Politically correct insanity

[pizza]

Chicago Christmas Festival Nixes 'Nativity Story' Ads Over Fears of Offending Non-Christians

Tuesday , November 28, 2006

CHICAGO — A public Christmas festival is no place for the Christmas story, the city says. Officials have asked organizers of a downtown Christmas festival, the German Christkindlmarket, to reconsider using a movie studio as a sponsor because it is worried ads for its film "The Nativity Story" might offend non-Christians.

New Line Cinema, which said it was dropped, had planned to play a loop of the new film on televisions at the event. The decision had both the studio and a prominent Christian group shaking their heads.

"The last time I checked, the first six letters of Christmas still spell out Christ," said Paul Braoudakis, spokesman for the Barrington, Ill.-based Willow Creek Association, a group of more than 11,000 churches of various denominations. "It's tantamount to celebrating Lincoln's birthday without talking about Abraham Lincoln."

He also said that there is a nativity scene in Daley Plaza — and that some vendors at the festival sell items related to the nativity.

The city does not want to appear to endorse one religion over another, said Cindy Gatziolis, a spokeswoman for the Mayor's Office of Special Events. She acknowledged there is a nativity scene, but also said there will be representations of other faiths, including a Jewish menorah, all put up by private groups. She stressed that the city did not order organizers to drop the studio as a sponsor.

"Our guidance was that this very prominently placed advertisement would not only be insensitive to the many people of different faiths who come to enjoy the market for its food and unique gifts, but also it would be contrary to acceptable advertising standards suggested to the many festivals holding events on Daley Plaza," Jim Law, executive director of the office, said in a statement.

Officials with the German American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, which has organized the event for several years, did not immediately return calls for comment. The festival started Thursday.

An executive vice president with New Line Cinema, Christina Kounelias, said the studio's plan to spend $12,000 in Chicago was part of an advertising campaign around the country. Kounelias said that as far as she knew, the Chicago festival was the only instance where the studio was turned down.

Kounelias said she finds it hard to believe that non-Christians who attended something called Christkindlmarket would be surprised or offended by the presence of posters, brochures and other advertisements of the movie.

"One would assume that if (people) were to go to Christkindlmarket, they'd know it is about Christmas," she said.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly ... 39,00.html

[pizza]

"The last time I checked, the first six letters of Christmas still spell out Christ," said Paul Braoudakis, spokesman for the Barrington, Ill.-based Willow Creek Association, a group of more than 11,000 churches of various denominations. "It's tantamount to celebrating Lincoln's birthday without talking about Abraham Lincoln."

That may eventually happen; Lincoln was the Union President and a Republican and celebrating his birthday could offend Democrats and southerners.

[Teresa B]

It's a weird phenomenon--everybody's scared to display Christmas icons for fear of offending non-Christians, yet there is this backlash against PC. The way I see it, it's now becoming PC to express one's own Christmas sentiments without considering anyone else's religion.

In my little medical office, we display a Christmas tree, although I am a non-Christian and I have some non-Christian patients. (The majority are Christian).

Last year I noticed my staff (who are all Christians) making a POINT of saying "Merry Christmas" and NOT "Have a nice holiday" or anything generic.

IMHO, the whole thing is nonsense. Let private businesses display whatever religious icons they want, and let people say whatever friendly holiday wish they want. We are not a "Christian Nation" and I am very uncomfortable with everyone thinking the ONLY correct thing to say is "Merry Christmas." That seems rather Orwellian to me.

Teresa

[Ralph]

I'm planning on celebrating Kwaanza this year. I may put out a display on the lawn.

[RebLem]

Has it occurred to anyone that some Christians, mindful of the story of the the moneylenders being driven out of the temple, might be offended by the association of the Nativity with commercial enterprises of any sort?

[pizza]

Has it occurred to anyone that some Christians, mindful of the story of the the moneylenders being driven out of the temple, might be offended by the association of the Nativity with commercial enterprises of any sort?

Has it occurred to anyone that it is ridiculous to attempt to order life's activities based on the attempt to avoid all possible offense to everyone?

[Teresa B]

Has it occurred to anyone that some Christians, mindful of the story of the the moneylenders being driven out of the temple, might be offended by the association of the Nativity with commercial enterprises of any sort?

Has it occurred to anyone that it is ridiculous to attempt to order life's activities based on the attempt to avoid all possible offense to everyone?

Of course. My point, not so succinctly said, was that battling "PC" can spawn more PC, which is just as bad. Why not follow good old American ideals and let people express themselves any way they wish, as long as no one is harmed?

Teresa

[Gregory Kleyn]

Suppose that film was one of the prophet Muhammed being visited by the angel Gabriel in annunciation of the last and final messenger?

Pizza would be up in arms.

[Ted]

Why not follow good old American ideals and let people express themselves any way they wish, as long as no one is harmed?

Someone has to be harmed…It’s the American Way

[Brendan]

Suppose that film was one of the prophet Muhammed being visited by the angel Gabriel in annunciation of the last and final messenger?

Pizza would be up in arms.

What would such a film have to do with any Xmas or other Western holiday or shopping opportunity?

[Fugu]

Has it occurred to anyone that some Christians, mindful of the story of the the moneylenders being driven out of the temple, might be offended by the association of the Nativity with commercial enterprises of any sort?

Has it occurred to anyone that it is ridiculous to attempt to order life's activities based on the attempt to avoid all possible offense to everyone?

Don't be a fool (I know that's hard). Lincoln, the Republican, in no way resembles the Repuklicans of today. The imbeciles that make up the Repuklican party today may try to trace their lineage back to Lincoln, but they always get caught when they try to get past equal rights and their continued support of the rich over the middle and lower classes.

[anasazi]

Hopefully, poor Christmas will struggle on. The news of it's death, over 40 years ago (yes, even then there were reports) have been exagerrated.

Why drag politics into Christmas? I'ma little bit tired of politics by now, but like Mame, I need a little Christmas.

[pizza]

Suppose that film was one of the prophet Muhammed being visited by the angel Gabriel in annunciation of the last and final messenger?

Pizza would be up in arms.

Damn right if it was intended to disrupt the public Christmas Festival. Let them show it during Ramadan until it comes out of their ears for all I care. But don't be there when the Talibanists show up to shoot the blasphemers who operate the theaters and internet cafes like they did in Gaza yesterday.

[Agnes Selby]

PC stands for Public Criticism of too much Politically Correct.

Where are the wonderful Irish jokes and the Jewish jokes I used
to love so much?

PC stands for Public Concern. Concern because it is Politically Correct to kill but not Politically Correct to laugh.

Politically Correct has not diminished hate, as evidenced by the actor and
the comedian only recently. One gave vent to his accumulated anger against the Jews and the other against the Blacks. A perfect demonstration that PC does not work and instead, creates more problems.

Perhaps Borat is, after all, a breath of fresh air.

Regards.
Agnes.
------------------

[burnitdown]

Borat seems very PC to me in that he's making fun of people with un-PC opinions.

I went to college during the worst of PC, and it is thoughtcrime, highly destructive and very much reminiscent of the Stalin years in Russia. I think any belief system has the ability to seek this kind of control, but the only ones that did are those motivated by "revenge" as Nietzsche defined it. Seeing PC in action completely changed my political outlook.

But, the reason I originally wanted to post...

I'm a Nietzschean with all of the attendant knowledge about the psychology of Christianity. But, to me, it is also the religion of normal people I know who are trying to have normal lives. Christmas is part of this. People who are so shocked and offended that a Christian holiday might exist could learn a lot from looking at their own behavior. What's so offensive about getting together with family on a Christian, formerly (and probably future) pagan holiday, and not worrying too much about the religious aspects? Worship Santa Claus if you want to, but let the kids have a nice xmas.

(sound of soapbox being dragged out of sight)

[Corlyss_D]

When they try to get past equal rights and their continued support of the rich over the middle and lower classes.

More leftwing socialist bs from our resident academic loon. The Dems only know how to destroy self-reliance, breed state-dependent underclasses, and can muster only enough bile and venom to spew at Republicans, so they have nothing left for the nation's real enemies.

[Corlyss_D]

Borat seems very PC to me in that he's making fun of people with un-PC opinions.

I thought so as well. His pranks remind me of two classmates at college who delighted in pulling the same kinds of masquerades on people they thought too trusting or too dumb to see thru their juvenile antics. They were so clever they almost couldn't stand themselves. The objective might have been to make fools of the targets but the real payoff was enthralling others with accounts of their malicious jokes, very much as it is with Baron-Cohen. I thought about seeing Borat, but I don't want to encourage him.

I went to college during the worst of PC, and it is thoughtcrime, highly destructive and very much reminiscent of the Stalin years in Russia.

Well, that was the origin of the phrase. "Political correctness" originated to castigate Russian Communists who didn't toe the line. In the US it is etiquette with claws. We in the US have already enshrined thought crimes in the form of hate crimes, which do nothing to engender tolerance and only serve to punish people for what they think. Another bad idea from Europe chasing out good ideas.

[DavidRoss]

"Politically correct insanity?" Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

[Barry]

Borat seems very PC to me in that he's making fun of people with un-PC opinions.

November 24, 2006
Borat's Misplaced Anti-Semitism
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- "Borat" is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as columnist David Brooks astutely points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly.

But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but which requires at least one elaboration: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude of many liberal Jews toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.

You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making anti-Semitic remarks in order to elicit a nodding anti-Semitic response. And with enough liquor and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most notorious such scene (on "Da Ali G Show" where the character was born), Borat sings "Throw the Jew Down the Well'' in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to counter charges that he was promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool'' to expose it in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not anti-Semitism, then "indifference'' to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path to the Holocaust.

Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart (Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be found in a country and western bar in Tucson?

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.

With anti-Semitism re-emerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost -- is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendents of the same ones that crucified Christ'' have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world.'' Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism -- not "indifference'' to but active -- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual -- et tu, Norway? -- mocks "God's Chosen People'' ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds'') and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded ... on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion.''

Yet amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel and Nixon saved it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.

It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe, where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

[burnitdown]

His pranks remind me of two classmates at college who delighted in pulling the same kinds of masquerades on people they thought too trusting or too dumb to see thru their juvenile antics. They were so clever they almost couldn't stand themselves.

Agreed on all counts, though I didn't use all in the "quote" function. It's one thing to be an intellectual elitist of sorts, saying "this idea is superior to the others," but an entirely different thing to use it in that sneering, sadistic way. There's a lot of people I care about and not all of them are going to make it through the first page of Plato... while that means I disregard some of their ideas, it doesn't mean I ever want to do so sneeringly. I think Nietzsche is right and that sneering instinct corrupts the soul of the sneerer. Everything I've seen at least suggests that is the case.

[Brendan]

Cohen has done some non-PC stuff as well. My favourite was as Ali G with the Vegans: he presented them with a roast chicken and told them he had a live chicken out the back, and he would kill it if they didn't eat the roast. Was it about saving an actual chicken or being holier-than-thou?

[burnitdown]

My favourite was as Ali G with the Vegans: he presented them with a roast chicken and told them he had a live chicken out the back, and he would kill it if they didn't eat the roast.

Heh - the hostage dilemma. Uphold principle or give in to situational logic? What a neat skit.

[Daisy]

I am so beastly sick of living in a PC world that sometimes I wish we'd get taken right out of it - and you know what I mean, fellow Christians. "They" would never miss us, and we'd have the last laugh. That may sound ugly, but again, you know what I mean.

Anyway, has anyone seen the classic South Park Christmas special? You know the one - where everyone has some reason to be offended by Christmas and its symbols and the PC worshippers remove everything. The only thing left is literally a piece of s**t which grey-clad carollers sing an ode to. And in the back of the room is a sad-looking Jesus with a small birthday cake and wearing a bent party hat, singing sorrowfully, "Happy birthday to me".

Says it all.

And then there was the one about Global Warming....

(South Park - rude, crude, tasteless, and the most subtle conservative satire on TV)

[BWV 1080]

I am so beastly sick of living in a PC world that sometimes I wish we'd get taken right out of it - and you know what I mean, fellow Christians. "They" would never miss us, and we'd have the last laugh. That may sound ugly, but again, you know what I mean.

Anyway, has anyone seen the classic South Park Christmas special? You know the one - where everyone has some reason to be offended by Christmas and its symbols and the PC worshippers remove everything. The only thing left is literally a piece of s**t which grey-clad carollers sing an ode to. And in the back of the room is a sad-looking Jesus with a small birthday cake and wearing a bent party hat, singing sorrowfully, "Happy birthday to me".

Says it all.

And then there was the one about Global Warming....

(South Park - rude, crude, tasteless, and the most subtle conservative satire on TV)

that was a great episode. South Park is the best satire on TV

[rogch]

There were celebrations at christmas time long before they became part of christian traditions, but they of course had other names. It is actually an old pagan mid winter celebration. In Scandinavia it is still called "jul" which is the same word as "yule".

[RebLem]

There were celebrations at christmas time long before they became part of christian traditions, but they of course had other names. It is actually an old pagan mid winter celebration. In Scandinavia it is still called "jul" which is the same word as "yule".

Roger,

I really do appreciate your effort to bring some reality to this disucssion, but unfortunately many righties are not interested in reality. Its just sexier to pretend you've been wounded and then try to get other people to lick you all over.

Sincerely,
RebLem

[pizza]

Most intelligent and thoughtful people prefer that their fellow countrymen retain the pleasures of celebrating their holidays and take no offense whatsoever in their doing so. It's the loonie-lefties who try to find something offensive about the other guy's traditions and holidays and then set about trying to foist their nonsense upon the rest of us. Christmas will survive regardless.

[Werner]

A "fair and balanced" opinion from Pizza. I agree completely.

[burnitdown]

A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University's Robert Putnam, one of the world's most influential political scientists.

His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone - from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.

This is a contentious finding in the current climate of concern about the benefits of immigration. Professor Putnam told the Financial Times he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity, saying it "would have been irresponsible to publish without that".

The core message of the research was that, "in the presence of diversity, we hunker down", he said. "We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us."

Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, "the most diverse human habitation in human history", but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where "diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians' picnic".

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c4ac4a74-570f-1 ... e2340.html

If multiculturalism creates an unstable monoculture, it could easily explain Political Correctness as a spasm of discontent.

[lmpower]

The question is how fragmented and balkanized can a society be before it becomes dysfunctional?

[BWV 1080]

ISTM that different groups of Americans have hated eachother since colonial days. There was no love lost between the Puritans, Dutch in NY, Quakers, Catholics in MA, VA Planters and backcountry Scotch-Irish. You do not even have to include Indians or Africans in the mix.

[burnitdown]

ISTM that different groups of Americans have hated eachother since colonial days. There was no love lost between the Puritans, Dutch in NY, Quakers, Catholics in MA, VA Planters and backcountry Scotch-Irish. You do not even have to include Indians or Africans in the mix.

It's never been a working idea, and as we can see, it's not working now. It's hard for me to imagine Quakers not getting along with anyone except via conscientious objection.