Philosophical Vegan Forum

garrethdsouza wrote:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-co ... 76271.html

Most of this unsubstantiated social justice political correctness just makes its advocates look like nutcases, and that harms any other message we may be trying to deliver. We need to try very hard not to be weird like that.

I'm going to link this for the millionth time:
http://www.peta.org/living/food/making- ... ucts-food/

That same reasoning applies with being obsessive and anal about political correctness too. There are serious issues in human social justice, but the influence of the way we use words is dubious at best.
Even if you had a valid point (which I do not concede you do -- I believe the opposite in this particular instance) raising such a trivial matter in this way damages the rest of what you have to say in terms of public perception.

It's fine if you personally want to avoid those words, just as if you personally want to read every single minute ingredient and pursue personal purity as a vegan, but criticizing others for not doing so is bad for business in terms of actually promoting more meaningful and evidence based causes.

Vegans should try not to nitpick about tiny stuff.
Social justice warriors of other stripes should try not to be PC police.

And on that note:
While I'm completely on board for the major human social justice issues, I also expect all social justice warriors to be vegan. If they aren't, they're just hypocrites for asking me to help with their causes -- although I wouldn't expect them to avoid saying things like "men are pigs" or using animal related words in a derogatory way (or, even avoiding the little things like honey, or traces of dairy, etc. or a well-intentioned vegetarian dish prepared by a family member). That's just idiotic at this point. We have serious issues at hand, and that kind of pedantic bullshit isn't helping make any movement seem reasonable.

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/01/30/382475295/what-research-says-about-the-consequences-of-p-c-culture

garrethdsouza wrote:http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ ... -c-culture

Interesting article, thanks for sharing.
The study seems to have lacked real controls (ice breakers are proven effective, and the PC topic was a good ice breaker; you'd need to compare a few against that, not just sticking the kids in cold), but I'd love to see more work done on this.

What I was saying, though, is that being a PC nazi makes you look weird, and detracts from what you're saying.
Kind of how excessive grammar nazi-ing other people makes you look like an anal retentive freak.
It's a question of effective activism.

Also, that the whole ableism thing is wrong.

Either you assert that an ant and a human are morally equal in all ways, OR you appeal to the irrational argument of speciesism, OR you appeal to an "ableist" argument that looks at the abilities of the ant (like sentience, and the degree to which it is) to find moral value as compared to the human.

Choose one.