Tanada wrote:evilgenius wrote:I'm not assuming it's bad. If anything, I think the real challenge with PC is the finding of balance. I only co-mingle it with conspiracy theory in order to show those right-wingers most apt to rail against it the import of it, by associating it with something they tend to really love.
PC is not law, so why do so many rail against it as if it were? It's only argument. What causes a person to become so upset by it? Aside from overthrowing a nostalgic impulse to see the world a certain way, if may be that it gets at people because it assaults their world view. Not everybody can take that kind of assault, but if your world view is actually well thought out, and you constantly re-examine it to make certain it's valid, you should be able to. George Carlin was like that (that whole personhole cover schtick), and he essentially sought balance. Otherwise people need to rethink their selves and wonder why it is that they aren't in control of everything.
If only that were true, unfortunately we have everything from 'hate crime' legislation to workplace human resources rules that turn poor taste into a firing offense.
Hate crime has to be one of the dumbest ideas ever invented, if someone murders me it does not matter if they did it because of my gender, ethnicity or religious beliefs. Murder in the first degree in our current culture often gets an 11 year sentence commuted to 7 with time off for good behavior. If you convict the perpetrator of a 'hate crime' they will get double that, but if both people are the same ethnicity/gender/religious conviction then that does not come into play. How does that promote a just society? If you kill your own its OK, just don't cross that 'hate' line or we will really get you?
I don't know about whether hate crime legislation is as bad as you insinuate. In many cases it has been the only legal tool that prosecutors have been able to use in order to go after locally corrupt government, or quasi-governmental bodies. Consider events like the Rodney King beating, which could only be legally addressed via hate crime legislation.
The trouble with it, in my opinion, is not that it can be used this way, but whether or not it constitutes double jeopardy to do so. Is it a mistake, in other words, to implement something that essentially normally compounds the severity of punishment in such a way that it can stand on its own as a tool?
The intention to stand up for civil rights might be better handled by civil rights legislation that stands for a whole disenfranchised group rather than creating a means to chip away at that intention by winning piecemeal cases. The piecemeal route is too vague for me, and leaves too much room for a wide variety of interpretation. It doesn't set a consistent taboo line for potential perpetrators to be wary of, not stopping future violations. And its inconsistent availability of application toward the intent for which it was formed leaves it open to criticism that debilitates that intent.
The real trouble, maybe, is in wanting revenge over change when seeking justice. Hate crime legislation is slanted toward revenge, whereas civil rights legislation is designed from the get go to bring about change. It's one thing to charge an individual officer with a hate crime when they cross a line, usually this must be proven on video, and quite another to bypass the said officer entirely and instead concentrate upon how the police force as a whole has treated a community, something for which an individual incident can spark an inquiry and no video is necessary. It's simply more honest to approach something like racial or sexual prejudice this way, on balance, rather than to attempt to take an individual example and try to extrapolate that across an entire entity's behavior pattern. Plus, this is the arena where a particular community's falling down, such as when they are responsible for the destruction of their own institutions, like when they fail and have to farm out their local government or the people simply don't vote, can come into the discussion on a formal basis. In this way a challenge to improve, as in areas of responsibility, can be communicated to an obvious situation as well as violations of a community's rights receive redress.