Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 50 total)
  • Political correctness – what's the point? Is there one? Am i missing something?
  • binners
    Full Member

    And I'm not talking about philosophically, culturally or politically. I mean literally. What purpose does it serve at all

    i'm just designing a questionnaire for a (public sector) client. The entire first page of a two page document addresses in unbelievably pedantic and specific detail the ethnic origin and sexual orientation of the replyee.

    The subject ot the questionnaire: How happy residents are with cleaning services?!!!

    I'm a bit mystified, but what possible bearing does your racial background or sexuality have on how happy you might be with cleaning services? What is the point of all this endless waffle? I despair!

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    i believe your sexuality has a big bearing on how clean your back passage is and how happy you are with the service it recieves
    IGMC
    I actually use an ESF [ european] form at work that gives gender choices as male , female and other.
    I generally agree with all the PC do gooder stuffEDIT: Given scrufs reply below can I just point out my comment is said in jest

    uplink
    Free Member

    It doesn't serve any purpose other than the desire that seems to be there to collect as much data as possible

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    scruff
    Free Member

    Yup, get the same with my Public Sector employment. Its an industry wots made itself up, mainly by the Gays.

    BigButSlimmerBloke
    Free Member

    what possible bearing does your racial background or sexuality have on how happy you might be with cleaning services?

    Q1 – Do you read the Daily Mail?
    Q2 – Is your cleaner a darkie?
    Q3 (the tricky one
    – is this a) a good thing, they know their place
    b) a bad thing, you don't want one of those thieving illegal immgrant benefit scroungers yes you know they'e working but that's not the point is it? in your house

    [OEGGVjWF]
    Free Member

    I never ever do this but…lol at scruff.

    TandemJeremy
    Free Member

    Firstly what you are describing is not political correctness – 'cos PC is a linguistic philosophy about removing pejorative words for everday usage.

    Ethnic monitoring can be useful to see if some peoples get a raw deal. However councils do get rather tied up on it and are so afraid of upsetting any random nutter that they overplay the hand completely

    buzz-lightyear
    Free Member

    PC: An amorphous set of rules to help tactless people avoid offending sensitive people

    They collect all this personal data to produce metrics about users of services – demographics or sommat. Helps them target their efforts at the right user niches. I think it's a bit cheeky and they they shouldn't have the right to do demand this data. But they know that if it were voluntary, no-one would bother providing it.

    IMO

    molgrips
    Free Member

    The point is not to offend anyone. As a middle-class white presumably English male, you're not on the receiving end of indirect discrimination, pigeon-holing or stereotyping, so it's not surprising that you don't understand the need for political correctness.

    Having said that, it can be taken too far, which is another issue entirely. But what's known as political correctness can be important – or rather, the process of discovery that society had to go through to arrive at that point.

    brakes
    Free Member

    the diversity department need something to write/ draw graphs about

    buzz-lightyear
    Free Member

    On a philosophical note: do people imagine one can eliminate racism, fattism, heightism, ageism etc, by banning or removing words from the vocabulary?

    a la newspeak and thoughtcrime

    nedrapier
    Full Member

    Old Mother Hubbard
    Went to the cupboard
    To get her poor doggie a bone,
    When she got there the cupboard was bare because she had spent 13 years creating public sector non-jobs for people with worthless degrees. So the poor little doggie shat in her bed.

    There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
    He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
    He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse
    And they all lived together in a little crooked house that he bought with a secret loan from a millionaire chum that he didn't declare to his mortgage lender because he's a sleazy prick who thinks he's better than you.

    Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he; He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl but he only got his bowl because some bullshit statistics showed that if he smoked his pipe then at least two of his fiddlers would die of cancer.

    As I was going to St. Ives
    I met a man with seven wives,
    They were all sitting on the platform at Bristol Temple Meads and had been there for about three hours because the rail system in this country is a pile of **** shit.

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
    Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the King's horses, And all the King's men
    Did not have enough helicopters to put Humpty together again and anyway it's a waste of time because it is a vicious tribal dispute that will continue long after we have been forced to withdraw.

    This little piggy went to market,
    This little piggy stayed at home,
    This little piggy had roast beef,
    And this little piggy flipped his London flat and his constituency home eight times and used your money to pay for a new conservatory, a massive telly and a vibrating chair and then tried to stop you finding out about it,
    All the way home.

    Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
    Half a pound of treacle.
    By the way, the chief medical officer says that amount of treacle is really bad for you and that excessive treacle eating is costing this country £14bn a day in lost productivity and exploding children.

    Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?
    Yes sir, yes sir, but it will cost you £1.20 a bag because of the government's latest hike in wool duty and the fact that sterling is now worth less than the Albanian Lek.

    Doctor Foster
    Went to Gloucester
    In a shower of rain.
    He would have stepped in a puddle
    Right up to his middle
    But luckily he was a GP so was driving one of his Range Rovers to the golf course while his receptionist referred all his patients to the local chemist.

    One, two buckle my shoe
    Three, four, knock at the door
    Five, seven is it? I'm sorry, I went to a state school that felt that arithmetic was not as important as teaching me about lesbians and socialism.

    Rock a bye baby on the tree top,
    When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
    When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
    But the police and fire brigade won't be able to do anything in case they breach the latest health and safety directive from the Department of **** Arseholes.

    the daily mash: A child's guide to modern britain

    CaptJon
    Free Member

    Why are you putting those questions on the first two pages? Surely they belong at the end.

    br
    Free Member

    I always tick 'other' on meaningless stuff – and for 'origin' and the like – write 'Yorkshireman'.

    uplink
    Free Member

    They should do those sort of questionnaires with scratch panels
    you simply scratch off the panel adjacent to the relevant answer

    If you get 3 £ symbols, you're eligible for a grant to set up a support group

    buzz-lightyear
    Free Member

    "If you get 3 £ symbols, you're eligible for a grant to set up a support group"

    Very imaginative 😀

    nicko74
    Full Member

    I used to love the ethnicity questions, since for quite a while the approved format was
    "Are you:
    white
    Irish
    Black
    Asian
    Other"

    binners
    Full Member

    Its escalated since then:

    Asian or Asian British – Bangladeshi
    Asian or Asian British – Indian
    Asian or Asian British – Pakistani
    Asian or Asian British – Any other Asian Background
    Black or Black British – African
    Black or Black British – Caribbean
    Black or Black British – Any other Black Background
    Chinese
    Mixed – White & Asian
    Mixed – White & Black African
    Mixed – White & Black Caribbean
    Mixed – Any other Mixed Background
    White – British
    White – Irish
    White – Any other White Background
    No other Ethnic Group
    Not Stated

    Zulu-Eleven
    Free Member

    It all goes on your files 😯

    midlifecrashes
    Full Member

    It's basically to save a lot of time in a civil war. In Bosnia and Kosovo the visiting mercenaries were able to go to the town hall and pick up lists of people to butcher and houses to burn without all the time consuming torture and guesswork from peoples accents.

    brooess
    Free Member

    IME – living with a girl who worked in the House of Lords and was very politically correct, she felt she was doing 'right' by sticking up for minorities who couldn't stick up for themselves. In principle it made sense, but in practice she seemed to be assuming that other people a) needed and b) wanted her to stick up for them. Which is actually quite patronising. 'You're black, society discriminates against you, therefore I will stick my nose in and help you, whether you want it or not' She was white middle class.
    She was also a control freak and there were certain things you weren't allowed to believe if she deemed it incorrect. Like when I suggested a girl should go to Brownies if she couldn't go to the local Cub Scout group….!

    brakes
    Free Member

    Brownies

    I find that offensive

    Trimix
    Free Member

    At college we were banned from using certain words that were deemed to be unPC. So we used different words instead, they then banned those, so we used different ones again. This went on for a while until it became clear that you cant ban thoughts or stereotypes, you can only educate and hope that the education works.

    Not everyone was capable of being educated though, so it never worked properly.

    I suggested selective breeding for that, but everyone shouted at me.

    DrRSwank
    Free Member

    As a middle-class white presumably English male, you're not on the receiving end of indirect discrimination, pigeon-holing or stereotyping

    This is exactly the point of PC BS. It's to make people as described above into another pigeon-holed group.

    We can't take the rip out of anyone who does not fit the above description – so, by default, we become the downtrodden.

    A prime example of it all gone wrong was one of my all time favourite comedy shows – Goodness Gracious Me. **** brilliant. If it had been done by a bunch of white fellas – there'd have been uproar.

    None of it makes any sense. It's all about the nanny state laying Great Britain on her back and allowing anyone who wants to to screw us over.

    LOL.

    uplink
    Free Member
    ernie_lynch
    Free Member

    Britain could do the same as France where ethnic monitoring is illegal – but I'm not sure whether French society is any better off for it.

    Ethnic monitoring is actually quite useful, and the French government finds itself disadvantaged as they often don't know the facts behind the problems. As a consequence, the present French Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, wants the ban on ethnic monitoring lifted.

    .

    This is exactly the point of PC BS……….None of it makes any sense. It's all about the nanny state laying Great Britain on her back and allowing anyone who wants to to screw us over.

    The origins of "political correctness", if indeed is what this is, is the United States. I'm not sure whether they have a "nanny state" or are happy lay on their backs and let everyone screw them.

    Dickyboy
    Full Member

    At the top of a local viewpoint the powers that be installed a brass plate on a wooden plinth pointing out & naming all the noteworthy things to see across the horizon & also gave a braille translation…..

    DrRSwank
    Free Member

    The US defo have a nanny state…… I'm sat here in San Francisco at the moment watching the helpless locals wander around waiting for the government to tell them when to breathe……

    DrRSwank
    Free Member

    At the top of a local viewpoint the powers that be installed a brass plate on a wooden plinth pointing out & naming all the noteworthy things to see across the horizon & also gave a braille translation…..

    LOL – the site I'm working on today has braille on the car park barrier so that any blind people driving onto site can contact security and gain access toe the visitors parking….

    ernie_lynch
    Free Member

    The US defo have a nanny state…..

    Well you learn something new every day.

    Although "Nanny" didn't seem much bothered when the citizens of New Orleans were abandoned and left to die in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

    And "Nanny" also doesn't seem much bothered that millions of Americans have no health care cover.

    Maybe "Nanny" is only really concerned about wealthy white Americans ? 💡

    CaptJon
    Free Member

    If you're required to tick your ethnic group a number of times for the same organisation, change it every time you fill out the form.

    DA_DOOD–lulz
    Free Member

    As a middle-class white presumably English male, you're not on the receiving end of indirect discrimination, pigeon-holing or stereotyping

    Except when you're being labelled a little Englander ? Or if you're all of the above but working class then you're more than likely a chav/racist/football hooligan (perm any 2 or more).

    Not to worry, I think the yoghurt weavers have decreed that it's ok.

    BigDummy
    Free Member

    pointing out & naming all the noteworthy things to see across the horizon & also gave a braille translation

    I'm not blind, but as I understand the world, those things exist whether or not they can be seen. They are still there (I think) if one goes up t the viewpoint at night or in the fog. Unless you seriously doubt the persistence of physical objects through time when you cannot see them, it is hard to see the problem with a blind person standing at the viewpoint and saying to himself "in that direction is Cadair Idris". 🙂

    Dickyboy
    Full Member

    1. Number of blind people making it to said view point without sighted companion – few & far between.
    2. Length of time brass plate lasted before being nicked & sold for scrap – bout 6 months.
    3. Result – compared with a much cheaper version even less people either sighted or blind get to find out what the view beholds :cry:.

    BigDummy
    Free Member

    I think that's to do with thieving gits stealing brass plates rather than political correctness as such. Doesn't happen in Surrey. 😉

    buzz-lightyear
    Free Member

    "I suggested selective breeding for that, but everyone shouted at me. "

    PMSL!

    Dickyboy
    Full Member

    Point was they only made it in brass so they could put the braille impression on it & then stuck it on the top of a hill where it was highly likely to get nicked.
    Hmmm Surrey V Buckinghamshire in poshness battle – your votes please 😕

    epicyclo
    Full Member

    The reality is that if poverty was removed as a factor the whole process becomes meaningless. Therefore fix poverty (but don't ask me how 🙂 )

    kennyp
    Free Member

    Most PC stuff seems to be about giving people who are desperate to be offended by something, something they can pretend to be offended about………..if you see what I mean.

    scraprider
    Free Member

    baa baa black sheep , and black board allways have been and always will be, agree with kennyp

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