Political correctness exists everywhere, from Pinochet's Chile to Mussolini Italy to Thatcher's UK and Mao's China. It simply speech that is politically okay. It doesn't automatically entail "We can't do sunspot research" for everyone, it just means "This doesn't fly because it goes against our ingrained ideals". Political Correctness would ALWAYS exist. It wouldn't be PC to demand Washington to become King, or for George III to abdicate. Nothing more, nothing less. A 'free speech' state defense doesn't work because we already have limits on Free speech - fire in a theatre, death threats against the president, libel or slander laws. PC now ontop of that is more often than not just a way to offer updates to common lexicon (the fading out of slurs, the rising of uncommon labels) and little else.
Except, that I am not necessarily talking about laws governing how a civiliced society should function. It goes without a saying, that you shouldn't stand in a crowd and shouting nonsense like, there is a bomb! Or that you should not deliberalty put people in harm.
However, what we see today is an increase in people that actually demand cencorship and that feel actually 'alright' if free speech as it is now, would be limited so some groups are less offended.
I even had recently a case where it affected a workmate. To give you a bit of background, my live was once threatened by Neonazis, so I am not really a friend of them or their ideology and I pretty much know what racism can do.
In my job I supervice children and we have some pretty troublesome individuals in our groups, there is quite often violence, and the school I work at has issues with drugs and all sorts of shit, like abbused and neglected children and teenagers for example
So yeah, we often have conversations with our pupils when it comes to discipline, descency, respect and pretty much the 'basics' that everyone should understand. So my workmate talked to 4-5 children educating them about respect, since some of them bullied a child and she tried to explain why that was wrong. Well one of them had trouble to understand why his behaviour in particular was wrong. So, after trying to explain it, at some point she told him in her frustration, that if he doesn't keep the boy alone, she will wash his head till he's pale. He was black. And suddenly in his anger, he rushes out and starts telling a teacher that we're all racists. Said teacher who strange enough don't seem to be bothered much about the drug and viollence problem, feel the need to have a discussion with my workmate and suddenly it's about 'racism'.
Was the comment of my workmate wrong? Yeah. Was it racism? No. People confuse subjects here and become offended about the most trivial things while ignoring the elephant in the room. Political Correctness as how it is practised today, is ignoring context. I told the school to start an official investigation if they felt that there was any kind of 'racism' here, which I would have welcomed. But you know what? No one did anything. And why don't they? Because no one wants to stir up to much shit.
