It's the fact that people are called retards, autists, and homophobic slurs. To some it's about "having thick skin". To others it's about normalizing "hate speech".
It really depends on what your life experience is to determine which camp you fall in. If you've been on the receiving end of hate speech or discrimination, you tend to be in the second camp. If you've lived a relatively privileged life in terms of 'fitting in' to the world around you, you tend to think people just need to grow thicker skin.
And this disagreement between those two groups sums up like 95% of all social media posts right now.
As someone who fell into category 1 for most of my childhood, I think you have the labels reversed. I think it takes a tremendously sheltered privileged life to get offended by such weak words, especially when they're clearly in jest. Thick skin comes from being exposed to the realities of the world and having an idea of the magnitude and context of e.g. those memes compared to actual hate speech such as I experienced.
It's not a case of 'people who never experienced hate speech think its ok', it's a case of 'people who experienced real hate speech can differentiate it from crude jokes and shitposts'
If anyone remembers Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, the American couple who went to Tajikistan and started video blogging to show that 'all humans are kind' and promptly got murdered by ISIS because they had no idea how dangerous the country was? That's the kind of sheltered privileged demographic that gets offended by shitposting. They have no clue what actual hate or actual danger looks like.
Political correctness and victim culture are pretty unique to the wealthier segments of the West and Europe.
The even weirder thing is it's finding a reception among weak-willed administrators at various institutions who capitulate under the slightest provocation from these small groups of highly vocal outage mobs (largely because these groups have gotten really good at stirring up controversy, and the low-budget modern internet media is perpetually looking for controversy, legitimate or not).
But if you did a survey of the general population (or the institution's actual customers) instead of just listening to these small mobs you'd find that it really isn't that big of a deal to the vast majority of people. The average person understands context and intent - assuming they heard the original source, not the filtered down unfunny reinterpretations that make the rounds.
I was listening to a "best of Jeff Ross" on Youtube recently and all I could think of was that if any of his stuff had been filtered through these cancel culture people over the last few decades he'd basically be considered the devil instead of one of the funniest people in comedy.
I fear for the future of culture, especially comedy, which thrives in a sort of experimental unfiltered chaos. Maybe it will have to live on in the underground like Samizdat in the Soviet Union.
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
And that's why you do see people campaigning against hate speech outside of the West and Europe - but much more quietly and less visibly, partly because they're not amplified and partly because (as you've noticed) it's genuinely dangerous for them to do so.
There's a Pride in Uganda. It's illegal. You won't find people telling you not to use "f-g" there, because they don't have the power to say so safely.
Thank you for letting me know that Asia has no complex rules about how to address people, and no social consequences for failure to obey those rules.
The top 5 Asian countries by size are Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. None of them have correctness, in fact all of them are anti-PC and see it as a weakness, especially in China and Russia where westerners are viewed as thin-skinned and weak minded due to PC culture. And in 3 of them people will either express real hate speech or outright violence towards homosexuals.
Your flowery ideals about the world around you are proving the point I was making.
In my opinion this is backwards. You can have people who lived an extremely privileged life, they never experienced that many hardships at all, and so when they see someone being called anything that could be slightly offensive they overreact in defense of the other person, because if they were insulted in a similar manner they would really feel it strongly.
Similarly, you can have people who receive a lot of hate and don't fit in, grow a thicker skin because of it, and then tells others that they should do the same because it worked for them. Those people might have some combination of personality traits that allowed them to grow a thicker skin in the first place, so their advice will work for some people but not others.
From my life experience these two modes happen much more often than the ones you described.
It happens all the time that you use a slur casually and don't realize it applies to someone next to you. If a person is conscious of that happening daily where it's not socially acceptable to say anything, then they may internalize that this is normal and expect others to also have a "thick skin".
Seeing the ensuing discussion: QED
