The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
One of the best examples is the women's movement in the 70s being confronted internally by minority women blaming middle class white women for winning the right to work in an office building, when minority women had long been holding down jobs and needed other forms of championing, such as against police abuse, or the effects of poverty, or discrimination against their sexaul orientation.
It's insane to reduce the drive for political correctness to a bunch of radical students becoming tenured professors and unleashing their inner prigs against everyone else.
Different racist cultures develop different ideas on what makes someone white. "Yiannopoulos" might be called a 'wog':
The slur became widely diffused in Australia with an increase in immigration from Southern Europe and the Levant after the Second World War, and the term expanded to include all immigrants from the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. These new arrivals were perceived by the majority population as contrasting with the larger predominant Anglo-Celtic Australian people. [1]
All boats rise with the tide I guess.
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Not only lesbian. Living with a Sri Lankan woman and raising two boys. And living not in Germany, but Switzerland.
Seems to bend herself quite a lot to gain power ...
Those people know the restrictions they push for won't apply to them, they are too powerful, quite literally above the law.
> A successful theory of the origin of political correctness has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s, for example? They were concerned with much the same issues. [1]
> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power.
The issue is a factual one. Student protests were in fact a huge contributor to the civil rights movement which was undoubtedly very successful. Applying his theory with this correction:
"The output of progressive movements is political correctness" + "1960s student movement output civil rights" = "civil rights are political correctness"
Of course Paul Graham believes in civil rights, which is why he instead decided that the 1960s student movements must have had no power or effect. Remove the modern context/our understanding of PG and the philosophy of the piece boils down to "things progressives try to impress on society are bad". Vague asterisks in regards to the distant past don't solve that fundamental problem.
>Röhm's appointment was opposed from the beginning by some in the SA who saw it as cementing the subordination of the SA to the Nazi Party's political wing. His homosexuality was seized upon by those who disagreed with the organizational reforms but could not openly criticize Hitler without breaking with Nazism, because of the Führer principle. Hitler said that the personal life of a Nazi was only a concern for the party if it contradicted the fundamental principles of Nazism. The leader of the Berlin SA, Walther Stennes, rebelled against the SA leadership and declared that he and his followers would "never serve under a notorious homosexual like Röhm and his Pupenjungen (male prostitutes)". On 3 February, Hitler dismissed Stennes's objection, stating, "The SA is not a girls' boarding school."
In case it is not obvious from my original comment, I am not trying to paint Nazi party as a beacon of DEI. The Nazi state went on to murder thousands of homosexuals. But in response to the OP, Röhm was certainly not closeted and it is doubtful that his homosexuality could even be described as an 'open secret'.
Seeing all of that, I'm really not sure his boat has been rising with the tide, so to speak. I personally don't believe anyone thinks conversion therapy is good for themselves unless they are deeply troubled.
[1] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/activist-milo-yiannopoulos...
I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out.
One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer
???
How did you conclude that Graham believes this?
Can you quote a specific passage from Graham's essay that supports this idea?
I thought Graham was quite clear in targeting priggishness. He analogizes wokeness to Victorian prudishness. I didn't see any claim that priggishness is inherent to progressive ideology. In fact, he wrote:
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
And also:
>But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
There's a big difference between these two things
* Berkeley's Free Speech Movement: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
* "Free speech is a disease and we are the cure", from the sidebar of /r/ShitRedditSays: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal
"Beginning in April 1931, the SPD newspaper Münchener Post published a series of front-page stories about alleged homosexuality in the SA, which turned out to be based on forgeries. SPD leaders set out to obtain authentic evidence of Röhm's sexuality and, if possible, convict him under Paragraph 175. Röhm was tried five times, but never convicted. During the German presidential election in March 1932, the SPD released a pamphlet edited by ex-Nazi Helmuth Klotz [de] with Röhm's letters to Heimsoth. This second round of disclosures sparked a plot by some Nazis to murder Röhm, which fell through and resulted in additional negative press for the party."
It cannot be more public than that. The Social Democrats used the anti-gay paragraph.
Another known gay Nazi was Rudolf Hess:
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/10/opinion/l-hess-homosexual...
And Klaus Mann wrote a novel about German actor and director Gustaf Gründgens, famous for his Mephisto role in Goethe's Faust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_(novel)
"The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter. Gründgens's homosexuality was widely known."
The whole selective persecution of gays began after Röhm's paramilitary SA surged to 4,000,000 members in 1934, and a couple of people including Himmler intrigued against him.
People like Hess and Gründgens were never touched or exposed even though most people knew.
They just don’t think their daughter swimming against “boys” and then using the same locker room is progress.
Nevertheless, Thiel donated a lot to Trump's campaign, one of its goals being a federal ban on gay marriage and other restrictions of the freedom of LGBT people.
It's reasonably simple: Be sufficiently powerful and your sins will be overlooked (for a recent example: See Donald Trump's "sentence" in New York). And in non-rule-of-law societies your sins-while-powerful will be used against you (this is why democracies historically always had immunity arrangements)
Do you genuinely think you're presenting the "woke" side of the argument in good faith here?
They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...
He wasn't killed by Hitler because he was gay, as the article and parent comment explain. The first public disclosures of his homosexuality came in 1931. Before that, everyone who mattered in the Nazi party had already known for years. He was killed in 1934 for political reasons.
Homosexuality is also a significant problem among the AfD and its supporters. Röhm's example illustrates that it is not paradoxical for a known homosexual to rise to a position of power within a homophobic party. If even the Nazi party of the 1930s could tolerate known homosexuals within its ranks, that ought to tell us how seriously we should take the argument that the AfD can't be racist or homophobic because of Alice Weidel!
I laughed at the beginning when he stated that student movements in the '60s didn't have any real power. Paul, please just take a sociology class or something.