I’ve been working a bit on the Political correctness article in Wikipedia and I ran across the best “PC beatup” story ever, starting with a claim from last year that nursery school students in Oxfordshire had been banned from singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. Among the ramifications were the foundation of a new political party (with a plug from Harry’s Place), and worldwide circulation leading to a claim in the Adelaide Advertiser that “black coffee” had fallen under a similar ban. Having visited Adelaide recently, I can assure anxious coffee-addicts that this is, like the rest of the story, a load of old bollocks. (I will admit that “doppio” has displaced “double-shot short black” in Australia over the last few years, a boon to addicts like me who are really in a hurry for their fix).
Going back even further, I once ran a contest to find a Mark Steyn column without either a gross error or a distorted or misattributed quotation. There weren’t any entries, though I gave an award to Tim Dunlop for coining the term “Steynwallingâ€? (failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error). But now thanks to Tim Lambert and TBogg, we have a winner. It’s Steyn himself, who states “incidentally, I stopped writing for the (New York) Times a few years ago because their fanatical “fact-checking” copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge.” (John Holbo has a little bit more fun with Tim’s debunking here)
John Quiggin 
germany has a coffee chain called “mr bleck“, the logo of which is, well, sort of gollywog-esque.
A friend of mine has a company that is known as “Worldwide Facility Management”.
Basically it is a cleaning company.
I would argue that they are using “marketing’ words to promote their company. They avoid describing exactly what they do.
So, could it be that ‘political correctness’ is to the left, what ‘marketing’ is to the right?
Political correctness, and its invariable correlate multiculturalism, has two meanings.
The good usage enjoins people to avoid sexual or racial vilification. It is simply an extension of good manners to the debate over proper forms of cultural association.
The bad usage takes the form of an informal ban on straight talk about diversity. It sometimes degenerates into outright threats of violence against scientists who question the fads and fallacies of liberal arts and the Standard Social Science Model.
Political correctness has become a vehicle for intellectual disingenuity about ideological matters. The massive disconnect between cultural elites and the populus on questions of cultural association is proof that political correctness is still a cancer in the soul of the academy.
More interesting, from an intellectual point of view, is the growing body of evidence showing that biological diversification explains much sociological stratification. It appears that racial/sexual nature is a major factor in regulating social structure. Cultural scripture does not overwhelmingly impress the Inscribed Slate.
One would hope that academics, whose professional duty is to tell the truth, would pull their weight in exposing the bodyguard of lies protecting liberal-Leftists sacred cows. Instead of pooh-poohing the whole thing.
Pr Q says:
Maybe Pr Q should read the science pages of his newspaper and steer clear of fairy tales. Here the politically correct beat-ups are more literal than metaphoric.
I see James Watson just lost his job> for making a politically incorrect – but true – statement. Namely that Africans have substantially lower IQ’s than non-Africans.
I dont know what are the cause of racial and sexual intellectual disparities. It may be ecological envirnoment or biological endowment or something else. It is an interesting question in itself. And the right answer could help many people, given the woes of this continent.
But I do know that Watson is one of the worlds greatest scientists. Apart from discovering DNA, he founded the HUman Genome Project and is the advisor to the Allen Brain Institute. He should not be censored just because of his habit of talking bluntly about sensitive matters.
Larry SUmmers, maybe the worlds best policy economist, got politically corrected a while back for making analagous claims about the intellectual performance of women. He also lost his job.
Is Pr Q, who styles himself as a liberal-Left defender of free speech and robust scientific debate, going to acknowledge that the Left have a poor record in this respect? And that political correctness is driving this illiberal trend? Or is he going to pretend that it is all a figment of Mark Steyn’s imagination?
Australia was in the grip of politically correct thought police. This is not the conclusion of a RWDB. It comes straight out of the mouth of a bastion of the liberal-Left. According to Sally Neighbour:
But apparently those days are not gone. Police reports on the appearance of criminals are still routinely censored by the metro broadsheets.
If liberal academics do not stand up for the honest reportage and analysis of facts then who will?