{"id":30233,"date":"2016-10-06T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30233"},"modified":"2016-09-27T10:04:52","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T14:04:52","slug":"qotd-political-correctness-to-the-point-of-derangement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/10\/06\/qotd-political-correctness-to-the-point-of-derangement\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Political Correctness to the point of derangement"},"content":{"rendered":"

My favourite example of political correctness involves the American Navy. In October 2001, shortly after America invaded Afghanistan, some of its Navy personnel were preparing missiles that were going to be fired at al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. One of the Navy men decided to write some words on the side of his missile to express his anger about 9\/11. So in reference to the 9\/11 hijackings, he wrote the following message on his missile: \u2018Hijack this, you faggots.\u2019<\/p>\n

Now, little did he know that even though the American military had rather a lot on its mind at that moment, his message would still cause a massive controversy. When they heard about what had happened, the upper echelons of the Navy were outraged. They expressed \u2018official disapproval\u2019 of the homophobic message. They issued a warning that Navy personnel should \u2018more closely edit their spontaneous acts of penmanship\u2019. Some unofficial guidelines were issued, covering what could and could not be written on post-9\/11 missiles. So it was okay to write things like \u2018I love New York\u2019 but not okay to use words like faggot.<\/p>\n

That is my favourite example of political correctness for two reasons. Firstly because it sums up how psychotically obsessed with language politically correct people are. Because what these Navy people were effectively saying is that it is okay to kill people, but not to offend them. It is okay to drop missiles on someone\u2019s town or someone\u2019s cave, just so long as those missiles don\u2019t have anything \u2018inappropriate\u2019 written on them. Heaven forbid that the last thing a member of the Taliban should see before having his head blown off is a word reminding him of the existence of homosexuality.<\/p>\n

This really captures the warping of morality that is inherent in political correctness, where one becomes so myopically focused on speech codes, on linguistic representation, that everything else, even matters of life and death, can become subordinate to that.<\/p>\n

Brendan O’Neill, “The new war against PC \u2013 it\u2019s too late and it\u2019s picked the wrong target”, Spiked<\/em><\/a>, 2015-01-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My favourite example of political correctness involves the American Navy. In October 2001, shortly after America invaded Afghanistan, some of its Navy personnel were preparing missiles that were going to be fired at al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds. One of the Navy men decided to write some words on the side of his missile to express […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41,13],"tags":[186,424,30,238,351],"class_list":["post-30233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-morality","tag-navy","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7RD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30233"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30234,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30233\/revisions\/30234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}