Boordom: Overanalysis of Admitted Simplification

David Friedman writes: 

Loosely speaking, I think the clash can be described as between people who see non-PC speech as a positive virtue and those who see it as a fault--or, if you prefer, between people who approve of offending liberal sensibilities ("liberal" in the modern sense of the term) and those who share enough of those sensibilities to prefer not to offend them. The former group see the latter as wimps, the latter see the former as boors...

...Which gets me to what I suspect is another difference between the two groups—for simplicity I will label them "wimps" and "boors"—their attitude to those who disagree with them politically. The wimps, I suspect, have friends they respect who not only are not libertarian but are well to the left on the political spectrum, hence wimps are likely to think of their opponents to the left as reasonable people who are mistaken. The boors are likely to see opponents to their left as stupid or evil. On the other hand, the boors are rather more likely to have friends who are conservatives, even kinds of conservatives, such as religious fundamentalists or neo-confederates, whom the wimps disapprove of. So in that case the pattern may reverse, with the wimps seeing those they disagree with as evil or stupid, the boors seeing them as holding some mistaken views.

From this we can say that wimps:

1. disapprove of non-politically correct speech.

2. think of those on the left as reasonable and mistaken.

3. find conservatives stupid or evil.

In contrast, boors:

1. approve of politically correct speech.

2. think of those on the right as reasonable and mistaken.

3. find liberals stupid or evil.

Should one choose to be either?  Well, as to the issue of being PC Friedman himself has mixed feelings:

I myself have somewhat mixed feelings on issue of being deliberately non-PC. On the one hand, I find it disturbing that, in our society as it now exists, true statements about certain questions are likely to result in serious negative consequences for those who make them, with the forced resignation of the president of Harvard the most striking recent example. On the other hand, I think offending other people for the fun of it is both rude and counterproductive

Luckily, there's a middle not excluded here that's easily followed: say true statements even if politically incorrect, but don't say those statements just to be rude.  There's no better model than Friedman himself, who is polite to a fault but never flinches at being contrarian.  Doing such, we can all rise above the boor/wimp divide.

Now what of the other characteristics?  Which side should a libertarian find evil and which side should we find reasonable and mistaken?  Of course, both sides are immoral from a libertarian standpoint, otherwise they'd be libertarians, and so far as evil is just a synonym for immoral (and not, by contrast, particularly egregious immorality), we should side with neither.  But mightn't we find one side closer to libertarian principles than another?  Less immoral than the other?  We might! We just might!

But, personally, I don't.  And as to reasonable mistakenness, I find both sides reasonable and mistaken.  Going along with Friedman's hypothesis, perhaps this has something do do with having friends on both sides of the spectrum (but of course, this doesn't tell us which way the causation runs).

See, I'm neither boor nor wimp (though go through the archives, and you can find examples of me being both--my bad), but some unnamed third category, which we will dub "awesome."  And you can be awesome, too.