Being "politically correct" a good thing, overall?

[THe_KELRaTH]

I did not read all the stuff, but being politically correct is stupid...Being polite is another matter and oftimes they overlap, so be polite and let others worry about being politically correct.

Very well put!

 

[RM. Andersson]

Re: Being "politically correct" a good thing, over

I belive it is at all times NOT good, except when it helps your survival. What is your idea on this?

I don´t think it´s good at all. It is based on altruism ,collectivism and moral greyness.

It´s a worldwide code. It originates from socialist and liberal "intellectualls" that think welfare statism is a good thing and that capitalism and freedom is wrong.
They are always prepared to do defend any brutal dictator or thug. Because they think that noone can ever be fully evil or fully good and thus compromise is always a virtue.
They defend different forms of perverted behaivour because the moral greyness makes it impossible for them to tell the difference between right or wrong.

Regards!

 

[nutball]

Re: Being "politically correct" a good thing, over

I belive it is at all times NOT good, except when it helps your survival. What is your idea on this?

I don´t think it´s good at all. It is based on altruism ,collectivism and moral greyness.

It´s a worldwide code. It originates from socialist and liberal "intellectualls" that think welfare statism is a good thing and that capitalism and freedom is wrong.
They are always prepared to do defend any brutal dictator or thug. Because they think that noone can ever be fully evil or fully good and thus compromise is always a virtue.
They defend different forms of perverted behaivour because the moral greyness makes it impossible for them to tell the difference between right or wrong.

Regards!

Trouble is that moral absolutism really only works if a) you're the only person on the planet, or b) everyone has the same morals.

In a situation (like in the Real World, for example) where various groups of moral absolutists don't agree with each other, then problems develop. Problems involving aeroplanes and tall buildings, for example.

 

[Sabastian]

Re: Being "politically correct" a good thing, over

I belive it is at all times NOT good, except when it helps your survival. What is your idea on this?

I don´t think it´s good at all. It is based on altruism ,collectivism and moral greyness.

It´s a worldwide code. It originates from socialist and liberal "intellectualls" that think welfare statism is a good thing and that capitalism and freedom is wrong.
They are always prepared to do defend any brutal dictator or thug. Because they think that noone can ever be fully evil or fully good and thus compromise is always a virtue.
They defend different forms of perverted behaivour because the moral greyness makes it impossible for them to tell the difference between right or wrong.

Regards!

Trouble is that moral absolutism really only works if a) you're the only person on the planet, or b) everyone has the same morals.

In a situation (like in the Real World, for example) where various groups of moral absolutists don't agree with each other, then problems develop. Problems involving aeroplanes and tall buildings, for example.

You know something, I don't give a dam about moral relativism. I also don't think that if we don't know about something for sure that we ought not to right it off as if we will never know the truth. We should be allowed to say and think the things we believe, to hell with political correctness. All it does is stifles debate and obscure the truth. Simply because it is difficult to measure something does not mean absolutely that there is no casualty in it. The single largest problem in society today comes not from absolutist morality, rather ironically I might add, from the notion that there is no good or bad, right or wrong in human actions and choice. This all stems of course from the notion of relativism and theory that supports it and all the hopelessness it brings with it with regards to life. Oh, as a side note here there have been extensive debate on this subject matter. I come fairly well equipped but can only take absolutism so far and then what anyone reasonable has to do is conclude that we do not know if the universe is fashioned intentionally or without a reason. To this … no one knows the answer. So in the end you cannot dismiss objective truth… absolutely, no one can, and this gives us reason to hope.

For the benefit of those who are neither physicists nor chemists, let me quickly point out that the effects of the uncertainty principle are so small for macroscopic objects (such as a human body) as to be invisible. Another example from my days of teaching physical chemistry at Berkeley will suffice. Suppose we take a Honda Civic automobile (weight about one ton) and specify its velocity to within one-billionth of a mile per hour (i.e., 0.000000001 mph), obviously much greater precision than currently measurable. Given this uncertainty in the velocity, what is the uncertainty in the position of the vehicle? The Heisenberg principle tells us that the position of the Honda Civic is uncertain by about one-billionth of one-billionth of one-billionth of a meter (i.e., 0.000000000000000000000000001 meter). This was my way of proving to the students that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would never provide an excuse for their getting lost on the freeway on the way to class after a long weekend at home.

http://www.westminsterhall.us/hfs3/qm_postmod.doc

EDITED, for additional quotes from the above article.

1. Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Louis de Broglie considered the uncertainty in quantum mechanics to be merely a statement of human ignorance. Their followers on this particular point continue to insist that events in the quantum world, like those in the world of classical physics, are fully causal and deterministic. Einstein spent a good part of the last thirty years of his life (without success) in search of such a precise theory. Einstein expressed his resistance to the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics with his famous statement "God does not play dice with the universe."

2. Niels Bohr was of the opinion that uncertainty is not a result of temporary ignorance, solvable by further research. Uncertainty is a fundamental and unavoidable limitation on human knowledge. Bohr thought that we must remain agnostic about the ontology of the atomic world and talk only about the results obtained under certain experimental conditions. Note, however, that when I gave this lecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Science and Technology (ETH Zuerich) in July 2000, Professor Hans Primas did not like Pearcey and Thaxton's description of Bohr's view. Primas has been studying the historical views of Bohr and Heisenberg for the past 30 years and insisted that Bohr had a different view of the uncertainty principle every year of his life after 1930 (Bohr died in 1962). So perhaps we should take the present description as the time-averaged Bohr interpretation of the uncertainty principle.

3. Werner Heisenberg ascribed uncertainty to nature. According to Heisenberg, nature is not deterministic, as classical physics assumed; it is indeterminate. When a scientist intrudes his/her measuring device into an atomic system, he/she forces a particular outcome to be actualized from what was before a fuzzy realm of potentialities.

4. I will refer to this fourth view as the subjective interpretation. Its proponents claim that when we choose which property will be measured via an experiment, this is essentially equivalent to saying that we "create" a particular property. This is the view of many of the postmodernists who have attempted to relate their ideas to quantum mechanics. The subjective view also resonates with Hinduism and with the popular Eastern/New Age books "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters."

Jerram Barrs (Autumn 1996 newsletter, Francis Schaeffer Instititute, St. Louis) has done a fine job in summarizing four key ingredients of postmodernism:

1. Postmodernism says that nothing can be known by reason. Reason is inadequate. There is no objective truth. This concept, of course, dovetails with a popular opinion, held long before the introduction of the term "postmodernism," namely "You have your truth and I have my truth, and that is all that matters."

2. One logical consequence of postmodernism is the rejection of authority. Postmodernism believes that there is no book, no idea, and no social structure that could command or deserve respect. If there is no authority which engenders respect, then all styles are equally valid. No art is better than any other art; there is no high culture. Andy Warhol's depictions of tomato soup cans (my friend Professor Carl Moser in Paris has a superb collection) are just as great as Rembrandt's "Night Watch." This follows from the conviction that there is no measure against which we can evaluate such things.

3. For the postmodernist there can be no transcendent or bindng commandments. No one has the right to tell another person what to do. The individual becomes the moral authority. Again, this resonates with the popular idea that long preceded postmoderninsm, namely "Who are you to give me instructions for my life?"

4. A fourth consequence of postmodernism may be practical idolatry. Though persons no longer have truth to provide meaning, they sometimes hunger for what might be called "idols of the mind." Certain individuals may thus be inclined to believe almost anything, no matter how irrational it might appear. In fact, some may not even ask the question "Is it reasonable?" If people have no objective values to direct their lives, they often demand idols for their wills. People usually live for something, whether it is achieving respect, making money, or being successful; and it may completely control their lives.

In "The Creator and the Cosmos" Hugh Ross has done an excellent job of summarizing the evidence against an observer created reality. With modest additions, deletions, and nuancing by the present author:

1. There is no movement from imprecision to precision in quantum phenomena. All that happens is that the observer can choose where to put the imprecision. If the observer chooses to measure the position of the quantum particle sufficiently precisely, he or she loses the potential for some degree of precision in measuring the particle's velocity. Conversely, if the experimenter decides to measure the velocity of the quantum particle sufficiently accurately, the potential for unlimited precision on the position of the particle will be irretrievably lost.

2. Experiments are obviously designed and directed by human beings. But this does not mean that the observer gives reality to the quantum event. One can always imagine a set of natural circumstances (involving no human being) that could give rise to the same quantum event. The observer can choose some aspect of reality he/she wants to discern in a particular experiment. Though in quantum entities, indefinite properties (see discussion below following point 5.) become definite to the observer through measurements, the observer cannot determine how and when the indefinite property becomes definite.

3. Rather than affirming the postmodernist view that human beings are more powerful than we might have imagined, quantum mechanics tells us that we are weaker. In classical physics (Newton and Maxwell, pre-1900) no apparent limit exists on our ability to make accurate measurements. In quantum mechanics, a fundamental and easily determinable limit exists. In classical physics, we can see all aspects of causality. But in quantum mechanics some aspect of causality always remains hidden from human investigation.

4. The time duration between a quantum event and its observed result is always very brief, briefer by many orders of magnitude than the time period separating the beginning of the universe from the recent appearance of human beings. Speculations to the contrary, for both the universe and people, time is not reversible. Thus, no amount of human activity can ever affect events that occurred billions of years ago. The idea that one can create his or her own universe receives no support from quantum mechanics.

5. An experiment designed with insufficient foresight or performed with insufficient care may be unintentionally disrupted. And there are observations that cannot be understood without taking the uncertainty principle into consideration. Nevertheless, experiments consistently reveal that nature is described correctly by the condition that the human consciousness is irrelevant. A properly described experiment carried out in Berkeley, California can be reproduced by a different group of scientists in Cambridge, England one year later. Furthermore, there is nothing particularly special about human observers. Inanimate objects, such as microwave, infrared, and ultraviolet spectrometers, are far more capable than humans of detecting quantum mechanical events.

"My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism," explains Sokal, "and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism, being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In particular I had political motivations because I was worried about the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left."

"It was a parody, intended to be extreme. It comes out in the first two paragraphs, and says, without any evidence or argument – of course it says it in high-faluting language, but translated into English it basically says – "Most western intellectuals used to believe that there exists a real world, but now we know better."

"In some cases it’s not clear what their philosophy is and we don’t make any attempt to judge their philosophy. On the other hand the authors of relativism, we don’t accuse them of imposture, we accuse them of ambiguous writing or sloppy thinking, but certainly not of trying to misrepresent things. So they’re completely separate and the link between them is primarily sociological. There’s only a very weak logical link between them."

"The best thing about this whole affair for me, which has now taken about three years of my life, has been that I’ve been able to meet and sometimes become good friends with really interesting people in history, philosophy and sociology that I wouldn’t have otherwise met. From then I’ve found out both that things were worse than I thought, in the sense that some of the sloppy thinking was spread more widely than I thought and also that things were better than I thought in there were a lot of people within the humanities and social sciences who had been arguing against sloppy thinking for years and often were not being heard. After the parody and again after the book I got an incredible amount of email from people in the humanities and social sciences and people on the political left as well, who were saying, ‘Thank you. We’ve been trying to say this for years without getting through, and maybe it was necessary for an outsider to come in and shake up our field and say that our local emperor is running naked.’"

http://www.philosophers.co.uk/noframes/articles/sokalnf.htm

Scientists themselves sometimes get philosophically confused (although sociologists will not say it, I believe that a lot of confusion can be found in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics) and they can grossly exaggerate the relevance, scope or level of confirmation of their theories. Scientists can also be selfish, arrogant and prejudiced. In case these descriptions do not apply to you, just think about your colleagues! Scientific research is a human activity, too human maybe. All this justifies subjecting it to careful and reasoned analysis from a historical, sociological and philosophical viewpoint. But it does not warrant sloppy thinking or radical relativism.
By no means do Sokal and I wish to fight what some commentators have called a "science war", which pits scientists against anti-scientific humanists of all sorts. But we wish to defend canons of rationality that are - or should be - common to all. And we do not want to let it be forgotten that the discovery of objective, culture-independent truths about the world has had powerful consequences as one of the sources of the enlightenment, and is one of the best remedies against the permanent short-sightedness of our cultural prejudices.

http://physicsweb.org/article/world/10/12/2

The Copenhagen interpretation leads to the most astonishing set of contradictions that ever existed in science. Those contradictions are usually presented under the name of paradoxes because that expression seems less absurd. In simple terms, the Copenhagen interpretation leads to observations that clearly imply three unsurmountable difficulties,
a) negation of causality
b) negation of realism and
c) involvement of infinite and imaginary velocities or masses.
We will first discuss causality because this fundamental concept can be more easily conceived. Causality is also an extremely basic condition in science. Points b) and c) will be discussed in chapter 4.

http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/HEISENBERG/Chapter1.html

Abstract: Motivated by the observation that the Probability theory violates the continuity condition at probabilities very close to 0 and 1 and therefore may be incomplete, a new Axiom (the Continuity Axiom) is introduced and compared against the Probability Axiom. It is shown that the Probability theory is indeed an incomplete description of physical phenomena, and its argument that events of very low probabilities cannot happen is a fallacy. It is shown that the Continuity Axiom leads to a more complete and faithful description of physical phenomena. It is suggested that the Probability Axiom is replaced by the Continuity Axiom.

Will you choose to stay with the Probability Axiom, which seems to be in conceptual conflict with reality, and has no ability to make quantitative predictions regarding convergence of trials with finite sample sizes? Or will you give serious thought to the Continuity Axiom, which is consistent with reality, and has a quantitative convergence theorem to help experimenters to predict future outcomes of tests with finite sample sizes? I believe you will agree with me that while the Continuity Axiom still needs to stand the test of time, the Probability Axiom is dead.

http://www.thinhtran.com/probability.html

 

[RM. Andersson]

Re: Being "politically correct" a good thing, over

I belive it is at all times NOT good, except when it helps your survival. What is your idea on this?

I don´t think it´s good at all. It is based on altruism ,collectivism and moral greyness.

It´s a worldwide code. It originates from socialist and liberal "intellectualls" that think welfare statism is a good thing and that capitalism and freedom is wrong.
They are always prepared to do defend any brutal dictator or thug. Because they think that noone can ever be fully evil or fully good and thus compromise is always a virtue.
They defend different forms of perverted behaivour because the moral greyness makes it impossible for them to tell the difference between right or wrong.

Regards!

Trouble is that moral absolutism really only works if a) you're the only person on the planet, or b) everyone has the same morals.

In a situation (like in the Real World, for example) where various groups of moral absolutists don't agree with each other, then problems develop. Problems involving aeroplanes and tall buildings, for example.

My moral idéas are based on mans basic needs. They are valid for all human beings. We are all humans and thus the same basic moral code will always be right. Because it´s based on logic and a true understanding of man.

The principles of democracy and individual human rigths are universal.
This is what PC-people fail to understand.

Look at this link.

http://www.democracyforiran.de/Iran - past, present & future - Future.htm

This is a very good exampel. This is what the peolpe of Iran really wants.

PC- people would say that it would be good to try to find possible compromises and have good relations with the brutal regime.
I say: - No compromise. The regime is fully evil.

Because I understand what morals the people in Iran really believe in. Because I know they are human beings just like me and they need the same basic things that I need.

The typical PC idéas in a case like this are not honest. Because any moral code that forbids and paralyzes moral judgement will be a contradiction in terms. It´s not logic.
In a compromise between good and evil it´s always evil that will benefit.

Someone that escape the responsibility of moral judgement and closes his eyes and mind will be evil himself.
As human beings we all have that responsibility. We can never let some brutal dictator murder and torture thousands and refuse to judge him. And instead try to understand him and seek compromise and consensum.
Only PC-people think like that. I understand how they think but I don´t like them.

This is also true if some people in your own country are doing evil things. You have a responsibility as a human being. If they are doing something wrong you must judge them. Judge and be prepared to be judged. It´s fair.

Regards!




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[Tahir2]

Sometimes a racist is just a racist. No point being PC about that.

 

[RM. Andersson]

It´s good that most racists are easy to recognize. Most of them support terrorist organizations with racist goals and idéas. Some of them even support and defend the most brutal dictators on the planet.

 

[ricercar]

Man i knew of ran his thesis through a program to scan for "political correctness." It changed his name from 'Bowman' to 'Archer.'

Feh.

 

[ByteMe]

It´s good that most racists are easy to recognize. Most of them support terrorist organizations with racist goals and idéas. Some of them even support and defend the most brutal dictators on the planet.

Amen.