Mob rule isn't the opposite of political correctness going over the edge, mob rule is political correctness going over the edge. Witch burnings? The "Reign of Terror?" The Bolsheviks? National Socialism? Mao's purges? Tiannenman Square?
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I don't understand what's so shocking about what he says. Just think a little bit:
If that's the case then the entire concept of "If you act like an asshole people will not like you." is also mob rule. It forces conformity upon the asshole to not be an asshole.
There is a certain fundy "logic" at play here once you realise that political correctness is the fundy catch-phrase for liberal/leftist thought. If those "witches" hadn't been preaching hate against the true god, they wouldn't have needed burning. If those dang commies weren't trying to destroy the German way of life, Hitler wouldn't have had to kill all the Jewish spies they sent to Germany. If those radical student protesters weren't spewing hate againt the Chinese government, they wouldn't have needed to be run over by tanks. See....it all makes sense...well at least to a fundy.
Fenris_Wulf: Where do you get those Fundivision(TM) glasses, to see things from their perspective so clearly?
Political correctness isn't *just* the attempt to avoid saying offensive things: it usually implies it's gone too far in the other direction, to the point where the truth is considered offensive and hid by comforting lies. It's the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that we have to give nonsense and pseudoscience 'equal time' to real science, and that leads to the idea that no culture can judge any of another's customs morally.
The Russian and Chinese Communism examples are authoritarianism, the exact opposite of mob rule. Witch burnings are a bit more complex -- the closest recent equivalent would be something like lynchings, in that they were ignored by the authorities though (usually) technically illegal. (Most witch burnings were disapproved of by the authorities, though there were exceptions.)
I can indeed see a loose connection with the Reign of Terror, though, in that it *was* an overexuberant dedication to the idea of equality which became corrupted into a hatred of authority. While it's a horribly overblown comparison, I can even see the connection that the anti-science/anti-authority strands of far-left thought need to be watched. (Probably they're more of a risk to science than the anti-science far-right stuff, because they're pseudoscience rather than a denial of science, and harder to spot. Anyone with a real interest in science can easily see why Creationism isn't science; some of the anti-vaccination and alt-med stuff is much easier to mistake for science.)
Word does not mean things just because you want them to have that meaning.
Mob rule could be witch burnings, ok. But there is no political correctness about witch burnings. It's the very opposite, simple (ie uneducated) folks agitated by the church to accuse wise women of witchcraft. And there were witch trials, so some kind of authorities must have condoned the practices.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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