Rice - getting away from "Punish France, ignore Germany..."?

I also would be interested to know from Nimh and Dlowan how Lash, who it seems to me was not being unusually abrasive and in no way personally insulting, was 'rude' when her last post was far less abrasive than mine was. How was it offensive when not personally directed? Or should we consider personally directed insults from (insert name here) as okay because they are stated less abrasively?

Come on. Now this could really get silly.

Personal insults are diversionary and nonproductive. Telling the truth as you see it is the foundation of debate or spirited discussion. Now we can choose to be PC and be offended because a person believes something to be true. Or we can choose not to be PC and encourage people to tell it as they see it, and that can be done without being personally insulting.

Oddly the very PC police who are defending all that is moral, upright, and virtuous in this world and eliminating all that is evil can't seem to do that without being personally insulting.

OK - I hate this poster-to-poster play-by-play - but I called her rude so I guess I have to show the beef or shut up (or whatever that saying is ;-)).


Lash proposes her POV. She believes - like Fox, like you JW - that the US media are stacked against her kind - that its therefore scandalously "biased". She knows it because she feels it, she breathes it - after all, she doesnt recognize herself in what the media put out - well, apart from Fox, and hundreds of talk radio stations country-wide, and the Washington Times and the National Review and the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal - but - not in what CBS, CNN, ABC, NYT, LAT put out. So she knows it - "the media" are biased - against her kind.

I dont agree, for the simple fact that when I look at CNN, or read American press reports, from the background of my set of norms, values and ideas, I see a media landscape that is incredibly tame when it comes to questioning the authority figures - the President, the Cabinet members - tamer and lamer, I would say from my vantage point, than most any other Western country's media I know. When I look at the American media's websites, I see a paradigm of reporting that is overwhelmingly centred around a perspective that in Holland would count as distinctly right-wing. Compared to BBC and BBC World reporing, CNN reporting is gratingly jingoistic and foregoes on any of the hard questions that any British PM would be asked during Question Time. When I look at ...

Well, you get my drift. From my perspective - and I dare say, any mainstream centrist or centre-leftist European's as well - the American media ARE indeed biased - in that they are chauvinist, ethnocentric and blarily right-wing - and act like the President's lapdog compared to how journalists here would behave. Not all their fault - the system's also slanted against them - what, with the only persons ever getting to ask a question at the President's or Rumsfeld's or etc press conference being those invited to by his assistants - if you rub him the wrong way, you can forget that privilege next time - etc. All this strikes us as well weird.

So thats my perspective.

Now does that mean we have a disagreement here? Yes it does.

Is that what Lash notes? No, it isnt.

See, in Lash's world, evidenced in her post, there is only one truth. Hers (or yours, if you wish). And that truth is so blatantly obvious, that anyone who doesnt see it or denies it - that the US media are, loosely summarised, a system of liberal propaganda - must be either stupid or malevalent:


Its not that we sincerely see it differently - no, we are "dense", or worse, we act all "dense about it" - it's our preference to act dense about it - because our motivation is that we don't want to be disturbed when "looking the other way" or "keeping our mouth shut".

We can't possibly sincerely believe that, from our respective national and political vantage points, the US media is if anything biased to what here would be pretty far out to the right - no, it must be some big cover-up exercise we're all engaging in. Well, either that or we really are dense, I suppose. Those are the only options, in Lash's yes, very rude, argument.

So. Dont mean to kick up a whole debate about whether Lash was or was not rude - but you asked what I considered rude about her post - well, this was. I dont see how the heroic label "un-PC" would apply to it - I just see it as boorish.

Not illegal, mind you - not disallowed - not against the TOS. Lemme spell that out. I am not saying she should be shut up or banned or whatever. Her post was rude - but also not half as rude as other posts of her in Politics these last few months. <shrugs> I suppose it comes with the territory. We have Dookie, we have Lash. But I hope it wont be too "un-PC" if in turn I dare express my belief that it was rude.


One cant, of course. Only reason one can be banned in the course of a discussion on PC or other subjects is for being rude enough to transgress the TOS. Which I dont think ever has been an issue in this conversation just now.

I think, you could add 'center-right' to your "mainstream centrist or centre-leftist European's [perspective]" :wink: .

"Dank je wel" for your response, nimh!!!

Thanks Walter.

OK, back to the issue at hand, before we'll get all too distracted away from it. Because there were some serious questions posed here, and I would hate for that to be washed aside in the fray.

More specifically, Foxfyre actually suggested some definitions of PC to work with. Which is A Good Thing, because then we can measure by her and others' actual uses of the label here whether that use fits - or whether the definition is not actually the one you go by and should therefore be changed. After all, we all want to end up at a use consistent enough that it is fair, rather than used as a non-sequitur type put down.


Fair enough. I'm not a big fan of double standards either, myself.

But, I would add - since I am so much not a fan of double standards - that there's one here, as well.

Because - to just get our feet back on the ground - yes, there are folks who'll selectively cry outrage over the Confederate flag and demand action to be undertaken and fines passed out, when they'll just wink and blink at someone burning the US flag. Awright.

But so there are, of course, folks who'll selectively cry outrage at lefty demonstraors burning the US flag. Who'll demand such behaviour to be forbidden, who'll angrily yell that those rabble-rousers should be put in jail - or just leave the country, if they dont like it here - in short, who'll make clear that they "believe that such practices should be eliminated". But who'll blink and shrug at the guy waving his Confederate flag - or would even praisingly call him "un-PC".

Same with the other examples. Just like there are plenty of people who'll cry foul when you "criticize the gay lifestyle", but in the meantime consider Christians to be fair game, there are of course millions of people who applaud and nod at every politician or preacherman lambasting the gay lifestyle, but who'll organise petitions and campaigns and actions to take programmes off the air when they feel that Christians have been maligned - or even just when their religious (Christian) sensitivities have not been respected. (We Christians shouldnt get that gay stuff shoved in our face in the street or on TV - we should make an action against that station/shop/etc, write angry letters to the editor, complain with the owners, as long as it takes for them to pull it/remove it!)

Happens all the time. I'm no fan of either behaviour; just switch the station, or look away or something.

Now, I didnt formulate this equation - Fox did. On the one hand, gays or people of other races as object of contempt or insult; on the other, Christians or men in uniform. She says, its unfair to complain about one and not the other. Good, I agree. She says, its PC to complain about one and not the other. Awright, if thats the definition. But that just leaves me with the question I asked her before again:

If it's a case of "the PC police" clamping down, when selective indignation is applied to the criticism of gay lifestyles or the spitting on people of other races, but not to the targeting of Christians or spitting on people in uniform --- then why would the very mirror image of it (indignation about remarks against Christians or insult of soldiers, but equanimity about remarks against gays or insult of, say, interracial couples) NOT also be "PC"? Just a conservative PC?

It happens, right? And its the very same thing, just from the other side. The behaviour in both cases certainly fits in the definition of PC you yourself posted here. Only difference I can see it that roughly speaking now its people 'on your side' who do it. So, would you change the dictionary definition, then, after all?


But YOU just called it "un-PC", "to suggest that Condi Rice is a better Secretary of State that Colin Powell because of her ability to use feminine wiles". Literally! "It would be un-PC".

So ... you are proponing being PC, then, in that particular case?

Or do you have no problem with people suggesting Condi Rice is a better Secretary of State than Powell because of her use of feminine wiles, because they're being un-PC and that is a good thing?

Or are there good kinds of un-PC and bad kinds of un-PC (and thus, good and bad kinds of PC)?


Or you could go either:

- back to your own definitions of PC, and apply them consistently (thus avoiding blatant double standards) or
- suggest an adaptation of your definitions so they actually cover the way you want to use the term "PC"?

Lash's comments, quoted by Nimh, were not personally directed but collectively directed. They did not single out any particular person for insult and her comments can be put in the 'if the shoe fits wear it' category or dismissed as not applicable to me/I/myself. Thus though the comments were insulting no doubt to some persons who disagree with them (or more likely are guilty as charged), and they were very much un-PC, she was not personally insulting as those who criticized her were.

Now to address Nimh's other points:

Double standards are not acceptable to me no matter who is applying a double standard. There is a subtle difference, however, between 'double standard' and 'PC-ness' in some of the examples you used.

PC-ness in no way applies in any situation in which one's space is corrupted or violated. Objecting to being around another person's cigarette smoke for instance has nothing to do with PC. It is wanting a smoke free environment for yourself. Not wishing to be confronted at the airport by religious zealots pushing flowers or pamphlets or urging you to consider whether "are you saved Brother?" has nothing to do with PC-ness. It is not wanting your space/privacy violated. Not wanting to change the definition of marriage or not wanting homosexuality or any kind of sexuality taught to grade schoolers has nothing to do with PC-ness. It has everything to do with one's personal beliefs or convictions about what marriage is and one's parental rights. Not wanting to be denied housing or employment because one is gay has nothing to do with PC-ness; it has everything to do with basic human rights. When any of these kinds of rights are threatened by a group with a different agenda, tempers can flare and it can get very cruel and ugly. But these are not PC issues. These are policy issues based on REAL human and/or personal rights.

PC comes into play when people are judged positively or negatively by their thoughts, ideas, words, expressions. That president/professor at Harvard who expressed an opinion that it was likely that a lower number of female students and professors in advanced math and science courses could possibly be related to inate traits of gender was un-PC in capital letters. There was no suggestion re testing his theory. His head must roll. You simply cannot suggest that women are in any way less capable than men in anything. It isn't done. It isn't PC. (I personally think he is most likely right.)

I cited many other examples in this thread where the speaker was making a joke or was most likely right and/or could be right, but was crucified because his/her words were un-PC. The use of a word, phrase, opinion, possibility etc. that has been judged by the PC police to be offensive to anybody on their protected list is what makes something PC or not PC.

What makes the whole system so ridiculous and offensive to me is that the PC police make the decisions about what is and is not PC and make no admission of shame that the disparities and double standards are so glaring.

I know everyone's seen this story today, but I just couldn't help myself, LOL. At least she wasn't wearing a brooch!!!!!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51640-2005Feb24.html?nav=rss_politics

Condoleezza Rice's Commanding Clothes

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page C01

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield on Wednesday dressed all in black. She was wearing a black skirt that hit just above the knee, and it was topped with a black coat that fell to mid-calf. The coat, with its seven gold buttons running down the front and its band collar, called to mind a Marine's dress uniform or the "save humanity" ensemble worn by Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix."

As Rice walked out to greet the troops, the coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal the top of a pair of knee-high boots. The boots had a high, slender heel that is not particularly practical. But it is a popular silhouette because it tends to elongate and flatter the leg. In short, the boots are sexy.

Rice boldly eschewed the typical fare chosen by powerful American women on the world stage. She was not wearing a bland suit with a loose-fitting skirt and short boxy jacket with a pair of sensible pumps. She did not cloak her power in photogenic hues, a feminine brooch and a non-threatening aesthetic. Rice looked as though she was prepared to talk tough, knock heads and do a freeze-frame "Matrix" jump kick if necessary. Who wouldn't give her ensemble a double take -- all the while hoping not to rub her the wrong way?

Rice's coat and boots speak of sex and power -- such a volatile combination, and one that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal. When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy. When a woman combines them in the real world, stubborn stereotypes have her power devolving into a form that is purely sexual.

Rice challenges expectations and assumptions. There is undeniable authority in her long black jacket with its severe details and menacing silhouette. The darkness lends an air of mystery and foreboding. Black is the color of intellectualism, of abstinence, of penitence. If there is any symbolism to be gleaned from Rice's stark garments, it is that she is tough and focused enough for whatever task is at hand.

Countless essays and books have been written about the erotic nature of high heels. There is no need to reiterate in detail the reasons why so many women swear by uncomfortable three-inch heels and why so many men are happy that they do. Heels change the way a woman walks, forcing her hips to sway. They alter her posture in myriad enticing ways, all of which are politically incorrect to discuss.

But the sexual frisson in Rice's look also comes from the tension of a woman dressed in vaguely masculine attire -- that is, the long, military-inspired jacket. When the designer Yves Saint Laurent first encouraged women to wear trousers more than 30 years ago, his reasons were not simply because pants are comfortable or practical. He knew that the sight of a woman draped in the accouterments of a man is sexually provocative. A woman was embracing something forbidden.

Rice's appearance at Wiesbaden -- a military base with all of its attendant images of machismo, strength and power -- was striking because she walked out draped in a banner of authority, power and toughness. She was not hiding behind matronliness, androgyny or the stereotype of the steel magnolia. Rice brought her full self to the world stage -- and that included her sexuality. It was not overt or inappropriate. If it was distracting, it is only because it is so rare.
__________________________________________________________
And the caption showing Dr. Rice in her boots:

"Rice's black high-heel boots: As a fashion statement, absolutely powerful."

So, what was Dubya wearing?

I could be wrong, but I can't remember any news reporter, pundit, columnists, or even a satireist (is that a word?) who ever commented on what Colin Powell was wearing. They do comment frequently on the president's ties, but I think that's some sort of left wing fetish thing.

Dubya was at the same event as Condi. I guess his tie wasn't sexy enough LOL. Or, Robin could have said:

"As Bush walked out to greet the troops, his coat blew open in a rather swashbuckling way to reveal a baby-blue tie. The tie had a thin, darker blue stripe that is not particularly practical. But, it is a popular tie because it tends to elongate and flatter the torso. In short, the tie was sexy."

Was she dressed "to kill?" LOL