Political Correctness and Halloween Costumes

[TheWanderingFish]

Perhaps this is just a costume designed for someone to put on, and go out and have a bit of fun? I can't speak for the general population of course, but I don't tend to read much into the Halloween costumes of the people I meet.

Er, so?

Nobody seems to be arguing that somebody woke up and said "You know who needs further demonising? The mentally ill!"

Hell, if that was the case, they'd probably not have taken it down when people pointed out the problem.

You don't have to be intentional trying to make things worse for someone to do so.

I believe that intent is a large factor to consider, that is all.

If I go over to a person, and push them to the ground, and they break their nose, I've harmed them.

If I trip and fall, and push a person to the ground and they break their nose, I've still harmed them, but I don't think that any one would argue that those situations are the same.

 

[TheWanderingFish]

Perhaps if the part of the population who wasn't effected by this costume, had stood up as well and said "Actually, I'm not bothered by it", then we would see a different result.

Yeah, the voice of the unaffected is the one we should be listening to here.

Why are the voices of the unaffected suddenly not worth as much as those who are affected? You cannot give certain people's opinions a greater weight than others; that would be unfair.

 

[TekMoney]

Perhaps if the part of the population who wasn't effected by this costume, had stood up as well and said "Actually, I'm not bothered by it", then we would see a different result.

Yeah, the voice of the unaffected is the one we should be listening to here.

Why are the voices of the unaffected suddenly not worth as much as those who are affected? You cannot give certain people's opinions a greater weight than others; that would be unfair.

Because the unaffected lack the perspective to decide if they're offended or not. It's not happening to them.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Mental patient speaking here, not offended in the slightest. We're all fucking mental, whether we're patients or not... The costume in question is over-the-top camp/horror portrayal of a person who most likely is beyond crazy. BTW, not kidding about being a mental patient, been in a ward, been under observation, medication, the whole 9 fucking yards.
Lighten up people, the more you try to be so inoffensive to things the more you should just say "nobody open their mouths, you'll offend someone and they might cry, or worse sue".
We've gone years and years offending each other, we'll keep doing it because our perspectives are different, our experiences are different. We're all different. Tolerance isn't being PC, its being able to hear something that you could take offense to and just laughing it off. If someone is intentionally being offensive its a different story, but honestly folks you need to get a bit thicker in the skin area. Sticks and stones...
Or just keep pushing this we all gotta be sensitive and walk on eggshells tripe, and watch people explode from the stress of making so much goddamn effort not to offend someone...
You know I always thought maturity was being able to hear something that might be offensive and taking it in stride, but according to society I guess its being PC and censoring any form of speech deemed "offensive".
What a load of bullshit.
If I offended you, I'm not sorry, you probably needed to be.

 

[vIRL Nightmare]

In my mind it comes down to this. There are many kinds of people in the world and you can kind of generalize them in 2 over arching groups. The chill people who know how to relax and take a joke and are accepting of many things and people even if they themselves don't necessarily participate, then there are the people that can't let anyone have fun or relax and believe anything against their perfect little ideal is evil and wrong and no one is allowed.

People fail to understand that they don't need to, nor do we want them to, be offended for some one elses sake and blow things out of proportion. But what do I know.

 

[Something Amyss]

Dick Cheney didn't say a word about gay rights until his daughter came out, after his term was up and he could no longer affect change.

Actually, he did. And I'd note the Veep has little power to enact change. I mean, unless you're talking about his term in Congress, but I would then make the point he said nothing about his daughter during the first Bush/Cheney campaign and she had been out for a while by that point.

What he did is something completely different: he remained silent on the matter until his view could no longer harm his political career. As did GW Bush.

I reject the notion that people react only out of self-interest, but it's also worth pointing out that what you're using as an example is instead an example of something different.

It's fucking Halloween. People need to fucking grow up and get over it. Freedom to do what we want should supersede your butthurt.

Freedom to do what you want also allows them to not "get over it," but it didn't stop you from just telling them to "fucking grow up."

It's almost like freedom of expression is not freedom of criticism, but that would sort of make your argument look self-contradictory.

Your complaints of "hypocritical bullshit" seem to demonstrate both hypocrisy and butthurt.

 

[vIRL Nightmare]

Wow the drama in this thread. I can skip my teenage Soap Opera.

 

[spartan231490]

Why do I do this to myself? It would be so nice to just ignore you people, sadly I have to live in the world you are shaping, and so I have to try, even if the effort is ultimately futile.

You keep calling me butthurt, but the one line I posted to you that came across as angry was parodying your anger. You're the one who is getting angry here dude, not me.

your opening and closing statements are full of passive-aggressive anger. Also, I'm not angry at all, I'm frustrated.. Seeing your powers of deduction in action, I can see how you'd confuse the two.

I've got no problem with you being offended, I've got a problem with the expectation(sometimes reality) that the world will bend over backwards to make you feel better.

Look I'm a stand up comedian

appeal to authority

, I have two responses if I say something that offends someone. I will look at what I said and if I see merit it it I will defend it, if I don't and I realised the joke was needlessly offensive and served no other purpose than getting a cheap laugh at someone's expense then I'll apologise and scrap it. There is nothing wrong with expressing displeasure and then the offending party deciding to amend for it.

Stereotyping =/= bigotry. Seriously, get off the cross.

Again, you're getting way more worked up about this than me and then accusing me of over reacting. And yes stereotyping is not necessarily direct biggotry but it certainly feeds a culture of closed mindedness.

stereotyping is how our minds work, you know schemas. There's nothing close-minded about it, it's simple statistics.

funnily enough, I'm not responding to what anyone in the thread said, notice the lack of quotes.

You flat out addressed people in this thread

No, I didn't. Point out one point in my first post when I used a specific pronoun. I spoke in the second person, because I couldn't think of a good way to phrase it in the third person without making things needlessly complex, from a grammatical standpoint. For the simplicity of the reader, I used the second person to address those people who thought that the costume was inappropriate and should have been recalled, regardless of their paticipation in this thread. Sorry, next time I'll use a morass of unspecified pronouns to avoid offending anyone, of course what I say will be completely incomprehensible, but I guess that's just the price we pay for being politically correct.

Also, you have a problem with a Halloween costume that portrays all Mental patients as dangerous and threats to society, but you have no problem with Laws that do the same thing?

See? Right there. You stated as fact that we have a problem with this but not exclusionary gun ownership laws.

No I didn't. Out of context you might make the argument that I'm addressing anyone who reads my post(like that makes any logical sense, I would have to assume that not one person agrees with me, among many other flaws) but the rest of the post(like my qualifying statement right there in my first post where I specify that I'm talking to those who compose the general majority) makes it clear I'm using a generic second person, and not specifically addressing you. Way to make it unnecessarily personal.

I'm responding to the idea of a company pulling a product based on butthurt over the way it portrays mental patients.

By saying we support exclusionary laws that none of us have claimed to support.

surprise surprise, none of you claimed to support it. Maybe because I was making a general claim against popular opinion and not a specific reply to one or several commenters. Hey, that would also explain why I didn't quote anyone, but instead made an open reply on the original topic, funny how that works and has internal, logical consistency, isn't it?

funnily enough I never implied you did. Do you support using mental health issues as an exclusionary criteria? Because you don't have to do so in your country for your to support it, funnily enough human beings are capable of having opinions about things that don't directly effect them.

Yes we are, but if it's not an issue I've ever dealt with or considered then no I don't have to have formed an opinion on it. I've never even considered the issue because it's not an issue I knew existed because nobody can just buy a gun over here.

ad hominem,

There is literally no ad hominem there or even an attack of any sort, you accused the people in this thread of supporting laws that nobody claimed they support and then used it to label us hypocrites and say you're sick of this hypocritical bullshit, which none of us expressed, so clearly you imagined it.

As I said, I wasn't arguing the point of any specific commenter on this thread. If I had been, I would have quoted them in my comment. As for imagining it: " I'd get sick ofit too if I imagined it everywhere I went." You are simultaneously accusing me of being paranoid and delusional. You're completely right, there's no personal attack there used to discredit my point, you were just making the implication because you don't get enough chances to use the word "imagined" in your arguments, right?

I really shouldn't suspect anything better from the cesspool that is humanity.

Let me guess, you're one of the few enlightened ones?

More ad hominem, but I'll respond anyway. Depends on what you mean by enlightened. Yes, I am one of the few who seems to recognize how fucked up we are, but it's not like I have the power to change it. I'm just the only piece of shit that knows I'm a piece of shit. Yay me!

Open your eyes and look around, if you don't see hypocrisy everywhere you're wearing some seriously rose-tinted glasses.

Yes but none of the hypocrisy that you claimed was in this thread. Once again, you claimed people in this thread are hypocrites because they support laws they never said they support and then used this imaginary/assumed support of exclusionary laws to label us hypocrites.

Once again, I never claimed anything about the people in this thread. I was addressing the topic event, the recall of the costume. I never read any of the comments on the thread, I would never have dreamt of replying anything about them. I was responding solely to the event in the OP. Sorry to say it, but the whole world doesn't revolve around you. Just because I was attacking someone's ideas, doesn't mean you were one of those people. Grow up.(That's what it looks like when I attack someone personally btw, I quote them and everything)

I could point out examples, but you're previous reaction to reality shows how pointless such efforts would be.

Yes people are capable of hypocrisy, but nobody here has been proven guilty of the exact hypocrisy you are accusing us of.

I was responding to your ad hominem insult that I see hypocrisy everywhere without cause. I wasn't discussing the presence of hypocrisy in this thread, as I have pointed out, I was making a general reply, not specifically replying to anything said in this thread.

I am not discussing hypocrisy in general here. You accused us of being hypocrites

I didn't, nice try

for a specific reason, a reason that has never been demonstrated in this thread (once again so we're clear none of us have expressed support for the laws you claim we support that make us guilty of hypocrisy).

Must be nice to live in your fantasy world,

Really? And you accuse me of ad hominem? Because you've been just wonderful you have. So pleasant, almost Victorian in nature.

It must be nice to just make up the opinion of the person you're arguing against, must make it almost impossible to use. Wish I was malicious enough to just use straw man where-ever I went, but I guess I'm just not as strong as you.

 

[spartan231490]

snip

It's fucking Halloween. People need to fucking grow up and get over it. Freedom to do what we want should supersede your butthurt.

Freedom to do what you want also allows them to not "get over it," but it didn't stop you from just telling them to "fucking grow up."

It's almost like freedom of expression is not freedom of criticism, but that would sort of make your argument look self-contradictory.

Your complaints of "hypocritical bullshit" seem to demonstrate both hypocrisy and butthurt.

Perhaps I should have made this clearer, but I guess it was too hard for people to make the connection between the lack of quotes and the fact that I was replying to the event the OP started the thread to discuss. I don't care if you are offended, I only care when you start expecting the world to bend over backwards to make you feel better(like taking the product off the market). I'm not referring to people who were offended, just to the people who think it was the right call to recall the product. I thought I made that clear with this statement: "just because the particular stereotype being played with offends you doesn't give you the right to shut it down." but I guess not.

So no, freedom of expression=/=freedom of criticism doesn't make my argument self-contradictory, it makes your interpretation of my argument self-contradictory.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

**SNIP**
You see here's the thing, if the costumes had any artistic merit, or even needed to be called mental patient for any reason then I'd support the naming. If there was a reason for it to be offensive (even if being offensive was itself the reason for it) even if I didn't approve I'd accept it and hell I'm not even that bothered by the name. I'm not saying they had to change it or they should have changed it, I'm just saying if you offend someone you should consider what you did and actually decide if you want to alter your behaviour. My only issue in this thread has been this. If you are offended you have every right to express that, and then the offending party is allowed examine their actions and decide if they want to rectify it.

What bothers me is that people don't seem to think they should ever take responsibility for anything they say or do or consider how these things can affect other people. The issue is always "offended people need to grow up and deal with it" and never "people should aim to treat each other with dignity and respect". Like I said it can go both ways. If someone is offended by my material and even after considering it I still believe what I'm saying has merit I will still say I'm sorry they were offended but I will defend saying it and I will keep saying it. If however I realise the only thing the joke did was get cheap laughs out of ignorance, it has no merit to it and only serves to offend people then I'll apologise and I won't use the material anymore. I don't want to set out to offend people and if I can say the same thing in an offensive or inoffensive way with nothing being lost then I'll choose the inoffensive way. I have a bit about the word "******" and why I don't like the word. It involves me repeatedly saying the word ****** over and over again; "******. ******. ******. ******..." (no that isn't the punchline) Using that word makes people uncomfortable and offends people. But since I'm ultimately on the side of not using the word as a generic insult and the bit wouldn't work without using the word I will defend that bit even if it offends people.

What bothers me is that people nitpick shit so damn much, I mean a poor choice in words isn't lynchmob worthy. It ain't a federal case or anything. And don't get me started on artistic merit, because a world that allows pissing in public to be called "performance art" has no business getting down on ANY form of art no matter how stupid it may be.
I just see that things are getting to the point where every minor complaint is getting turned into a major debate simply because it might be offensive or off-putting to some. I mean we have enough crap to deal with as it is and a few poorly chosen words on a halloween costume isn't a big deal, considering there are some mental patients in existence who fit that costume. Is it representative of all? No but remember this is also a world where you can sue for likeness infringement and shit like that so the use of generic terms is a CYA attempt by those who make said costume.
Bad choice of words, but its nowhere near the level of calling gay-folk "******" or black folk the n-word. Hell its not even c-word level bad. But the PC crowd treats any slightly offensive language as something to get up in arms about. I just wonder why people trot out the "you're as bad as racist" type arguments for petty shit like this.
And thats it, its so petty...