People Need To Stop Saying “Political Correctness” Like It Means Anything

On March 3 this year, 53-year-old Brisbane man Mark Bladen was filmed choking and attempting to punch a 14-year-old in a skate park in The Gap, something we can all agree is probably not a very good look. The story that came out was that the teen in question had allegedly been bullying his daughter and that, upon finding out the whereabouts of said teen, Bladen went down to the skate park to give him a “good old-fashioned talking to“. According to an interview he gave to 60 Minutes, he had no intention of hurting the kid, but just “snapped” after he smiled at him.

Bladen was apologetic after he landed a $1,000 fine with no recorded conviction from Brisbane Magistrates Court, telling other parents not follow his lead outside the court, according to the AAP: “I’m very sorry for what I did, very regretful and ashamed. Please don’t do what I did, I just lost control, it’s definitely not the way to handle things.

As News.com.au notes, however, it appears this incident wasn’t apparently his own fault:

Mr Bladen, who is a hero to his mates at the local pub, said he regrets what he did but doesn’t believe in political correctness.

“We live in a day of PC, political correctness, and I hate it. I absolutely hate it. When I was young, a lady was treated as a lady. It should be the same now. It’s not hard to have respect for somebody. I’m a great believer in karma. You give respect, you get respect back.”

The word ‘but’ here, usually a relatively innocuous conjunction, seems to be doing a miraculous amount of lifting in drawing some sort of causal link between a grown man strangling a 14-year-old and the very nebulous and ill-defined concept of political correctness.

It’s hard to imagine what role political correctness plays in this. Is it considered politically correct to bully someone’s daughter? Is that why political correctness is bad? Or was it because of political correctness that he got fined for the otherwise harmless act of assaulting a teenager? It might be difficult to pin down how those words apply here largely due to the fact that, combined in that order, the words ‘political’ and ‘correctness’ don’t mean a single damn thing.

Railing against whatever political correctness is supposed to be has underpinned the bulk of the last few years of conservative movements. The right love Trump because he isn’t afraid to be politically incorrect. The right loved pedophilia-apologist Milo Yiannopoulos for the same reason. Conservative Australian columnist Rita Panahi penned a column expressing outrage at the disgusting climate of political correctness that meant that Eddie Maguire was criticised just for making an anti-semitic joke:

McGuire, who has Scottish ancestry, said the following to a contestant on Millionaire Hot Seat: “So you have a Jewish father and a Scottish mother? I reckon it would have been hard getting pocket money from them!”

The throwaway line was genuinely funny and bore no hint of malice but was nevertheless condemned by civil rights group, the Anti-Defamation Commission.

Comic icon Mel Brooks warned that “stupidly politically correct” culture would be “the death of comedy” and every week, the fun police expand their extensive list of what is offensive. You know something is wrong when a joke about pocket money is deemed out of bounds.

(Just as a side note, I’m not sure people were overly concerned that he was being deeply offensive to the Scots there.)

Right now, conservatives in the US and abroad are having a meltdown because a comedian doing a roast of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did, well, a roast of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They’re insisting that Michelle Wolf went too far in making some not-very-tongue-in-cheek jokes about Sanders being a liar to her face and for supposedly attacking her appearance (although it would be more accurate to describe it as ‘mentioning her appearance while calling her a liar’).

Sad state of affairs, isn’t it, when a comedian can’t make jokes just because pearl-clutching conservatives deem them to be too politically incorrect?

Given that News Corp has written what feels like a hit piece a day on her since Anzac Day last year, you probably don’t need a refresher on who Yassmin Abdel-Magied is. It’s odd, though, that in the tens of thousands of words written about her in the Murdoch press, not once did anyone bring her up as an example of ‘political correctness gone mad’ – a person who was effectively hounded out of the country thanks to a seven-word Facebook post that conservative Australia deemed to be too incorrect, politically.

Writer Benjamin Law faced a similar barrage of outrage from News Corp’s usual suspects for weeks after making a joke about ‘hate-fucking’ anti-gay conservative MPs, something that these columnists construed as some sort of threat of non-consensual sexual violence. Was he propped up by the right for being a champion against political correctness for being brave enough to make jokes that people found distasteful? Of course not, because the concept of political correctness isn’t an actual coherent thing, it’s just a meaningless phrase thrown around to defend their own nonsense.

When Trump actually does insult a woman’s appearance, it’s refreshing, anti-political-correctness honesty – something to be lauded. When Milo constantly argues that feminists are ugly, it’s the same again. But, of course, Law and Wolf won’t have the same praise extended to them because that is reserved for the people who are challenging the status quo by, uh, saying stuff they (and society’s existing power structures) agree with. Brave stuff indeed.

https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/990642998693318656

The right either needs to actually apply this shit consistently by sticking up for people like Tarneen Onus Williams, even if they don’t agree with them, or they need to take those two dumb, meaningless words out of their mouths permanently.

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV