Poll: 71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions | Hacker News Reader

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

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>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.

What blows my mind is that you believe it.

From the same report what White American's (Conservatives's) think/believe:

“The political climate is focused on repressing Caucasians, especially white males.”

“I believe that BLM and Antifa are terrorist groups and are as antithetical to the United States as any neo-Nazi group or white nationalist group.”

“I don’t believe climate change is happening because of humans.”

“I work in a totally PC environment and if I dare state that I feel homosexuality or sexual promiscuity is not in line with what the Bible teaches, I feel attacked and accused of being insensitive.”

“Blacks can have things that are just for them, but no one else can.”

But, those are just about beliefs. None of those have to do with the establishment of laws. 51% of democrats (a majority!) want to establish a law punishing people for not using the right words.

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"

My Wife will be first in the slammer, English is her second language and she often gets he and she mixed up..

My Chinese friends do it constantly. I think he/she is gender neutral in Mandarin.

Filipina by any chance?

I’ve started calling it the war on words.

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 name I would find that annoying.

That said some trans people seem to want to introduce entirely new pronouns that didn't previously exist. That feels like overreach to me. Changing such a basic part of the language by force is not something to take lightly.

Edit: to clarify, I would not support such a law myself!

I agree that I would also find it annoying. We also have social mechanics around asking people's names, and referring to them when we don't know their name.

I think one of the big complaints about the gendered pronouns is that there's no established social path for this. How do you predetermine the preferred gender pronoun of people? You should try a social experiment--- you should ask the preferred pronoun of everyone you interact with today. It'll be awkward, and it might even get you punched.

Conservatives are saying: "hey, it's ridiculous to try to create a law about this, when it's possible to break this law in a truly innocent way."

coffeefilterbrain, I'd also just like to point that we have no law against calling someone the wrong name, and it's generally regarded as a childish thing to do. So I think conservatives feel that SJWs are trying to apply a legal solution to a problem that has a social solution.

> I think one of the big complaints about the gendered pronouns...

I'd say that's definitely a complaint, but a minor one. The bigger complaint is the Orwellian implications of language policing, though the person complaining might not reach for the word "Orwellian" exactly.

I think the issue is using the law to punish people for not agreeing to do this.

> I can imagine that if I changed my name and people refused to use my new name I would find that annoying.

It would also be annoying if my preferred pronoun was "sir" or "his/her majesty". That's an absurd example, obviously, but it's not entirely up to individuals to control language in their vicinity.

Annoying should not equal illegal.

> To not use it then would be like refusing to call someone by their preferred name

So? I don't have to call you anything. I can call you Bob or Samantha or Dingus O'Frankenstein. Legally you can't do anything about it.

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.

This is really interesting because for example my mother tongue (hungarian) doesn't have grammatical genders. Like it's non existent (unlike in english, german, or any other germanic language).

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.

Study looks like it's not scientifically rigorous. But believe whatever you want.

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

That's not the same thing as creating a law. It's the creation of a law that is the issue.

We are starting to apply the techniques of Newspeak from 1984. By eliminating certain words from the language you can't even think incorrect thoughts anymore.

This has been the case for a while. For better or worse, we no longer use "archaic" terms, instead they've been replaced with more culturally appropriate terms that appear to have identical meanings. Mentally retarded -> mentally challenged/disabled has always kind of baffled me as either can be used as an insult.

Oriental -> East Asian always baffled me too, but not being Asian myself. But I guess it's because we don't call the West the Occidental.

They banned ad banners with attractive people having nice toned bodies in London Tube, too bad you cannot outlaw being attractive in real life :).

You'd enjoy "Harrison Bergeron", a short story by Kurt Vonnegut http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

This the reason why services like Gab are on the rise. They guarantee your freedom of speech - which includes "hate speech" - http://wapo.st/2yl0MBP, confirmed by SCOTUS to be legal (http://bit.ly/1V8FdH3).

The reason Google, Facebook, Twitter, Cloudflare are able to get away with outright censorship of what is legally deemed to be free speech, however unpopular or distasteful it may be, is because of archaic laws that do not fit very well with speech over a medium like the internet - the above bad actors all claim private property rights and use those to trump (no pun intended to POTUS :) our constitutionally guaranteed right to (legal) free speech. The scariest/most extreme example of this was Cloudflare's example of its CEO waking up on the wrong foot one day and deciding to remove Daily Stormer's DDOS protections because he felt like it. DS is about as politically incorrect as they get, topping even 4chan's /pol/, IMHO, but it is protected speech.

Until the laws are changed to say that your ownership of a server that hosts my public speech has no right to abridge my expression, this is going to continue ad nauseum... usually through the proliferation of so called "community standards", which is basically another way of saying, "we get to determine what you can say."

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 it's so out of touch of how we think -- we're a bundle of feelings and contradictory opinions trying to create structure and order in a world of chaotic discourse. It's silly to think that a person's opinion about something is the a rote application of abstract principles or vice versa.

So dammit, I'm going to try and do better.

It can also be that a few poll questions aren't sufficient to reveal the nuances behind why people answer certain ways. That said this dataset is invaluable.

> 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.

>(53%) also agree that “colleges have an obligation to protect students from offensive speech and ideas that could create a difficult learning environment.”

Yeah, but who decides what is offensive speech? If some Catholic students feels abortion or birth control are offensive ideas and discussing them are creating a difficult learning environment, should those ideas be banned from college to protect the students?

That's the point of this article. It shows that both sides get very emotional over the things they take pride in. Conservatives get emotional over pride in their national identity (Don't burn the flag!) and liberals get emotional in their pride over racial/gender/sexual identity (you can't tell me what gender I am!).

I think the larger point here (and I'm not sure if the authors themselves saw it) is that regardless of alignment, when people feel attacked they get more emotional and embrace increasingly extreme views.

Perhaps this should serve as a lesson to all of us that unchecked-emotion is the root of political conflict.

No, but there aren't any serious proposals for banning discussion of those things in colleges. People do get punished for violating political correctness.

That being said, there are social norms that make discussion of abortion impolite. It's so advanced that political candidates largely avoid the issue even though voters still use it as a primary litmus test in the polling place.

In my humble opinion, America has fallen into a mindset of righteous indignation. This can be defined as simply one person's opinion is believed to be superior over another, but instead of an understanding that this can be true, or false, or neither, there is an overwhelming compulsion for people to demand their opinion reign supreme, even if it harms the other person. This goes beyond simple disagreement, and takes on a malicious form to silence disagreement, force acquiescence, and punish dissenters.

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.

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 have those myopic views

> 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.

I think this is the "pot of gold" that people employing political correctness are hoping for.

What's unclear is: A) Is this largely effective? B) What are the side-effects of this?

For example, let's suppose the way PC worked was the same, but the topic was reversed. Let's say that "anti-American" (criticizing the executive) views were labeled as xenophobic and politically offensive.

Would that serve to increase political consensus or intensify resentful disagreement?

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. Opponents of "PC Culture" usually are criticizing people for being overly sensitive which implies that the offenses are legitimate but for whatever reason are not worth sacrificing personal freedoms over.

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

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.

> 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 to believe in. The former is 1984-level insanity. Not sure how you can compare the two.

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.

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.

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.

> The survey finds that many microaggressions colleges and universities advise faculty and students to avoid aren’t considered offensive by most people of color. [...] Telling a recent immigrant: “You speak good English”.

I don't understand this one. It's an aggression to tell an immigrant they speak good English? People have told me I speak good English, where they aggressive? I guess they could say it in a condescending or patronizing way. But then again if they wanted to be mean and offensive, they could probably find another way of being mean. A rule about not mentioning how well I speak English won't stop them.

It's also interesting that out of all the places it's universities that go out of their way ensuring nobody is offended about anything. How are they studying history, which is full of terrible things. Are their history departments rewriting ancient texts and manuscripts to excise any disagreeable stuff.

Looking at what happened to my university, it seems after tuition has increased to astronomical proportions, colleges have started to treat students as customers. If you are a customer and walk into a store, you expect to be treated like royalty, especially if you just shelled out a six figure check to them. "How dare they insult me" is a pretty rational, though shortsighted, comeback given the cost of attending the school. The interesting thing happens then after kids graduate. They expect to go through life without ever being offended. I mean, yeah, it's nice to never be offended, but it's also unrealistic.

People have said this to me and whenever it comes up I find myself a little put off by it. I'm not "offended" per se and I don't believe that I'm voluntarily making the decision to be put off by it. However, it just seems weird to me that this person automatically assumed that the brown people country I grew up in couldn't teach me how to properly communicate using one of the most important languages in the world.

I definitely agree with you that it's wrong to call it an aggression and there definitely shouldn't be any rules about saying something like that, but I do think there is something wrong with going into a conversation assuming that the other person does not possess a skill because of their ethnicity.

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 using the wrong pronoun

- They were upset about a professor getting in trouble for wanting to only use male and female pronouns based on biological gender

- "Don't force it down my throat and I won't force it down yours"

- They feel like they cannot express their views without being attacked. In response, they now express their views much more aggressively and will attack others (sadly).

- They hate hate hate many things that they associate with social justice warriors, e.g. political correctness, "safe spaces," etc.

- They like Trump's outwardly strong stance on terrorism

- They were concerned about the decline of religion, and worry that this will lead to more radical extremists (with the radical extremists converting people who feel disenfranchised and purposeless)

- They support gay marriage but were upset at a story of a store keeper who got in trouble for refusing to serve a gay couple

- They (as former legal immigrants) hate the idea of illegal immigrants skipping the queue

- Extreme distrust of the mainstream media

- Extreme distrust and disliking of Hillary Clinton

- Strong distrust and disliking of Obama (will update if I recall their stated reasoning)

- Generally seemed pretty anti-politicians

I'm not intending to invite a discussion as to whether their opinions are right or wrong. I'm just posting these here because I think that for anyone on HN working in politics, it may be important to know why your opponents dislike (their image of) you.

And on changing opinions:

https://psmag.com/news/why-even-your-best-arguments-never-wo...

https://twitter.com/csallen/status/914926162379460609

https://ozanvarol.com/how-to-change-a-mind-yours-or-someone-...

I've seen this as well. The above opinions are held by the majority of trump supporters I know and have been held for a long time before trump.

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.

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.)

> - "Don't force it down my throat and I won't force it down yours"

> - They were concerned about the decline of religion, and worry that this will lead to more radical extremists (with the radical extremists converting people who feel disenfranchised and purposeless)

I'm curious about how they envision remediation of the decline of religion without shoving it down people's throat.

Probably they don't. You can be concerned with something without government force being your proposed solution.

a thing can be possible while still being improbable.

I can be concerned about the decline in size of scoops of ice cream at the corner store without envisioning any sort of remediation. Concern about something and an expectation of remediation don't necessarily go hand in hand.

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 at all

Most enby people I know are at least not actively uncomfortable with people using binary pronouns, although I'll continue to point out that singular they has been correct grammar for longer than anyone has been alive. They might decide to pursue activism towards greater awareness, and some of that is likely to be student activism - they're also likely to create and participate in social spaces where they're respected. It's generally not a problem in workplaces, since enby people are almost universally terrified of being out about their gender at work.

> They were very upset about stories of people being suspended from elementary school after using the wrong pronoun

Doesn't appear to have actually happened. Some kid got sent to the Principal's office once, and I assume got talked to and sent back to class, since no news source says anything else. I can't figure out the actual details on what happened to cause the kid to be sent to the office, since every news story on the subject seems to have a different set of facts, strongly suggesting that at least some of those facts were partially made up. I suspect some teacher was on edge about potential bullying - which definitely happens - didn't realise the kid didn't already know, and the issue probably got resolved without any lasting harm to anyone.

> They were upset about a professor getting in trouble for wanting to only use male and female pronouns based on biological gender

Now that we're talking about adults in an educational setting where people are intended to interact professionally with each other, a failure to respect the adults you interact with - and the people who part-fund your job, at that - is likely to get you fired, yes. The only way you can twist this to be a bad thing is if you thoroughly believe that people with nonbinary genders are not worth respecting.

> They feel like they cannot express their views without being attacked

How do they think many of us feel, and have felt for decades? We spend ridiculous amounts of energy trying to calm their fears, anyway - I spend much of my social time explaining to people in real life why their (usually unintentionally) misguided ideas about trans people are based on incorrect facts.

---

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?

> 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.

Dislike Trump/Brexit/etc. but voting for those is the only way to express the outlined views anonymously and be heard. That and waste as least money on unjust wellfare-seekers as possible.

No offense, but those are all anecdotal observations and include no demographic information. As one person in millions, why do you feel your unscientific observations on this topic are relevant?

I'm a trump supporter and I agree with all of those and I doubt many fellow supporters disagree with anything of it either.

Polling and statistical generalisations hide a lot of detail - they can generally identify the what, but whether they get the why is much more hit and miss.

Most obviously without anecdotal reports on what people believe, pollsters would not know what questions to ask.

he never proclaimed them to be true , it is indeed unscientific observation. what gets under your skin ?

Disclaimer : I am on neither side .

Nothing is really "under my skin", I just don't see how these observations about a few select Trump supporters are valuable in the grand scheme of things. It comes across as stereotyping.

Though published by Cato, an institution with a clear leaning, for me at least these statistics seem to broker an overdue potential peace.

By offering a better understanding of another party's views, it opens up the opportunity to draw parallels that lessen tension.

I will have a nice chuckle if (when?) this post gets flagged... ;-)

It's flagged at the moment.

I found it outstanding that Republicans view the Wall Street Journal as having a liberal bias. A business-focused, capitalist-centric paper, with a liberal bias. I suppose if that's your definition, of course you'll see journalists having a liberal bias as a whole...

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 controlling political speech continues to be a top-of-mind issue for independent or libertarian voters, as it seems to be on track to be given the acceleration of communication over the Internet, then my guess is that the Democratic party will continue to lose power.

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?

Colleges shut down controversial discussion, so they ceded the nexus to the Internet- with somewhat predictable results, in my opinion.

I have learned over many years, that polling data is rarely ever correct and usually contains a severe bias. This same poll can be conducted by a different organization with the exact same sample population and the finding will be "71% of Americans Say Political Correctness Has Enhanced Discussions." Both will have data to back up their claim. And that's why polls are one of the worst ways to obtain information

There were a lot of questions along the lines of:

> ...it’s hateful or offensive to say...

I would like to see more specific responses to this. It seems like people might say yes because:

- they are offended

- they think members of specific groups would be offended

- they think specific people they know would be offended

- they think people generally would be offended

Hateful seems a little more objective, but for many people, hate is a subjective feeling as well, so the above questions could just as easily be reworded about 'hate' instead of 'offense'.

I think breaking things down like that a bit more might help with better understanding. I can't say how many times I've seen people verbally kick sand at each other over what hypothetical third parties think or feel (veterans, immigrants, children, 'the poor', etc.).

It does maybe makes it harder for certain people who have difficulty expressing their thoughts and don't master the language as well to express themselves. But for most people, I think its just intellectual lazyness.

In the Information Age most people with an interest in an issue will have already heard “your” opinion on it, because most people have off-the-shelf opinions that have already been widely circulated.

Until etiquette and discourse norms evolve to incorporate this understanding conversations will be frustrating for everyone!

And even those who don't hold off-the-rack opinions may be inclined to pretend that they do, from fear of alienating others or getting hostile responses to heterodoxy, inability to communicate their position (due to their own or others weaknesses), or just an unwillingness to constantly invest the time required to explain a unique and nuanced opinion.

I'm surprised its only 71%

according to cato

This post is @ 40pts and only 31 minutes old with 2 comments. Seems to me that the poll's outcome is rather predictive.

I read it yesterday on my GN feed. So maybe others have too.

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