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Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

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Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#61

>51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. This one blows my mind. A law that punishes people if they don't use certain words? I just... I can't even... Wow.

And 74% of Whigs support a law that requires Americans to believe obviously improbable poll results. That's why I'm voting with either the Anti-Masonic party or the Free Soil party next election.

OK. Sorry for the snark. But I find this wholly improbable.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#62

>51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. This one blows my mind. A law that punishes people if they don't use certain words? I just... I can't even... Wow.

Lets not cherry-pick here, 65% of Republicans want to fire people for bending a knee.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#63
post #9

I think an interesting takeaway for me is that people aren't principled. And of course it's obvious in hindsight, but the scatterbrained nature of this data puts the sheer reality of it right in your face. There's no admonishment intended, this is entirely my err. It's so easy lose touch with humanity on the Internet: discussions are formal, responses are picked apart word-by-word, contradictions are jumped on. But i…

> I think an interesting takeaway for me is that people aren't principled.

Some people are. Not all. I'm not sure how you would differentiate that in a telephone poll.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#64
post #46

> 51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. That is pretty absurd. > 65% of Republicans say NFL players should be fired if they refuse to stand for the anthem. This more absurd. EDIT: maybe I got the order of absurdness wrong.

The first indicates that the government should regulate verbal speech of pronouns of its citizens, the second indicates that NFL team owners a) should have the right to terminate employees for not standing for the anthem and b) ought to do so since (assumingly) it is interpreted as being disrespectful to the dead by either themselves or the fans. The latter seems to be a controversial but sane thing to expect someone…

Or, you know, the questions chosen could have purposely been such that no matter what the results, the liberal responders would come out looking worse.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#66
post #46

> 51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. That is pretty absurd. > 65% of Republicans say NFL players should be fired if they refuse to stand for the anthem. This more absurd. EDIT: maybe I got the order of absurdness wrong.

The first indicates that the government should regulate verbal speech of pronouns of its citizens, the second indicates that NFL team owners a) should have the right to terminate employees for not standing for the anthem and b) ought to do so since (assumingly) it is interpreted as being disrespectful to the dead by either themselves or the fans. The latter seems to be a controversial but sane thing to expect someone…

> Not sure how you can compare the two

Lack of education.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#67

>51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. This one blows my mind. A law that punishes people if they don't use certain words? I just... I can't even... Wow.

Well let's try to understand it. This view must be rooted in the idea that such people have chosen their gender, and therefore chosen their gender pronoun. To not use it then would be like refusing to call someone by their preferred name. I don't know of widespread cases where people refuse to call others by their name after a name change, but I can imagine that if I changed my name and people refused to use my new n…

You're right, it's annoying, but the solution should still be social, not legal.

They could have a protest where every person is called by their opposite pronoun just to show how it feels.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#68
post #2

In case it's useful to anyone on HN working in/on politics, I've been with some Trump supporting and voting people lately, and my takeaways: - They hate the idea of getting in trouble for using the wrong pronouns for people. A few strongly disliked, and most somewhat disliked, having to use non-traditional pronouns at all. - They were very upset about stories of people being suspended from elementary school after usi…

All generally valid viewpoints, of course. There may be questions of degree, and more fundamentally, of proportion to other issues not mentioned. But taken individually, I can get where they're coming from on nearly all of these bullet points. (In particular: while I personally don't think political correctness comes anywhere near in significance to the issues it (clumsily) tries to address -- it is a significant problem in itself, and I can see why it provokes so many negative feelings in people).

It's the fact they chose, as a frontman for this body of positions, a person who's not only blatantly incompetent -- but who may very well get large numbers of us killed (for example, by unnecessarily provoking a confrontation with North Korea) and/or potentially cause extreme, irreparable damage in a whole bunch of other ways -- that's the part I don't get. Or that they can't see this basic disconnect (between the sentiment of their positions; and the reality of the end result of the course of action they advocate in response to this sentiment). When it should be blindingly obvious.

EDIT: Failed to notice that this thread represents the very essence of a "pure politics" discussion, and hence is strongly against site guidelines. Nonetheless your analysis was very succinct and thoughtful.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#69
post #46

> 51% of Democrats support a law that requires Americans use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. That is pretty absurd. > 65% of Republicans say NFL players should be fired if they refuse to stand for the anthem. This more absurd. EDIT: maybe I got the order of absurdness wrong.

The first indicates that the government should regulate verbal speech of pronouns of its citizens, the second indicates that NFL team owners a) should have the right to terminate employees for not standing for the anthem and b) ought to do so since (assumingly) it is interpreted as being disrespectful to the dead by either themselves or the fans. The latter seems to be a controversial but sane thing to expect someone…

Also, professional athletes are basically in the entertainment industry. If they do something that bursts the entertainment bubble, it's undermines interest of the entire company.

Re: Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "America has fallen into," it makes it sound like you believe that this is specific to America, and recent. Was there some historic golden-age that I'm unaware of when people didn't get emotional over political views? (consider the duel of our founding fathers)

I think there was, and it was pre-1990s. Something flipped after that. I feel like before the 90s, there was disagreement, but it didn't take on the extreme, vengeful tactics that it has today. This may be a result of the internet, or the 24hr news cycle, I honestly don't know. But something has changed. There's been a ratcheting up of attempts to silence dissent, and aggressively punish someone for disagreeing.

The end of the Cold War might have had something to do with it. The Other went away, so people pick another one.
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