

I hear that there are anti-SJW groups forming that are just as insane as the SJW groups, and maybe you ran into them. I haven't yet, but it's a shame if mistakes are just repeated again, and again from one extreme to another. The action-reaction as you call it. I think you're right that morality is decided by the group (including the assholes). And that the media polarizes us, and they are having that effect on me over time. Not in the sense that I become more in favor of one side, but in the sense that I find myself more agitated over time, sometimes even making the same mistakes.

I do think it's not as simple as 'just don't be an asshole' because it has a different meaning depending on the echo-chamber you're in. Or let's rephrase that. I think you're right, but I do think the culture in which such a thing would be determined is now consisting of many smaller online cultures that are more tightly controlled than in the past that are typically only interacting in negative ways with people who think differently. Thinking Trump has good ideas on Resetera or RPG.net would be akin to being an asshole there (completely within their rights of course), whereas their own policies and responses would make these people an asshole in many places outside of Resetera and RPG.net.

I think because all these groups are keeping to themselves with many restrictions in place yet are also busy taking specific things from outside the group to get real angry about (while being unable to have any form of nuance get a hold because they're echo chambers), it's becoming more of a volatile mess than it used to be. (And like you say I would also like to sarcastically thank the media for driving people to polarization in their hunt for more money.) I guess it's always been impossible to not be an asshole to anyone on the internet because there's always someone who'd think that way, but I feel like these groups are now more effective than ever in becoming upset and mob-like, and more active than ever in trying to actually hurt the people they disagree with. Like actually trying to take people's jobs or platforms, to take people's relationships away, to prevent things from being discussed even at universities, to prevent sides from being portrayed even outside the groups, or to prevent documentaries from being seen by the common people, etc. based on opinions that I fear are sometimes formed by nodding in an echo-chamber and not through an unmoderated discussion.

I find your idea of thinking too much about something very interesting, and ironically I do want to spend some time thinking that over. As somebody who loves to think about things it caught me off-guard and I have no idea how to respond to it. It kind of hit my weak spot because I realized I almost assume that thinking can only be a good thing, but maybe there is such a thing as overthinking something. I do notice that because of the whole gender discussions going on I have become more paranoid about movies, articles, commercials, anything really, in the sense that I worry from the offset that they might try to be political in an underhanded way. That they try to make it harder for people to have a less emotional discussion. And that's perhaps unhealthy. But it's hard for me to just accept that the solution would be to stop thinking about it so much.

Did you read the studies lol.

First link, all subjects that are trans are on hormone therapy, Which alters the brain and shown to influence hypothalamic size. Some died from neurological issues or an illness that affects the brain and the subject size is low.

Second link: Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men... we detected significant differences between MTF transsexuals, males, and females in a large number of regions across the brain. More specifically...

Sounds like everyone is different.

And yet it still wouldn't prove that transgenderism is normal just a reason why they are like that.

I did read them, and both quite frankly, helps prove my case.

The second link EXPLICITLY mentions this

"These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity."

The links provide evidence that they are a biological phenomenon. And as a result, gender dysphoria fall under medical information, which is what sex ed is about teaching.

I dont care about proving what is "normal" and what isnt. Because Sex Ed isnt about teaching status quo or normalcy. It is about equipping children with medically accurate information in regards to sexuality, so they are equipped to deal with future situations when they arise.

Distinct so neither male or female then.

But shouldn't we find out if it is normal or not, then teach the material in a certain way if it is normal or not. We know Aids isn't normal and that means we will teach kids to try to prevent aids. We cannot just change facts without any evidence to make the few feel normal.

By covering gender dysphoria they arent teaching necessarily changing any facts without evidence to back it up. Teachers can lie, but that is on the teacher, not the system.

In regards to teaching about gender dysphoria, teachers should supply them with medically accurate information on what it is and the best way to deal with it. When I took sex ed classes, we didnt just learn how to prevent STIs, but more importantly, what to do should we contract them. Preventive is important, but so is mitigation. Whether it is normal or not is completely irrelevant.

@npiet1: Seems our only difference here is the disagreement on normalcy then. For me, it isn't important at all. I just want schools to teach historically/scientifically/linguistically accurate and mathematically correct information.

I couldnt find much on that site other than sentimental stuff. The lessons seems to be aimed with political goals in mind rather than medical ones, which isnt really what sex ed is for. I thought they were teaching something more along the lines of...

• Gender dysphoria is a thing
• Around 0.5% of you may have it
• If you have it, you dont need to be ashamed
• Consult a doctor as your doctor should have the best plan for you
• If you know someone who is transgender, here is what you should know

With the goals being to let people with trans know how to best deal with the cards they have been dealt and to eliminate as much confusion about trans as possible.

@Maroxad: that's all I want to and then once educate let them decide for themselves.

parents asked for a lesson plan and never got one. All we knew is what the kids told us until it hit the media circuit because of this woman. (My kids school didn't get it because they were due for sex ed later in the year)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theage.com.au/national/victoria/whos-behind-the-safe-school-videos-the-concerned-mums-political-connections-20170811-gxukuu.html

@npiet1: I dug a bit deeper and found something. Yeah some of that stuff makes me go "wtf" (namely non-medically accurate information).

But a lot of the hysteria concerning this movement is basically just right wing PC-outrage from the parents.

All in all, there are some good ideas in the plan, but they should tone down on the politics somewhat. Time spent preaching is time that could have been spent teaching (medically accurate information).

You guys are on a slippery slope argument. I'm not getting into the nuts and bolts of your actual discussion and my comments are in no way about this subject. But discrepancy do occur in nature so you could call that normal. However, those discrepancies also are not advantageous for the individual and are treated to improve quality of life. So just because something occurs does not mean it's okay to leave it untreated etc.

In short I find this are of discussion is not a healthy one.

It's always been there. TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, etc. already provided people with platforms to offend or be offended. The dawn of social media (Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, etc) simply gave it a more broader stage to dance on...

That may be true but at some point we also started to enforce political correctness as though it mattered if x was offended by y.

Is that true, though? If that has changed, it began before my lifetime. Even as a small child there were certain words that were (and remain) socially taboo.

When social media became mainstream, coupled with a generation of fragility and finding victimhood powerful, the idea became cemented.

it's not that it's really gotten worse.. it's just that now there is a permanent record of all the stupid shit people say.

in the past, someone says some dumb shit outside of work and the only people that know about it are the people there, and it's likely forgotten about immediately.

these same idiots now instead post it on the internet where it can live forever.

the moral? don't post dumb shit online unless you want everyone knowing about it.

Honestly, it is less bad these days than it used to be.

Blasphemy laws are seldom a thing in industrialized countries these days. And things are a lot less taboo than they used to be. D&D and Harry Potter come to mind.

I blame Twitter

@Maroxad: You nailed it in your second post. Starting with "to answer your question."

I too would have had a similar list of highlights.

To answer the question... ever since the tribe. (that is the short answer, to your long answer)

That's not quite the same thing though is it? Yes specific words are socially taboo in an entertainment/ public sense because they change the for want of a better word rating. And in general they weren't used in public because society used to be more courteous. That has changed though shows geared for children still avoid profanity. However, we are now being sanitized to the point that it's beyond ridiculous. As a society we cheer and applaud if someone is fired for something they may have said years ago rather than looking at the growth that individual has achieved. And even if they say something now we want them fired. I'm not talking about minor things like FCC allowance. I'm talking real word consequences because someone said something and some people got upset.

I say let the market dictate.

I'm not sure what's worse, people complaining that they are offended, or people complaining about the people complaining they are offended.

When you're part of a human centipede, it's considered preferable to be first in the row.