HAH! You know what I mean though….even if you have the best of intentions you can still be conditioned to have some prejudice thoughts. The trick is to recognize those feelings and deal with them using rationality and logic.

So that would make Klaus Armstrong-Braun a closet racist then? I wonder if he likes having a good laugh about Polacks?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6155603/Council-canteen-changes-name-of-offensive-Spotted-Dick.html

If you actually read that story Klaus Armstrong-Braun is just mistaken. It has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness – classic example of the kind of story that will get recounted as ‘the PC brigade have even banned Spotted Dick now, you couldn’t make it up’ etc.

HAH! You know what I mean though….even if you have the best of intentions you can still be conditioned to have some prejudice thoughts. The trick is to recognize those feelings and deal with them using rationality and logic.

Agreed. I grew up in a place where there was almost no ethnic minorities at all, and we had a special assembly when a black kid started at school to warn us all not to be racist. I don’t think I can have entirely escaped being influenced by that, despite being brought up by lefty PC do-gooders. 🙂

So that would make Klaus Armstrong-Braun a closet racist then? I wonder if he likes having a good laugh about Polacks?

Of course not.
But, the renaming of Spotted Dick has no relevance to racism, has it?
Unless Mr Blobbly has contacted the relevant authorities.

Yet again, I struggle to see any relevance to the subject under discussion in your post.

bwaarp, excellent post, thanks for that. 😀

I know exactly what you mean – we are conditioned to expect certain attitudes and behaviours from people dependant on their appearance.

I used to go out with a girl who had left Uganda with her family during Idi Amin’s purge of Asian people in the 70’s.
Her family were Muslim, but very liberal. Certainly far more liberal than the Catholic side of my family 😀

The only predjudice we received as a couple was from my family and Asian lads in the street who didn’t believe that she should be associating with a British bloke.
How random is that?!?

P.S. Anyhooo these are just some of my random thoughts that I’m MULLING on about how I FEEL…. that I’ve typed out loud for you guys. Please don’t take offence to them, intellectually I don’t like treating humans differently so please don’t take anything I say out of context.

No worries.
Thanks for being honest.
I really like this place sometimes. 😀

Mildly irritating? Go ballistic – they deserve it.

Oh, & …..”thank god…. highly educated …..so she saw through her parents crap”
believe me, education has nothing to do with it. 😀

Yet again, I struggle to see any relevance to the subject under discussion in your post.

So not only have you forgotten that you said “The only people who really complain about ‘poltical correctness gone mad’ ARE the kind of people who miss the 70’s…” you didn’t even spot where I’d quoted you?

grum – it doesn’t really matter that Mr Armstrong-Braun is mistaken, Rusty was accusing anybody using that term of being a closet racist.

So not only have you forgotten that you said “The only people who really complain about ‘poltical correctness gone mad’ ARE the kind of people who miss the 70’s…” you didn’t even spot where I’d quoted you?

Yes, I did spot it. 😀

I wasn’t aware that the over reaction to the use of the word ‘dick’ could possbly be seen as ‘political correctness’.

I now appreciate my terrible error.

I can assure you that I’ve given myself a damn good talking to and I’ll try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I offer my most humble apologies.

Please, copy and paste this into your folder of internet victories.

Let me know if you’d like me to post a nice picture of myself waving a white flag.
You could get it laminated.

Let me know if you’d like me to post a nice picture of myself waving a white flag.
You could get it laminated.

i think the norm is for you to send your keyboard to him.

Let me know if you’d like me to post a nice picture of myself waving a white flag.
You could get it laminated.

Rusty, nice way to take the highroad.

So not only have you forgotten that you said “The only people who really complain about ‘poltical correctness gone mad’ ARE the kind of people who miss the 70’s…” you didn’t even spot where I’d quoted you?

What point were you trying to make then? That Rusty Spanners logic must mean that the spotted dick people are racists because they complained about “political correctness gone mad”. I think this is a completely specious point to make, even totally irrelevant in the context of what we are talking about.

Specious why? Rusty was suggesting that anybody using the term must be a closet racist – I mean there’s not a lot of room for doubt with the word “only” – so why doesn’t that apply to Mr Armstrong-Braun? I mean you’d think it applied even more to somebody using the term incorrectly…

Maybe if he didn’t mean that anybody using that term was a closet racist he should have phrased himself differently. Or even backed down graciously and admitted that he just hadn’t expressed himself very well when challenged. I don’t think I’ve seen him actually take back those words…

Blah blah blah semantics blah blah blah read between the lines blah blah blah context.

He meant anyone using the term in the context of a race discussion.

P.S. Although you did post a telegraph article so I’d almost be tempted to take it as evidence for a literal interpretation of Rusty’s point.

P.S. Although you did post a telegraph article so I’d almost be tempted to take it as evidence for a literal interpretation of Rusty’s point.

Is that a print media ad-hom? 😆

It’s not Ad Hom when the paper is barely better than the Daily Fail. If you’d posted the Times then you would have shot yourself in the foot with a .22lr instead of a 40mm bofors canon.

Yep, it would seem it is. Presumably your theory is that no left leaning newspaper would have published a similar story?

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/2009/09/08/pud-you-believe-it-55578-24630230/

Deleted:

Apologies.

It would appear that I nearly took this idiot seriously.

……..North Wales. That bastion of liberal progressive anti-racism lol

Anyhow, the proper old school left wing were often racist.

You still shot yourself in the foot with your post btw.

Define your objections to ‘political correctness’.

I don’t have any if by that you mean what you express in your last sentence – that pretty much goes without saying for anybody who isn’t a bigot. From what I could work out though, it was you who was judging people based on them saying something pretty inoffensive.

Are you really claiming that there are no cases where political correctness goes a bit over the top? How about this one from a paper which might meet your approval
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/may/15/race.world

Did that paper you linked to trot out the often Daily Mail touted “It’s PC gone mad”. You do tend to find that sentence being used a lot in Daily Fail articles about Christians not getting why they aren’t allowed to discriminate against homosexuals or something to do with Muslims and pork etc

Why don’t you try following the link and see? Surely it’s preferable to have read what you are commenting on?

Nope, doesn’t have the words “Political correctness gone mad” in it. Like the term “‘elf in safety” it’s mostly a term reserved for use by people like Melanie Phillips and Richard Littlejohn…people who are quite possibly suffering from Anosognosia.

I’m not about to disagree with your opinion of those two, nor of the newspaper (sic) they write for.

There is some middle ground though, there are some quite clearly ridiculous examples of political correctness. I seem to remember the Christmas lights in Oxford being de-Christmastized much to the behest of the local Sikh, Muslim and Jewish population.

That’s not to say political correctness is bad though. On the whole it’s made some wonderful improvements to society.

Again it’s all about the context and language used, I tend to turn off when reading anything with such sensationalist language in the context of ethnic or racial issues. They’re usually designed to inflame tensions.

So not only have you forgotten that you said “The only people who really complain about ‘poltical correctness gone mad’ ARE the kind of people who miss the 70’s…” you didn’t even spot where I’d quoted you?

grum – it doesn’t really matter that Mr Armstrong-Braun is mistaken, Rusty was accusing anybody using that term of being a closet racist.

It’s funny, because, I knew what RS meant. I’m sure most everybody else did too.

Where i work, amongst other restrictions, we can no longer refer to ‘political correctness gone mad’. The appropriate phrase is ‘political correctness living with mental health problems’.