Goon, if that boolean inversion is your sincere take on that argument then the cognitive dissonance you exhibit around side stepping the biggest lessons of the past 200 years in Gedankenwerk around societal change are not surprising. A moral standard "trying to do good" has seen the backside of enough people in the last century and a bit and it's apparent that expending effort in couching this any exact manner for you is a waste.
Most human endeavour is to be taken as someone acting in good faith. However the "moral" stance these days is less frequently tied to people's actions. It's too often degenerated to little more than a virtue signal aligned to some zeitgeist/moving goal of some societal influence, whatever one may fix one's gaze onto ... and that is quite fickle in this fast advancing age with accepted standard of behaviour today may loose you your job next year. Cui bono?
The authoritarian aspect of it: if a simple working guy has to fear for his job for a single uncautious mistake how far away is one from a Moscow show trial or a NSDAP rally or a struggle session?
The lessons of Lenin and co and what ideological nonsense fought it out in Weimar Germany and what followed gave Mr Orwell, Huxley enough relevance to become standard school reading...and so it should stay. Sad how little is leaned.
Timber, if that is what you derived from what I 'said', I despair of my ability to type clearly!
The term 'political correctness' is used too loosely to be useful. As a result, twitterative discussions of the subject (like the one in the present thread) tend muddify, which is why like JohnnyP I was not keen to dip my toe in. But there you go and here we are.
I think that keeping 'political correctness' closer to its historical roots, to refer to actual or attempted enforcement of
political orthodoxy (of the kind that the ANC had in mind when it spoke of sending Julius Malema for political re-education, for example), allows us to be more precise and to communicate more clearly.
What the Jeremy Clarksons of the world (bless their ingenuous tell-it-'like'-it-is hearts) seem to refer to when they apoplectically ejaculate 'political correctness gone mad' is, I suggest, more accurately called
social correctness. [Insert lengthy tract about anxious white men contemplating a world without them as alpha dog who have decided to 'take back' their gods-given place before they've lost it.]
None of this is to say that there are no problems. 'Safe spaces' at universities, for example, where students can hide from ideas that may offend them, are a ludicrous development in USAn universities. As was the (much more alarming, I think) demarcation during the reign of Bush II of minute areas of the USA as 'free-speech zones' to ensure that Bush II was not hurt by the wounding words of naughty citizens in desperate want of 'political correction'. 'Snowflakes', eh?
As for 'virtue signalling', to borrow from our USAn cousins, you'll find it across the political spectrum. What do you think politicians who profess undying love for 'family values' (Manson Family?) are doing? Or when they claim to be god-fearing folk? Or when they claim to be the 'most humble person' an interviewer has ever met? Or when they beg the question by claiming that they will make a thing 'great' 'again'?
In any event, if you disapprove of political correctness but also of its 'boolean inverse', would the correct conclusion be that you approve of
some 'political correctness'? If it is, how much of it, when, about what, and, most importantly, why?
