Time our society look toward decency and manners - By Jay Moor

Found here. My comments in bold.

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My recent letter on political correctness brought a reader’s huffy response. Puzzled, I did a little research on the topic, wondering why someone would react so negatively to a call for social decency. (Term-switching. "political correctness" is not the same as "social decency.")

First, I googled “politically correct, images.” That produced scores of cartoons and posters, 95 percent of which were sarcastic justifications for overt racism, bigotry and xenophobia. (I just googled the exact same thing. The letter writer is lying. I barely found any racism, bigotry, or xenophobia.)

Most say what my respondent said: Political correctness is a liberal plot to divide the country by submerging “the truth.” Only a few images defended the phrase, but those that did argued, as I did, that being politically correct is one of the main ways to reduce friction in a diverse society. In other words, it is the political expression of good manners. (Actually, it is the political enforcement of arbitrary rules regarding offenses. The offender learns he is an offender after the fact, because the "expression" is judged by the offend-ee and deemed offensive at that point. Therefore, political correctness is a control and manipulation technique which attacks unwitting offenders arbitrarily.

That is how people get labeled for supposedly displaying "overt racism, bigotry and xenophobia." Under the guise of "good manners," offenders are attacked with the most vile names, they are picketed, ostracized, and boycotted. The enforcers of political correctness, drunk with power, hold sway political discourse in this country way beyond the supposed offenses perpetrated against them.

Alternately, these righteous defenders of good manners are fragile flowers who make it a public show of how damaged they are by our careless words. They need safe spaces, reassurance, counseling, and restorative therapy just to be able to function again. 

In any case, political correctness is a power play. Unfortunately, too many of us have blinked first and thus given a platform for the enforcers to beat us down.)

Then I ran across this from the Guardian: “Political correctness: How the right invented phantom enemy Donald Trump.”

This article outlines how and why conservatives have transformed the words, “politically correct,” into the dog-whistle used so effectively by Donald Trump. When Trump calls women fat pigs and comes down on Muslims and Mexicans, claiming it’s because he has no time to be politically correct, he’s saying to America that it’s okay to express intolerance, prejudice and xenophobia and, moreover, to do it in violent ways. The Guardian article is quite detailed in how right-wing academics and others have latched onto the term, “politically correct” or PC, and used it as a weapon against an enemy -- liberal tyranny -- that doesn’t exist. (The author himself ironically engages in the same techniques as the enforcers. He brands Trump's words as unacceptable, attaches pejorative labels, and paints with a broad brush in an effort to obfuscate and distract. 

Let's document the quasi-clever techniques used in this paragraph:

1. An appeal to a sympathetic source to establish his case
2. A gratuitous use of the word conservative, when Trump is far from being conservative
3. An ironic accusation that conservatives have transformed the meaning of words, when it is the politically correct who do that
4. The use of the term "dog whistle," which means there is some sort of code-speak employed by people that has secret meanings.
5. Name calling, like "intolerance, prejudice and xenophobia"
6. More irony in accusing those who object to PC as a weapon, when PC itself is a weapon
7. Summarily dismissing the negative connotations of PC as not existing

The author was apparently unable or unwilling to locate any negative expressions of PC enforcement.)

Because the term, “politically correct,” is now such a mind-distorting fundament in the conservative universe, I suggest we stop using it altogether. (That is, too many people understand that PC is damaging and manipulative, so a new word is needed to relabel the activity into something mor innocuous.)

It is no longer allowed to serve any positive social purpose. (The very point of objecting to PC is that it doesn't serve a positive social purpose.)

It has been turned into a smear-word for demagogues who would harness our ignorance, hatred and suspicion. (More irony. It is the Left that uses PC to smear people.)

Let’s find ways to improve American society using words like decency, empathy and, yes, good manners.