Saturday 24 May 2014

Don't mention the war

Because I am meant to be doing an RE assignment, I am spending far too much time on Facebook on things totally unrelated to study. I now know that I will spend my first half million from my best-sellers on a watch which shows the planets' orbits in real-time (see here). I also know that yesterday was, apparently, World Turtle Day. The 'What career should you actually have?' quiz on BuzzFeed says I should be a humanitarian, so that's okay. I obviously chose the correct things to take to a desert island, and the right city to live in (even though I've never been to Cape Town). 

Scrolling through pages of facts and opinions, the one thing that stands out is that some people really are offended by an awful lot of stuff. And they like to tell everyone about it. There was a newspaper article this morning about a church near here, which had to remove a sign because it offended one person. The sign said, 'If you think there is no God, you’d better be right,' with flames underneath the message. I would have been more affected if hell was represented by pages of quadratic equations, but I actually thought it was quite amusing and in no way offensive, even from the point of view of a practising sinner. 

There are too many things that we're afraid to say or write in fear of offending someone. I don't mean deliberate racism / homophobia etc, but remarks that someone will skew to make offensive. 


It's probably wrong of me, but I get a bit of satisfaction when the 'That's offensive,' comments start bringing out the inner teenager in people. I like a page on Facebook called 'I f*cking love science' (yes, I can see the irony in what I've typed...), and it's full of amazing science-related stuff which has actually taught me quite a bit and has added an extra bit of wonder to things, but there are lots of whines about the 'offensive' title of the page. Here's a copy of one example:
  • 'I really do wish you folks would eliminate "f*cking" in your site. It just sounds too sophomoric and gratuitously crude for me to re-post.  
  • 'Get over yourself.   
  •  'Don't look then, you precious snowflake.'
  • 'That's too bad then.' 
  • 'I agree. I have wanted to post a few items but I did not because of this.' 
  • 'Copy and paste, people. Copy and paste.'  
  • 'Feel free to feel smugly superior for not swearing if that is your pinnacle of human achievement, but many others disagree ~ considering a rich and full spectrum of emotion represented by various intensifiers to be a useful linguistic tool, and the discovery of new insights into how the universe functions to be closer to the pinnacle of human accomplishments.'
  •  'In other words, f*cking deal with it u absolute bender.' 
Forgive me if that made me snigger. 

I know we shouldn't go around purposefully upsetting people and being thoughtless, but when some deliberately go out looking for things to be outraged by, I have little sympathy. Be outraged by starvation and famine, child brides and war, not the way someone has said something. 

After having probably wound up a few people with that, I'm now off to not do any work. Like Son Number Two, who is upstairs shooting zombies, I will be starting my homework 'tomorrow'. Or sometime.  



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