Comment by thomassmith65
6 days ago
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights movement.
Any real history of "political correctness," if we're going to use that term to mean the pursuit of social justice, will be incomplete without an accounting of the internal struggles of various activist causes when confronted with their own wrongdoing/ignorance/blindness/lack of "political correctness".
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.
> I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate
Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.
Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
I had a similar double-take moment reading about Breitbart editor "Milo Yiannopoulos" a few years ago.
Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':
I couldn't remember his name in order to write this up, so I went googling and stumbled across Afro-Cuban Proud Boys leader "Enrique Tarrio".
All boats rise with the tide I guess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wog
Yiannopoulos is an... interesting case in general. Apparently[1] he declared himself to be "ex-gay", 'demoted' his husband to housemate, and is treating his homosexuality 'like an addiction'. His future plans include 'rehabilitating conversion therapy'.
Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled.
[1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
Peter Thiel is gay and still advocates against gay marriage (He's married to a man himself).
Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
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Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
I don't think its accurate to describe the AfD as right wing. Far right or possibly fascist
That only makes the progressive outlook more remarkable.
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> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
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Vito, an important member of the New Jersey crime family DiMeo (Italian Mafia) during the early 2000s was gay as well
They actually do know it, and they’re mad that so many think they don’t. It’s why they think wokeness is a problem, it is (to them) mainly performative and insulting because progress has happened and continues to.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
> They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
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Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"
Graham is fairly explicit that the civil rights movement wasn't priggish in the way he criticizes. He basically develops the thesis that such priggishness arises as a side effect of any ideology when it becomes sufficiently dominant, and it's worth opposing the priggishness, independent of the merits of the dominant ideology in question.
There's a big difference between these two things
* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/
Are you sure? He says 'And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.'
What "performative" and "social justice" would have meant in 1960 would be very different and a throwaway line to that effect does nothing to rescue the piece. But to give an example:
> A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1]
> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction:
"The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness"
Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
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He's presenting his own musings as some kind of historical record. Utterly unburdened by the need for data to back up his narrative.
The Internet has finally allowed the wealthy and powerful to converse at the same level and in the same space as your big brother's friend who smokes a lot of weed and knows that the government is suppressing a car that runs on water
Not all bad, then.
I have to admit it's pretty funny that all of the citations in the piece are just more of his own opinions.
Those aren't citations, they're just asides.
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