在我看来，对某些政治正确的肤浅或不恰当的时尚理解的必然性，最终源于不理性/缺乏教育的公众。

"Political correctness" is one more popular neologism of the sort that is characteristic of psychotic thinking, i.e. words that are made up on the spot in response to irrational obsessiveness and compulsion. As with all such it's difficult to pin down an exact meaning (what politics? and why correct?). True for media-driven labeling in general (saves space for advertisement). Such terms indeed succeed well in reinforcing delusions. E.g., "geek". Were Aristotle and Plato ancient "Geeks"??

作为一个非裔美国人(不管那是什么意思)，我已经厌倦了每次有人用“黑”字的时候就被要求愤怒。我个人喜欢那些敢于坚持个人信念的人，不管他们可能多么误入歧途。就像我们社区常说的那样，我们不担心床单上的那些，我们担心其他的。我很高兴看到一些高度敏感的东西，特别是在“发育障碍”领域，但我个人希望能够说，有些东西看起来“基佬”，而不会引起政治警察的愤怒。坦白地说，虽然我是一个女人，而且在这一点上我是一个女人，但所有的粉色衣服和配饰在我丰富的深色皮肤上看起来只是“同性恋”。该死，我说出来了。

Ok, Cathy, you've lost me. You sound highly irrational here. The argument against using certain words or phrases is quite utilitarian. For every individual free to take certain actions there are tens, hundreds, and even thousands more unhappy with said action. You might appreciate someone using certain words or phrases, but what if those phrases became personal? What if they sparked riots? What if those comments harmed another individual? At some point here, I think individuals rights must give way to the legitimate moral claims.
Isn't it *moral* to preserve community? Isn't it *moral* to respect the dignity of others? Isn't it *moral* to view others as you would value being seen? I'm an African-American, too, and I think it my duty--no, my obligation--to live up to a decorum of respect that falls in line with the ancient traditions of Aristotle who believed the only way to be virtuous was to surround yourself around virtuous people. In my view, I can only do that, if I help lead my community to a life of virtuous and moral behavior.
另外，我们为什么要和那个写了《更伟大的一代》的人谈话呢?难道他们对这种“开放”(如果曾经有过一个奥威尔式的词的话)不负有部分责任吗?这是另一个话题了。

Hmmmm,
Maybe Corey is right. And if so, naming a teddy bear Mohammad should be punnished by 40 lashes. The problem with trying to stay within the boundries of morality is those said moralities are transitory and region specific. Instead of the dogmatic belief in the power of individual words and what they mean to a few, perhaps adherance to fundamental principlals of conduct would better serve the ends of those trying to bring about the better interaction between people. In short, be polite, try not to show hatred but be free to express ideas openly. "everything we really need to know we should have learned in kindergaten." Robert Fulgem

1
The 1960s arena, where one could practice righteousness of an adolescent sort and save America from its absentminded sinfulness, was begotten by a generation which had survived the ?29 Panic and fought a desperate war on two fronts with various totalitarian regimes. Of course, compared to saving Western civilization(hard to believe that those rubes supposed it worth saving)from the dark side of the force, the breaking of custom?s cake by that generation?s children must be more profound, yes? Well.
2
除了为我们的“更关怀、进步、平等的社会”(一个十年接一个十年成为“后这个或那个”和“去这个或那个”的时代)而庆幸，在那里人们不能说“不”，只能对“不”说“不”，我们被视为这个职位的平庸。在遗传学家把我们引导到对优雅的确信之前，我们留下了5000年的人类历史来挖掘我们的假设，从这种愚蠢、通奸和自私自利的丰富性中，我们可以推定一个后验和先验，即那些?你认为他们已经成为历史了吗?S的解决方案总是被我们(显然)对补救的不可减少和野蛮的蔑视所解决。
3
“政治正确”是当下的正统观念，是社会中各种认知/情感现实的主宰。然而，这个术语的意思是不冒犯那些观点变得神圣(并通过外推到实践或人与一个人的实质相投?每个时代都有其存在的论纲，通过谩骂和/或碰杯、拷问或铁杉来强制的确定性。自然，正统学说的高潮只会出现在一个时辰的临终的流露，是意志的流露，得到了它的女仆——智慧的认可。今天，有些人认为，如果莎士比亚的作品没有理由像莎士比亚那样写作，也就是说，如果人们不能按时完成更多的工作，那么明天可能会很乏味，这些人的粗暴本性让人嗤之以鼻。美国人将他们的“贪婪之梦”变为肉肉，或者进行大屠杀、圣战，或者在泥泞中为“善”而摔跤。如果人们不得不在一个黎明醒来，忍受一个除了最终令人厌烦的完美之外，找不到任何缺点的时代。但是，正如陀思妥耶夫斯基所言，人们有时甚至会反抗伊甸园的对称，而这种在“理智与情感”的逻辑上做出的冒犯威严的行为，也许终究是超越理智的精髓，是这个自恋、恐惧、恐怖的宇宙孤儿的特殊天才。
By the by, who is Whorf? And should we glean our apothems from Klingon philosophers?
Cordially, Lawrence Cottrell.

I think the problem with "Political correctness" is that it takes a good idea too far. The infamous "N" word for instance is a demeaning term - at least when used by non-African-Americans. In fact, if I had just used the "N-word" instead of "African- Americans" in this post, it would have aroused a storm of protest. Rightly so.
When I grew up in the 50's, everyone I knew used the "N-word". It describe a people who were: stupid, lazy, immoral, over-sexed, ignorant and smelled bad. They were good at basketball but couldn't play hockey or swim. Education was wasted on them and they were so inferior that you could pick them up by the toe.
The "N-word" includes all these negatives stereotypes within it's definition. This is why it should not be used by anyone who either values truth or wishes not to be offensive.
关于“政治正确”的一个常见错误是把完全无害的词语当作它们本身是负面的或冒犯的。
我曾经因为说一个看不见的人是盲人而受到严厉的训斥。有人告诉我，政治上正确的说法是“视力受到挑战”。为什么?因为“盲人”这个词显然给看不见的人贴上了低人一等的标签。出于一种非哲学的心情，我用一句政治上不正确的话结束了谈话:“滚开!”
我应该做的是指出，“盲目”这个词仅仅是对一种品质的准确描述，它所暗示的劣等只是在某种意义上，对人类来说，看到比不看到更好。“Blind”没有与“n”字相关的消极或政治内容。
For me the worst aspect of 'Political correctness" then is that it undermines simplicity of expression and clarity of thought.
Sincerely, Ed Healy

A story:
I was in a bathroom in Chinatown in San Francisco. Two Chinese women came in and began to discussing a variety of topics. One commented that her brother was dating a new guy "he's Caucasian, you know." I felt a small wave of being offended. I immediately questioned this feeling. Why should I be offended? I'm Caucasian. I burn in the sun. I'm a white girl. I realized that the offence was not in the word, but in the thought - and in the specific thought that: "we are a group and THEY are not part of our group." As a white gal, the feeling of being a "them" instead of an "us" was foreign (no pun intended).
所以最终我意识到PC词并不重要。它们能起作用的原因可能是，从它们第一次被引入到它们被接受为主流之间，种族主义的刺痛略有减少。在这段时间里，这些新词背后的含义、文化包袱、情感和思想都还没有跟上电脑新词的步伐。
Angela
www.bodywreath.com
P.S. I'm also a little offended that my spell check capitalized Caucasian. It's not a country or a religion (not in the way it is currently used), I don't belong to an organized group. What's up?

It's been my own experience that Political Correctness is rarely about avoiding nasty terms in the presence of the person or group to whom those terms might apply. Rather it almost always involves different sensibilities among member of the same group, none of whom are directly implicated by the term(s) in question. I'm thinking mainly of family dynamics, e.g. the kid home from college who's takes offense to an older relative's use of an outdated ethnonym or label. I think the notion of kindness was invoked on the show, but where does that play in when no one in the conversation is directly implicated by the offensive speech? Who's being the unkind -- the 20-year old who's decided his parents are backward-thinking, or the parent who at best enjoys needling his overly-sensitive child or at worst feels threatened by his child thinking he's backward-thinking?

There's also this funny posting at languagelog.org about the meta-linguistics of political correctness:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005259.html

While the over-reaching thesis of political correctness might be overzealous policing of every term and word, and antithesis a reactionary backlash, it seems to me the appropriate synthesis is a focus on being sensitive in our use of language.
Reasonable accomodations should be made when a term hurts someone else's feelings. Use of outdated terms shouldn't be scorned or mocked, but gently corrected. Using "police officer" or "firefighter" instead of "policeman" or "fireman" is totally reasonable. Replacing all pronouns with "zi" may be going a bit far. Spelling it "womyn" seems a little radical.
Bottom line: language is powerful and we ought to be sensitive (not over-sensitive) when we use it.
P.S. Black folk were enslaved and Jim Crowed in America for a couple hundred years - is it really too much to throw them a bone and say "African American"?

Re: the Philosophy Talk show on "God" (now in re-run):
Not addressed in that program: "God", a capitalized proper name connotes
an existing person or personage or person-like form. "order" is a simple noun.
So if we say that some order entailed the creation of the universe or was entailed by
the creation of the universe, then hey! no problem, BUT as soon as you say "God"
you are invoking an anthropomorphized, texturized soy-bean product first
concocted by a Mesopotamian field hand 8000 years ago, no?
That guy from Claremont is clueless. The Universe was created to appeal to
our sensibilities, he said? Duh: this bud's for you! See the USA in a Chevrolet!
Duh, God, a Madison Ave. marketeer? Duh!

In response to Lawrence Cottrell and anyone interested in proper philosophical discussion:
Whorf refers to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, not a Star Trek character. In a nutshell, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the limits of language are the limits of a language speaker's reality; e.g. the Inuit language has several words that describe different kinds of snow, but the English language only has the word "snow." If you're familiar with the novel 1984, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is directly applied in Newspeak.
Now, your post reads beautifully and froths with fervor. However, in philosophical discussion, literary quips are generally avoided. This is mostly because literary language often contains gaps in reasoning and also vagueness, ambiguity, and general imprecision. For example: you compare the enforcement of political correctness to events such as the horrors of the Inquisition and the death of Socrates. Firstly, there is a gap in reasoning: you do not explain WHY political correctness is similar to those events. Of course, you could claim that your reason is implied, but that is impermissible in philosophical discussion, which stresses explicitness. I could also refute your claim as an ad hoc fallacy. Which leads to the second point, I could claim that the comparison commits the fallacy of false analogy. I think many would agree that the enforcement of political correctness is nowhere close in degree to the torturous killings of the Inquisition.
严谨在哲学讨论中是必不可少的，我希望我所写的能够帮助您和其他人理解哲学讨论中常见的错误。

Dear Mark,
当哲学没有任何实质的东西，也就是说，当哲学是一门为了学科而学科的学科时，人们应该考虑成为一名水管工，水管工是一种有用的职业。
(1) If men are no more than "the limits" of their linguistic "reality," the poet is more real than the Philosopher. I am the former, mostly.
(2) If Philosophy is no more than analysis of grammars, she has become the tramp of a credentialed naivete clinging to a deductive clemency not even interesting; ontology, once Philosophy's reason for existence, is de trop but had at least the capacity to kill or resurrect, to cause a stir on some rialto or in some garret.
(3) If men are no more than "the limits" of their linguistic "reality," they are nothing per se. If they are nothing in se, "good" and "evil" are grammatical convention, and one is entitled to feed men to the fishes for amusement's sake or sacrifice hecatombs for aesthetic symmetry.
(4) Unlike a genuine science, which may get us to Mars, Philosophical scientism is where grown men play jacks when the occupation of spiritual Asclepius is no longer available to them. If Minerva can not inspire us into a chapel or onto a barricade, cause some authority to wish to trepan one, a Philosopher ought be embarrassed at the irrelevancy of his Ph.D.
(5) Explicitly, "each age has had its thesis of being," and whether deviation from an orthodoxy has brought upon the miscreant an auto-da-fe, a gulag, a gas chamber, a shunning or a "C" when one deserved a "B," the simple truth of my assertion seems to have leapt the ha-ha of your comprehension. Moreover, what ever "gap" you've imagined in my brief frolic within the marches of your domain seems to arise from your supposition that orthodoxy is less orthodox because it does not kill but only coerces humanely, i.e., modern deduction is on the non-dark side of the force. Well. Given the language limitations of your "reality," you'll forgive me if I prefer a good tickle on a Sunday afternoon to the condesensions of a logic-chopping martinet presuming to edify me regarding ratiocination's catechism.
Cordially, Lawrence Cottrell

In the small city that I live in I have noticed that it has become very popular to "help" the refugee families from Africa. Working as a social worker in a setting which is truly diverse and multi-cultural I noticed a few things that concerned me this week. First of all, there is a tendency among the "refugee helpers" to want to give them more services and help and to allow for more socially "inappropriate" behavior to continue. For example at holiday time, most of the families in the setting in which I work want and need help with gifts, clothing and food. I find that the one thing that most of the families have in common is poverty. Yet several staff members and outside companies wanted to sponsor a refugee family from Africa. Today was our last day before holiday break and at the end of the day a co-worker called me and said, "Why did you not deliver the gifts to the -----family (a refugee family from Africa)? I was first defensive explaining that, through an interpreter, I had discussed how the gifts could be picked up and the father, who had a vehicle would be happy to pick up the gifts. I went in to the office to "vent" because I was shocked and this person came busting in and said, "I just thought that it might be helpful for you if I delivered them!" I again, explained that there was a plan in place. At this point I was angry because there were racist overtones. Many families without vehicles had come with strollers or had found rides to get gifts. I did deliver some but am a one person show and could not do it all. I finally kind of lost it when I saw the person in the parking lot. I said, "You know I am a straight shooter, and I am wondering why you would ask me why I hadn't delivered the gifts"! She denied ever saying that and I called her on it and said, "Yes you did". I, once again explained what the plan was but she showed no remorse. She later called,.... blah, blah, blah, " I wasn't sure if it was because they aren't Christian". Another incident involved a family where the family has a huge van, they live around the corner and the father drove the women to the agency and had them all load the goods while he sat in the car. He also refused to pick up a huge basket of food a few weeks ago and had me and his wife carry food for ten up to the third floor. I think that he is sexist, plain and simple and needs to be educated that other women in this culture will find him as such if we do not let him know this. The family also has a vehicle, help from a settlement agency with finances, employment and all kinds of support. I realize that they face great difficulties coming to a new culture, though these families have been here a few years, but I also feel for the hundreds of other families who have no beds for their children, no work, no food etc... who are not refugees. In this small city it has become politically fashionable to help refugees from Africa even if it means that in the short run they receive special privileges that others who live in poverty do not receive. Just venting. I am sure someone will call me racist but I am not a racist. I just believe in equity.

On Juan Williams' firing by NPR: It wasn't what he said that condemned him in the eyes and ears of NPR---it was where he was when he said it. I agree with Neuman on his main point. Politically correct speech was a low point, but only one of many. The sickness in our society only begets more sickness.