We've always had assholes who take things too far in society (Cosmo from Seinfeld/Michael Richards) was one of the first examples. He hasn't had work since and essentially committed social suicide as a response - which I think is becoming the new standard punishment and one that is way out of whack with who we are as humans. We give the appropriate social reaction, but I feel like it goes too far. People make mistakes, they always have.
But we're going through history with a fine-tuned brush and destroying anyone who doesn't fit into our modern conception of socially acceptable.
It'd be dumb to say the PC crowd is always getting it wrong. They do get it right often, but the pitchfork mob career/life ending response is where I part ways.
Where I differ, and I wish more people took a more rational approach to it, is that we're all flawed humans moving through a fucked up world. And we're unfairly destroying manu great minds and contributors in the process using some idealistic and unrealistic standard that none of us will ever achiever.
The end result is that the only people we allow to be leaders are milquetoast, authority-loving, angels who've never experimented in their lives.
This kind of this destroys culture. And the solution is to stop taking these small highly vocal mobs so serious and look at what they are. New idealistic well-intentioned Puritans 2.0.
We need to embrace the chaos and let people get offended again, and move on with our lives, because it really isn't that bad. It's not the way we reach progress.
If you want progress them embrace experimentation of all kinds, not some overton window with an ever growing list of things that are not okay. Or reevaluating the great people in history as if they grew up in the 1990s/early 2000s.
History is littered with mistakes but it's also full of great moments and experimentation and progress. The more we shut down this chaos every time we get offended the less great culture we'll get out of it.
If in the 1700s+ free speech had a clause where no one can get offended ever we'd live in the most boring and backwards world imaginable. The pseudo-progressives are attacking the very freedoms that allows progress to exist. And we need people will balls again to set up and push back. Because we aren't getting it from our university administrators trying to protector their jobs or from corporate pro-diversity divisions that are trying to keep up with culture, so you keep buy their products.
Top-down control of what is and what is not okay from culture is not that solution, period. Not doing that has allowed culture to flourish in the free democratic western states for decades and we're moving backwards, always with the best intentions, but too quickly to realize the side-effects and massive downsides of doing so.
/rant