The Linguist - language learning should be fun

Political correctness II - the podcast and transcript

I recently did two video podcasts on political correctness. Here is the podcast. Download PC2 ,
and here below is the transcript, for those people who want to use this content for their English study. This audio and text will be added to the LingQ Library, so tha you can use the LingQ tools to learn any useful words and phrases you would like to add to your vocabulary. You can see the videos at my account at youtube.

Transcript:

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.

Political correctness I - the podcast and transcript

I recently did two video podcasts on political correctness. Here is the first podcast, Download PC1
and here below is the transcript, for those people who want to use this content for their English study. This audio and text will be added to the LingQ Library, so tha you can use the LingQ tools to learn any useful words and phrases you would like to add to your vocabulary. You can see the videos at my account at youtube.

Transcript:

Steve Kaufmann here and what I’m going to do for the next little while is that I’m going to record my videos.  I’m also going to record them as podcasts and I’m going to provide transcripts.  This will make it possible for people who want to use these for language learning to do so.

I’m going to talk about two types of subjects, I’m either going to talk about language learning or I’m going to talk about other, call them, interesting, topical, controversial subjects, which I hope will be interesting for people to listen to, because in language learning if the subject is interesting, you’re more likely to learn.

And, certainly, that has been my experience with my Russian studies.  Ever since I discovered Echo Moskvi I have just been fascinated by the range of interviews and daily commentary/monologues that the various journalists on Echo Moskvi have provided me with. 

Now I’m not a mini multitasking Echo Moskvi, but I’m going to try to, somehow, do what they do and I’m going to provide video as well, even though I, personally, don’t believe that video is all that helpful in language learning.  But I asked the question here at my blog, The Linguist on Language, and I would say a majority of people who answered said they like video.

Now video as in a movie with action and people talking to each other is a lot more fun than looking at some old coot deliver a monologue, but I can’t provide drama here.  All I can provide is me talking in a video and I will also provide the audio as a separate file and the transcripts.

Now what am I going to talk about?  Let’s talk a few things here; first of all, I want to stay on the subject of political correctness because it does relate to how we use language.  I made the point that I think we should be free to express ourselves freely, without being constrained by sort of new techniques of dialoging and making sure we’re nice to people, because all of that is hypocrisy.

Whenever I come across people who try to tell me how I should be more considerate and not try to impose my views, they are the most intolerant of anybody’s views that don’t conform to theirs, so I consider that to be just an attempt to squash other people’s points of view.

Now I want to talk a bit about something that came up on Echo Moskvi, which is this very fascinating radio station in Russia that is available online where you download both sound files and text files, which I import, of course, into LingQ.  It seems that in Russia a minister, apparently a very highly-respected minister of the government there, has proposed a piece of legislation that would make it a crime, a criminal offense, in Russia to deny that the Soviet Union won what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War.  They don’t refer to it as II Word War, it’s known as the Great Patriotic War and, of course, it is true that the Soviet Union, by far, suffered greater casualties than any other of the allies.  It is also true that the Soviet Union probably was instrumental, if not decisive, in defeating Hitler, because Hitler committed more troops into the Soviet Union than anywhere else. 

There were some absolutely monumental battles, like Stalingrad, and the combination of the Soviet manpower and the industrial capability that was set up back of the front in the Euros; whether, to some extent, but mostly, this absolutely incredible mobilization of the human and industrial resources of the Soviet Union was responsible for the defeat of Hitler.

Now why would you have a law that makes it a criminal offense to deny that the Soviet Union won the war?  Are there people out there saying that the Soviet Union lost the war?  I haven’t heard them and many of the commentators on Echo Moskvi were of the same tone that this was rather unnecessary and I think a vote amongst their listeners found 75% who said that this was not necessary.

However, it raises some interesting points as, again, the commentator on Echo Moskvi made the point.  Well, he said what if you…for example, there was a documentary film that was produced in Russia, which said that the Russian Army was poorly prepared, poorly led, uncertain of their battles and this contributed to massive losses, which were unnecessary.  In other words, they criticized some of the actors, some of the officers or some of the people, who were involved in the Russian defense of the motherland. 

A leader of the Veteran’s Association in Russia has said that the person who created this documentary not only should be put in prison, but he should be hanged…I find that tone in Russia is very common, you know they don’t come after you in half measures, it’s “hang ‘em”...because he has offended the memory of many people who died defending Russia against Hitlerism and eventually defeating Hitler. 

So should we be allowed to say things that might offend people?  You know what if it’s true that there were officers who were incompetent, drunk or committed troops to battle before they were ready and caused unnecessary loss of life and so forth and so on, should we not be allowed to say that?

It’s similar to the discussion we’ve had in Canada about the massive bombing of civilian targets in Germany during the war by the Royal Air Force, the British Royal Air Force.  Twenty-five percent of those airmen that flew over Germany, obviously, they risked their lives, they were considered heroes and these were dangerous missions, but what they did was they just totally massacred civilians in a number of cities.

Dresden is always raised as the sort of German Hiroshima, but, in fact, the numbers in Dresden have been grossly exaggerated for a variety of reasons and what happened in Dresden is no different from what happened in Hamburg and a number of other cities. 

Are we not allowed to question the tactics and strategies that were used at that time in warfare?  Maybe we are and maybe we aren’t, I don’t know.  Personally, I would be in favor of freedom of speech and that we should be able to question some of those decisions. 

Similarly, here, freedom of speech, you know, I’ve been discussing.  We now have this political correct movement in North America and, yeah, that reminds me.  There is a Canadian 75 year old man of aboriginal origin from Saskatchewan who served in the Canadian Army who was given the Order of Canada and is highly-regarded in the native community and who has -- on several occasions and on one occasion – given a speech where he said the Jews were responsible for the war and Hitler had the right idea in frying six million of them.  I mean he said the most ghastly things.  He was initially accused of spreading hate and then, just recently, a judge acquitted him of these crimes. 

Now, on the one hand, I think it’s perfectly harmless for someone like this to say what he said and if not such a big fuss had been made about it nobody would have paid much attention; they would have just said he’s a foolish old man.  Now they’ve turned it into a major incident so that his words have been written all over our newspapers.

But now the judge acquits him and says he’s acquitted because he didn’t really mean these comments to be public.  I mean of course that’s totally ridiculous, because he said these at a public meeting and he repeated them on several occasions.  So he meant it, there’s no question; he’s just a stupid old man.  But, of course, the only reason he’s acquitted is because he’s native, because that’s a protected group. 

If his name had been John McDonald, member of sort of a high-class Anglo-waspish society, he would have been castigated.  There would have been handwringing and we have to fight racism, this is very bad, it’s widespread and we’ve got to do something, so it all depends on who you are. 

You know we’re going to run out of time on this first video, but I also wanted to comment a little bit on this fellow David who’s come at me on this whole political correctness front, but I’ll have to do that in another video.

Bye for now.