Sunday, August 15, 2004 at 1:51 AM
Edited Sunday, August 15, 2004 at 2:05 AM What did Adam say on Kimmel that was so bad? Was it really worthy of booing? You tell me, Spree. You're the one who said in your previous post: I love that he's anti-PC to the point that Kimmel's audience, one that gleefully cheers Kimmel's bashing of most pop-culture stuff, booed Adam. Why exactly do you love it, Spree? And do you not agree that a great deal of unmitigated racism finds cover under the aegis of "anti-PC" and do you not find that fact at least a little disturbing? Would it not cause you to wonder about the devolution of the term into an attack on sanity itself? Doesn't the ease with which the term lends itself to such uses bother you? That's another of those dumb "slippery slope" arguments that Adam and Drew revile. I'm not sure why the fact that Adam and Drew revile them is particularly relevant here. A slippery-slope argument, by the way, would claim that if we begin by criticizing some "politically correct" notions, then we'll soon end up terrorizing blacks and denying the Holocaust. But that, of course, is not what I said. I said that when evil groups such as Holocaust deniers and Ku Kluxers feel free to use the term "PC" to defend the indefensible, knowing that the built-in associations of the word can be readily adapted to promote a racist agenda, perhaps the word has become too contaminated now to use for its original purpose: ridiculing the exaggerated forms of etiquette demanded by the hypersensitive. Is there anybody here who thinks blacks and Jews--or, for that matter, all sane, decent people--are being ridiculously hypersensitive when they object to our home-grown fascists' hostile rhetoric and Big Lies? when the number of people bashing PC gets so large that even those loons are bashing it, you know your idealistic thought-constraint theory has got some problems. Depends on what you mean by "has got some problems." If you mean that PC must be wrong because so many people are attacking it, then you have committed the fallacy of argumentum ad populum. In any case, as I said above, it's because the loonies have adopted it so readily as a term of contempt and abuse, because it is so easily perverted to suit their agenda, that we might consider whether the term is past its pull-date. This doesn't mean, however, that truly ridiculous positions shouldn't be ridiculed. Hell, I ridicule the ridiculous all the time. It's the (probably) irreversible devolution and perversion of the term I'm concerned about. —Coleman | 
