When is PC too PC?

[Alatar]

I spent last night competing with other motorcycle gangs to buy and sell guns and drugs, which involved throwdowns between gangs and trying to lose heat from the cops while promoting prospects to full gang members. Sons of Anarchy. Should I feel bad?

[Dave_LF]

I don't know; did you win?

[Alatar]

No, I got into too many fights with rival gangs instead of trading enough arms and drugs.

[Frelga]

My default answer to that question is yes, yes you should.

[yovargas]

I spent last night competing with other motorcycle gangs to buy and sell guns and drugs, which involved throwdowns between gangs and trying to lose heat from the cops while promoting prospects to full gang members. Sons of Anarchy. Should I feel bad?

It depends - how culturally and ethnically diverse was your gang?

[Túrin Turambar]

Terror strikes Emory University:

“I legitimately feared for my life.”
“It was deliberate intimidation. Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone.”
It was a threat to “to put us in concentration camps and kill us”.
“It was an act of violence…it was an active threat.”

In response, students staged a protest and demanded that the University administration take immediate steps to protect them. The President of the University sent out an email to all students re-assuring them that everything was being done to ensure their safety.

What happened? Someone had gone around writing ‘Trump 2016’ in chalk on the sidewalk.

Sooner or later, these students will need to go out into the real world, where people hold controversial opinions and say offensive things, and, for that matter, where there are thousands of people who would actually like to kill them given the opportunity. How will they cope with it if university has done everything possible to shield them from a 'threat' like this?

[yovargas]

I googled this story because with this kind of stuff there's usually another side that makes thing look at least a little less crazy. So far, I have not found that other side....

[Inanna]

Bloody morons.


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[Alatar]

Back on the boardgaming front... This game about shopping in communist era Poland is causing waves in Russia, with the government telling the manufacturers to drop the boardgame or have all their products banned!

Get in a queue with your family in front of a store and experience a rush of genuine emotions! The board game Kolejka (a.k.a. Queue) tells a story of everyday life in Poland at the tail-end of the Communist era. The players' task appears to be simple: They have to send their family members out to various stores on the game board to buy all the items on their shopping list. The problem is, however, that the shelves in the five neighborhood stores are empty. The players line up their pawns in front of the shops without knowing which shop will have a delivery. Tension mounts as the product delivery cards are uncovered and it turns out that there will be enough product cards only for the lucky few standing closest to the door of a store. Since everyone wants to be first, the queue starts to push up against the door. To get ahead, the people in the queue use a range of queuing cards, such as 'Mother carrying small child', 'This is not your place, sir', or 'Under-the-counter goods'. But they have to watch out for 'Closed for stocktaking', 'Delivery error', and for the black pawns the speculators standing in the queue. Only those players who make the best use of the queuing cards in their hand will come home with full shopping bags. On the product cards are photos of sixty original objects from the Communist era. The merchandise includes Relaks shoes, Przemysawka eau de cologne, and Popularna tea, as well as other commodities that were once in scarce supply. The neighborhood also has an outdoor market but the prices there are steep unless, of course, you manage to strike a deal with the market trader. In this realistic game you really have to be savvy to get the goods. Are you brave enough to confront the everyday life of the 1980s?

[yovargas]

That's kinda hilarious.

[Inanna]

It is. And... I think brings greater clarity to Al's previous point.


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[Frelga]

Oh, you think it was fun and games, do you. I'd like to see you cope when it was all for real.

But that's not about PC, it's about an authoritarian government suppressing a negative representation of a period that it wishes to glorify.

[Maria]

Someone showed me this the other day:
The Hurt Feelings Report
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/11 ... MT_WF1.pdf

Variations exist for different agencies.

[Inanna]

That looks like a joke.


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[Maria]

It is.

[Impenitent]

Re queueing in Poland, my husband tells a story of an outing with his grandfather in 1979 during his first visit back to Poland since he left as a six year old. They were simply out for a walk and turned a corner in Lodz to find a very long queue snaking out of a corner store. Marc wanted to continue on their way, but his grandfather stopped and joined the queue on mere speculation. When Marc expressed surprise, his grandfather insisted that there had to be something good just brought in. "And they might have toilet paper."

Posting on phone via Tapatalk

[Túrin Turambar]

Here is an interesting example that’s attracted a lot of media attention in Australia over the last couple of weeks.

The University of New South Wales has released a ‘diversity toolkit’ advising students on the appropriate terminology to use when referring to Australian history and indigenous Australians.

Students are advised not to say that ‘Captain Cook discovered Australia’. This is a no-brainer. Cook was a remarkable navigator and man of science who mapped the Pacific and Southern Oceans to a greater degree than anyone else, but he was not the first person, nor the first European, nor even the first Englishman to ‘find’ Australia.

Students are advised to say that Australia was not ‘settled’, but ‘invaded’, by the British. This has caused a huge row, but personally I don’t have a problem with it. British law did distinguish between the invasion of a country occupied by people who already cultivated the land, and the colonisation by settlement of land not cultivated. But I cannot see how indigenous Australians would have seen the forceful taking of their land as anything other than an invasion.

The ‘invasion’ point has attracted most of the attention, but I actually think that the really notable part comes next. Saying that “Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for 40,000 years” is classified as ‘less-appropriate’ (the number is 40,000 to 45,000 years depending on the margin of error of dating the earliest archaeological finds, but that’s neither here nor there). The guidelines say that:

Forty thousand years puts a limit on the occupation of Australia and thus tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions. Many Indigenous Australians see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate.

Instead, we are advised to say that Aboriginal people have lived in Australia "... since the beginning of the Dreaming/s"*.

"Since the beginning of the Dreaming/s" reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land.

Sorry, but what? The creation beliefs of Aboriginal people trump the fairly well-established migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa? Does this apply to the science faculties of the university as well as the history faculty? Should we deny that humans evolved in Africa at all in order to reflect the creation beliefs of every religion? This is the sort of thing that completely baffles me.

*‘Dreaming/s’ or ‘Dreamtime’ (the latter is less politically-correct according to the guidelines) is a rendition into English of aspects of Aboriginal religious beliefs about the creation of the world and its people, their laws and customs, and the interaction between the spiritual and temporal. These obviously vary significantly from group to group, and I’m not knowledgeable enough about Aboriginal culture to explain exactly what the word/s mean.

[Frelga]

Well... Does a group of people that counts years based on the birth of their deity really have THAT much room for casting stones here? (Or, in case of my own religion, based on time of Creation calculated from their religious texts, so I'm not being snooty either)

I mean, I don't know about Australia, but in the US, I'd expect the 40K years period to upset more people then the reference to Dreamtime, given how many of them believe in the 6K year Earth, to the extent of trying to force that belief onto the school curriculum.

[yovargas]

But.....can you imagine any serious university telling it's students it is inappropriate to say that stuff happened more than 6K years ago? That'd be ridiculous.


The invasion thing though, that part is awesome, IMO.

[Inanna]

I agree with Yov. Both the comments. Bloody ridiculous and bloody awesome.