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I was recently the victim of a politically-correct sub-editor of a distinguished medical journal for which I write. I do not claim to have suffered inordinately as a result; at most I experienced a brief spasm of anger, leading to a slightly longer period of irritation. Then I calmed down: 99.99999 per cent of the world's population would never read what I wrote, and of the 0.00001 per cent that did read it, 99.99 per cent would not notice the change.
On the other hand, as Burke said, liberty is seldom lost all at once; usually it is nibbled away, until - to change thinkers to Tocqueville - people become 'a herd of timid and industrious sheep, of which the government is the shepherd.' (It needn't be the government that does all the shepherding, intellectual apparatchiks will do just as well.)
Therefore, at the risk of sounding and even becoming a little paranoid, and of seeing dangers to our freedom lurking everywhere, even in insignificant phenomena, it is necessary sometimes to protest at the most minor acts of arbitrary power.
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