Giving courtesy a bad name

I like Diarmaid MacCulloch’s take on "political correctness"

When I was young my parents were insistent on the importance of being courteous and respectful of other people’s opinions and I am saddened that those undramatic virtues have now been relabeled in an unfriendly spirit.

To which Mark Kleiman adds:

The polemical assignment of nasty names to virtues has become a regular practice: we now have “elitism” to denigrate the love of excellence and “permissiveness” for to make freedom seem threatening. Whoever invented “political correctness” as a bad name for courtesy did a bad day’s work.

Mark Kleiman

Footnote: MacCulloch's new book looks very interesting, but our collection really doesn't need yet another mammoth tome taking up space, unread, on our bookshelf.