[ExI] "PC"

[Damien Broderick]

There's a lot of confusion surrounding this ham-fisted "PC" 
expression. Whose "politics" are supposed to be supported by 
"correct" thinking and speaking, and who are the Western politicians 
who ordain its correctness?

One component is PCness what I'd rather call "mealy-mouthed 
euphemism". Even there, it's not clear who gains by calling a person 
who is cognitively disabled "a veggie" rather than "someone with 
special needs". I'd rather such people were called "disabled" or 
"impaired" or something accurate. There's a degree of wishful 
thinking in slurring from "that term is ugly and hurts" to magical 
thinking along the lines of "If we call Suzie a `developing genius,' 
maybe she'll stop sitting in the corner sucking her thumbs and 
crapping on the floor."

Another component is explicit denial of what appears to be the case: 
maybe you can lose your job and get beaten up for asserting that the 
reason black people as a group score on average 15 points lower on 
alleged culture-fair IQ tests, is probably because a lot of them 
can't think very well about the sorts of questions posed on IQ tests, 
and furthermore IQ tests results correlate quite well with success in 
an industrial nation, which is ne reason why... etc. Is it due to 
PCness if you can't openly discuss findings that suggest Asian IQ 
scores are somewhat to the right of 100, but have a more narrow 
standard deviation than the normalized 15 or 16?  It goes right out 
of control when you lose your job for using the word "niggardly," as 
happened to a political aide with a broad vocabulary (although he got 
his job back).

Nothing simple about any of this.

Damien Broderick