Political Correctness

RedEyedAbyss

• Freedom fries instead of French fries


• Right-to-work instead of anti-labor


• Oil sands instead of tar sands


• Climate change skepticism instead of climate change denial


• The whole Dixie Chicks fiasco

So why do people think it's only liberals who are guilty of being PC? I guess leftists use the term Orwellian instead. Still, it seems that most people who claim to be politically incorrect dislike it when others are politically incorrect in turn.

Kraken

Because political correctness is something the folks on the right placed upon the folks on the left. Not knowing that it places them as transgressors of a code.

InsanityAddict

Political correctness: perceived as bottom-up, by or catering to professional victims, usually with some form of official change attached to it. A company deciding to drop Simple White Crackers unprompted because it might be racist is being PC. 

Orwellian: top-down by the government/large corp, seen as done to increase power no matter the cause. Laws that widen the definition of online hate speech, no matter who it protects, would fall under this definition.

I'd say a lot of examples where there isn't an imposition of some kind would be classified as 'spin'/'propaganda'.

glennmagusharvey

RedEyedAbyss wrote:

• Freedom fries instead of French fries


• Right-to-work instead of anti-labor


• Oil sands instead of tar sands


• Climate change skepticism instead of climate change denial


• The whole Dixie Chicks fiasco

So why do people think it's only liberals who are guilty of being PC? I guess leftists use the term Orwellian instead. Still, it seems that most people who claim to be politically incorrect dislike it when others are politically incorrect in turn.

I dunno about this Dixie Chicks fiasco, but the "freedom fries" thing is not the same as political correctness since the intent of political correctness is (supposedly) to not offend people, while the point of "freedom fries" is to specifically offend the French.

A similar example (that you didn't cite) is the whole "keep Christ in Christmas" thing, along with all those crappy movies about how godless atheist liberals are trying to take down all symbols of religious expression from nativity scenes to public signs about God.

That's the gist of the difference between "liberal" political correctness and conservatives doing stuff like this.  Conservatives who do this think that liberals prefer political correctness because they're too shit-scared to offend people, and (U.S.) conservatives do it to show off and to score points for American exceptionalism.

As for "right-to-work" and "climate change skepticism" (and probably "oil sands", but I am less familiar with that example), I think those are just attempts at rebranding something that they started on the defensive about.

 

That said, yes, you have a point -- conservatives in the US criticize liberals for trying to control speech but they do the same when it serves themselves.