easy said:
When i got reborned in a cyber sense, I swore I'd never even look at the RRP board.
Oh well.
It occurred to me that being PC, is generally just being a nice person and that taking an anti PC stance is generally condoning being nasty.
To take it a step further, its not hard to mount a case that those who publicly ridicule PC, take Jeff Kennett's latest McGuire et al defence as an example, have a nasty streak.
To take it a further step, the oft made link between PC and the death of humour, is a polarising straw-woman isnt it?
discuss. without being nasty. (gulps) :theyareontome
Political correctness is used to describe the idea that language or actions need to be modulated to be in line with objectively correct values or ideals regardless of context. So language and actions become a tug of war between meaning, context, interpretation and intention. Whether or not PC is valuable or frustrating depends entirely on the audience.
If you're conducting yourself in front of a wide audience, PC is paramount, because interpretation wins the battle here. With increasing size of audience, there is an increasing variety of interpretation. Each interpretation causes a response, some more emotive and with more impact than others. If we accept that our actions and comments can have negative impacts, and we accept that it is inherently not okay to propagate negativity/distress/pain then we should all accept that conducting yourself with political correctness is vital when it comes to reaching a wide and varied audience.
If the audience is small, but unknown, then the above applies.
If the audience is small, and known, the PC is completely useless. Context, meaning and intention win the battle here. I'm not afraid of calling my good friends a variety of names I wouldn't repeat at work, because they understand the context, they know my intention, and we share the meaning. To bring it back to your point, I'm generally not very nice to my friends. And that's okay. Because we understand each other. And we live in good humour.
Humour doesn't need to be in contradiction to PC, but if it does fall in opposition, then it needs to be well seated in context, meaning and intention. Which is impossible when dealing with an unknown or expansive audience.
The grey area here falls in whether comments or actions which are inherently not politically correct can be separated from prejudice and bigotry. It seems that most non PC comments are prejudiced in some way. But I think there is some middle ground where Political correctness ends, but before bigotry starts. Anyone who's played Cards Against Humanity with a group of good friends probably agrees.