Why Stephen Fry is arguing against political correctness (2018)

If they're arguing against a general statement (by Fry) with a specific, anecdotal example, it's fair to question whether that specific example is generalizable.

It says why (because he feels it's counter-productive to achieving the goal of a more inclusive society), but I'd highly recommend just going and watching the full debate yourself.

I remember it, and it was basically a warning of all the things that have happened in America. Thankfully we're always a little behind America here in Europe.

Social media must take much of the blame (and it's one of the reasons I don't use it).

Nevertheless, I believe there are deeper cultural reasons at its root. For many reasons, people today have less resilience than they did half century ago and even less than the prewar generation.

These reasons are many and diverse and it's hardly possible to detail them here in any comprehensive way but some are very obvious.

First, there's not the same emphasis on teaching manners and self-restraint as there was, say, five decades ago. Nor is the same level of emphasis placed on listening to others and making an effort to understand and accommodate their views as there once was.

Similarly, there's a righteous sense of self-entitlement that once wasn't there to the extent it is today.

And then there's the overprotection bubble that kids have been brought up in over the past forty or so years - for instance, kids being driven to school, and or not being allowed to discover the 'bad' world for themselves. This breeds timidity and an over sensitivity to worldly knocks and thus people now overreact at the slightest provocation - even when they experience the mildest indignation or upset.

Couple these issues with the ever-increasing number of groups of people who consider themselves disadvantaged in comparison to others and we've a recipe for trouble. Having to make 'allowances' and or special rules for so many subgroups of people - whether or not these groups have legitimate or reasonable claims - is wearying society. (Here, I'm not suggesting these groups don't have a legitimate cause, rather it's the effort that society has to expend in adjusting to and accommodating them that's a major source of problem.)

Then there's other factors such as inequality which is growing so fast that people haven't time to adjust. Same goes for racism, mix too many different ethnic groups too quickly and or that the population growth rises too quickly so people don't have time to adjust and the discontent manifests as resentment towards others.

Put all this together with a media that squawks loudly at the slightest provocation and you've conflict for sure.

It seems from the evidence that Fry does have a valid point, how relevant it is remains to be seen.

Incidentally, decades ago when I was growing up and copped abuse from others, I was taught to consider the old ditty 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me'.

From my experience, there's a modicum of truth in that saying.

"the sensation they are experiencing is not being cancelled but merely going out of fashion" - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/14/terry-...

I admire your attempt to be honest, but being honest in return, I think this "we just care about facts" thing is just one of many tactics to move people from the first group to the second group, while they themselves don't realise what's happened.

I'm sure there's something you believe, and that is the accepted 'politically correct' consensus, that someone else is arguing the 'but it's just facts' about.

Possibilities are, for example, the people who say they're not 'racists', they don't hate anyone, they call themselves 'race realists' because they just simply believe that a) multiple human races exist, b) some are inferior to others.

To them it's just objective facts. They're not happy about it, but can't stand by and pretend it's not true. They've done their own research and decided that the politically correct poindexters might want to pretend that there's no scientific basis for race, and it's a social construct, but they they can't fool them. So they'll happily talk at great length about this pseudoscientific belief they have, all the time railing against the consensus. And they'll sadly have to side with the racists, not because they're racist, but just because well, some races are inferior, so you have to treat them in a way that might appear 'racist' if you thought they were equally human.

Here's another example, guess what their big focus is:

> ...there will be an accounting for this fraud. People are very very angry, and while the skeptics whose darkest doubts have been vindicated don't pull the levers of organized science (the frauds do that), there are some financial and political resources available to the skeptics who have been demanding integrity in science, and they understand now that this is war.

> A cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media concubines have conspired to lie about global warming. The reasons are obvious: power and money. The illusion of planetary crisis serves as vehicle for 'emergency measures to save the planet', which are merely measures to empower and enrich an elite few. Al Gore, carbon-credit entrepreneur who puts his 'mouth where his money is', had it figured out a decade ago. The fraudulent scientists who suckle off the 7 billion dollars spent this year alone on the global warming scam (more than the U.S. spends annually on cancer research and AIDS research) are merely using science, rather than hedge funds, to enrich themselves...

> I'm not sure that the scientific community can or will respond to this debacle in a courageous or ethical way. The [redacted] debate clearly demonstrates that venality and shameless self-interest, as well as a toxic leftist-atheist ideology, runs very deep in the scientific community.

> 'Consensus science' isn't science. 'Consensus' is an attribute of politics, not science. Science inherently involves utter transparency and rigorous and respectful open debate. Real scientists welcome scrutiny and critique; the hallmark of a good scientist is that a good scientist reserves his most rigorous scrutiny for his own work. Censorship, invocation of 'consensus science' to elide scrutiny, real or threatened use of judicial coercion, and professional destruction of skeptics- which are characteristic tactics of global warming alarmists and of Darwinists- are tactics used to circumvent the scientific process.

I redacted it above, at first mention but you probably gathered from the last line that this guy doesn't believe in evolution.

He's not anti-science though, not in his mind, he's only against those Darwinist frauds.