Telika: Ok, just this.
To summarize where I stand as a person, that is, where my post "comes from" :
- I am against Linko's firing (if it's based on that tweet)
- I am on the ravenous liberal side (I have infinitely much more sympathy, esteem and respect for a SirPrim or Vainam than for any Richlind or Rwarehall)
- I do think that internet's global communication has the perverse effect of putting different subcultures in contact without providing the codes required to comprehend them, and that out culture of speed and our glorification of knee-jerk responses (and "strong positions") make such comprehension impossible.
- I consider that the offensiveness of that hashtag's deliberate misuse was overblown.
- I don't believe in good faith in internet gaming forums (that is, in actual intentions of "communicating", "discussing", "understanding", etc). These exchanges tend to be pure "everything goes" attempts at "scoring points" with no regard for intellectual honesty. And I loathe this. So, expect general contempt from my side.
Make of that background what you want. But from there, I'd just like to point out this :
There is absolutely zero "intellectualism" in the way that these stats from the More In Commons Hidden Tribes reports are being used here. Not only the source data itself is a tad dubious (I'm a bit prejudiced against thinktanks, be they left-winged or right-winged, and the stats they show here result from a very clunky methodology, questions with ambiguous and loaded terms, etc), but that data is lazily misused in your post's rhetorics (equating those 8% "progressive activists" to the people outraged by Linko's tweet, based on their statistically lower scare of "political correctness"). The mere fact that you directly identify positions with groups instead of checking distribution ("49% of A think this while 51% of B think this therefore B thinks this and A doesn't") shows a very superficial interest in the matter, but that's almost a detail. Jumping from "don't think PC is an issue" to "having no problem with that tweet" is dishonest, given how "political correctness" means something different to so many people, and in particular seeing the large overlap, in these statistics, between people who "think PC is a problem" and those who "think hate speech is a problem". A person who'd consider a given tweet to be problematic ("hate speech") would be called oppressively "politically correct" by the tweet's aother, and yet would be statistically likely to denounce "political correctness" themself.
Anyway, that's some of the issues that you overlook. Questionning the data (for instance : what people meant by "PC" when they complain about it), and thinking about what the data actually tells and doesn't tell (something you didn't give much time to, eager to instrumentalize the most convenient inference possible) would have been the first steps in a genuine discussion.
My point is : Don't play the "science" card if it's just to cherry pick vague numbers with zero reflexivity, for cheap rhetorical effects. The reality is : you don't even care about the realities behind it, but just seek to re-use whatever argument sounds cool enough (to yourself and your side). And that's the norm on such boards.
So yeah, when I read stuff like
chandra: engage in the
discussion that this thread is about
Telika: I do giggle.
Thank you for taking the time to respond articulately here. You're right, I probably did confuse things by pointing out two different variables at once.
As far as you pointing out the stat on hate speech from the same study, that is irrelevant to our current discussion, unless you are attempting to say that Linko90 did something that meets the definition of hate speech?
"Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity" -Wikipedia
If you do think re-tweeting an innocuous hashtag in a different context is hate speech and thus a fireable offense, then you're probably in the 7% of people who strongly disagree that political correctness has gone too far.
Again, thank you for taking the time to respond articulately here. Like I said before, you're right, I probably did confuse things by pointing out two different variables at once (although as they both tended to support each other, I didn't think weakened the overall point to the degree you implied it did) but your idea that the "source data itself is a tad dubious...and the stats they show here result from a very clunky methodology" is simply not substantiated by anything else you've written here, as you haven't given a specific critique of their research design other then your opinion that some questions used "loaded terms." In truth, everyone knows exactly what political correctness means and everything they published used a statistical model with a 95% Confidence Interval, as you can check for yourself in the appendix.
Your suggestion that: "A person who'd consider a given tweet to be problematic ("hate speech") would be called oppressively "politically correct" by the tweet's aother, and yet would be statistically likely to denounce "political correctness" themself." is rather counter-inuative to suggest that people who consider innocous tweets to be ffensive hate speech are not politically correct themselves - no one is confusing political correctness, we all know what that means -- you are instead confusing "hate speech" with "speech that politcally correct people disagree with."
And even if one does mostly agree with you and say that 99% of the study was not well-constructed, it's very hard to argue with these two statistical findings:
-80% of 8,000 people said "agree" when asked this question "Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Political correctness is a problem in our country."
-And on the flip-side, only 7% of those same 8,000 people strongly disagree with the claim that "political correctness has gone too far" in a survey section on free speech.
Let's apply this statisical significant information to Linko90's situation by answering a few questions:
1) Was Linko90 fired because of saying something "politically incorrect": YES
2) Was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of the people who strongly agree that "political correctness is a problem in our country." :NO
3) Was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of those who strongly disagree with this statement: "political correctness has gone too far": YES
4) Therefore, was Linko90 likely fired because of the actions of a vocal minority of GOG's customers?: YES
5) Do the majority of GOG's customers disagree with Linko90's firering? YES
That has been my main point from the start. The sort of people who argued here and elsewhere for Linko90 to be fired organized campaigns and use institutional power to focus their relatively weak strength against one target at a time and this has a chilling effect on the 80% of people who disagree with them and their tactics.
Think of it this way: if you're at a party with 40 people and 3 people are walking around shouting that 32 people should leave the party or only be allowed to stay if they agreed with them on changing the music to Yanni and replacing the beer with zima, you would not take these people's suggestion seriously. You would politely ask them to leave the party and when they didn't, you would warn others to ignore them because, well, (to use a colloquial term) they're a-holes.
In response to your statement that: "I don't believe in good faith in internet gaming forums (that is, in actual intentions of "communicating", "discussing", "understanding", etc). These exchanges tend to be pure "everything goes" attempts at "scoring points" with no regard for intellectual honesty. And I loathe this. So, expect general contempt from my side."
I suggest you set your sights higher. Maybe that's how some others do things here, but that's not me. I've seen lots of places on the internet were excellent exchanges of information take place and people's minds are changed (sometimes even my own). And I won't change to be like your low expectations, instead I will continue to be the change that I want to see.