Apathy Sketchpad

From time to time I submit stuff to Newsbiscuit. More occasionally they use it. Their submission board is pretty awkward to work, though, so I thought I’d post my favourites on this blog also, where I can keep an eye on them. First, the ones they used:

• Large Hadron Collider “may destroy universe”, say stupid people (original submission)
• Department for Children, Schools and Families to ‘give up on schools’ (original submission)
• Labour to use ‘guest leaders’ (original submission)
• Halloween update; local youths ‘less frightening than usual’ (original submission)
• Book of phone numbers ‘left on doorstep’ (original submission)

(I do like my headlines-with-quotes-in.)

Next, some of the ones they didn’t. I’ll put most of them after the fold, since there are a lot of them. Also, some might be offensive if you’re easily offended. First, though, my favourite, from early to mid October:

Gordon Brown has new kitchen sink installed under anti-terrorism laws

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had his kitchen refitted under laws brought in in the wake of the September 11th and July 7th terrorist attacks.

The refit was proposed in August, as part of a larger reorganisation of Number 10. Brown’s wife Sarah raised objections to the plans at an early stage, saying that the new system would make cooking difficult and that she didn’t like the colour. It seemed that the deadlock was unresolvable until September 17th, when the Prime Minister realised he could use existing anti-terror laws to push the installation through without first gaining his wife’s approval.

Critics have claimed that this is “a clear abuse” of the power handed to the PM’s office by these new rules. One backbench MP said that while he understood the need to have special new measures to deal with the new kind of threat faced today, the government had taken advantage of the fear to pass laws granting themselves more power than they had ever been elected to. Other recent applications of the anti-terror laws include freezing the assets of Iceland UK, resolving the double-booking of a conference room in Parliament, and the emergency resolution on Tuesday which mandated it was James’ turn to do the washing up.

Brown has insisted that neither he nor the government has abused the trust placed in them by Parliament, saying that there are “other kinds of terrorism” besides violent attacks on civilians, and that these might be said to include refusal to wash dishes or bad taste in kitchen units.

The House of Lords is expected to overturn the decision, but James Brown has said that as he’s already done the washing up, it’s too late to reverse the damage and a system must be put in place to prevent these situations from arising in the first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’ve been working on But Sir…, I’ve seen a lot of petitions asking for a total ban on swearing on TV. To those people I say ‘fuck off’.

The problem I have with it is that there’s no difference between a word that is swearing and a word that is not other than how people react to it. I’ve been over this before. The actual meaning of the word is irrelevant, as demonstrated by the relative offensiveness of ‘poo’, ‘crap’ and ’shit’. So if the words aren’t offensive because of what they mean then why is it? It’s arbitrary. It’s made up. Someone decided ‘fuck’ was offensive, so you started taking offence at it. So now it’s offensive because you take offence rather than the other way around. That’s self-reinforcing nonsense. It’s basically a religion. So if you want to legislate based on some arbitrary list of words you’ve decided you don’t want to hear, I see no reason to listen to you.

Here’s one:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make urgent representation to the Broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, the broadcasting institutions operating in the UK and film regulators, asking them to stop the use of unnecessary swearing and bad language in their productions (including those available for downloading from websites) and to urge providers of user-generated content to take similar action.

…

 

In May 2008 the Radio Times conducted an opinion poll, which found that 69% of people believed there is too much swearing on TV. In November 2008 the Sunday Express launched a Clean Up TV Crusade focusing on the excessive use of swearing and the Sunday Telegraph conducted a poll which found that 56% of people thought the f*** word should never be used on TV. The Office of Communications (Ofcom) in its Communications Market reports for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 found that the majority of people believe there is too much swearing on TV.

…

John Beyer of mediawatch-uk

 

Haha, ‘the f*** word’. You won’t even use the word in its correct context. Even when there’s ambiguity. You might mean ‘fart’. Or ‘feet’. And let’s leave out the question of what percentage of Radio Times readers are grannies. Of course they’ll say there’s too much swearing.

But that’s a sensible one — reduce swearing. Fair enough. This one is madder:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban swearing on TV and Radio.

Too many ‘F’ words. Why? Whats the point? Get back to good pubic standards of decency. Stop the Ross-dross and promote proper use of the English language. Stop swearing on the Radio and TV!

Chris K

It’s saddening that people genuinely think that this is appropriate language in which to petition the Prime Minister. It’s also a bit of a worry that they equate ‘talking like I do’ with ‘proper use of the English language’.

And this one is even madder:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban all Swearing in public places .

Ban all swearing in public places and especially on the British Broadcasting Corporation, to bring back a standard of decency and set an example to the younger generation.

Mrs Margaret Elward of housewife

This has six signatories, including a ‘Mister Why on earh is the PM being petitioned for this?’ and someone claiming to be called ‘because we care about standards in our Country, you obviously don’t’. Well, they have a definition of ’standards’ which means arbitrarily excluding certain words from our vocabularies (but not ‘knowing how petitons work’), and I’m sorry but I have bigger things to worry about than that, and that’s before we get onto the bigger issues with allowing the government to ban words they disapprove of.

Really, who are these people? “Set an example to the younger generation”? Do you really think that the biggest problem with young people is that they (we?) swear too much? It just doesn’t make any sense. Even if someone stops us swearing, we’ll just make up some other words and shout those in exactly the same context, and then presumably half of them will try to get the new words added to the list and the other half will say ‘well, that’s not the f-star-star-star word, so that’s okay by me,’ and go back to watching Father Ted.

It’s ridiculous. Why do people insist on acting stupid?

Oh, wait. I think I know the answer to that one.

In the news recently was a story about Prince William telling someone to “fucking piss off”. Now I have no particular problem with him saying that (hey, I just did), but it shouldn’t be news. If I said it, that wouldn’t be news, but no, he’s Royal. He shouldn’t use language like that! Er, yeah, right. He’d fit in real well at university if he acted like the rest of his family, and not the rest of the world.

In fact, I have a problem with the whole swearing thing. Why, in the name of all that’s reasonable, are some words deemed offensive, while others — which mean the same things — are not? For an example, let’s dive in at the deep end and offend as many people as possible: Fuck. If you say “fuck”, even in it’s correct context, that’s about the worst thing you can do. But if you say “shag” instead, that’s only a bit offensive. Say “sex”, and you’re quite safe, as long as there’s no kids around. I mean, who decides these things? I don’t think they’re quite up to the job, since the term they’d have us use is “take tea with the parson”. The other point about swearing is the beeps and silences they put in TV shows and music. I never noticed that the Gorillaz’ track had a swear-word in it until I heard the censored version. And the last verse of Stan has almost no lyrics at all on MTV.

Two last examples of idiot censors, then I’ll drop it and change the subject, I promise. Weezer’s song Hash Pipe obviously is obscene, as it uses the word “hash”. Who, might I ask, is going to be offended or shocked by the word “hash”, and know what it means? MTV blanked the word “hash” and called the song Half Pipe, wheras Play UK, blanked it and called the song H### Pipe. Anyone know what the name for the “#” symbol is? No, not “pound”, the other name (pound is “£”). That’s right, “hash”. The other example is The Kids by Eminem. The song is about why you shouldn’t do drugs. It gives examples and explains the dangers. At my school that was called PSE. To the censors, it’s offensive. They distorted all the names of drugs in the song.

Now I promised to change the subject, so I’ll briefly mention my other related pet hate and then leave you alone. Please and thankyou. It seems to me that there are people who think your’re being perfectly polite if you roll your eyes, shout at them, but say “please”, but if you smile, and ask them calmly, but don’t happen to use the “magic word”, then your a horrible person who is not worthy of their help.