Just What is (and what is wrong with) Political Correctness?

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What he is doing is affirming the right of students to an education free from ALL political indoctrination in the classroom, both right and left, which right now is heavily, intimidatingly and unethically practiced by many supposed educators and is far and away predominantly leftist.

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And your experience of the school and University system in the last couple of decades has consisted of what, exactly?

A few years ago, David Howard, a white aid to the black mayor of D.C., used the word "niggardly" when talking about a budget. He was then forced to resign (he got his job back later) because of pressure from black colleagues who felt offended.Politcal correctness is good at its heart (to not needlessly offend people), but sometimes it just goes overboard, as I see from previous posts has happened in England.

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It is a classic example of designing a survey to get the results you want.

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1) It's not a survey.2) The whole point of the study is that the widely-accepted premise that "man" is a gender neutral term is false.Can you please explain how the experimental protocol was so biased that it invalidated the results?

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Pick one:

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My ancestors left Germany a hundred years ago.
I'm Jewish.
A and B.
I'm a closet Nazi.

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LOL!

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Politcal correctness is good at its heart (to not needlessly offend people), but sometimes it just goes overboard,

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Yes, but PC was not the issue here.Poor vocabulary was.

Well, the whole concept that the terms used were comparable. Given the terms used I would have bet on the results. It was simply self fulfilling. But hey, even professors need to eat. And the sheer joy folk like me get from laughing at the results may even be worth the costs.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I concede that you directly made no such moral equivalence, but, in my favor, I did use the word "implication." It was implied by many things, but especially by your description of the "hate war" and your supposed abuse and oppression at the hands of the left and your unwillingness to acknowledge that the violence of the black nationalist movement was in direct response to the centuries of terror and oppression experienced by blacks in America that was still being expresed at the time the BPP formed. And yes, there was oppression and bigotry in SF and Oakland, especially coming from the police. I'm sure you don't believe that, but it is true.

Thank you for that concession but I don't get the idea you think you were wrong. I don't think any of that was implied. It's just something you projected on me."Abuse and oppression at the hands of the left?" I was simply trying to describe how it felt to be in that atmosphere, to characterize the effect of that mentality. Very little of a personal nature happened to me. I was trying to describe the scene, you know, like a reporter in the middle of a war. Except it was personal just to me in the privacy of my own mind because I had no intellectual perspective on any of it. It was like a nightmare I'd blundered into. And in case that can be misconstrued as some kind of total characterization of my life in those years, it's not, they were overall fun years of my life. I'm just trying to focus on the political scene. I absolutely totally vehemently disagree with you, that's all. My opinion is that there was no meaningful connection between the two, zip, nada, and I'd appreciate it if you would stop characterizing my legitimate opinion as an "unwillingness to acknowledge" what is merely your own opinion. I'm sure there were excessive police actions but that's all anybody heard about. The fact that they were dealing with criminal activity instead of a legitimate cause was never heard in the aggressive din of the propaganda. And the Berkeley police were KNOWN for their liberal evenhandedness and they too were trashed as pigs.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Well, the whole concept that the terms used were comparable. Given the terms used I would have bet on the results.

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So you agree with the conclusions of the study; that "man" is not a neutral term.But tell me, how would you have designed the study?What chapter titles would you have chosen that would have made them "comparable"?Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

No, not at all. I believe that when it is used as it was in the study it was assigned a conditional value. IMHO it was a silly study.They used the term Man in an artificial way that provided the results they wanted. That's great for political opinion polls, but lousy science.Like I said, the sheer joy though of laughing about it is probably worth any costs.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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They used the term Man in an artificial way that provided the results they wanted.

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No, they used it in exactly the way it was used in textbooks and in the common understanding that "man" was a gender neutral term.There are examples of such usage if you would like me to find some.

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I believe that when it is used as it was in the study it was assigned a conditional value.

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What do you mean by "conditional value"?If anything, it should have biased the results towards the perception of the term "man" to be more neutral because they made sure that the subjects knew that the chapter titles were for a sociology book not a book on men only.So what chapter titles would you have chosen?Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

I don't know what I would have chosen Schraf. Not at all sure any of the examples like Industrial Man woud be appropriate. There Man is a separate word, standing alone.But hey, if the study makes you happy because you got the results you wanted, it makes me happy cause I can laugh at it, looks like a win-win to me.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Not at all sure any of the examples like Industrial Man woud be appropriate. There Man is a separate word, standing alone.

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You aren't criticizing the study when you say the above. You are just saying what the study was examining; using the word "man", alone, as a gender neutral term. This usage was a standard usage of the term at the time the study was done. (Ashley Montegue's Antropology book, Man: His First Two Million Years is one example)But hey, if it makes you happy to smugly handwave away perfectly sound science without deigning to explain yourself when asked, nor bothering to address most of what I say, then go to it.

Quite so.Perhaps the best way to sum it up is that the meaning of 'guys' is context sensitive.

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Oops! Wrong Planet

I think the study is completely unable to differentiate between a word being gender-neutral or not and the actual concept of the word having a strong gender-based stereotype. Industrial Man--that's a male, all the way. I don't care HOW you present the concept of Industrial Man, whether it be lexically, pictorially, auditorily--you're going to get a bias because the actual concept has a gender-specific stereotype.The study TRIED to deal with that issue by using related words (like Industry), but these words evoke absolutely no image of people at all; they are more abstract. They're not good choices to counteract the issue described above.Better choices of words would contain the word "man" but refer to a concept that is gender-neutral. If there were such a word referring to the more gender-neutral "teacher", that would be great. I can't think of any good examples off the top of my head. But it's pretty clear to me that the study is not well-designed.