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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

“Americans strongly dislike [term which is demonized constantly]”

... you don’t say.

Ask them if they like people using words like fa---- and ni---- and b---- in the workplace.

If the majority of people say they wish they could use those words then by all means write an article to tell us about it.

All this “study” tells us is that people react as trained to a highly manipulated term.

It’s like all the people who say they’re not a feminist but they think women should be paid the same for the same work and rapists should be prosecuted.

“I’m for those things, but I’m against the banner under which they would be naturally advocated for, because I associate that banner with shitty people for some reason.”

All you have to do to hobble a movement is associate its name with some garbage.

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"Excuse me Erik, but "hobble" is an ableist term, its problematic and offensive and you should apologise now. If you don't apologise we will harass your employer for employing an obvious bigot."

That's the kind of Political Correctness people are reacting to is the Richelieu-esque "give me six lines and I'll find something to be offended by" behaviour that is all to common now days.

That's also the kind of political correctness that isn't very common at all. There is always a small slither of truth in the claims but they are amplified many times to achieve the ends.

Yeah, the article was highlighting a noisy fringe who presume to speak for all liberals and react with extreme venom to any dissent. They are annoying and counterproductive, yet have somehow found a lot of purchase in the tech community.

I think we should all tell them to knock it off, rather than being intimidated by their bullying.

Straw man

> Ask them if they like people using words like fa---- and ni---- and b---- in the workplace.

Low hanging fruit. What about using "guys" when referring to a mixed gender collection of individuals, as in "thanks, guys"?

I have seen coworkers publicly shamed by using "guys" in that way. Too often, the negative responses were as if the speaker had said "thanks to the men here only, and not to the women". This, despite knowing that "guys" is colloquially gender neutral [0], and despite knowing that's precisely how the speaker was using it.

I find it troubling that when etymologically gendered words become gender neutral, some people choose to fight to keep those words gendered.

[0] To the point that it is used even when there are no men present.

Using masculine nouns/pronouns in the generic sense is a long-standing tradition in English: "man", "men", "he".

In fact, German (the primary origin of English grammar) uses "Mann" for "male person" and "man" for "you/one/a person".

Sadly, it seems English is unacceptable to a vocal part of the population.

I wonder if it is related English's general _lack_ of gender. In languages where everything has a "gender", people learn that grammar does not have to have a perfect match. German "Mädchen" ("girl") is neuter, and "Bikini" (loan word) is masculine, but those are simply odd parts of the language and everyone gets over it.

> It’s like all the people who say they’re not a feminist but they think women should be paid the same for the same work and rapists should be prosecuted.

> “I’m for those things, but I’m against the banner under which they would be naturally advocated for, because I associate that banner with shitty people for some reason.”

That's an excellent example, actually.

"For some reason"....there are many waves of feminism over the course of over a century, and many variations within those.

There's everything from "Women should be able to own property." to "The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race." [1]

Don't think that "feminism" or "political correctness" or "liberal" or "conservative" have some universal, timeless meaning.

---

The article discusses whether people think the US, right now, is too far to the politically correct side of the spectrum of social communication.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Miller_Gearhart

Alternatively, it's really easy to hobble a movement by having its most visible and enthusiastic proponents actually be total garbage.

I'm a lifelong liberal and I cannot STAND the social justice people. They're the #2 objection I hear when I canvas voters (which the social justice people never seem to find time to do, I guess they're busy on twitter).

I used to claim these people didn't really exist in large numbers and were mostly a conservative media invention, but I've kinda lost the ability to do that in good faith. I try to hem and haw around it now.

What's the #1 objection?

The question is not whether you use the word in the workplace. The question is whether, if you have used one of those words anywhere, ever, should your life be destroyed?

Do you have an example of someone who used words like that outside the workplace and had their life destroyed?

Donald Sterling

I mean, define 'destroyed': he was fined $2.5M and forced to sell the LA Clippers for $2B. That kind of 'destroyed' I would probably be able to live with. Still, as stated in 'Slate Star Codex'

"... banned for life from an industry he’s been in for thirty-five years, banned from ever going to basketball games, forced to sell his property against his will, publicly condemned by everyone from the President of the United States on down, denounced in every media outlet from the national news to the Podunk Herald-Tribune, and got people all over the Internet gloating about how pleased they are that he will die soon"

Is that 'destroyed'? Depends on his state of mind, I guess.

However, people who thought this was excessive and said so publicly were fired. Is that 'destroyed'? Dunno.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140504023509/http://www.gamere...

Paula Deen

She has a restaurant opening near me next spring. I suspect it will do very well.

Seems a little dramatic to say Paula Deen’s life is “destroyed”.

No, she was not literally murdered. She was blackballed.

Someone had accused Dean of saying the N word, which she denied but then admitted to using it years ago. In a matter of weeks, Food Network, J.C. Penney, Kmart, Sears, Target, Walmart and her book publisher all dropped her, despite her apologies for her confession.

Jimmy Carter said, "I think she has been punished, perhaps overly severely, for her honesty in admitting it and for the use of the word in the distant past."

Well I guess “should your life be destroyed?“ wasn’t the question after all then.

I wish people would write clearly on this subject instead of using meaningless hyperbolic language. It’s an important subject.

Nor do I think the question is whether "rapists should be prosecuted".

Would you say that diversity is a core value aspect of the PC culture that the article highlight.

Equality feminism focuses on the basic similarities between men and women, and promote the legal status as equal and undifferentiated for men and women. Activism here focused on reducing gender as a factor in how people treated each other and feminism often merged with humanism.

But then the 1980s and 1990s brought about a new focus in popular feminism on difference feminism, with focus on what they call the essential differences between men and women. In opposition to equality feminism, this view advocates for the celebration of differences, and diversity became a key value of the movement. Polarization also increased on this political area, and here I would insert a claim that there is a direct link of causation here.

I have seen plenty of people who say they are not feminist because they follow the views of equality feminism. They think women should be paid the same for the same work, that humans committing sexual violence should be prosecuted, but at the same time object when people are differentiated based on gender. Women shelter instead of shelters for abuse victims, "mens violence against women" laws instead of domestic crime laws, male/white privilege instead of social economical privilege, female hiring instead of unbiased hiring, and so on.

> All you have to do to hobble a movement is associate its name with some garbage.

Or it could be that the movement changed and not everyone is happy about that.

I don’t think PC culture puts diversity at its core.

It is about demanding a work-focused language at work. And it values not triggering people’s traumas so that they can get their work done.

You’re maybe thinking of affirmative action?

The article defines the PC culture based on the report "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape". This is why I highlighted the polarization aspect, and how the language and activism has changed in the feminist movement while the goal has remained the same. Looking at the report, diversity is a key concept that defines much of the current polarized political landscape.

Demanding a work-focused language at work, ie professionalism, is not mention in the report. I do however see it as something that people in the middle brings up when large companies like google talk about bringing politics into the companies. There is definitively a segment of the population that think that politics and the polarization aspect of it do not belong at work.

> It’s like all the people who say they’re not a feminist but they think women should be paid the same for the same work and rapists should be prosecuted.

Feminism is an odd example. Do you mean gender feminism, postmodern feminism, Marxist feminism, equity feminism, radical feminism, individualist feminism, black feminism, liberal feminism, etc?

You can't even say that the commonality among them is they "think women should be paid the same for the same work" because they don't even agree on what qualifies as a woman.

> rapists should be prosecuted

Few (if any) are debating over whether or not rapists should be prosecuted. The current argument is over whether or not that should be done with or without due process.

This is why feminism is an excellent example - the "PC culture" in the article has similar very wide meaning for each individual.

Whoops, you're right, I completely misinterpreted that post. Thanks for pointing it out.

Passive voice is problematic. Who's doing the demonization and manipulation?

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