Nanette_HB:

Well, I think there would actually have been greater understanding of the "intent", and also of the attempted humor if the original post (here at huffington post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher/on-the-ground-with-lamont_b_26316.html) had the least, little, tiny bit to do with race, with Lieberman's hypocrisy over race issues, the fliers in the parking lot... anything at all. If you'll read it you'll see... it did not. Not a thing.

This is what really screamed out "STUPIDITY!!!" to me. I knew all about the context, and thus, what it was all about. But how in the world was anyone else who didn't already know the story supposed to get it???

No way!

on the left coast? Moyers doesn't come on for 20-some minutes.

It's interesting how the real world nibbles at the edges of cybspace from time to time. "Remember me? Remember me?" it seems to whisper quietly.

Haven't you ever heard of a spoiler alert? Dammit!

I, of course, still think he was over-reacting (heh) and should have waited for me to explain, but still... I am more aware now, and now just say ET or space creatures, or something, regardless of who I am speaking to.

Maybe I'm just too pig-headed, but I would have a real hard time with this one.

First off, I grew up on science fiction. So aliens it is--as it has always been. At first I far preferred the stories where the aliens were good. But with time I came to appreciate the ones where they were... alien, I guess. Really different from us. Like in Xenogenesis. So it's never been a pejorative, either.

Second, as a consequence, all my life when anyone would say "aliens" to refer to people from another country, I'd say something to the effect of "Oh, really? Are they from Alpha Centauri?" Or "Where's their spaceship?" A definite geeky teenage guy thing, I know. In origins, at least. But a wierd sort of matter of principle after all these years. I just don't see how someone with with DNA at least 99% the same as mine can be considered "alien."

This does not compute.

OTOH, I don't use aliens as a metaphor much that I'm aware of. So maybe that's why I've never had the sort of experience you recount.

L.W.M.:

I'm sorry...

Fools on the left started this PC shit and it has come back to bite them on the ass.

One more rightwing myth. It deserves a bit of refutation, so here goes.

It was folks on the left who coined the term "PC." It was used--first and foremost on college campuses--to describe those who were obsessed by the minutia of language, to the detriment of any systematic understanding, and action based on such understanding. Those who were PC were the clueless minority. I wouldn't go so far as to say that "PC" was a term of ostracism, but it was a term of opprobrium. You might tolerate someone who was PC in an open meeting or organization. But you would never invite them to a party.

This then got conflated with something larger, which was not, strictly speaking, a leftist idea at all: campus speech codes. As a matter of record, campuses have had speech codes since forever. (Heck, back in the 1960s, when I was in college, someone posted a dress code from a nearby college on our student union door as a joke/reminder what the rest of the world was like.) Colleges have always been regarded as privileged communities, and they have always had rules.

What the influx of the unwashed in the 1960s accomplished was a significant loosening of the exclusionary bonds that had previously been taken for granted. Speech codes--like dress codes--were largely ignored. But this was only a relatively brief period of time, and it lead fairly quickly to incidents of harrasment, and more sustained fostering animosity.

The introduction of revised speech codes to curb abusive racist and sexist language was certainly informed by a progressive viewpoint that saw such abuse as detrimental, and saw those being abused as worthy of enjoying the same collegial atmosphere as anyone else. But that progressive sensitivity went into writing codes whose form and purpose reflected long-standing college norms and practices, altered only to acknowledge women and minorities as full-fledged members of the college community, worthy of being treated with the same dignity as anyone else.

In short, the colleges were simply asserting their traditional values.

There was a wide range of different ways that such codes were written and enforced, most rather sensible, a handful of exceptions, not so much.

Then, around 1990, with the fall of communism, the right suddenly experienced a severe demonization vacuum. This is when they picked up the term "PC," and ran with it. The media just ate it up. It became a classic example of a moral panic. (See Wikipedia on this--they have a pretty good entry on moral panic.) And in the process it came to mean anything that the right didn't like. Global warming was PC. Wearing seatbelts was PC. It was an authoritarian codeword for projecting their own authoritarianism onto others.

Buying into (or, at the very least, mindlessly exploiting) the authoritarian logic that casts loser control freaks as rebels, Bill Maher thought it was a hip to name his TV show "Politically Incorrect," signalling a defiance of authority. Then after years and years on the air, shortly after 9/11, he actually said something that actually was politically incorrect (that whatever else you could say about them, the terrorists who flew the planes into the Twin Towers weren't cowards) and he ultimately lost his job as a result.