6 ms·

Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture

draw_down 7y ago
Americans strongly dislike what they perceive as PC culture, but most of us participate in it in some form. In other words, we don't like that others have a list of things we can't say, but we all have a list of things others can't say. The fight is purported to be PC vs politically incorrect, but the truth is everyone has their own little version of political correctness. People rant about free speech but they would never allow someone to burn a flag. They rail against political correctness but they lose their minds when a football player says something they don't like. Et cetera. Or to put it yet another way, the fight is over which ways of curtailing speech are acceptable to classify as "political correctness" and which are not.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  > but the truth is everyone has their own little version of political correctness Personally - I'm ok with you saying whatever you want. Any word, in any context. If I don't like it that's my problem. You can burn a flag too. I don't care.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  I think what you're describing is not that every person has their own little version of political correctness, but that every group has their own subgroup of people who have an instinct to police speech. I'm personally fine with whatever speech you want to use (with the exceptions that are enshrined in U.S. law; no inciting violence, etc.), but I may choose not to interact with you. And I suspect that a sizable chunk of the population actually feels this way.
  - draw_down 7y ago
    Yes, thank you, I agree it operates more on a subgroup level.
0815test 7y ago
I've always liked the Mac more, strangely enough.
CM30 7y ago
Honestly, I suspect there isn't a single place on the planet where the majority of the population likes PC culture, or thinks like many of the more vocal types on Twitter do. The stats would probably be pretty similar in the UK, much of Europe, Australia, etc. Either way, the stats provided also likely hint that the best way to deal with online controversies over political correctness and offensiveness now is simply to ignore them altogether. I mean, at the end of the day, how much of a sales drop does an angry mob on Twitter account for? For many businesses, probably about 0.01% at most. Ignore it, and any issues will just go away on their own eventually.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  It's like the meatspace world never learned the golden rule of the internet: don't feed the trolls.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Right. It's appalling how often I see Twitter metrics drive product decisions --- as if Twitter were the real world. It's a cheap and easy substitute for real market research. When you let Twitter lead you around by the nose, you're going to see an awfully distorted view of the world.
notenoughbeans 7y ago
One of my first gigs out of college was to build a thesaurus for a government agency that would go through their documents and update outdated and politically incorrect terms with a newer and less offensive alternative. It was interesting to see how language evolved over time.
- goodfight 7y ago
  Sounds like you worked in a literal 1984 scenario
  - wtdata 7y ago
    Exactly, this is the definition of Newspeak in Orwell's book.
  - kspacewalk 7y ago
    So replacing "lunatic asylum" with "mental institution" and " Negros" with "African Americans" is Orwellian?
mikelward 7y ago
Quote from Neil Gaiman: http://urbanbohemian.com/2015/08/07/neil-gaiman-on-political-correctness/ http://urbanbohemian.com/2015/08/07/neil-gaiman-on-political... I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.” Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening. I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”
- anaisbetts 7y ago
  Great comment. This is easy stuff: * If someone from a marginalized (or tbh, any other) group says, "Please call me XYZ", do it * If you use the wrong term, briefly apologize and use the right one instead. That's all you gotta do.
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Wrong, you should do the opposite, because they want to control how you think, and you have a duty to keep your thought independent.
    - anaisbetts 7y ago
      Who exactly is "they" here?
    - krapp 7y ago
      >Wrong, you should do the opposite, because they want to control how you think, and you have a duty to keep your thought independent. But... "doing the opposite" as some kind of "duty" because you believe marginalized groups want to control your thoughts is the antithesis of having "independent" thought. Please tell me this place has just broken my ability to detect irony.
sverona 7y ago
There's a semantics issue at play here. Buried about halfway down the article is this: "One obvious question is what people mean by “political correctness.” In the extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them. But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind." In other words, the anxiety is not "oh god I'll have to treat people with basic respect." The anxiety is "oh god they'll cancel me if I make an honest mistake," and possibly "the ensuing social dynamics will mean I'll be out of a job." I'm a trans woman. I get misgendered a lot. Trust me when I say that we can tell, by and large, when it's an honest mistake. The people who are doing it just to be malicious are easy to spot. I'm about as far left as they come and I think "cancel culture," by which I mean the practice of cutting off everyday, actual social interactions with people who say something wrong, is the real problem here. You see it a lot on Twitter, especially leftist Twitter, because there are a lot of people who use social media explicitly to harass others, and so people who don't want to be harassed adjust their priors accordingly and quickly. And, yes, some people do it for the social clout of showing off how woke they are. I think the fact that people are expressing this specific anxiety, rather than spewing obvious racism, says they want to do better but fear they aren't being given the chance. This is irrational. If people correct you, they are giving you a chance. They're not going to turn around and tell their friends that you messed up, except maybe to vent. It won't spread like a rumor. That's all in your head. If people cut off contact with you because of one thing you said, continuing to worry about it or spend time with them probably isn't beneficial to you anyway. On the other hand, if you want to be in someone's good graces, maybe you should listen to them when they tell you how to address them. We call it "political correctness" because of politicians. We hold politicians (and writers) to one standard _precisely because they have the time to compose what they want to say._ We do not hold our friends to the same standard.
- tootie 7y ago
  I'm in my 40s and was raised in a town that was 99% white and leaned republican. Casual racism and violently anti-gay speech was the norm. Living today in a world of political correctness just feels like we're finally all being responsible. I haven't changed my speech or how I address people one iota. I work at a certifiably woke organization and all I see is people celebrating their cultures and treating people like people. Anyone who thinks they have to watch what they say are people who are just used to being assholes to minorities and aren't used to being judged for it.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
It seems that "political correctness" is only applied to liberal causes. Conservatives have their own politically sacred issues, yet there is no pejorative use of "PC" about these issues. Why is that? For example, I find flag fetishism and reciting the pledge of allegiance to be creepy. Wearing flag lapel pins is an effortless show of patriotism. Ascribing heroism to every member of the US armed forces is ridiculous. It would be political suicide for liberal politicians to express such opinions, but the reverse is certainly not true -- conservatives get bonus points from their base for dismissing liberal causes as being PC posturing.

Americans strongly dislike what they perceive as PC culture, but most of us participate in it in some form. In other words, we don't like that others have a list of things we can't say, but we all have a list of things others can't say. The fight is purported to be PC vs politically incorrect, but the truth is everyone has their own little version of political correctness. People rant about free speech but they would never allow someone to burn a flag. They rail against political correctness but they lose their minds when a football player says something they don't like. Et cetera. Or to put it yet another way, the fight is over which ways of curtailing speech are acceptable to classify as "political correctness" and which are not.

xfitm3 7y ago
> but the truth is everyone has their own little version of political correctness Personally - I'm ok with you saying whatever you want. Any word, in any context. If I don't like it that's my problem. You can burn a flag too. I don't care.
toasterlovin 7y ago
I think what you're describing is not that every person has their own little version of political correctness, but that every group has their own subgroup of people who have an instinct to police speech. I'm personally fine with whatever speech you want to use (with the exceptions that are enshrined in U.S. law; no inciting violence, etc.), but I may choose not to interact with you. And I suspect that a sizable chunk of the population actually feels this way.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Yes, thank you, I agree it operates more on a subgroup level.

0815test 7y ago

I've always liked the Mac more, strangely enough.

CM30 7y ago

Honestly, I suspect there isn't a single place on the planet where the majority of the population likes PC culture, or thinks like many of the more vocal types on Twitter do. The stats would probably be pretty similar in the UK, much of Europe, Australia, etc. Either way, the stats provided also likely hint that the best way to deal with online controversies over political correctness and offensiveness now is simply to ignore them altogether. I mean, at the end of the day, how much of a sales drop does an angry mob on Twitter account for? For many businesses, probably about 0.01% at most. Ignore it, and any issues will just go away on their own eventually.

toasterlovin 7y ago
It's like the meatspace world never learned the golden rule of the internet: don't feed the trolls.
quotemstr 7y ago
Right. It's appalling how often I see Twitter metrics drive product decisions --- as if Twitter were the real world. It's a cheap and easy substitute for real market research. When you let Twitter lead you around by the nose, you're going to see an awfully distorted view of the world.

notenoughbeans 7y ago

One of my first gigs out of college was to build a thesaurus for a government agency that would go through their documents and update outdated and politically incorrect terms with a newer and less offensive alternative. It was interesting to see how language evolved over time.

goodfight 7y ago
Sounds like you worked in a literal 1984 scenario
- wtdata 7y ago
  Exactly, this is the definition of Newspeak in Orwell's book.
- kspacewalk 7y ago
  So replacing "lunatic asylum" with "mental institution" and " Negros" with "African Americans" is Orwellian?

mikelward 7y ago

Quote from Neil Gaiman: http://urbanbohemian.com/2015/08/07/neil-gaiman-on-political-correctness/ http://urbanbohemian.com/2015/08/07/neil-gaiman-on-political... I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.” Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening. I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

anaisbetts 7y ago
Great comment. This is easy stuff: * If someone from a marginalized (or tbh, any other) group says, "Please call me XYZ", do it * If you use the wrong term, briefly apologize and use the right one instead. That's all you gotta do.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  Wrong, you should do the opposite, because they want to control how you think, and you have a duty to keep your thought independent.
  - anaisbetts 7y ago
    Who exactly is "they" here?
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Wrong, you should do the opposite, because they want to control how you think, and you have a duty to keep your thought independent. But... "doing the opposite" as some kind of "duty" because you believe marginalized groups want to control your thoughts is the antithesis of having "independent" thought. Please tell me this place has just broken my ability to detect irony.

sverona 7y ago

There's a semantics issue at play here. Buried about halfway down the article is this: "One obvious question is what people mean by “political correctness.” In the extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them. But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind." In other words, the anxiety is not "oh god I'll have to treat people with basic respect." The anxiety is "oh god they'll cancel me if I make an honest mistake," and possibly "the ensuing social dynamics will mean I'll be out of a job." I'm a trans woman. I get misgendered a lot. Trust me when I say that we can tell, by and large, when it's an honest mistake. The people who are doing it just to be malicious are easy to spot. I'm about as far left as they come and I think "cancel culture," by which I mean the practice of cutting off everyday, actual social interactions with people who say something wrong, is the real problem here. You see it a lot on Twitter, especially leftist Twitter, because there are a lot of people who use social media explicitly to harass others, and so people who don't want to be harassed adjust their priors accordingly and quickly. And, yes, some people do it for the social clout of showing off how woke they are. I think the fact that people are expressing this specific anxiety, rather than spewing obvious racism, says they want to do better but fear they aren't being given the chance. This is irrational. If people correct you, they are giving you a chance. They're not going to turn around and tell their friends that you messed up, except maybe to vent. It won't spread like a rumor. That's all in your head. If people cut off contact with you because of one thing you said, continuing to worry about it or spend time with them probably isn't beneficial to you anyway. On the other hand, if you want to be in someone's good graces, maybe you should listen to them when they tell you how to address them. We call it "political correctness" because of politicians. We hold politicians (and writers) to one standard _precisely because they have the time to compose what they want to say._ We do not hold our friends to the same standard.

tootie 7y ago
I'm in my 40s and was raised in a town that was 99% white and leaned republican. Casual racism and violently anti-gay speech was the norm. Living today in a world of political correctness just feels like we're finally all being responsible. I haven't changed my speech or how I address people one iota. I work at a certifiably woke organization and all I see is people celebrating their cultures and treating people like people. Anyone who thinks they have to watch what they say are people who are just used to being assholes to minorities and aren't used to being judged for it.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

It seems that "political correctness" is only applied to liberal causes. Conservatives have their own politically sacred issues, yet there is no pejorative use of "PC" about these issues. Why is that? For example, I find flag fetishism and reciting the pledge of allegiance to be creepy. Wearing flag lapel pins is an effortless show of patriotism. Ascribing heroism to every member of the US armed forces is ridiculous. It would be political suicide for liberal politicians to express such opinions, but the reverse is certainly not true -- conservatives get bonus points from their base for dismissing liberal causes as being PC posturing.