PanzerFranzz: In truth, everyone knows exactly what political correctness means
Telika: I'll start with that, because it's the basis of a lot of other assumptions. And it's, itself, a very unprofessionally naive assumption within that report. The first step in (soft and hard) science is to define the terms unambiguously, in order to build a collective reflexion without the blur of miscommunications and shifting meanings. This alone is a large part of the work. But when you make quantitative polls, you have to keep in mind that you are not adressing scientists that went through that trouble. You're adressing people who have a "common sense" understanding (and usage) of a term, and "common sense" is subjective, it's subcultural. It's also fluctuating : people who have no reason to fixate some reference definition tend to use a term differently in different circumstances. That's how ordinary, living, language works, outside of legal or scientific fields (and even within the latter, a meaning can vary from author to author - thankfully explicitely).
It is the case with many "common sense" notions, that sound obvious and are anything but. Patriotism, identity, gender, tolerance, freedom, freedom of speech, family, god, love, friendship, lie, terrorism, corruption, theft, prostitution, honour, dignity, nature, culture, art, game, fascism, violence, good, evil, feminism, racism, intelligence, strength, cowardice, weakness, dignity, etc.. etc... All these everyday words sound obvious, we use them in everyday communications without thinking of it, but in reality, they contain very different things for different people. And qualitative studies are required to explore their local contents. In everyday life, we shrug off the variations. But differences appear, for instance, when people start adding "true" or "real" before these words, hinting at an awareness of these variations. It appears when you support remote struggles based on their slogans or general ideas, and notice afterwards that, in practice, their applications don't match your expectations. Or, more commonly, when people from different ideological group seemingly accuse each others of the same things, that is, use the same words against each others (and in self-definition), with a difference of implied content. You're a fascist. No, YOU're a fascist. No, I fight for freedom. No, that's NOT freedom. Yadda.
"Politically correct" is even more vulnerable than these basic notions, as it's a more elaborate construct. Consider this : The term's origin is in extreme-right currents pushing back against antiracist trends starting to policy or silence their discourses. But my first encounter with this term was in writings from (french) leftist anarchism, using it to denounce the oppressive bourgeois standards of decency and politeness. Calling out the latent racism of colonial France, the bigotry of political religiosity, the hypocrisy of national identities or self-serving, patronizing charities, etc. In that context, "political correctness" was the respect of conservative values and their naturalistic myth of immanence. "Political correctness" was the pressure against crude and derisive descriptions of the self-satisfied facade of society from satirists, comedians, caricature journals, and sociologists.
Such satire is now commonplace, and a lot of the shockingly counter-cultural values of that era are now widely accepted. Common sense has shifted, to a large extend, in our cultures. Other norms and values are now dominant (on a surface level, people usually "know" now that racism is bad, sexism is bad, pollution is bad, authoritarianism is bad - and when they are guilty of it on some level, at least they usually try to present it as something else instead of proudly embracing it). So, normative consensus, against which some individual push back by calling it "political correctness", has shifted content as a whole. But it's never a homogeneous change, and, in the world, or within one country, groups of people always feel oppressed by currents which representatives feel oppressed in return by them. It's partly subjective, but depends a lot on contexts - areas, parts of societies, subcultures, moments, situations, etc.
The result of it is that "political correctness", as a label, has a complex history of being used to designate opposite discourses in different contexts (place, time, etc). It's not a reliable, univocal idea. A given discourse can be arbitrarily designated as p.c. by someone and not someone else. The only common idea is the subjective feeling of one's discourse being wrongly stigmatized as shameful by others, but genuinely shameful discourses exist ("oh no, the p.c. brigade would criminalize me as a pedophile"). Also, as the awareness of the artificiality and ambiguity of this notion spreads, some people are more and more reluctant to use it seriously.
Now, take the opposite. "Hate speech" as it is being called nowadays. It has (for partly different reasons) the same level of ambiguity. Genocide apologists would of course call "politically correct" all discredit brought to their motives (and see the "hatred" in the discourses of antinazis against them). But in the whole spectrum of racist discourses (including unconscious ones, or deliberate backhanded ones betting on deniability, or "mild" ones that "simply" hierarchize populations "without wishing harm", or culturalist variants, or naive well-meaning anthropological ignorance, etc) where would a limit be set ? I mean, a limit beyond which it would be called "hate speech" by objective standards, and below which criticizing it would be illegitimate "political correctness" ? It's a rhetorical question. The point is : people disagree about that. Which mean that people define "hate speech" differently, and thus define differently the threshold of "abusively normative discourse stigmatization".
This is what is illustrated by the huge overlap between people complaining about "too much hate speech" and "too much political correctness". Curbing what you'd call "hate speech" is "political correctness" from the standpoint of those hate speech pundits. The targets of those that you'd judge as "politically correct" are "hate speech" proponents in their eyes. And, in some contexts, normalized "hate speech" is "political correctness" itself. These categories vary widely in-between. You can try to define them precisely, but that's still different from guessing (or establishing through qualitative fieldwork) the individual definitions of the polled people.
It's incredibly disengenuous for someone who supports the criminalization of "hate speech" to complain about a lack of objectivity, especially as you attempt to portray "social science" -- which is notoriously biased and subjective -- as being virtuous and noble.
People who promote the criminalization of speech care nothing about human rights and dignity. What they *do* care about is social control, and I am quite certain that you are well-acquainted with the words that are used to describe them. But if for some reason you have forgotten them, I will be happy to refresh your memory and go into exacting detail about the history of elite "sciences", and the functions they serve.
richlind33: You were mean to me the other day, and I almost cried about it! You meanie!
TARFU: I wouldn't say I was mean. More like gentle trolling, but I knew you could handle it cuz your avatar shows you to be a big tough guy.
My avatar is a meme of epic and legendary proportion, so yeah. And I forgive you. ;p
