Sweejak wrote:I think the most poisonous tendency everywhere today is political correctness. I don't see it on the right very much, they don't seem to care, but I do see a lot of it on the left. It's mentally corrosive.
The repression and/or stigmatization of certain personal opinions, beliefs and/or orientations isn't just mentally corrosive. It's incompatible with the preservation of a free society. Especially if it's accompanied by the privileging or mandating of other personal opinions, beliefs and/or orientations.
You might not notice that when you see it on the right. But there's absolutely no way that you don't see it. Because there's not a single contemporary faction on the right for which working to bring that about isn't a central (or the central) political purpose around which it coalesces.
It's just kind of a forest for the trees type of thing, it's too naturally a part of the landscape to be remarkable as such most of the time. Despite which, what you got on the right are:
* Traditionalists, who want to maintain the natural transcendence of a Christian moral order (and also preserve our heritage of reverence for the classical antecedents of western civilization -- ie, a core curriculum that counts Greek and Roman thinkers as a supreme influence in academic terms -- though you don't actually see too much of it on the stump).
But who are, in short, absolutely forthright about the inferiority and decadence of any and all other cultural influences and traditions. Though they now allow Catholics of Irish, Italian and Polish descent (plus a few others) to be naturally morally transcendent as long as they're not too ostentatiously ethnic or Catholic, which they didn't used to do when ethnic Catholics were mostly confined to the blue-collar communities they formed as first-generation immigrants. Same-but-different story with Jews, if they're wealthy or cultured or deracinated enough.
They also like local and regional governance and don't like federal or centralized power. They used to be at least a little more obvious about rooting for a social order that was basically a revamped and modernized version of old-school, pre-industrialized English manor-house-and-vicarage-based administrational authority of the landed gentry than they are now, although they haven't ever exactly emphasized that, obviously.
But that's what they're about, and it's enforced political correctness by any and every literal standard that there is.
Ron Paul is basically as close to being an unreconstructed traditionalist as it's politically viable to be in the present. IOW, not viable at all. That's why he and others have rebranded themselves as libertarians. The views of more traditional traditionalist types like William F. Buckley and Victor Davis Hanson do still have some followers, but not as many as you'd need to get elected.
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Hm. I'm expressing myself in many sentences and paragraphs again, dammit. But there's really no other way to express myself honestly, at least that I can think of. I mean, I could go the rhetorical shorthand route and get to more or less the same destination a lot faster, I suppose.
But then I'd only get there rhetorically. Besides which, I'd have to take the BP management approach to corner-cutting, wrt to just skipping steps on which doing the job well depends in order just to fucking get it done already. Which never ends well, imo.
Largely because imo it never ends. It's just a way of staying in the game by punting until most of the crowd loses interest, at which point you can just shoot whoever's standing between you and the goal line then claim it was just an accident, and furthermore not one that was your fault in any way, shape or form. Because who could have predicted (et cetera)?
Then you can just toss a sheet over the corpses, move the goal posts and start the whole thing all over. Never-endingly.
And without ever looking like anything but the very model of pith on a play-by-play basis, too. During every one of which I'd probably get flagged for....I guess, intentional grounding. (And btw: Aw, fuck, man. A combination penalty? That is just too fucking unfair. Fucking referees, they only ever call that when a talkative left-wing player does it. Meanwhile, you sure as hell don't ever see anyone waving while all those short-spoken assholes on the other side (plus the ones who make up most of my team) kick the ball back and forth over the fifty-yard line all day, do you? I was just trying to advance the ball by fair means and in full accordance with all the rules and customs of sportsmanlike conduct. Though don't mistake me. Because of course, I totally give credit to all the other players. They beat me fair and square, I can't argue with that.)
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Anyway. Sorry. I'll do the other factions one at a time, as briefly as I can. In the interests of which, may I stipulate now that
of course there's a lot of overlap among and between them. And that furthermore,
of course it's both intra- and interpartisan in nature? Because real life is rarely that simple? And real people never are?
Because I do happily stipulate to that, due to having no interest at all in qualifying every fucking thing down to its very last nuance, just for the sheer boredom and labor-intensive thrill of the thing. Believe it or not. So I'd much rather take it as granted that we're talking about the kind of thing that slops around, not the kind of thing that stays inertly in its neatly labeled container. As long as I can say once, in bold, indented type:
That doesn't mean that there aren't any meaningful distinctions between and among factions and parties in contemporary American politics, so why bother splitting hairs.
Because this is still just barely potentially a democracy. As I expect it will continue to be in some diminished and pathetic but nevertheless democratic form for at least another ten or fifteen minutes.
By definition, in a democratic system of government, parties and factions are meaningfully distinct from one another if (we, the) people distinguish among and between them.
And aren't when they don't.
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Which is actually why I'm lengthily-for-this-medium making some right now. It's always an important and productive thing to do, imo. Even though I have less than no hope that my doing it'll make any fucking difference in practical terms now or ever.
Because principles are also important. And so is articulating them. It's sort of like:
Sure, BP's mom may have no problems with letting it take as many shortcuts across unlit, unpaved roads that are just one extreme S-turn after another with no working breaks in the car at very high speeds as it feels like taking. To continue using BP as a metaphorically exemplary representation of The Corner-Cutter. Which isn't at all prejudicial. I have no idea what you're talking about.
In any event, I'd even concede that as far as it goes, it's not really illogical to respond, as some political factions do, by saying: "Well, since BP always walks away from whatever wreckage ensues with a few minor injuries at most, and its insurance covers whatever part of the damages to others it has to pay for, why shouldn't she? It's not
her fault that your uptight and stupid mom doesn't love you enough to be as indulgent as she is and didn't thriftily save enough money to make it possible. You're a grown-up now, anyway, you're perfectly free to try doing the same thing if you really want to."
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It's just that all of that could be true as true can be from now until doomsday with no hint of change every becoming visible anywhere on the horizon, and it still wouldn't affect these two additional and (I would hold) self-evident truths by so much as a fraction of a percentage of one degree:
(a) As far as it goes isn't nearly far enough to make much of a difference to anybody, let alone to many; and
(b) Whether it's visible or not at any particular moment, the only beneficial political change that (we the) people can ever realistically hope to realize will always only be realistic if it's attainable by means that are realistically (and actually) available to (we the) people at rates that we don't have to mortgage (or sacrifice) any of our freedoms in order to pay.
And there are no such means apart from the ones that proceed from the ability to recognize, understand, make and articulate political distinctions with enough precision and detail to know what we support, what we oppose, and for what reasons. The last of which also have to be widely recognized and understood, which means that they too have to be both articulated and articulable with precision and in detail.
Language is the only tool that's realistically essential for the purposes of political empowerment, from a populist perspective. As well as from a PTB perspective, assuming a system that isn't primarily based on brute physical force, as a matter of fact. But fuck them.. They've got access to other tools. (We the) people, acting autonomously, independently, and in opposition to a Power That Is can only reliably count on having that one.
On the upside, we can pretty much always rely on having it. I mean, yes, you can make it very difficult for people to communicate, but you can't really render them powerless to do so if they don't want to be. Except by killing them or permanently confining them in isolation from one another or lobotomizing them in very large numbers or some roughly comparable extreme. All of which are very costly and ultimately unsustainable in the long run, as well as impossible to do globally to an entire population even in the short term.
And that's what I have to say about political correctness. Both in the conventional sense of the phrase as its deservedly applied to the left and in the form in which it's tacitly a permanent practice that's ideologically fundamental to every faction there is on the right.
Because either way, it has direct and indirect chilling effects not just on freedom of speech but on freedom of comprehension. So I agree with you and then some.
Also, I believe that George Orwell wrote an essay saying more or less the same thing, except much, much better. He had a way with words.
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Or maybe I
won't do the other factions one at a time, actually. Or all together. Or in any way at all. Because I got other stuff to do right now. And by the time I'm finished with it, I'm pretty sure that I'll have remembered that it's really inconsiderate to impose your lengthy opinions on people who aren't interested in and didn't ask for them.
I did have fun writing the above, though. Plus I learned a little something about my own opinions while doing it. So thanks very much in advance for your tolerance, you all. It's sincerely and greatly appreciated.
