system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Political correctness, breaking statues, cancelling people from the past, etc are a form of anachronistic bigotry

Consider this thought experiment: 

> Let’s say you are from 2020 where a specific word has inappropriate connotations, so you travel back in time before the word was coined and pick a person at random and convince them of its inappropriate nature in your real present(I.e. their future-2020), but it turned out that when you returned to your real present(I.e. their future-2020), the ethical values had changed in ways beyond you, but in ways that it could accomodate that word without any hint of inappropriate connotations that you thought it implied, in fact, in positive ways. In that case would it be right of you to have done so viz. to have re-oriented someone's point of view without catering to the temporally emergent aspects of language, thoughts, and society.

The idea here is not to create a hypothetical ethical dilemma that has no answer, but to say that this is not hypothetical and we are constantly doing this i.e., all of us are constantly time travelling inside our head. We are constantly judging yesterday by today’s standards. How is this temporal inconsistency justified when there is no ethical baseline at all?

This is not to be conflated with a situation like someone committing a murder 10 years ago and getting punished now. That is a perfectly consistent action as murders have never been a part of acceptable ethical standards since the dawn of civilisation. They do have a baseline for us to evaluate them from, but we wouldn’t apply this to early cannibalistic humans and judge their ethics by today’s standards, would we?

More often than not words and actions acquire new meaning as society progresses, that is why the use of the word anachronistic in the title; just because we can change the chronology(the order of events) in our head doesn’t mean that they can be evaluated by today’s ethical standards; and as we use these words more, it becomes more loose and broad for a dictionary to be able to encompass its essence, and that is precisely why people of past, their words, and actions must be evaluated with this temporal aspect in mind. This is to say that time decides the second order effects and we are not respecting the second order effects with these actions.
gpt
So let's look at statues as the thing that's been pretty predominant recently. By and large, the statues being targeted are of people who, even in their time, were recognized as bad. 

Columbus was deposed by his own employers for his monstrous actions. Confederates were traitors and slavers. Churchill was regarded as not sane when it came to his intense hatred of India and other nations attempted to aid them while he refused. The Founding Fathers were recognized hypocrites for "all men are created equal" and they had rebelled from an empire that was in the process of eliminating slavery from its borders. They themselves recognized slavery as, at best, a necessary evil. 

These people are not being judged by modern standards. These standards existed back when they were alive and they have no claim to ignorance of the morality of their decisions. Similar arguments can be made for the people without statues who are being "canceled".