Peaceful Opinions Can Still Cause Offense

politically correct

Introduction

In the 21st century, or even 2020, because of the internet which was at dial-up speeds when I was a child, the world is much smaller than it was 100 or 50 years ago. The children of today know more about the world than I did when I was a child.

Another thing that is happening nowadays, is that people are getting offended by anything and everything nowadays. People are too scared to say what they think in case they offend someone. It’s virtually impossible to have a Twitter account without someone block you because they are offended by opinions. It’s impossible to run a website without someone trying to hack it or take it offline. If you have an Instagram account or a blog, you are bound to receive some hate comments. Is it possible to not offend anyone nowadays?

The scope of political correctness (the scope of what we’re not allowed to say in society) has expanded compared to 50 years ago. It will still a thing 50 years ago, but now it is bigger than it was before..

Everyone is prejudiced in some way

ChildLine, a British charity for children, used to have a list of different -isms on their website with examples, but they removed it. I’ll list the eight they had.

  • racism
  • sexism
  • classism
  • ablelism
  • lookism
  • homophobia
  • transphobia
  • islamophobia

What is a prejudice? A prejudice is a judgement that someone makes of another person or group or person, without needing to know the individual person the judgement is made of. If you ask me, everyone is prejudiced in some way, and if someone tells you that they are not prejudiced, they are lying. Everyone has prejudices, they just don’t want to tell you what they are, because it’s not socially acceptable to be seen as a person who harbours hate towards other people.

Words don’t have to be discriminatory or rude for them to cause offence

If you listen to some people [1] [2] [3], they will have you believe that political correctness is about ensuring that bigots don’t say sexist or racist things so that the feelings and rights of minorities (eg. black people, women) are protected. I reject this argument entirely.

Words don’t have to be discriminatory to cause offence. I can list 10 things which are politically incorrect in today’s society, which have nothing to do with sprouting bigotry.

  1. Supporting Donald Trump
  2. Saying that there’s only 2 genders
  3. Saying that transgender women shouldn’t take part in women’s sports
  4. Being against feminism or being critical of it
  5. Calling mental illnesses like depression and anxiety a disability
  6. Calling autism a disability
  7. Being pro abortion
  8. Saying that women are just as responsible as men are when having sex whilst drunk
  9. Saying that transgenders cannot change their biological sex
  10. Saying that a child needs to be raised by a mother and a father to be raised properly
  11. Making rape jokes

But what about hate speech?

America is the only country in the world that doesn’t have laws against hate speech. In all other countries, you are prohibited from using language that is against what is called a protected category of people,such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, transgender identity. It’s not just enough to not commit a crime targeting someone by their identity, but to also not use language to target someone by their identity.

As you can imagine, these hate crime and hate speech laws restrict the things we can say. Also stopping someone from expressing an opinion doesn’t stop them from thinking it.

Be careful of people who distort the meaning of words to suit themselves

Be careful of people who use lexicon such as “nazi”, “racist”, “it’s a private company it can do what it likes” and “speech should have consequences”, because those are the people who distort the meaning of language to suit themselves. What they appear to say is that nazi’s and bigots dont deserve free speech, but if you further examine their ideology, you’ll see that who they think shouldn’t have free speech, extends much further than bigots and nazi’s, but basically anyone who expresses an opinion that goes against their beliefs.

We all fight the bigotry label

We all don’t want to be labelled a bigot, nazi or racist, because being labelled a bigot results in negative consequences for that person. They can lose their job, be deplatformed, get banned from a forum, find it hard getting work, be asked to apologise for what they said. In Cancel Culture that we have now it seems appropriate to dig up something someone said 5-10 years ago and use it as evidence that they’re an evil bigot so they should never get any work again.

Silicon Valley is censoring millions of people

It should be of no secret that Silicon Valley is censoring millions of people through banning, shadowbanning, and deleting an entire account’s content. I will now give a list of what Silicon Valley censors.

  • pro-life content
  • conservatives
  • Trump supporters
  • vaccine truthers
  • white nationalists
  • red pill ideology (concerning attraction and intergender dynamics)
  • natural health information
  • anti-feminists
  • people against mass immigration
  • pick up artists
  • fat shaming

My opinion, is that these things should not be censored. To analyse the above topics that are censored currently on social media, or damage of someone’s reputation, they break down into two categories, ideas and contempt. To have a healthy society, people need to be able to express ideas and debate and discuss them. The best response to toxic ideas is to debate those ideas and critique them, not to shut down those ideas. As far as contempt is concerned, people have a right to say that they don’t like a particular person or organisation, as long as they don’t use lies, fabrication or selective quoting in their rebuttal.

People are creating alt-tech to compete with Silicon Valley (such as myself and others), which is always a good thing. Tynamite supports all social networks and platforms which give users the ability to freely speak and think.

What speech shouldn’t be allowed?

I can list some bullet points of what speech I think shouldn’t be allowed in an online community.

  • Threats
  • Defamation
  • Rudeness (to an extent)
  • Off-topic
  • Advocating for physical or economic harm
  • Bullying

Of course we shouldn’t fling racial insults to each other on the street, but if someone is doing so on their own private blog or on a social network where you can choose to block or unfollow the user, as long as they are not bullying a person and are being general with their words, I don’t see the problem of such racial language.

Conclusion

So that’s my opinion on political correctness, that we should have freedom of speech and not let the bad people erode our freedom of speech.

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