Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Is political correctness going too far?

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macca said:
It seems to me that those who ask for freedom, tolerance and acceptance of their lifestyle show very little tolerance and acceptance of others who may choose a different path.
Click to expand...
With any group, movement or cause don't assume that those who speak are representing the views of the entire group or even most of it.

Of those I know personally who fit into the group referred to, well I haven't asked them about this case specifically but none are keen on this sort of approach in general. They're far more aligned to the broad concept of personal freedom so long as everyone's consenting and it's not harming others. That's what they originally wanted and nothing more, actual equality.

Same goes for other things. Don't assume everyone who broadly supports protection of the natural environment agrees with the big name organisations associated with the cause. Suffice to say I'm very sure there's considerable dissent there over certain issues.

Same with things like unions. There are good ones that do take a reasonable view and do work for the members' best interests yes but, thing is, those generally aren't the unions you'll hear much of in the news. For the others though, well there are certainly some who don't have majority support from those they claim to represent.

Same in any context. Those who speak might be representing the rest, they might be pushing their own agenda, or worst case they're deliberately aiming to harm those they claim to represent by making them seem unreasonable. :2twocents
 
Had a giggle at this; and some ammo for whatever viewpoint held, said the joker to the thief. I love the smell of self-flagellation in the morning.

I was wrong about Trump voters​

Trump voters were not wrong about their betrayal by condescending American elites. Commentators should remember that in 2024.

Bret Stephens Contributor NYT.

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a uniqu threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.

What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.

I was blind to this. Although I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected”. My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighbourhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected”. Their neighbourhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists – clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”.

No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.
Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.

Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome – became, more and more, not just passe, but taboo.

It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.

This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.
For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.

Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax – there’s just no other word for it – that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.

A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of January 6, 2021?
Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” Abraham Lincoln noted early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
 
SirRumpole said:
Some people arriving from other countries apparently expect the rest of us to conform to them.

www.abc.net.au

These students have been excluded from school because of their hairstyle

Two students of African heritage are barred from an independent regional Victorian high school for not tying up their braided hair, with their mother saying she will report the school to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
Click to expand...
To be fair it's a pretty dumb rule. They are suspended even from online schoolwork simply for not tying up their hair? I think that's pathetic. It's not 1950. It reminds me of the BS I was indoctrinated with when I went to school and took years to learn to it was all BS.
 
Dona Ferentes said:
Had a giggle at this; and some ammo for whatever viewpoint held, said the joker to the thief. I love the smell of self-flagellation in the morning.

I was wrong about Trump voters​

Trump voters were not wrong about their betrayal by condescending American elites. Commentators should remember that in 2024.

Bret Stephens Contributor NYT.

The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a uniqu threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.

What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.

I was blind to this. Although I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected”. My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighbourhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected”. Their neighbourhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists – clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”.

No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.
Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.

Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome – became, more and more, not just passe, but taboo.

It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.

This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.
For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.

Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax – there’s just no other word for it – that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.

A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of January 6, 2021?
Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” Abraham Lincoln noted early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
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Talk about slow. Anti Trumpers are playing catch-up while the rest of us have moved on.
Trump was a political outlier. The only shtbag that could withstand the even bigger shtbags in US politics.

Unfortunately the moment and momentum was lost and its pointless putting him in for another term.
 
The destruction of English grammar. When this lunacy ends I'm popping a bottle of Dom.

As if they/them isn't stupid enough, the writer can't seem to refer to Miller in the singular or plural. :rolleyes:


www.abc.net.au

Ezra Miller issues apology, says they suffer 'complex mental health issues'

Actor Ezra Miller issues a statement apologising for their behaviour and promising to do "the necessary work" to recover.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 
wayneL said:
The destruction of English grammar. When this lunacy ends I'm popping a bottle of Dom.

As if they/them isn't stupid enough, the writer can't seem to refer to Miller in the singular or plural. :rolleyes:


www.abc.net.au

Ezra Miller issues apology, says they suffer 'complex mental health issues'

Actor Ezra Miller issues a statement apologising for their behaviour and promising to do "the necessary work" to recover.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
Click to expand...
Yea, grammatically their is OK but actually it doesn't work. Need another word like Ms was for not saying whether a female is married or not.
Non binary is becoming common.
 
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the
fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(Stan starts crying.)
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually
have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the
Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to
have babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he
can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
 
Knobby22 said:
Judith: Why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?
Stan: I want to have babies.
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies.
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan -- you haven't got a womb. Where's the
fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
(Stan starts crying.)
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually
have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the
Romans', but that he can have the *right* to have babies.
Francis: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to
have babies, brother. Sister, sorry.
Reg: (pissed) What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he
can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
Click to expand...

They will all be produced in a test tube soon anyway. Anyone can have one, for a price.
 
Knobby22 said:
True, but what do you do? Free country.
Click to expand...
Sure. I can identify as the king of Atlantis and insist my pronouns are his majesty/your majesty.

However, as much as I am free to suffer from such a delusion, it is unlikely that our national broadcaster would indulge me.

Most egregiously, the use of they them there, refer to more than one person. At once it is both ridiculous for a single person, and creates grammatical stumbling blocks as seen in the article.

Equally, people should be perfectly free to push back on such absurdities, without the threat of being labelled as hate speech.
 
wayneL said:
Sure. I can identify as the king of Atlantis and insist my pronouns are his majesty/your majesty.

However, as much as I am free to suffer from such a delusion, it is unlikely that our national broadcaster would indulge me.

Most egregiously, the use of they them there, refer to more than one person. At once it is both ridiculous for a single person, and creates grammatical stumbling blocks as seen in the article.

Equally, people should be perfectly free to push back on such absurdities, without the threat of being labelled as hate speech.
Click to expand...
But is that now oppression? It's a fine line.

In your case they are imagining to be the King of Atlantis which is obviously not true but if they are actually non binary etc. then who are we to say "no your not!"
 
Knobby22 said:
But is that now oppression? It's a fine line.

In your case they are imagining to be the King of Atlantis which is obviously not true but if they are actually non binary etc. then who are we to say "no your not!"
Click to expand...
Okay, but let us first define non-binary.

All kicked off my thoughts for discussion... Non-binary would be a human neither biologically male or female, or a human which is chromosomally (sp?) male or female, but which exhibits the genitalia of the opposite sex.

In the first instance I would posit that this is non-existent and in the second instance that it is extraordinarily rare.

This is not to say that there aren't very feminine males or very masculine females. We all know people like that.

However they are still biologically male or female.

Ultimately I think we have to figure out whether we are doing these people a favour. Are we doing them a kindness by indulging them, or are we cementing what is actual fact a mental illness. (And no judgement there I have in down that chasm in my own way).

Additionally, we need to think about whether it is healthy for us to villainize people who want to push back on that.

Is it considered oppression for us to try to help people who are suffering from schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder etc etc?

Should we indulge the paranoia of a schizophrenic? Or should we, to the best of our ability, try to ameliorate that condition for the person's benefit?

Which brings me back to Ezra. Clearly he is a person suffering from some degree of mental illness.

What good would it do him to pander to such condition for the sake of some ridiculous academic gender ideology which has no basis in biology?
 
One example of how people want to bury the truth for the sake of political correctness.

www.abc.net.au

Indigenous activists condemn New York Times obituary of Uncle Jack Charles as offensive

An Aboriginal activist and former police officer slams the New York Times obituary of Uncle Jack Charles for highlighting his criminal history and drug use.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au

Also interesting that some of that 'mob' didn't mind bagging the Queen for events that happened hundreds of years before she was born, but it was quite ok to cover up the actual past of one of their alleged heroes.
 
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evidently the proto-industrialists of the Iron Age have to bend the knee?

"We have been taught many lessons from Europeans and the Western world. I am European. For what we have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before giving moral lessons."
Click to expand...
from the self-loathing boss of FIFA, defending the indefensible

www.bbc.com

World Cup 2022: Fifa president Gianni Infantino accuses West of 'hypocrisy'

Fifa president Gianni Infantino accuses the West of "hypocrisy" in its reporting about Qatar's human rights record on the eve of the World Cup.
www.bbc.com
 
I am with Rushdie. Roald Dahl is meant to be difficult, he would be furious with the changes.
They did a poll on the ABC and it came out 87% against it. To me it is defacing art.

www.theage.com.au

Salman Rushdie calls revisions to Roald Dahl books ‘absurd censorship’

Recent changes in Dahl’s children’s books were a joint effort by the publisher and the Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the works’ copyright and trademarks.
www.theage.com.au www.theage.com.au
 
The astronaut team for the moon mission is below.

Political correctness gone mad. One woman, one African American and two white guys.
One of those white guys has done no space missions before and yet got chosen! Surely they had someone else they could have picked.
The others have done a number of missions each to the space station and the moon mission is at another level. Surely picking a white guy just to look good is wrong.

Political correctness has gone too far.

www.abc.net.au

NASA's first Moon crew in 50 years includes woman, Black astronaut

For the first time a woman and an African American have been chosen for NASA's mission to fly around the Moon next year.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
 
Knobby22 said:
The astronaut team for the moon mission is below.

Political correctness gone mad. One woman, one African American and two white guys.
One of those white guys has done no space missions before and yet got chosen! Surely they had someone else they could have picked.
The others have done a number of missions each to the space station and the moon mission is at another level. Surely picking a white guy just to look good is wrong.

Political correctness has gone too far.

www.abc.net.au

NASA's first Moon crew in 50 years includes woman, Black astronaut

For the first time a woman and an African American have been chosen for NASA's mission to fly around the Moon next year.
www.abc.net.au www.abc.net.au
Click to expand...
They are all in their 40s. Totes ageism, give young people that have just dropped out of school a chance.
 
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