Political correctness II

Steve Kaufmann here, videocasting and podcasting from The Linguist on Language. I'm going to continue doing these videocasts and podcasts from my blog and we will provide transcripts, therefore, for people who are using these texts for language learning. I will announce at my blog where we put the transcripts; we may simply put them on the blog. I would certainly encourage people to come to LingQ (l-i-n-g-Q.com) if they need to work on some of the vocabulary and the phrases and the words in these texts that they want to learn.

Now I sort of have the wind in my sails a bit on this whole subject of political correctness, so I want to stay with the subject. I want to, first of all, thank John B. who commented at my blog in support of the idea that this subject of freedom of speech very much belongs at a blog where we're talking about language. It's interesting that the person who has criticized me for, as he called it “ranting” here, and you know he was not very flattering in his views about me, which is fine. He felt that I should just get back to talking about language and he was sort of telling me what I should say here at my own blog, you know? But, no, I think it definitely has a place here, besides which, I'm going to stray away from the subject of language from time to time, just to cater to those people who are interested in using my blog, podcast and videocast as a language-learning exercise. I had some very nice communication from Tamara in Russia where they are using the blog for their language learning. She sounds like a marvelous teacher, so this will help her and I'm sure it will help other people. So, the blog will provide different things for different people. I'll talk about language learning, but I'll also talk about other subjects that I think are interesting. Now, when it comes to language learning or language, let me talk about this word “linguist”, because I call myself a linguist in the sense that I speak more than one language and I feel that anyone who speaks more than one language or likes to speak more than one language is a linguist to me.

Now, David, here, who has been involved in this polemic on political correctness, he's also a linguist, but he's a linguist…in fact, he might be a linguist in both senses. He says that he speaks more than one language, he doesn't specify, and he also says that he's a philologist, which I had to look up in a dictionary, but apparently a philologist is someone who studies ancient languages; maybe not event ancient, ancient or obscure, languages and analyzes. I'm not quite sure what he does, but he might tell us, I don't know. He seemed to take offense that I even asked him what he did and said something about I shouldn't ask him for any credentials or qualifications or something. I don't know what he said, but…yeah, “I don't think I need to mention my qualifications here”, he said. Okay, he's offended; whatever. But, it's interesting. He's also a linguist and he's interested in the subject of freedom of speech. The take that he has is “Freedom of speech is a right that has to be qualified when it infringes other people's rights.”  Okay, but who determines? What's a right, you know? In the case of the Canadian Rights Tribunals, McClain's Magazine was brought before the Human Rights Tribunal because they felt that an article printed by McClain's had offended a specific group, Muslims. They felt that the article was not friendly to Muslims or somehow could be construed or might give offense or, in fact, did give offense because a group of Muslims said they were offended. But that's not 100% of all Muslims in the world that were offended, that's not even 100% of all Muslims in Canada that were offended, it's a couple of Muslims. Who do they represent? We don't know. They were offended or say they were offended. Now is it a right to not be offended? Is that a right? I don't know. David, here, goes on, “Freedom of speech does not entitle anyone to use defamation to provide false testimony in court or to spread hatred.”  Well, yeah, we have laws that govern that, liable laws, you know? Whatever, telling lies in court, those are crimes. Spreading hatred…now that's a difficult one because…I don't know. I mentioned in my earlier podcast about this David (????? Hennique), who certainly had many hateful things to say, was he spreading hatred? Can one foolish old man, in fact, spread hated? I mean it's not like he has an organization that's marching in the streets, he just said something very stupid. But, here, David goes on, “Political correctness is an attempt to strike a balance.”  A balance between what? We have laws about defamation; we have laws about telling the truth in court. There are some laws regarding hatred, but, hopefully, they're directed more at organized groups rather than individuals saying stupid things. But, David feels that somehow it's the role of political correctness and I guess he would see him as part of this group of inquisitors who will decide. Certainly, that's what the Human Rights Tribunals are trying to do in Canada, that there's strike a balance. You can't say things; you can't say that a particular group is bad. It gets back to the earlier example I used, in Russia now they're going to have a law that says you can't deny that the Soviet Union won the war, but it's being taken now, by some groups in Russia, as an excuse to say you can't criticize anything that was done by the Soviet Army in the war because it might offend people. Now, of course, getting back to David, he says, “Striking this balance is not censorship.”  What nonsense! Of course it's censorship. If you haul someone in front of a Human Rights Tribunal, as they did in the case of a person in Alberta…this person in Alberta wrote a letter to a newspaper and said that he doesn't approve of homosexuality and he said it in terms that, quite frankly, are no longer persuasive with the majority of people who aren't as hung up about homosexuality as this preacher is, but that's him and he said this thing. Now he was hauled in front of a court and his final verdict was that he was no longer allowed to write anything about homosexuals and he was no longer allowed to talk about homosexuals in his sermons at his church and he had to pay $5,000 to some gay-lesbian group. The gay-lesbian group said we don't want this money, we don't agree with your decision. We think freedom of speech is the best protection of our rights, we can speak up, others can speak up. We can present our position, others present other positions. That's how we got the whole attitude of society to move on the question of homosexuality, it was through having freedom of speech and challenging some of the established values. They want no part of this money, so the Human Rights Tribunal of Alberta gave the money to the plaintiff, the guy who brought the complaint. He's not a gay or a lesbian; he's a soul brother of David here, the galloping politically correct vigilantes. So he ends up with the money; well, there's a way to make money. So then David goes on and makes the statement, “Political correctness, i.e. the Human Rights Tribunal, is not censorship.”  He says, “Stop making such preposterous claims.”  Well, political correctness is, in itself, not censorship because censorship means that you actually have the power to prevent people from writing or saying things. But political correctness is exactly that, it's the attempt to pressure people into not saying what they believe and not writing what they believe, so that is a form of censorship it's not preposterous. This fellow David is just a joke, he just uses these words like “preposterous”. He describes Ezra Levant as despicable; Ezra Levant (e-z-r-a l-e-v-a-n-t) is tremendous. He won the award in Canada for the best political blog; he has won awards. You don't have to agree with him, but he's not despicable David, just because he doesn't agree with you. Don't be so childish, you and all of your politically correct cohorts. Anyway, so blah-blah-blah.

So, I believe that we use language to express our ideas; we need to have the freedom to express our ideas. Attitudes within society move, it's only through debate that they move. It's when you try to suppress ideas, such has happened in the middle ages where we weren't allowed to question whether the sun revolved around the earth, etc., that's when we end up with greater injustice. I hope I don't have to get back to this subject. We may hear from David again, but, hopefully, that's lively and interesting to people who are studying English. Thank you for listening.