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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

#81

Post by civilian »

cafard wrote: post #61
irrational wrote: post #4

>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.

"if you don't have data, you're just another person with an opinion"

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

#82

Post by ggggtez »

gfodor wrote: post #60

Assuming this study is legitimate (which may be a major assumption given the source) it seems to imply the average self-identifying Democrat's views on speech have shifted radically away from the center over the last 10 years. I'd be shocked if these numbers were anywhere nearly as skewed if this poll were taken, say, in the 1990s during the previous blowback against "PC culture." If the government's role in controll…

The bias of the questions should be apparent. By asking "is it ok to punch Nazis", it never actually ask the respondent what constitutes a Nazi. Are we talking about people who are actively murdering minorities? How do we know what the respondent thought the survey meant when they use words like that?

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

#83

Post by irrational »

mFixman wrote: post #47
irrational wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting people to call you by a certain pronoun isn't the issue at all. Its creating a law that punishes people if they don't call you by your chosen pronoun. A law. Seriously, a law. I'm trying to think of any other laws that punish people if they don't say certain words.

There are already hate crime laws against other minorities.

Well, before today I would have said that refusing to call someone by a certain pronoun could never be prosecuted as a hate crime. If a majority of Democrats really do believe that there should be a law established that punishes people for not doing so, I'm not so sure... That seems as ridiculous as charging someone for a hate crime if they give a transgender person the side eye, but maybe it will happen.

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

#84

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

gfodor wrote: post #46
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg wrote: post #12

> 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…

Yeah I suppose I mixed up the ordering of things.

I view the NFL thing as less about whether employeers should be able to fire due to stating public opinions. If their public image is important to their job or they are doing it on company time that's perfectly reasonable.

Trying to get people fired for not conforming to behavior associated with patriotism is worrying because forced or expected nationalism can be pretty painful.

When I was going to public school there was frequently an expectation to stand and recite the pledge of allegiance. I was pretty uncomfortable with that and maybe view the NFL thing through that lens.

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

#86

Post by humanrebar »

southphillyman wrote: post #19

I don't have an issue with PC culture. It's a way for us to be trained to show empathy and respect for others. "PC Culture" online gradually trained me to not be homophobic and to become accepting of the LGBT community civil right fight. That's just one of several examples that have helped me evolve in the last decade. If the objections to my speech/actions were silenced or discredited it's a good chance I'd still ha…

> It's a way for us to be trained to show empathy and respect for others.

...that is ironically heavy handed, narrow in scope, and unempathetic.

I'm all for people being respected, but PC culture clearly calls pays attention to certain kinds of disrespect more than others.

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

#87

Post by gfodor »

kafkaesq wrote: post #68
arikr wrote: 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 pro…

The thing that seems to have gotten lost is that ultimately the choice for all Americans was between Trump and Hillary. There are many millions of Americans who came into 2016 with the view, established over the last 2 decades, warranted or not, they would never, under any circumstance, vote for Hillary Clinton for president. Within that group, there were many who felt that they would do anything, including vote for a person like Trump, to prevent such an outcome.

Trump is hated now but it's easy to forget what a fundamental difference this was. There were large swaths of voters who would have voted D if literally any other person with a pulse was on the ticket. For the most part, In fact, those people did do just that when they voted for Obama TWICE in the last two elections:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

I think the narrative that the electorate embraced Trump belies the fact that just as much, if not more, of the dynamic was that the electorate, unsurprisingly, rejected Hillary specifically (who by the way, as is known now, cheated the candidate who probably deserved to be on the ticket.)

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

#88

Post by rapsey »

vertex-four wrote: post #37
arikr wrote: 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…

Let's ignore the cesspit that's Twitter for the moment, since I don't know how it works, and focus on interactions in the real world. > They hate the idea of getting in trouble for using the wrong pronouns for people Relatively rarely happens. Does tend to happen if you repeat it consistently and show no attempt at learning - at that point, it's subtle bullying and disrespect. > having to use non-traditional pronouns…

> I don't know how to solve these problems. Most of it is continued education, but how are we going to educate people when there's systems in place - often religious and political - specifically intending to keep people in the dark about reality?

Your reality.

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

#89

Post by humanrebar »

southphillyman wrote: post #80
geebee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds, though, that people used their speech - at a time when their speech was constitutionally protected but neither popular or safe, to change your mind. I think this, among other things, is what Biden may be referring to in his recent comments on freedom of speech.

Yes, I thought about this after I made my comment. I'm looking at my situation in retrospect now that I AGREE with the sentiment that the "PC Culture" was trying to influence me to have. Some other exercising of freedom of speech could be used to influence me to have hateful opinions I suppose. I think the main difference is that usually people agree that being politically correct is good natured in its intent. Oppon…

In the 90s people criticized PC culture for being oversensitive. Now they criticize it for being overbearing and even oppressive.

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

#90

Post by mywittyname »

irrational wrote: post #34

I really want to know about the 9% that believe that MSNBC has a conservative bias and the 8% that believe that Fox has a liberal bias. Are they just trolling the interviewer, or are they so far to the left/right that anything and everything looks conservative/liberal.

I interpret that to really mean, "has a bias with respect to my person views." When read that way, the chart actually makes a lot of sense; the median "balanced" viewpoint ends up being where the actual bias really lays.
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