Saturday, February 15, 2014

holy shit an update

I've been lazy and tired recently. At least I don't have many fans to dissapoint?


Today, I just had a conversation about "political correctness" with someone and it veered into them basically claiming that the social justice concept of calling out bad behaviour is bad, and we should not do it. They claimed that this kind of thing will just "sweep the problem under the rug and make it harder to fix", while basically ignoring the idea that biggoted speech and behaviour helps to maintain the status-quo of social injustice and disadvantage. They even further went on to say that the Social Justice concept of calling out this speech and behaviour is censorship, and censorship is *always* wrong no matter what so we shouldn't do it. There are a lot of problems with this.

For one thing, censorship.

What is censorship? At the most basic, censorship is when an organisation or group in a position of power mandates the elimination of a particular idea or speech from media and society that it finds distasteful for some reason.

What censorship is *not* is the population in general going "this is distasteful" and speaking out against it, refusing to purchase things containing this idea, or otherwise activisting (it is TOO a word) for the elimination of this behaviour or speech in general.

When a group of bloggers or summat go "stop making rape appologising comments you assholes" they're not censoring speech. They literally *cannot* censor speech as they are not in the position of power to do so, and are GENERALLY speaking for a group that is in a disadvantaged position.

The other problems are a bit more complicated, but they basically boil down to giving the people with biggoted behaviour and speech more care than the people affected by their behaviour and speech. It is, quite literally, saying "how can you be so mean to those poor racists. They don't deserve it :("

I don't think I actually need to explain why that's problematic.

do i?

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