Off: Censorship

[M Holmes]

Dave Berry writes:

> On 14 Jan 11:35, M Holmes wrote:

> > That may be so, but in the normal world of language that's not what the
> > word "gender" means.
>
> Well, language changes.  AFAIK, "Gender dysphoria" is now the standard
> medical term for transexualism and related conditions.

I'm not against language changing. I'm opposed to people furthering
political agendas by attempted control of the language. It's like being
opposed to hijacking but not evolution.

> > and is thankfully rare in the UK. Unfortunately political correctness
> > isn't. [...]
> > there's the Zero Tolerance campaign here (nowt to do with drugs
> > and more to do with insulting men with their own tax dollars).
>
> I knew someone who was involved in the Edinburgh "Z" campaign.
> It certainly wasn't conceived of as a PC project

The fact that there's a Women's Committee in the Council and no Men's
Committee and that they started the Campaign makes me skeptical.

> and apparently
> did succeed in changing the lives of some women for the better.

That's good at least. How did the posters achieve this?

> Interestingly enough, when the campaign was repeated in London,
> the Edinburgh group criticised the new campaign for attacking men,
> which they were careful not to do (they criticised "male abuse
> of power", which they saw as different from criticising men).

It's hard to see what a poster saying simply "No Man Has The Right"
could be other than an attack on men. If I had a poster saying "No Woman
Has the Right" I'd certainly expect complaints from the vaginally enhanced.

Similarly the poster "99% of child abusers are men" was not only
factually innacurate (50% are men though the statistics *may* be higher
for child sexual abuse) as the Women's Committee acknowledged (but
didn't remove the posters) but likely to provoke the idea that 99% of
men are child abusers in the statistically naive. I wonder how well a
"99% of shoplifters are women" would go down?

> > > > Mike "Unreconstructed male" Holmes
> > >
> > > Isn't that a PC term for a much ruder word?
> >
> > Is it? What's that?
>
> I always thought that when people said "Unreconstructed male", they
> were ironically using a PC-sounded phrase to describe someone who
> they thought of as a tosser.

I've not heard it in that context, though I guess when it's been used to
imply that someone's a male chauvinist that the further implication
might be intended.

> I may be wrong though.  (And to be on
> the safe side, I want to make it clear that I'm not calling Mike a
> tosser).

I've been called worse anyway. I'm not really calling myself a male
chauvinist either. I'm more against PC than I'm for The Patriarchy ;-)

> Dave.

FoFP