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Melanie Tannenbaum has written several interesting blog posts about ambiguity intolerance and its connection to the early popular support Donald Trump is currently enjoying. Roughly speaking, people who are not comfortable without a plan of action or a path forward are said to have more ambiguity intolerance.
What may be surprising, however, is the research showing that people high in ambiguity intolerance feel so profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of uncertainty, they will often prefer a slightly negative yet certain outcome to a potentially-more-positive, uncertain one. In other words, people may find Donald Trump to be disagreeable, abrasive, or downright unlikeable. But because of his reputation for "telling it like it is" and "being honest to a fault," they also feel certain that they can believe Trump when he says he's telling the truth.
Tannenbaum points out that despite a record of Trump making contradictory comments in the past, people tend to believe his convictions on what he says because nobody would say those "non-normative" things if they really didn't believe it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by albert on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:25AM
Uh, no.
The main point is to make some ideas off-limits for discussion, preemptively shutting down the opposition's speech. Example: you'll recognize what I'm referring to when I ask you to imagine a world in which telling children to look both ways before crossing a street is called victim blaming.
To the extent that rebranding occurs, it too stifles speech. George Orwell understood this well when he wrote "1984". Language more-or-less sets the starting point and bounds by which we think. Example: the fight over what to call the opposing sides regarding abortion. (pro-this and anti-that, for different values of this and that)
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:48AM
preemptively shutting down the opposition's speech.
Example: you'll recognize what I'm referring to when I ask you to imagine a world in which telling children to look both ways before crossing a street is called victim blaming.
I'm finding your example to contradict your intent. If it takes such an extreme comparison to make your definition of "political correctness" recognizable, then I'm afraid all you've done is prove that such cases are so rare that no one has ever encountered them.
(Score: 4, Funny) by albert on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:29AM
In case you really don't get the reference, I'll give you a hint. It's about advice given to women. Also, the letter 'R'.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:38AM
That you are playing weirdly passive-aggressive games rather than stating your thesis further cements my belief that you are being intellectually dishonest. You've made it about asserting your intellectual superiority rather than make a convincing argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:13PM
(diff AC here)
Why is this marked offtopic?
It is SPOT on topic. It strikes to the core of why people do PC. They want to win an argument but use word tricks to do so. That is not winning. That is being intellectually dishonest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:26AM
The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. The SJW had not the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:45AM
But I have seen that exact sort of logic used to try to make Sony blameless for their terrible security practices when their security was broken. "Don't tell Sony to not use demonstrably awful security; tell criminal hackers not to do bad things!" Not sure if that's political correctness or what, but it is fucked up to be defending a multi-billion dollar corporation that was utterly negligent in protecting people's data and pretending like it's just some kind old person that can barely use email.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:17AM
It's not just Sony. In the recent OPM data hack (of the US Federal government, wherein hackers got personal data for tens of thousands of government employees), the woman in charge of OPM tried to deflect blame saying they didn't do anything wrong, and that "the hackers" should be blamed.
The hackers are blameless: they were doing their job, and they did it well apparently. They were doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. (And considering they probably are in the employment of a certain foreign government, what they did wasn't illegal either, it was perfectly legal and required of them.) The OPM agency is the one that deserves all the blame, for failing at its task of keeping this data secure.
Blaming "the hackers" is always wrong. The hackers are supposed to hack into systems and steal data. That's their job. And don't act like this is a horrible thing either: the US government has its own hackers, doing the exact same thing. Who really thinks the CIA and NSA aren't hacking into other governments' systems?