Political Correctness – Page 6 – The Libertarian Standard

The NOPD Is “Troubled”

Federal assistant AG Thomas Perez is considering filing a “pattern or practice” lawsuit against the New Orleans Police Department as a result of all the killings and coverups perpetrated by that department since Katrina. Due to niceties in federal law, such a suit, if won by the feds, would effectively allow the Justice Department to determine how the NOPD runs for a while.

What I find most interesting in the coverage of the story, though, is this: Even though Perez wants to take over the NOPD because of a lengthy and recent record of police killings of innocent people and ensuing cover-ups, Perez still can’t bring himself to call the NOPD “corrupt,” “malignant,” “evil,” or even “dangerous.” Perez and a New Orleans defense attorney (!) refer to the NOPD as “troubled,” which moniker the rest of us use to describe a rebellious and unhappy, but otherwise harmless, teenager.

I’m guessing that Perez and the defense attorney avoid stronger language partly instinctively in the avoidance of incurring personal liability (a habit lawyers learn quickly), and partly to avoid shaking our faith in government itself — political correctness at its most transparent. But it makes me wonder: If killing the people they’ve sworn “to protect and serve” earns a police department the label “troubled,” what must it take for these folks to refer to a department as “corrupt”?

Statist The-daism

Anti-Statism, Political Correctness, Statism

By Manuel Lora / April 13, 2010 / 3 Comments / 2 minutes of reading

Political correctness is not the only source of damage to language. Indeed, outright implicit statism has been around much longer than PC. Take, for example, a common question asked when people move: “How are the schools in your area?” By this they of course mean government schools. Then there is the space program (NASA primarily), the post office, the police, the roads. These endless the-daisms are the not unexpected result of the monopolization of goods and services by the state.

The vast majority of people take these the-daisms for granted. One would suspect, however, that unless you lived in a heavily statist society, the majority of the population would reject the idea of having a single provider of homes, food, media or news. “How is the housing in your district?” or maybe “How is the grocery store?” In some states that’s already the case for liquor stores.

Even in industries where there is some competition, such as media distribution companies, we see the-daisms: the phone company or the cable company. Due to government intervention, these providers often obtain the monopolistic, legislative right to operate in a certain area, shutting out potential competitors.

It would sound ridiculous to ask about “the pencil system” or “the restaurant system.” Yet it is somehow perfectly fine to have, or to want to have, a uniform, government health system — the health care system. How unfortunate.

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