Taboo "political correctness"... just for a moment. (This may be the first time I've ever used that particular LW locution.) Compare the accusations, "you are a hypocrite" and "you are politically incorrect". The first is common, the second nonexistent. Political correctness is never the explicit rationale for shutting someone out, in a way that hypocrisy can be, because hypocrisy is openly regarded as a negative trait. So the immediate mechanism of a PC shutdown of debate will always be something other than the abstraction, "PC". Suppose you want to tell the world that women love jerks, blacks are dumber than whites, and democracy is bad. People may express horror, incredulity, outrage, or other emotions; they may dismiss you as being part of an evil movement, or they may say that every sensible person knows that those ideas were refuted long ago; they may employ any number of argumentative techniques or emotional appeals. What they won't do is say, "Sir, your propositions are politically incorrect and therefore clearly invalid, Q.E.D." So saying "anyone can be targeted for political incorrectness" is like saying "anyone can be targeted for factual incorrectness". It's true but it's vacuous, because such criticisms always resolve into something more specific and that is the level at which they must be engaged. If someone complained that they were persistently shut out of political discussion because they were always being accused of factual incorrectness... well, either the allegations were false, in which case they might be rebutted, or they were true but irrelevant, in which case a defender can point out the irrelevance, or they were true and relevant, in which case shutting this person out of discussions might be the best thing to do. It's much the same for people who are "targeted for being politically incorrect". The alleged universal vulnerability to accusations of political incorrectness is somewhat fictitious. The real basis or motive of such criticism i

My fault for using a politically charged word for a joke (but I couldn't resist). Let's do it properly now: What exactly does "political correctness" mean? It is not just any set of taboos (we wouldn't refer to e.g. religious taboos as political correctness). It is a very specific set of modern-era taboos. So perhaps it is worth distinguishing between taboos in general, and political correctness as a specific example of taboos. Similarities are obvious, what exactly are the differences? I am just doing a quick guess now, but I think the difference is that the old taboos were openly known as taboos. (It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest, but it is allowed to say: "It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest.") The modern taboos pretend to be something else than taboos. (An analogy would be that everyone knows that when you walk in a sacred forest, you will be tortured to death, but if you say: "It is forbidden to walk in a sacred forest", the answer is: "No, there is no sacred forest, and you can walk anywhere you want, assuming you don't break any other law." And whenever a person is being tortured for walking in a sacred forest, there is always an alternative explanation, for example an imaginary crime.) Thus, "political correctness" = a specific set of modern taboos + a denial that taboos exist. If this is correct, then complaining, even abstractly, about political correctness, is already a big achievement. Saying that X is an example of political correctness equals to saying that X is false, which is breaking a taboo, and that is punished -- just like breaking any other taboo. But speaking about political correctness abstractly is breaking a meta-taboo built to protect the other taboos; but unlike those taboos, the meta-taboo is more difficult to defend. (How exactly would one defend it? By saying: "You should never speak about political correctness because everyone is allowed to speak about anything"? The contradiction becomes too obvious.) Speaking abo