John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
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Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#2Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English."
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#3"If people can't control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people's behaviour."
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#4"If people can't control their own emotions, then they have to start trying to control other people's behaviour."
Watching the current state of the western world, apparently only very few people have the ability to reflect on themself enough to realize this. Hopefully this is only a loud minorty.
I maybe the wrong person to judge, but imho, we need to resolutely oppose the PC- and cancel culture.
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#5Most folks are in favor of some form of "political correctness", in the form of polite manners.
The threshold should be different in comedy versus, say, the boardroom. It's not surprising Cleese, as a comedian, is focused on that aspect of things, but you can get equally Orwellian with fervent opposition to vaguely defined "PC" stuff too. People who lose their shit over "Happy Holidays", as an example.
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#6From one perspective, the rise of Politically Correct English evinces a kind of Lenin-to-Stalinesque irony. That is, the same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution---namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)---have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform.
This is funny in a dark way, maybe, and it's true that most criticisms of PCE seem to consist in making fun of its trendiness or vapidity.
This reviewer's own opinion is that prescriptive PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.
...
Forget Stalinization or Logic 101-level equivocations, though. There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact---in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself---of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.
Were I, for instance,a political conservative who opposed using taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PC progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates.
(Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve to burke the sorts of painful,unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in a pluralistic democracy lead to actual political change rather than symbolic political change. In other words, PCE acts as a form of censorship, and censorship always serves the status quo.)
"Authority and American Usage", 1999
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#7Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English." https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
Why do you feel this is relevant in the context of PC?
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#8Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English." https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
When the natives make up less than 50% of the population, he might have a point. What does it mean to be English? Nothing more than holding a passport?
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#9Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English." https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
When the natives make up less than 50% of the population, he might have a point. What does it mean to be English? Nothing more than holding a passport?
The English complaining about natives losing power would be a bit rich, wouldn't it?
Re: John Cleese: Political Correctness Can Lead to an Orwellian Nightmare (2016)
#10Perhaps worth noting: This is the same John Cleese that has decried London becoming a multicultural city that is "no longer English." https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/john-cleese-is-cancel...
When the natives make up less than 50% of the population, he might have a point. What does it mean to be English? Nothing more than holding a passport?
Apart from the gross sentiment that could easily be read from this comment, "natives" do not in fact make up less than 50% of London's population.
This whole story is a terrible fit for HN.