@blatham,
You are, first of all ignoring the fact that the terms
politically correct and
politically incorrect are almost exclusively used in relation to liberals and issues that matter most to them (e.g. identity politics). I'm sure it must irritate liberals but I didn't engineer the exclusive association. Blame the Media.
Every now and then an irritated liberal will attempt to make the case for political correctness being as much an obsession of the Right as it is the Left, but there's never traction, because, to a large extent, the examples they use don't fit the mold.
At this moment a controversy has taken over our neighborhood's social media site concerning whether or not our local High School should change its "mascot" from the current "Indian." Apparently, a woman who claimed to be a 2002 graduate of the school and who since moved to Portland (of course!) wrote an op-ed piece in a Portland paper or online site lamenting the great suffering she endured when she attended the HS. It must have been vicarious suffering because she's not an Indian, but then perhaps such is the extent of her empathy that she was able to place herself in the moccasins of the Commanches who well over 100 years ago sold a section of land to a bunch of German immigrants who then created our town. How she avoided cultural appropriation in possessing the spirit of the once proud Indian tribe is a mystery to me, but apparently, she is woke enough to have managed the slippery trick.
In any case, someone in our town saw the article that named names (at least the town's name) and accused the townspeople of all sorts of vile thoughts and attitudes, including (of course) rampant white privilege and even white supremacy! Feeling irked by a run-away's dragging the good name of our town and it's good people through the mud he posted a survey on the community site and asked if the name of the HS mascot should be changed. The three responses from which to choose are
1) "HE DOUBLE TOOTHPICK NO!!!
2) "HECK NO!"
3 "YES"
(I'm not a native Texan and even after 13 years here have no idea what #1 is all about other than it's more emphatic than #2)
Last time I looked the responses were
1) 59%
2) 34%
3) 7%
Not surprisingly just about every person casting a "Yes" vote seems to have felt compelled to lecture everyone else about cultural appropriation, white privilege, genocide, and so on. I did expect to see at least one response from the "No" side that was insulting and invective-filled, but there wasn't. Of course, all posts carry the user's full real name and we are all neighbors so while that fact didn't prevent someone on the "Yes" side from posting
Quote:Oh look, a bunch of primarily white Status Quo Warriors offended by being asked to maybe consider how cultural appropriation is bad. Y'all are an embarrassment.
it may have led to restraint about whiny liberal dumbasses.
My point is that this is a perfect example of what political correctness means today. A few people making a mountain out of a molehill about a supposed offense that can't possibly affect them; on behalf of a group that hasn't even expressed their opinion on the matter, let alone asked to be represented by them.
While being angered about an American entertainer in a foreign land apologizing for the president of the US seemed to me to be a somewhat excessive reaction, it wasn't the reaction of a small minority, it flowed from a deliberate intent to denigrate someone (In this case the US president and while a lot of people don't buy into the notion that he is the face of America, a whole lot do) and it wasn't accompanied by sanctimonious clatrap. "If you don't like it here, leave" may be overly simplistic, but it has a certain common sense to it and doesn't imply that the person saying it is dozens of rungs up the moral ladder from its recipient.
I'm not a huge fan of economic boycotts regardless of the side engaging in them, but they are usually more an expression of the displeasure of consumers (retaliation if you will) then an effort to stifle free speech. Telling someone we will storm where you intend to speak and set fires and punch people is an effort to stifle free speech. Telling them that I will not buy what they are trying to sell me if I don't like the things they say is not. Besides, aren't most of the liberals here forever going on about how there are rightly
consequences to speech? Finally, I'm quite sure that if either of us took the time to look we would find evidence of conservative pundits at the time saying something to the effect of "That Dixie Chick is vapid, but she has a right to say what's on her mind." Did they lead an organized effort to break the Dixie Chick Boycott? No, they didn't, the curs!
Your other examples are ever further off the mark. What you describe in the case of Christians and religious violence is, if anything, hypocrisy, not an example of political correctness, and typically the reaction to criticism of the US by foreigners is directly proportionate to the tone and substance of that criticism. I reacted much differently, in 1971, when a French college student in Paris advised me that Americans were all
baby-killers, citing Vietnam (not abortion statistics) as his evidence, then I did when just this May, a business associate in London told me that he thought our economy was based, primarily, on weapon sales and so we had an economic interest in continuing warfare around the world.
Finally, (yes, I know...finally!) you really are displaying how thin your liberal skin is in your response. Nowhere in my post did I accuse or imply that all or most liberals are guilty of any mental failing let alone an obsession with political correctness.
I do think it is an intellectual disorder that afflicts more liberals than conservatives, primarily because of the required component of sanctimony which, as we know, drives so much of what so many liberals say. However, as you frequently point out, conservatives are not free of all intellectual handicaps
