Comment by enragedcacti

6 days ago

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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enragedcacti

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0xDEAFBEAD  5 days ago

>The output of progressive movements is political correctness

???

How did you conclude that Graham believes this?

Can you quote a specific passage from Graham's essay that supports this idea?

I thought Graham was quite clear in targeting priggishness. He analogizes wokeness to Victorian prudishness. I didn't see any claim that priggishness is inherent to progressive ideology. In fact, he wrote:

>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.

And also:

>But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.

wendyshu  5 days ago

I don't really know what you're saying but Graham is speaking against the religious zeal of woke people, especially in regards to censorship. I'm not sure what that has to do with the civil rights movement.

  • enragedcacti  5 days ago

    It shows he doesn't answer the question of "how do we know when the woke people are right?" which is an important question given they have been right about a lot of things in the past.