Political Correctness Gone Mad

@val70 Not necessarily. Some people on both sides thrive on PC'ness.

@val70 Sort of.

There is an interesting series presently on BBC Radio Four, by Matthew Syed, examining the source and use of the word "woke".

A past tense of "awaken" [to what is going on, in this context] I had thought it a modern slang term, but it first appeared in a Lead Belly song in the 1930s, about a terrible miscarriage of justice. Nine black youths with little prospect of a fair trial for it, were sentenced to death for raping a white woman, in Alabama. The sentences were commuted to long prison terms, but in fact they were all innocent and were eventually pardoned.

@CestManan I can't understand either. I got into an argument about the wokeness of the BBC once on here. Somehow using that term would have made me into a right extremist, whilst challenging PC wouldn't. I can't see the difference except they're concepts about using language already decades apart. One is sayin nay and the other yay

@ArishMell So by using woke to protest against censorship I'm showing myself to be a right extremist?

@val70 I wouldn't like to say. Its original meaning seems to have been "awoke to oppression / injustice" but these days it seems thrown around so much it can mean almost anything.

Also I don't know how you define "right extremist", but I do object to censoring books written a long time ago, to match present-day political or social ideas. We cannot think or speak for our parents' or grandparents', or earlier, generations; just accept how thought and talked even if we do not agree with them now.

@val70 [quote]So by using woke to protest against censorship I'm showing myself to be a right extremist?[/quote]

Yes. "Woke" has essentially become a dog whistle for Fascists.

@BohemianBoo Gosh, you think? You haven't been around real ones yet. Have a good life

@val70 If Trump runs against Biden again, who are you gonna vote for?

@BohemianBoo Do I have a vote in that election? Of course, you'd think that way too. My hat goes off to that statement of yours. Try asking people questions first. For the rest, well, have a good life.

@val70 Let's say you did. Who would you vote for?

@val70 The term woke has been corrupted by conservative and right wing media who use it to build up a fake threat and accuse queer people of grooming which is outrageous, has no grounding in reality and has lead to real life harm (bomb threat at a hospital for example)

@FragileHeart 🙄 American situations yet again

@val70 Yes it is a unique American issue. I am not aware of right wing politicians outside of the US using the same narrative.

@FragileHeart Politicians no, but many members of societies foreign to the USA tend to copy Americanisms and American ideas for no other reason than being American. Irrespective of personal left- or right-wing beliefs, too.

@ArishMell Have you got another description for the decisions of censoring works of Roal Dahl, Fawlty Towers, etc? Those aren't American and get the same sort of treament now. Taken from their original context they are judged lacking by some idiots and then hacked to pieces. Do I actually need to be confronted with Dahl's antisemitism? What use does that serve? Edith Blyton was even a worse human but the girl she created that wanted to be called George is still read with great joy. Isn't that mishandling of art and history not worth a proper name? PC isn't about the past and correcting that. Somehow there's a need nowadays to change established cultural icons just for the sake of not offending someone else's feelings. That's much more about selling and marketing than the proper concern of the people focused on. I've heard that the defence against the use of the word woke is all about either race or gender, but aren't we forgetting that words are just labels?

@val70 I can't think of a better word than "censoring"!

All I know it's what was reported, which is that the copyright owners and publishers altered the stories to avoid possibly causing offence; but it seems now that Penguin Books will be issuing original-text "archive" editions.

Even worse, I understand some UK authors are among many to be kept out of some states' school libraries and courses until passed as suitable by .... well by whom exactly?

There does seem a fashion in some circles to deride figures of the past no matter how great their achievements, for having opinions that are seen as wrong now but were commonplace at the time; and this leads to a total distortion of both creator and created.

Not just children's authors either, as we see with people trying to link Richard Wagner with the Nazis, simply because he was anti-Semitic and held political-revolutionary views. Not pleasant attitudes, no, of course they were not; but we should be able to accept his views were widespread in his 19C time, and concentrate on enjoying his music.

Similarly, the English scientist Dr. Marie Stopes is sometimes attacked for supporting "eugenics". She did do that, as did very many academics of the late-19 - early-20C. Whilst later events showed how that social philosophy, which was never a science, would be used evilly; its early proponents genuinely thought it a positive idea. What though concentrating on Dr. Stopes' views there does from our own time 100 years later, is deflect attention from her extremely positive life as both a palaeontologist with a special interest in the Coal Measures botany; and her tireless campaigning for women's health.

It's as if past do-ers must be rejected as bad, for having ideas of their time we now see as bad, and I am not sure how much of that is really just jealousy in critics who have yet to "do" anything notable themselves. It wants yesterday's heroes to be super-human, but they were not, they were human and made mistakes, were flawed; yet also did good work. Are their modern-day critics super-human?


For commercial reasons? You might be right, and I think for negative rather than positive reasons: fearing lost sales if a few readers become too noisy about supposed slights to this-or-that "community". Though no-one (i hope) wants gratuitous offence-giving even by accident, the fear forgets we are all of one "community".


"Labels" indeed, but it is odd that an era marked by a desire for overwhelming "equality" and "inclusivity" in our manifold differences, has created a desire to label everyone as if we are all standard items in some sort of rigid database menu. Database menus of course, have the characteristic of inflexibility, so if something does not match the menu, it creates problems. All very impersonal, even dehumanising.


Ending yesterday was an interesting 5-part series, just over an hour altogether, on BBC Radio Four, on the history of the word 'woke'; from its original meaning and intention to its often unpleasant, very different version now. It started in the 1930s as African-American slang meaning [i] stay [a]woken[/i] - to injustice - but in the last couple of years became a poisonous term of political abuse.

@ArishMell Somehow I don't think that censoring is good enough. It's like talking about American history and not Trump. It's getting us no where that. Another one, still very current, is the argument that nazism hasn't got anything to do with socialism. Fine, but what the heck is it in the actually chosen name for themselves then? Denying fact that terminology can change from one side to the other of argument is madness. I'm sorry, but I consider it still as madness when one points to a term to describe something has been too loaded because of its past. What else next? Oh yes, I got it. Don't talk about socialism because it's only for fascists and communists. One can't have it two ways. It's in there by the use at the time plus the history of socialism is indeed a bit more complex than black and white. Excuse the pun there. No, we have it currently at the wrong side of the stick when it's actually provided to us as fact. The BBC is entirely woke, and that's the viewpoint of not only both extremes but ordinary viewers like myself in the past too. Look for a debate on Question Time about Brexit in the recent eight years and the views of study groups are presented as being part of the argument going on in society like the opinion inside a political party would be. The perfect example of madness there was the total blanketing of the problem of the Northen Ireland there. No better example of this madness from above, and I'm afraid that the present meaning of the term will continue just because of all that