andrewducker | Interesting Links for 23-10-2011

(tags: journalism usa )

??

Thank you for reminding me - someone already pointed this out on LJ, and I meant to fix it when I got home. Done now!

Was fairly sure it was just a typo...

If I were going to write a lengthy screed against offensive, insensitive language, I would not call my target a "twat" as if that were something bad.

A point also raised in the comments on the post. And I agree that in this context that it does look a tad hypocritical.

I like the "we are more than a macaque" bit. it reminds me of being in the belgian scouts where they'd call the arab kids we'd come across in town macaques, before throwing stones at them. :>

The fifth point in the epic fantasy thing is what REALLY annoys me about classic D&D style RPG worls with economies seemingly based on villages selling treasure to wandering heroes. I know it's a fantasy world, but it's just so ridiculous. I don't demand a realistic economy in a hokey RPG, but at least the pretence that it's an actual world rather than just a support system for the players' adventures.

Also, there's a point in a David Eddings book where something in the fantasy world is described as being the same size as a dime :-D

I assume "dime" is local slang for "copper piece" :->

You can exchange 10,000 of them for a platinum piece!

I've a vague recollection that in one of Billy's warhammer games, our characters were so rich that the random village we went through had no coins large enough to give us change for our Imperial Crowns when we wanted to buy something, so we bought the whole village instead.

Warhammer is one of those worlds that is generally portrayed as satirical enough that I don't need to view it as entirely functional, and so silly situations like that are part of the fun for me.

Several of the countries in Warhammer (mostly the Empire and Bretonnia) have relatively functioning feudal systems that almost make sense (apart from the surprising amount of river/road trade that takes place in a world with marauding beastmen and demons hiding in the woods)

That said, the wars between countries in the Old World tend to be minor skirmishes, so you could imagine that the resources poured into national wars in the corresponding period in the real world are, in the Warhammer world, being used for internal security against chaotic monsters and beastmen. If you wanted to.

At the risk of being controversial, I'm with Ricky Gervais on the use of 'mong' to mean an idiot, rather than a sufferer of Down's Syndrome. He is clearly not using it to insult someone by implying they have Down's Syndrome, and he has explicitly said he wouldn't do that.

There are people out there who love to be the victim, who love to be offended. We shouldn't pander to their prejudices. Political correctness works because it makes people afraid to say anything. And an awful lot of people are ignorant of the true origins of this insidious creed. (It is genuinely staggering that people who describe themselves as 'liberal' are proud to be politically correct. The two concepts are mutually exclusive.) To my mind, Ricky Gervais deserves a lot of credit for standing up against political correctness - we should be applauding him for being politically incorrect.

I'm not sure that someone's intentions matter so much when they are not obvious and visible, and when they affect people who do not take those intentions into account.

When a word is used as a term of abuse then using it in other ways tends, from my understanding and experience, to cause it to be used moreso as a term of abuse. It would not matter, for instance, if I used the word "Paki" purely as shorthand, because it is used every day on the streets as a term of denigration, designed to hurt people.

Using the word "mong" this way just increases the number of people who associate it with the meaning of "idiot", and means that the people who have Downs Syndrome are more likely to be effectively told that they are idiots.

If a word is used generally as an insult, then that word hurts - and if it then applies specifically to you, then you are getting constant feedback that there is something wrong with you.

I object to the word "gay" being used to mean "something bad" for the same reason - much as I'd object to the word "Jewish" being used to mean "tight with money".

And I don't find a contradiction here between this standpoint and being liberal. As a liberal I believe that Ricky Gervais has an _absolute_ right to use any language he likes. And I have an absolute right to feel whatever way I like about it, and react myself.

If you're a liberal, you believe in the freedom of the individual against the state, the free market, small government, free trade, low taxes and capitalism.

Political correctness is derived from Frankfurt School Marxism and was originally an attempt to destabilise western liberal society by discrediting establishment institutions. (And when you see the BBC and the Police being described with phrases like "hideously white" and "institutionally racist", you have to acknowledge their success.)

So again, political correctness is not and cannot be 'liberal'.

What's that you say? "Liberal" doesn't mean that any more? I thought we'd established that words aren't allowed to change their meanings.

There is nothing illiberal about it. I grant someone the right to say what they want. In return, I have the right to think they are stupid and inconsiderate because of it.

"he has explicitly said he wouldn't do that."

Actually, he's said that he's said he wouldn't do that. He spent a week encouraging several hundred thousand people to use the word as often as possible, then said in @replies to a couple of them that 'of course I've always said I wouldn't use it in that way'. This is after his fans have been hurling abuse, including that word, at anyone who dared criticise Gervais, including a lot of disablist language used toward the comedian Francesca Martinez.

And of course, Gervais' original use of the word was in conjunction with photos of himself pulling 'hilarious' faces, of the kind small children use to mock those with disabilities.

If your problem with 'political correctness' is truly that it 'makes people afraid to say anything', surely stirring up a huge mob to spend the best part of a week hurling abuse at anyone who questions a tasteless joke should be the kind of thing you disapprove of, rather than applaud?

And as for liberalism and 'political correctness' (or 'politeness' to give it its proper name) being opposites, I can strongly support someone's right to use whatever abusive terms they want *and* still criticise them for it. Which is, in fact, what Herring did. He never asked for Gervais to be banned from using the word, or banned from Twitter, or to lose his job, or for *any* action to be taken other than for Gervais to think about his language.

He didn't even necessarily want him to stop saying it - I had quite a long discussion with Herring on Twitter about this because I think his own use of 'mental' and 'mentally ill' in his comedy sometimes has the same problems, and all he wanted was for Gervais to think before saying these things.

There's definitely someone bravely standing up for the oppressed here, and it's not the person mocking one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world, and then getting a gang of bullies to harass anyone who dares utter the mildest criticism.

"There's definitely someone bravely standing up for the oppressed here, and it's not the person mocking one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world..."

Are you even following this argument? HE'S NOT MOCKING PEOPLE WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME!

He posted photos of himself pulling faces in a way that is commonly used to mock disabled people. He accompanied that with text saying that he looked like a 'mong' - a term of abuse for disabled people.

Were I to post photos of myself in blackface saying I "look like a nigger" it would be entirely reasonable for an impartial observer to say I was mocking black people, and to continue thinking so even were I to claim that the word 'nigger' has been reclaimed, that the blackface makeup had no racial connotations, and that of course I'd never meant to hurt anyone but this was just political correctness gone mad.

I hope you're being ironic in using the word "disablist"...

No, this won't do. The kids who say that things are 'gay' argue that they're not being homophobic; the word is being used pejoratively in a completely different sense. That argument just doesn't work because it obviously is, or has been very recently, a homophobic slur.

Lots of people use 'twat' pejoratively believing it to be a slightly ruder version of 'twit' -- indeed, it's used that way in this very article. Most of them, when you point out the actual derivation, desist, either because it's not their intention to be abusive to women, or because the word seems ruder than they thought.

The only possible reason that 'mong' has acquired a meaning of 'idiot' is that it's short for 'Mongol', and is a brutally offensive term of abuse for people with Down syndrome or other learning disability. It's perfectly reasonable that Gervais didn't know that, and the only remotely reasonable response for him to have made is 'gosh, you're right, I didn't think of that; I'll try not to use it again'.

This is a world away from the story of the poor man who lost his job for saying that a financial allocation was 'niggardly'. Can you see the distinction? Do you care? It's also different from insults where the group insulted is no longer suffers serious discrimination; as a left-handed person, I don't find the terms 'sinister' or 'cack-handed' particularly offensive. But people with learning disability continue to suffer all sorts of abuse. Paying attention to our language to ensure that we don't inadvertently give succour to abusers is really the least we can do.

"The only possible reason that 'mong' has acquired a meaning of 'idiot' is that it's short for 'Mongol', and is a brutally offensive term of abuse for people with Down syndrome or other learning disability."

Why is it offensive to people with Down's Syndrome to call them 'Mongols'? I can see on the other hand why it might be offensive to someone from Mongolia to be compared to someone with Down's Syndrome.

You are effectively saying that the word 'Mongol' (and that isn't what Ricky Gervais said anyway - he said 'Mong') describes someone with an odd set of chromosomes. Since I'm descended from Genghis Khan, I choose to be offended by that. My chromosomes are perfectly normal thank you very much, you ignorant, politically incorrect [censored].

It has racist origins - the original notion was that people with Down's Syndrome "look like" Mongolian people in terms of facial features etc. This is Just Not True. So it's probably offensive Mongolian people to use "Mongol" (or the short form "Mong") to describe people with Down's Syndrome on account of this.

It's offensive to people with Down's Syndrome partly because of ^^ but also partly simply because it has such a long history of being used as an insult. As with many terms that begin as a largely neutral description of characteristics it has been transformed into an insult by repeated use as such.

Using it as an insult for people who do not have Down's Syndrome, implicitly comparing whatever negative-behaviour you are insulting them for to the behaviour of people with Down's Syndrome, insults people with Down's Syndrome.

Incidentally, have you seen the South Park episode 'The F-Word'?

It takes much the same position as Ricky Gervais, only with the word 'fag'.

I think the point is that malicious intent doesn't doesn't have a one-to-one correspondance with hurtful outcomes. Some people refuse to apologise when they're genuinely in the wrong. Some people get offended when someone else makes an honest and inconsequential mistake. But often, person A really, really hurts person B without actually meaning to. This happens all the time, especially when A and B have different cultural norms and A thought what he/she did was unexceptional and B thought it was unconscionable.

We minimise that partly by (a) making wider awareness of what's ok and unnacceptable in different places and (b) understanding that it unavboidably happens anyway, and it doesn't make person A a monster to have inadvertantly hurt person B, but perhaps the only way out is for both parties to make an effort, for person A to apologise for inadvertantly harming person B, and for person B to accept the apology that A didn't do it maliciously.

But both of those are really hard. As far as A is concerned he/she didn't do anything wrong, and has the assumption that person B is just being whining and over-sensitive. And person B is out for blood because they've been hurt so much and this was too much.

I accept that Gervais didn't intend to insult people with Down's Syndrome(see comment about being horrified people might think he was). He assumed that no-one really used it as a specific slur any more and the only reason anyone would object was being over-sensitive -- an assumption which was understandable, but it was shortsighted not to see that if the assumption was less than 100% perfect, he would inadvertantly be being really, really horrible to thousands of people. That's an understandable thing for a comedian to do -- as shown in the article, even people rebuking the use of "m***" may inadvertently say "twat" not realising it's offensive to OTHER people. But that doesn't make it ok.

We all make this sort of mistake all the time -- it's literally unavoidable because we don't all have perfect knowledge of which slurs are ok to be edgy about and which are still widely used as terms of racial/sexual/other abuse, even if we make the effort to know! But it's unavoidable that occasionally someone bumps someone else in the street, maybe even knocks them down, but that doesn't mean the right response is not "Oh, I'm sorry, are you ok?" but to say "Oh, well, I've already inadvertantly hurt you but it wasn't my fault, so that's ok, so I might as well stamp on your face while I'm about it just to make the point"!

That first link appears to be about an incident in the UK, not the US. (Not that similar things don't happen all too often in the US, alas.)

You're completely correct. Don't know why I got that wrong. I'll fix it when I have a momentnear my desktop.

Edited 2011-10-23 13:11 (UTC)

> It does mean you shouldn’t create an urban setting and blithely announce that the kingdom has been devastated by war or dragons or ravaging hordes of unspeakable terrors while at the same time showing the entire populace hanging out in the cities eating well.

Hmm, like in Game of Thrones? Where up at the Wall they appear to have plentiful supplies of food despite being in an arctic wasteland. And who knows who the Lannister's army was kept supplied.

Certainly in the book they talk about where the food for the people on the Wall comes from. The series glosses over huge amounts of stuff, obviously.

That's fair enough. But we do traipse through an awful lot of countryside and not much of it that I remember seemed dedicated to food production.

I thought Game of Thrones was great for actually portraying a fuedal hierarchy, where nobles actually are people who rule a big swathe of countryside, and have greater or lesser loyalty from people in their area, rather than only showing people at court. In most books, it seems to be only a minor detail whether people have "lord" in front of their name, but here I really got a sense that it mattered, and the difference between "someone with a place at court" and "somenoe who owned a castle".

But I admit, it seems likely there are many anachronisms, and things GRRM paid attention to less.

Actually, the bit that bugged me from the start -- and yes this is on the telly, maybe he explains it in the book -- is the seasons.

'Winter lasts for several years'. Er... first of all, how? Even if it's something like complex planetary orbits (like they're in fact on a gas giant's moon for example), 'winter' can't last for several 'years' because that's the definition of what a year *is*.

The definition of a year is "one circuit around the sun". The seasons in GoT are apparently caused by axial tilt changing over time. It's mentioned in passing in the books that it gets a little warmer/cooler each year, but that there's also a larger cycle at work which causes it to get a lot colder/hotter.

Hmm I've possibly committed the oldest mistake there is, of confusing axial tilt with rotating around the sun. *hangs head in shame*

Still, axial tilt would be predictable surely?

I'm going to attempt to redeem myself by chucking in the word 'nutation' :)

Two points here:
1) Might be. Depends on how stable your planet is.
2) MAGIC.

Huh. I didn't realise that. I assumed that "seasons" were caused by some unspecified mechanism, and translated as "winter" etc even though they weren't 4-per-year.

And I did wonder where "years" came from, but I assumed either (a) they made astronomical observations to determine the year, even if it wasn't obvious or (b) a year is defined in terms of lunar months, completely ignoring "time to go round the sun" (as several real calendars do).

Those translations didn't seem exceptional to me.

But (according to a quick google) there _is_ a mention of day length correlating with season (which I forgot), which suggests it _is_ due to axial tilt, and either (a) there's a fictional celestial mechanics explanation or (b) GRRM stipulated the previous facts but didn't invent an explanation or forgot that day length needn't change with season (or deliberately gave a different explanation of it)

I blame the dragons.

Not sure how far through you've got with the books (or if you only saw the TV) but in the books the how and why of the Wall being supplied with food is gone into in detail and the effects of the lack of crop production and working farmland due to even temporary combat situations becomes severe and important from about book three onwards.

What are you talking about? There's tons of stuff in ASoIaF about how the Night's Watch is fed (and for that matter how their stores are running low by the time of DwD).

Please, please don't tell me you came to that conclusion based on nothing more than watching the TV adaptation of the first book...

Re the Ince article -- I happened to be at the gig in London with Robin Ince, Francesca Martinez and Richard Herring. Really, a perfect storm of people to have an opinion on the issue (and as it was a gig to support a left-leaning charity, likely to have an audience sympathetic to such things). Good fun gig actually. Richard Herring did make reference to the whole incident but only about 1/4 of the audience knew what he was on about.

Martinez's comedy was actually pretty good (I've never seen her before in my life apart from in an episode of Extras so I had no idea she was a comedian and actress). A friend and I both agreed that, initially at least, the audience reaction (and our own) was more "nervous laughter" than "laughter". Her speech patterns are initially hard to understand and her cerebral palsy does give her unusual tics (she is assisted to walk to and from the stage) which make it hard to understand. My own initial reaction was one of slight discomfort which is pretty hard to explain. In the end though I think the audience was laughing genuinely.

The "Five Things You Should Never Do in Epic Fantasy" post makes some very good points, but when it says you should never use the word "sherry" I start to lose sympathy with it. I know where the word comes from, but it's the only word I know of in English to describe what it describes.

Really, you might as well say "Characters in your epic fantasy are highly unlikely to speak English. Please make up your own language." Since you've bothered to render entire conversations in English, I think we can assume that somebody who uses the word "sherry" is actually using a different word that has been translated into English for the convenience of the reader.

Ditto champagne, port, dalmatians, probably cheddar, and samaritans. Some of the other examples are more debatable, I admit. Clearly, these words bother the poster, but it's impossible to produce language that everyone will love.

Yes it does rather miss the point that the vast majority of words are directly associated with the world we live in. They have to come from somewhere, after all.

Interesting Links for 23-10-2011

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