What someone else wrote about politically correct assholes. Well done!

I asked this question. "Is political correctness a good thing or a bad thing?"

Virtually every answer was written by politically correct assholes. But this one was well done:

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So it depends what you MEAN by political correctness. The people who like it tend to think it just means not shouting slurs at people and stuff like that. But PC is actually a very corrosive idea aimed at achieving political supremacy. It's right in the name after all - POLITICAL CORRECTNESS - ie making people choose the "correct" politics. And we all know who the PC stormtroopers regard as the correct choice.

Noam Chomsky and a bunch of other people recently wrote a very timidly worded defense of free speech and were shouted down by Twitter mobs and the NY Times and others for it. That's what PC is really about. It's about making it too costly to express controversial views. Someone who points out that fatal shootings by police are actually NOT racially distributed is branded a racist, and attacked by the mob. This is the beginning of undoing of democracy which cannot survive without free speech.

John Stuart Mill had a great philosophy about free speech. He was talking about defending the right of heretic to say heretical things. In his day such people would be whipped or put in stockade and maybe even killed. Mill said the heretic should be allowed to speak for two reasons:

1) He might be right. We can't be so arrogant as to assume we are right.

2) Even if he is wrong, by allowing bad ideas to be spoken, it forces those of us who hold the right ideas to think about our ideas, and practice articulating them in a way to combat those bad ideas with good ideas.

I would add to his list that by allowing even bad ideas to be spoken without punishment, we encourage those with good ideas who might lack the courage to speak to share those good ideas.

Political correctness, even the mild version, is fundamentally opposite of free speech. While I certainly disapprove of people saying truly racist things, I would rather combat that with ideas and counterspeech...not by trying to impose personal costs on the person to discourage him and others from speaking.

I encourage people to speak openly on issues of race and other controversial topics. Which you CANNOT DO under the current politically correct climate. I'm a libertarian, and I was in favor of police and criminal justice reform LONG before the media started paying attention to the problem. But the Black Lives Matter movement and organization has been hijacked by political advocacy groups that are not moving the issue in the right direction. Yet, I would NEVER say that in public because doing so means I would instantly be branded a racist …. falsely.

-- Entropy