Sam Harris is looking to set a trend again.
Sam Harris @SamHarrisOrg · 6 hours ago
Looking for examples of political correctness run amok. Please send links/stories here: http://www.samharris.org/contact
That trend has been set already, back around 1985 or so, but Sam was probably too busy studying the biology of gender differences to notice.
So, yay. The atheist movement can throw a big ol’ party with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as the hosts and everybody else dressed up as various kinds of political correctness run amok. Hilarity will ensue. And the atheist movement will continue to watch bemusedly as sensible people head for the exits.
A few elections back, I saw Them™ allow, nay, assist, a blind person to vote.
Srsly. Helping everyone have a voice? WTF?
…
Is that the kind of story he’s looking for?
Jesus what an asshole. Saying anything about “PC” unironically is a reliable indicator of a thoughtless, bigoted buffoon.
Jamie Kilstein was on the Yo, Is This Racist? podcast this week, and they were talking about how astounding it is that jerks managed to turn “being nice to other people” into an insult. That’s basically the entire foundation of society, and they’ve managed to make people think it’s a bad way to act. What the hell, honestly?
“Examples of political correctness run amok”? Here you go! 🙂
<fantasy>
Maybe he’s hoping to point to the dearth of actual examples of PC run amok in order to point out that, actually, it’s just people freaking out over basic courtesy? And factual correctness?
</fantasy>
Recent examples are the closing ranks behind Michael Shermer, especially claiming anyone disagreeing is simply not thinking rationally, or Sam Harris’ response to critics of his sexist remarks, or his earlier remarks about why Israel should not be criticized despite it doing eminently criticizable things. Those are political stances, considered “correct” by him and many of his cronies, and considered – according to their statements- to be stances for which disagreement with them is impossible for anyone thinking rationally.
p.s. Dear Sam,
Despite what this action of yours suggests you think, I’m pretty sure you don’t have to audition or build a resume to join the slymepit.
“Political correctness run amok…”
So Harris has officially become a shill for the right, eh? Back when I was a conservative in high school and college, I read plenty of “PC thought police” horror stories in the right wing media. In retrospect, they all boiled down to…
1) “Leftist” college professor said something some right-winger disagreed with.
2) Right-wing college student/students get in trouble for bigoted remarks.
Yup. Harris is on a nostalgia trip. (For the 80s?? blegh)
Funny I read that as an unintentional surrender. IE- PC running amok is everywhere!!! Only I can’t find any examples. Can you help me out?
On the upside, hopefully someone who does the Twitter will start a hashtag campaign of mocking/snarky responses. That could be alot of fun.
Dear Sam: http://freethoughtblogs.com/
You’re welcome.
Harris is yet another in a long line of people who get famous or semi-famous and their egos get out of control (e.g. Dawkins, Condell, among others). They mistakenly believe that because a few people agreed with them once they can say anything and people will agree regardless of how offensive it is.
No. When people agreed with them in the past, it because they had actually said something intelligent and worthwhile. Hubris took over, and now they’re just posting from out of their posteriors and making themselves look ridiculous, embarrassing the movement they once championed. I wish their followers would stop being blindly loyal. Open criticism would help, but just walking away and disassociating from them would be good enough, unsubscribing and blocking them on social media.
It says a lot about Harris that Michael Shermer is one of his prominent twitter commenters. If that’s who he wants to associate with….
Harris is becoming a parody of himself.
At this point we can declare Sam Harris to have unambiguously joined the atheist misogynist club.
Earlier on it was looking like he might just have been clueless and then dug deeper rather than admit he might have said something clueless. But now he has turned full Dawkins I guess we can expect him to post a Muslima within the next month.
It is important not to jump to conclusions. But when a conclusion is reached, throw him into the deep rift.
Well, I’m sure somewhere out there in the big wide world there are examples of political correctness generating adverse outcomes. But really this is no different to the infamous research showing that abortions caused suicidal thoughts and depression because the researchers put an ad in local papers asking women who had felt depressed or suicidal after an abortion to contact them. There’s nothing wrong with this research in itself, except that the researchers presented it as causal evidence that abortions caused depression when their study design made it impossible to draw that conclusion. But surely Harris wouldn’t stoop to that, would he? He’s an ardent skeptic, right?…Right?
Sam will get some stories, but he will only get one side. He will hear about the comedian criticized for using certain words. But he will not hear about the people held down and beaten while being called those words, and now leave sobbing and shaking when they hear people using them.
We do make small sacrifices for what they call political correctness, but the sacrifices are more than outweighed by the good. As Carlie says said, being nice to people is not an insult.
Is there anything in this world more Politically Correct than loudly decrying political correctness, or publicly proclaiming how intentionally politically incorrect you are?
Let’s be fair to ol’ Sam now. After Tuesday night you can understand how a guy might think the clocks have been rolled back thirty years.
Perhaps someone should direct Artie Lange and Anthony Cumia to Sam Harris’s site. Both of those fine comedians blamed PC gone wild for their career setbacks.
And, yes, I think they all deserve each other.
Has Sam Harris become the Daily Mail? I thought he was supposed to be clever!
I’ve seen people called “anti-semitic” for criticizing Israel’s political actions. Is that political correctness like Sam’s looking for?
There is a place for unironic PC: politicians and diplomats. As an elected representative one does have the responsibility to represent: even those who have views and beliefs we find abhorrent. Any Western diplomat will know that when negotiating with say Saudi Arabia one takes into account their cultural sensibilities and politicians refraining from blasphemy is in fact important due to the ease of misunderstandings or alienation. The same onus is not on the rest of us. Basic human decency however is..
Oh goody, an oncoming anti-“PC” circlejerk. It’s ridiculous that people use the phrase “political correctness” as if it is its own standalone argument, and that simple respect is frowned upon by these same folks. Oh, poor you has to be aware of humanity when speaking about them, how difficult for you, must be hard compared to being a white upper-middle-class educated cisgender heterosexual man.
I look forward to the upcoming article by a rich white male about how tough it is to be a rich white male who acts like an asshole. I’m sure there will be lots of cries of “which hunts” and “censorship”. I’m really looking forward to the part where he totally misrepresents free speech and makes it clear he doesn’t understand the constitution.
I can think of many, many destructive examples.
For instance, when the NUS in the UK refused to condemn ISIS because doing so would be islamophobic and neocolonialist.
I like Sam Harris… in fact I think he’s quite brilliant.
And as for 80s nostalgia… hes barely old enough to remember the decade.
It also appears that women’s rights, something near and dear to commenters here, are the first to be sacrificed on this altar.
Don’t dress ‘provocatively’, you know, lest you unfairly excite the libidos of a certain underprivileged visible minority.
When it comes to accommodation certain communities, we’re back to the days when courts said she ‘deserved it’ because her skirt was too short.
But denying this is real easy…just call me a racist et le tour est joué
Someone has been hilariously parodying Gamergate: http://www.salon.com/2014/11/07/jane_austen_slept_with_all_the_book_bloggers_how_readergate_smashes_shady_gamergate_arguments/
Someone should parody this as well. Do a #pcrunamok, but post about universal suffrage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Organizations working for the rights of Muslim women (as in Ophelia’s next), etc.
Too bad I don’t do Twitter.
It seems the anti-PC has been making a resurgence recently. Though nothing concrete is ever given without its own context, nuance and compromise, the spectre still looms large to those who’d rather curtail the right of the susceptible a place in society in favor of their ability to keep them on the outskirts.
Honestly, I do not know what is to blame. My initial source of this resurgence is the ongoing meme of machoism and how sensitivity is antithetical to freedom to offend people. At least now shitheads like Art(ch)ie (Bunker) Lange know they need to hide behind the pretense of “comedy”, whereas before it was just simply “the truth.” Progress in a way, I guess.
I am so damn tempted to blame the generation raised on the internet, not for the fact of anti-PC, but for the resurgence of this type of reaction. I am one of those who grew up with the internet my whole adolescent life. This revolved around discovering new ways to shock my sensibilities. And porn. Mainly porn. But also seeking out conflict.
The quickest way to achieve conflicts (the only goal, winning wasn’t as well thought out) was to find the most repulsive thing to say and defend it. Yes, the archaic troll. Was this a stage I went through? Absolutely. And I know if anyone told me I was wrong for doing it, then up went my arms and my disdain of their hatred toward my freedom to express myself took precedence over the previous shocking comments, which I had no support for and had no reason to support.
I grew out of it though. I realized through introspection this type of behavior, while exhilarating at first, tapered into a routine where I would say the most vile shit for a quick reaction. I was like the junky whose tolerance led them to desperation and multiple quick fixes without much investment in time to procure them.
Surely I wasn’t the only one. And there may be others who, after going down the rabbit hole so deep, never came out of it. Because it does fundamentally change you the longer you’re in it. Your thought processes adapt to quick retorts learned through either observing others who were on your side or which you’ve developed on your own. That’s when the adoption process begins for those ideas simply because the brain is plastic and will ease the processing by hardwiring your limbic response to those patterns and cues.
Anyway, I’m not postulating it as the definitive reason, but I think it’s an avenue worth exploring.
Ophelia, I am more or less a lurker. I am not part of the “atheist movement” per se. Never attended a conference, don’t blog, so there isn’t really an “exit” for me from which to depart. I have been an atheist as long as I can remember, however, despite my Catholic upbringing. I am raising my children as godless secular humanists, to be clear headed rational thinkers. It amazes me that FTB is so often shocked (shocked I say, shocked and appalled!) that the atheist movement leadership has the same ingrained prejudices as our society at large. Of course they are sexist, racist, homophobic ass cheeses. What else did you expect them to be? The hard work you and FTB and Rebecca Watson and Sarkeesian and everyone else are doing now, pushing back against the ass cheeses, is the tip of the spear. Real societal change will come from smaller parts of society like the “atheist movement.” Hopefully, change will then percolate through society at large. I have four children and a pack of nephews and nieces. Ram the spear home please. I want them to grow up in a better world than I had.
In other words: “Please help me assemble a deliberately biased sample to support a pre-determined ideological conclusion”.
Excellent stuff. Truly a lesson for all scientists on how to conduct a study.
I wonder if “Atheists filing suits to remove Nativity scenes from courthouse lawns” counts as PC run amok.
Or does PC in this context mean, “Being sensitive to the beliefs of groups that Sam Harris isn’t a member of”?
Why doesnt he just watch fox news ?
You know when atheists complain about religious invocations or when they wage the war on Christmas and so on
Dunc @29:
FTFY.
Sam Harris just goes to show you that a Ph.D. is all too often a junk degree. The man lacks any understanding of the fundamentals of scientific methodology.
@10 Uncle Ebenezer — you nailed it. “It’s the Loch Ness Monster devouring our manly society, I just can’t find any photos!”
@25 Decker — okay, you’re a racist. So’s Harris.
Decker @ 25
Yeeeeeesh – no kidding; that was part of the joke.
I’ll send Harris examples of political correctness when he gives me his definition of political correctness. Either that or he gives some evidence of being willing to explore his definition as this unfolds.
Yeeeeeesh – no kidding; that was part of the joke.
It’s very cold here this morning…
Without wanting to sound too right wing, I think that Harris need look no further than Rotherham for examples of this.Those in positions of authority did nothing because they were so afraid of being labelled racist if they did.
The shootings at Fort Hood are perhaps another example. the incident happened five years ago and the perp still hasn’t been convicted. America entered WWII in Dec ’41 and less than four years later had defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Lawyers have spent years arguing whether or not Nidal Hasan, owing to the laws on religious freedom, has the right to remain seated as the judge enters the courtroom.
Well, ‘PC’ IS a category of ‘Fashionable Nonsense.’ And Butterflies and Wheels IS supposed to be agin’ it. Somehow I doubt that that’s what Harris means.
I’m old enough to remember PC being used unironically, and as an effective descriptor of Red Diaper idiocy. It really was a term used by the Communist Party USA during the rapid 180s required between the Popular Front/Hitler Stalin Pact/Barbarossa.
It is a shame to see a useful term hijacked by right-wing shills.
Or at least, that’s the excuse they gave when it all came out. Funny how they weren’t that afraid of being labelled racist when it came to stop and search, or using undercover officers to try and dig up dirt on Stephen Lawrence’s family… But no, I’m sure we can take them entirely at their word on this one.
Brony @37:
Heh. There’s a better chance that Sam Harris will admit he’s wrong about everything than that he’ll define “political correctness” sufficiently well and narrowly that it’s a useful term that means something other than “any position held by someone critical of Sam Harris.”
Decker
What?
I’ve heard that story but it’s never passed the smell test. Can you identify a policeman who had a solid case but refused to make an arrest because he was afraid of being called a racist? In my experience police officers have the opposite problem.
From what I’ve heard, the Rotherham incident involved respected members of a community preying on girls who came from marginal situations and weren’t likely to be taken seriously as witnesses because of that. So in other words it’s a pretty standard child-molestation ring. Things would have played out the same way if the criminals had been members of the white upperclass.
In the US you’ve got the right to a speedy trial, but you don’t have to have one if you don’t want to. Nobody really cares whether he’s behind bars awaiting trial, or behind bars after a conviction, so nobody’s pushing to speed things up.
So that doesn’t count as PC run amok either. At worst, it’s lawyers trying to pad their bills.
Decker @38
Nasan was convicted and sentenced in 2013. Wikipedia sez:
Nisan was reduced to the lowest paygrade, forfeited all pay and allowances, and is awaiting execution at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Levenworth, KS.
Chigau @42
shhhhh, Please don’t interrupt Professor Decker’s history lesson*. I think they are about to get to the part about how the pc culture has caused the US to lose every war the last 50 years.
*facts optional
Is Decker trying to make a coherent point, or are they just smashing the keyboard impotently?
Well, you know, I can think of a few cases that actually could be termed “Political Correctness run amok.”
There was a case a few years ago where a college put out a job advertisement that said that said they were looking for a “dynamic” individual. Someone on the faculty complained about the advertisement, because she claimed that “dynamic” was a codeword for “male” because men were thought of as more dynamic than female. Clue for when you’re being sexist: when you diss your own entire gender like this. I’d say the majority of my most dynamic teachers have been women.
Another case: People objecting to the use of the words “niggardly” and “picnic” because of false etymology. When people pointed out that the etymology was false, they continued to lobby for the words to be labeled racist.
So yes, I’d say both of these are PC run amok.
But you know what? So what! Sure, in any movement, there will be some who take it too far. That doesn’t invalidate the premises of the movement. There were abolitionists who went overboard, and suffragettes, and Black Panthers, and truly misandrist feminists. But that doesn’t mean that the goals of any of those movements were wrong. Does the existence of Robespierre prove that we should bring back a hereditary aristocracy?
So screw Sam Harris. He could find a hundred examples of PC run amok. So what? That would prove exactly nothing about the values of the movement.
I’ll admit to being on edge when I see the word “niggardly” used. Not because of any false etymology, but because every time I see it used, it’s use is somehow linked to the slur.
Jacob Schmidt (#48) –
I avoid it not because of phonetic similarity, but because miserly is easier to say. And I prefer skinflint, tightfisted and tightwad because they’re funnier.
@25 Decker — okay, you’re a racist. So’s Harris.
My…I’m so insulted!
Going to be pretty tough to top Rotheram.
Smith College denouncing Wendy Kaminer, former board member on the ACLU, as a racist over her recent talk is a good example.
Yes, it says that Harris, too, is a thinky man’s thought leader, with lots of manly thinkiness…or is it thinky manliness?
I’m a fan of parody (e.g. Weird Al), but it’s usually only funny if it’s intentional.
Ouch.
“Looking for cherries to pick. Please send low-hanging fruit to my website. Ignore bulk of reasonable objections. Has worked thus far.”