One useful idea comes from George Orwell: "If you keep the little rules, you can break the big ones." I've found that you can often get away with circumventing procedures, &c. by simply being quiet about it and pretending to be conscientious.
A related idea is quiet networking. I hate networking with a passion, which is one reason why I didn't last in the corporate world. But I did find it useful sometimes to be friendly with people in other departments. If you need to do an end-run around some asinine procedure or political roadblock, it helps to be able to call up your buddy in Payables (or HR, or wherever) and discreetly get the thing done. (NB: this also means you'll be incurring debts, so it's important to be willing to return a favor now and then.) So for low-level cube-dwellers, such as I was, the idea is to learn who can help you, and be nice to them. If you're a supervisor (which it sounds like you are), you may need to learn the network of each of your subordinates.
I realize that's hard for you to wrap your liberal head around but I don't work 8 hours a day , 5 days a week so other people can decide how to spend my hard earned dollars. I work so that I can.
Part of living in a civil society is contributing to the upkeep and administration of the society generally, as opposed to your own welfare. It's called a social contract. That's the idea behind taxes. You may not like how the government spends your taxes, but that's another issue entirely. This taxation-is-theft routine is nonsense. If you don't like paying your taxes, move to a country that doesn't have an income tax.
And, BTW, I work twelve hours a day, six days a week, and somehow I can bear to let some of my hard-earned money go to keep my countrymen from dying of starvation or dysentery. I'm funny that way.
Courses should be tough and unrelenting, a constant barrage of knowledge that grinds children and young adults into suicidal tendancies to figure out which ones are the best at doing work.
This is sadistic crap. Sure, university courses should be tough, but the idea behind education is to help people become smarter and wiser -- not to torture them. Buy a plane ticket to Guantanamo if you're into that sort of thing.
There's a difference between what you can do and what you should do. If we did everything we can do, just because we can, we'd all end up dead.
But since you seem to be in favor of insulting people generally, perhaps there are some more fundamental issues in play here. So let's start with this:
What's supposed to be wrong with willfully insulting an entire subset of people?
Among other things, it gives the impression that you're a ignorant boor.
The real problem is that the PC approach to things is that words should only have one meaning.
It's hard to be more wrong than you currently are. The whole point is that the word has several meanings; that's what slang terms are. The reason some people get tied up in knots over offending others is because they know words can have different meanings. And, for the record, you say that "gay" can mean "homosexual" or "effeminate even if not necessarily homosexual" -- that's a distinction without a difference, since in both cases you're showing contempt for the same quality.
Another example of words with different meanings, and one quite applicable here: "idiot" literally means "layman," though we use it differently most of the time.
Don't be ridiculous. You can express plenty of feeling without slurs. For example: foul, vile, disgusting, ignorant, barbaric, and troll all express plenty of (negative) emotion, without being slurs.
If you want to learn something about the art of non-bigoted opprobrium, read Christopher Hitchens. He's a master. It's a little harder than calling everything you dislike "gay," but it's worth the effort.
No matter what you say these days, you're bound to offend somebody.
The trick is to distinguish between people who are legitimately offended and people who aren't. A slang term that implies that a certain group of people is corrupt ("Indian giver," "He jewed me out of $50") is really offensive. Insisting that jungles be called "rain forests," or that the "Third World" be called the "Developing World", is petty and absurd.
"Gay" in its derogatory sense is simply not a synonym for "contemptible." Saying "Spider-Man 2 was totally gay" does not mean "Spider-Man 2 was totally contemptible."
The word "gay" in that sense means something akin to "Weak; passing itself off as something stronger than it is; unlikely to be well-received by anyone with traditionally masculine values and/or attitudes."
I disagree: "gay", used as a slur, can have either your meaning or mine. It depends on context.
I haven't seen "Fruit Basket" so I have no idea what you're referring to there.
We shouldn't do that either. I struggle with "lame" myself, because I learned that expression when I was very young and never thought about its origin until I was grown.
I try not to be too easily offended. And I also dislike the unbelievably contorted, bland, content-free language that serious PC would foist on us. But somehow I couldn't ignore the use of "gay" as a slur.
So we walk a linguistic tightrope between blandness and bigotry.
By which you mean that politics is contemptible. This is bigotry, even if that's not how you mean it. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing you wouldn't put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really black".
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One useful idea comes from George Orwell: "If you keep the little rules, you can break the big ones." I've found that you can often get away with circumventing procedures, &c. by simply being quiet about it and pretending to be conscientious.
A related idea is quiet networking. I hate networking with a passion, which is one reason why I didn't last in the corporate world. But I did find it useful sometimes to be friendly with people in other departments. If you need to do an end-run around some asinine procedure or political roadblock, it helps to be able to call up your buddy in Payables (or HR, or wherever) and discreetly get the thing done. (NB: this also means you'll be incurring debts, so it's important to be willing to return a favor now and then.) So for low-level cube-dwellers, such as I was, the idea is to learn who can help you, and be nice to them. If you're a supervisor (which it sounds like you are), you may need to learn the network of each of your subordinates.
Part of living in a civil society is contributing to the upkeep and administration of the society generally, as opposed to your own welfare. It's called a social contract. That's the idea behind taxes. You may not like how the government spends your taxes, but that's another issue entirely. This taxation-is-theft routine is nonsense. If you don't like paying your taxes, move to a country that doesn't have an income tax.
And, BTW, I work twelve hours a day, six days a week, and somehow I can bear to let some of my hard-earned money go to keep my countrymen from dying of starvation or dysentery. I'm funny that way.
I know it's heretical to say in this space, but sometimes old technology is better. :)
Courses should be tough and unrelenting, a constant barrage of knowledge that grinds children and young adults into suicidal tendancies to figure out which ones are the best at doing work.
This is sadistic crap. Sure, university courses should be tough, but the idea behind education is to help people become smarter and wiser -- not to torture them. Buy a plane ticket to Guantanamo if you're into that sort of thing.
How do you feel about incoherent, ungrammatical logorrhea?
There's a difference between what you can do and what you should do. If we did everything we can do, just because we can, we'd all end up dead.
But since you seem to be in favor of insulting people generally, perhaps there are some more fundamental issues in play here. So let's start with this:
What's supposed to be wrong with willfully insulting an entire subset of people?
Among other things, it gives the impression that you're a ignorant boor.
The real problem is that the PC approach to things is that words should only have one meaning.
It's hard to be more wrong than you currently are. The whole point is that the word has several meanings; that's what slang terms are. The reason some people get tied up in knots over offending others is because they know words can have different meanings. And, for the record, you say that "gay" can mean "homosexual" or "effeminate even if not necessarily homosexual" -- that's a distinction without a difference, since in both cases you're showing contempt for the same quality.
Another example of words with different meanings, and one quite applicable here: "idiot" literally means "layman," though we use it differently most of the time.
Don't be ridiculous. You can express plenty of feeling without slurs. For example: foul, vile, disgusting, ignorant, barbaric, and troll all express plenty of (negative) emotion, without being slurs. If you want to learn something about the art of non-bigoted opprobrium, read Christopher Hitchens. He's a master. It's a little harder than calling everything you dislike "gay," but it's worth the effort.
You're assuming I'm male, probably on the theory that only an oversensitive man would object to the use of "gay" as a slur.
Have a little imagination. Your blinkered perspective bores me.
No matter what you say these days, you're bound to offend somebody.
The trick is to distinguish between people who are legitimately offended and people who aren't. A slang term that implies that a certain group of people is corrupt ("Indian giver," "He jewed me out of $50") is really offensive. Insisting that jungles be called "rain forests," or that the "Third World" be called the "Developing World", is petty and absurd.
"Gay" in its derogatory sense is simply not a synonym for "contemptible." Saying "Spider-Man 2 was totally gay" does not mean "Spider-Man 2 was totally contemptible."
The word "gay" in that sense means something akin to "Weak; passing itself off as something stronger than it is; unlikely to be well-received by anyone with traditionally masculine values and/or attitudes."
I disagree: "gay", used as a slur, can have either your meaning or mine. It depends on context.
I haven't seen "Fruit Basket" so I have no idea what you're referring to there.
We shouldn't do that either. I struggle with "lame" myself, because I learned that expression when I was very young and never thought about its origin until I was grown.
I try not to be too easily offended. And I also dislike the unbelievably contorted, bland, content-free language that serious PC would foist on us. But somehow I couldn't ignore the use of "gay" as a slur.
So we walk a linguistic tightrope between blandness and bigotry.
Politics is really gay.
By which you mean that politics is contemptible. This is bigotry, even if that's not how you mean it. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing you wouldn't put up a tagline that says, "Politics is really black".