Glitchspot has finally subsided. Right click, view image for maximum funnies:

Apparently I owe a read post, or something.

Anyway, this post is gonna be pretty long, so just a forewarning. For the summary press "Crtl + F" and type "tl;dr". :P

Everyone knows about political correctness and the PC police. They're the people who tell us what we can and cannot say, and what is deemed "offensive". Even on these boards PC is rife in the trivial moderations everyone has received. But who are these people, and what gives them the right to say what is and isn't offensive?

Political correctness goes far beyond the simple tiptoeing around the point people are making. PC is a poor form of social control that causes more problems than it solves. Whilst there are laws that do in fact do the exact same thing, these are saved for the more extreme variants, such as instigating hate crimes and slander. I feel that those laws are needed and a necessity in our society. However PC are unwritten moral codes forced upon us by people who have no clue about normal interaction.

These "moral codes" aren't shared by the general public, however. If you look at some of the recent cases in "political correctness gone mad" then you would surely agree that instances such as not being able to call coffee without milk "black" to be absurd. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the general public again, these rules aren't in place by the will of the people in charge, but the will of the people whom they supposedly cause offense to. Very much like a cIassoom, if one child is given special treatment over the rest, even if it wasn't warranted, then that child will inevitably be resented by the rest of the cIass. Society is no different.

Back in 2006, my local MP Jack Straw sparked a huge debate over the veils Muslim women wear. He asked them to remove them if they wished to see him in his office. While I do agree that those veils make is difficult and uncomfortable for simple interaction with them, and aren't needed in modern society, saying anything against the Muslims in my country will have the "racist" sticker swiftly followed behind it. In my town, where 20% of the population are Muslim (if you saw a map of it, colour coded by race, it would be the epitome of segregation) then you would understand why this could cause problems. There simply is no room for debate anymore. Something has got to give and I'm almost certain that it won't end very nicely. My prediction is of passive pessimism: someone is going to do something stupid which will end up in a riot.

This coincides with the cIasses in Britain as well, more to the point chavs. Chavs are seemingly victims of self-fulfilling prophecies: because they're treated like criminals they act like criminals. However, this has made a pendulum swing of which side people stand on. Much like the racial tension in my town, there is also a "chavs" vs "neo-snobs" rivalry. Going back to my school analogy, the law is tiptoeing around chavs and only punishing those who are willing to be punished. The kids who don't want detention simply run away, whereas the good students turn up. The ones who ran away are given another detention which, surprise surprise, they didn't turn up for. Again, this has created unnecessary tension between the lower-cIasses and the middle/upper-cIasses, however it isn't as easy to pin down. Around my area there are a lot of chavs, however this isn't a poor area. The chav culture has spread, much like the gangsta ghetto culture, to those who aren't a part of that subculture. This simply has now taken the form of demonising youngsters as mad, wild critters, who would sooner stab you with their many knives if you looked at their hoodies wrong.

All this has created a society that simply exists in one place, as opposed to together. Neighbours no longer know each other, everyone keeps their true feelings hidden in fear of being ousted as something they're not, and everyone hates each other for hating each other, which they don't. This spiralling cycle of hatred is absolutely nothing new. There has never been "the good ol' days". However, due to the freedom and availability of the media's frantic search for anything and everything that would signify this trend, our expectations and estimations of how far and wide this is spread is blown completely out of proportion. In my honest opinion, I feel that western society has dug itself a big hole with this. It won't be solved overnight, but we have to start being more lenient to one another before we begin to get ourselves out of it.

tl;dr - Everyone needs to calm the **** down and learn to take a joke.