Better Dead Than Rude.

the "american conservative' (a publication enjoyed by an increasing number of liberals and regularly featuring authors like Phillip Weiss and James Kunstler...and even publishing articles about factory farming abuse!.... is one of the most innovative thought-provoking magazines today...MSM (main stream media) has become a tool for big corprations and big interests, which run counter to our basic, ancient anglo-saxon liberties. On the pages of the TAC (and interestingly enough to some extent, Mother Jones and The Nation) you see strong, reasoned, thoughtful analysis of current events. Last month John Derbyshire took on PC:
Better Dead Than Rude
Political correctness began as a reasonable adjustment of manners, but as an ideology, it corrupts language and dulls thought.

Cant, n. The expression or repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered ideas, opinions or sentiments; especially: the insincere use of pious phraseology

My household favors the brand of iced tea that has little believe-it-or-not factlets printed on the inside of the bottle caps. The other day, my son opened a bottle of this stuff, turned over the cap, and reading from it, asked the room: “What was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier?” Dad: “First what object?” Son (not very patient with this sort of thing): “The answer’s a whip.” Dad: “I know, but ... ‘human-made’? What happened to ‘man-made’?”

We all know what happened to it, of course. Political correctness—hereafter “PC”—happened to it. To say “manmade” would be wrong. Some female maker of whips somewhere might suffer hurt feelings.

This is the sensibility of our times. Since the late 1980s, when it first came to general attention and acquired a name, PC has been part of our lives. Those of us of a conservative temperament—those, I mean, who demand of any large social change that it be weighed in the scales of liberty, order, amenity, and reason, that it be justified—have been scoffing at, grumbling about, deploring, or excoriating PC for 20 years now, yet its sillier manifestations can still make us gasp.

Item: ‘Stone Age’ is no longer acceptable, joining the list of other words and terms deemed offensive in polite society. ‘Primitive’ also is considered, well, primitive by some. ‘All anthropologists would agree that the negative use of the terms “primitive” and “Stone Age” to describe tribal peoples has serious implications for their welfare,’ the British-based Association of Social Anthropologists said Tuesday. ‘Governments and other social groups have long used these ideas as a pretext of [sic] depriving such peoples of land and their resources.’

—Washington Times

We are all familiar with stories of this kind, laughed at around the office water cooler or retailed on TV late-show monologues. PC is now part of the landscape. We are, in fact, at a point where PC fatigue has set in. News items like this one are as likely to generate sighs of resignation as giggles. In that sense, PC has won. To those who still mind it, PC is now just another disagreeable feature of the environment, like bad weather. And of course, a great many people don’t mind it at all.