Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape [pdf]
static1.squarespace.com
static1.squarespace.com
I just started reading it not knowing what I was in for, somehow both easy to digest but still broad and not that shallow. Infographics, survey responses, profiles of 'typical' people in each segment of the political spectrum, etc. Quite an enjoyable presentation.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a227...
(The submitted URL was https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...)
Thought policing like this is not why I participate in the HN community.
You aren't being called out on this behavior so I feel obligated to give you this feedback.
The most important part of the moderation job is to listen for what the community wants and, as long as it's within the mandate of the site, help to realize it. Moderation is necessary because (a) this wouldn't happen on its own, and (b) what would happen would be less interesting.
It only took ~15 minutes to get that far? What's the difference between spending 15 minutes reading hn and 15 minutes reading a report? It's still 15 minutes.
Open it up, I bet you'll find it interesting and get further than you think in a short amount of time.
I don’t have an opinion on the submitted article. I routinely flag posts that are political even if I agree with the contents because nothing good can ever come of them.
However, it's also useful to know people's feelings towards a phrase _without_ defining it, to understand what they feel about the term as _they_ interpret it. This gives a sense of the political atmosphere surrounding a term, which can be just as important as what the term actually means.
This isn't how things would work in some "ideal", perfectly rational world; but that's politics for you.
I think the key is to understand the reason why many Americans reject PC language and culture. Is such language overused due to a fear of being accused of *ism?
Or is it because people believe that communication should be empathetic by default, and doesn't need sanctimonious words to show it off? I generally assume there is no malice in someone else's words, which is especially helpful on the (mostly text-based) internet, where there aren't any para-verbal cues.
It might be illuminating to compare this heuristic to the requirement of a decent scientific paper to summarise related work properly.
The problem is that everyone is hyper sensitive to specific things, even where they claim to oppose political correctness. For instance, most "devoted conservatives" dislike political correctness, but made a big issue out of Obama's passing remarks about "you didn't build that" and "cling to guns and religion". They took great exception to Clinton's comments about "basket of deplorables", but didn't have a problem with Trump's "rapists and drug dealers".
Ie, when the other side says something that offends you, it deserves to be made into a big issue. When the other side is offended by something you say, political correctness has gone too far.
This was started by a concerted effort in the 1980s to turn the country more conservative, which was very successful and backlash to the liberal culture expansion of the 1960s through the 1970s. I don't however believe that the architects of that plan foresaw the damage that would come from polarization.
America has a large reckoning coming as we must learn and define what we want our national image to be. It's certainly no longer the shining city on the rock. We're far closer to the loud, obnoxious uncle at the dinner table talking about what we did in the past. Unless we can find common ground as a country, we're destined to fade in global power far quicker than we should have.
Edit: Typo
Political correctness is most often used as a criticism of the politically sensitive language used by different groups. As a very American example, you just need to look at the terms "Pro Life" and "Pro Choice". From the perspective of the opposing groups "Pro Life" amounts to "Pro subjugation of women at the cost of their individual health and political power", and "Pro Choice" amounts to "Pro infanticide sinful hedonists". Both groups have significant political power in American, and wielding that power they demand respect behind these "PC" labels.
Political correctness isn't new or some kind of distinct ideology, its an exercise or attempted exercise in political power to shape the language and outcomes of our politics. Its our basic civility and the structure of power. What is new maybe is the pace of social and political change of the past 100 years that has made people notice the exercise in new political power more often.
Manipulating language doesn't really work tho', because everyone understands what's really meant. As an example we all actually know that a "full stack engineer" is just a webdev, and a "senior" one probably only has 2 years experience.
I mean back in the days of client-server, you would have developers do a GUI in Delphi or Visual Basic and also write the SQL to run on the server, and noone ever bragged about being "full stack" back then, it was just a normal part of the job. In the early days of the web the same people would write the HTML and the Perl CGIs and no-one ever used the term "full stack". I was there.
It's baffling why people even try these tricks because they're so transparent and in fact only hurt their own credibility.
The earliest example of this I can remember is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul... (showing my age abit there!)
Somehow in the early 90's the term got lifted by the hard right to describe _anyone_ who they believe promoted progressive ideas. I remember when Rush Limbaugh was in his peak, he used the term "PC" constantly. Since that time it has come to be used exactly as you describe by the hard right and increasingly, the mainstream, which happens to also be shifting to the hard right.
Whatever the history, "politically correct" has always been an insult. While there certainly are people who think they're 100% correct in politics, no reasonable person wants to labeled by others as "PC".
Unfortunately, there's been some developments which make me wonder whether some are actually embracing the term without irony. That's disturbing and it is a sign that really, really bad stuff may be coming.
1) "Political correctness" has always meant "excessive language policing from the left" rather than anything more concrete—it was a pejorative term even before it was introduced to the general public in 1990 on the pages of the New York Times—so it's no surprise that it has a bad reputation.
2) It's kind of ironic to use a research paper by a group called More In Common, who seek to counteract polarisation, to slam a particular political group.
From experience that's more or less correct. I'm on the left and the majority of my friends are also on the left and we make fun of PC.
Why are so many people easily offended by language? I remember when Larry David did a funny bit about holocaust and people gone mad, "you can't joke about the holocaust". I think this is the PC that most people hate.
https://www.google.com/search?q=political+correctness&ie=utf...
Just because you managed to Google ONE definition of PC culture, it does not mean the people answering the study poll had the same thing in mind. Which is a bit of problem for methodology and the result itself. Especially in such a wide social topic like political correctness.
PC has one definition, but of course you can make up others
And definitions are never complex, multifaceted or problematic, eh? Thank goodness language is so simple and clear.
Bear in mind that any working democracy has to actively protect minorities, because otherwise it would decline into a tyranny of the majority.
Edit: There was a bit of a misunderstanding here, I'm afraid. Please see me other post about it. In a nutshell, you need to take the actual victims of discrimination seriously or have a lot of empathy, otherwise it will be difficult to judge the many arguments for and against some particular form of PC.
I am a minority. No it isn't. It is simply one faction of the dominant caste using us as pawns in its war on another faction.
LOL. Were you elected to speak for all minorities?
I was also not arguing for or against PC, as some people who replied erroneously presumed, too.
The arguments for and against PC are complex, and "political correctness" is an umbrella term for many different forms of nudging, regulation, etc., and every PC issue has different arguments for and against.
Make a similar survey about Americans' opinions about the IRS and you'll probably get the result that the majority of Americans dislike the IRS. It's safe to bet that the majority of this majority hasn't really thought this through either. Ask Americans about the police, and you probably get the same result. And so on, and so forth.
These kind of surveys don't tell us anything except that most Americans do not really spend much time thinking about the arguments for or against the issue under consideration. Why should they? For most people, PC will merely be an annoying and slightly silly behavioral regulation, because they have not become the victim of any serious discrimination in their life so far.
Since PC is about the protection of minorities, which is essential to a working democracy, it will concern those members of a minority the most who have actually been victims of discrimination. These are the people you have to listen to first and foremost, not to your "gut feeling" or to your political views and peers.
PS: I am actually mildly disabled. But then, that's the thing, isn't it? Everybody is going to be a minority at some point in their life, if you're old, if you have kids, if you have an injury - then you get the hard side of a society that caters for white able-bodied men.
Indeed. Here's a concrete example of PC culture banning a word and shaming people who actually have the condition https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/press/facts/brainstorming-offens...
93 per cent of people with epilepsy did not find the term derogatory or offensive in any way and many felt that this sort of political correctness singled out people with epilepsy as being easily offended.
"Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness."
"Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem.
If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education."
"Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.
So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are."
Aside from that, I disagree that PC is primarily intended to protect minorities. It is an attempt to control language and therefore people's thoughts, which is insidious. If one result of PC is less negative discrimination the other results are too high a price.