PC-ness tells you nothing about the idea itself, but solely things about how the person responding to it sees it.

The most "anti-PC" people in the US have their own jargon and codewords and "safe spaces" with all the same restrictions, just turned on their heads. For instance, there are very few places you could go where people would tell you to your face that black lives don't matter, but a much larger set of places where it wouldn't be "PC" to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.

Except when people lack empathy, they call it political correctness. My problem is I have not found a good way to teach empathy to someone who is lacking it, repeating someone elses story doesn't work and its hard to get other people sometimes to actively experience the same things that I have (even if its just listening to a story on the radio).

In children, reading fiction is supposed to be one thing that helps empathy.

There's also something called 'decompression therapy' that supposedly helped youths with psychopathy become less psychopathic.

The theory as I understand it goes like this: Everyone has a 'sphere of empathy', they empathize with those inside it but not outside. To a psychopath that boundary is their own skin, to a vegetarian it includes all animals, to a pescatarian all land animals... you get the idea. What makes people's sphere of empathy expand is feeling safe and empathized with, it allows them to risk the vulnerability of empathizing with someone who might betray them. But it's like voluntarily relaxing a muscle - the process is slow, and while the right pressure can help the problem point relax, too much pressure will make it tense up more.

When I was young, a long time ago, the term "politically correct" wasn't in use, except as the recorded reason Stalin gave when he sent people to be executed or imprisoned, namely that they were "politically incorrect." So I'm dubious about equating PC and empathy.

PC was created as a label to accuse the opposition of the same kind of intent.

My recollection is that the first instances where I saw the term "politically correct" widely used, it was unironic and self-applied, in singles ads. This was in Seattle in the late 80s.

That is genuinely interesting, do you happen to have any links or archives to the phenomenon?

Seriously? The concept of treating people fairly is Stalinist?

The issue with PC-culture is that it goes way, way beyond treating people fairly - I've never seen the ironic usage of political correctness applied to situation where it just required people to simply be treated fairly, the term is used when there's something ridiculous done to protect the appearance of treating people fairly or to prevent the risk that someone might get offended because of some interpretation (which has nothing to do with treating them fairly).

e.g. ESPN pulling veteran announcer Robert Lee off a University of Virginia football game because his name is too close to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general is an example of political correctness in action, and that has nothing to do with treating people fairly (certainly the announcer wasn't treated fairly in this through no fault of his own), but to prevent the risk that someone might get offended;

Censoring Huckleberry Finn (for having the n-word in it, despite being a great anti-racist novel of the time) done at some institutions was another example of political correctness - again, there's nothing in the act about treating people fairly, it's simply a fight against "taboo" words or thought, and that is pretty Stalinist in some aspects.

> ESPN pulling veteran announcer Robert Lee off a University of Virginia football game because his name is too close to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general is an example of political correctness in action, and that has nothing to do with treating people fairly (certainly the announcer wasn't treated fairly in this through no fault of his own), but to prevent the risk that someone might get offended;

Pretty sure that the announcer himself asked to be moved to another game.

Given the things that people complain about under the guise of complaining about "PC Culture", yes, to them it probably is.

There seem to be two different phenomena that are both called PC - they might be glibly described as preoccupied with victims and preoccupied with persecutors. If you're not a member of a group associated with victimhood, it's a good bet you've only ever interacted with the latter, but the former are actually motivated primarily by empathy.

I'm quite dubious about equating the modern sense of "politically correct" with that.

The next time I heard it was in the early eighties in a Marxist commune, so I'm not.