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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page. A while ago, a man was jailed for 20 weeks for posting 10 "grossly offensive" George Floyd memes in a private Whatsapp group. Another man was found guilty of sending an offensive tweet, celebrating the death of Sir Tom Moore, and the tweet was only live for 20 minutes. Recently a man was found guilty of wearing an offensive football shirt (a reference to the Hillsborough disaster over 30 years ago). There are many more examples in kind, these are just from the top of my head.

I think these are all absurd. Anything that offends normie public sensibilities is illegal. I would much prefer the American free speech norms.

Recently a man was found guilty of wearing an offensive football shirt (a reference to the Hillsborough disaster over 30 years ago).

Huh? Care to elaborate please?

The disaster occurred when fans without tickets stormed the stadium, there was a crowd crush and 97 people died. The tabloid 'The Sun' famously blamed the disaster on the fans, subsequent investigation found that the police official in charge on the day made numerous mistakes and that various safety procedures were not followed. This turned into a 30 year saga in part because of a wider 'culture war' between what was perceived as the Northern working class (associated with coal miners, unions and the left, and with the city of Sheffield where the disaster occurred and with Liverpool, where the victims were largely from) and the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher that was in power at the time, associated with the police (to whom she gave huge above-inflation pay raises) and the South. By this point Thatcher had had the police fighting the miners for 10 years and had largely won against them. The disaster thus became a political culture war topic for many years and countless expensive investigations were conducted, especially after Labour won again in 1997.

The man wore a shirt that said "97: Not Enough" on it. He was sentenced in part because there are special rules and laws governing behavior at soccer games in the UK because of longstanding issues with hooliganism. His sentence was a £1,000 fine and a ban from football games for 4 years.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, although for the sake of those who know nothing about this tragedy, I'll point out that it's slightly misleading to state that fans "stormed the stadium". But anyway, my point isn't that, it's that this incident with the T-shirt appears to be rather different from the other ones listed in the original comment. After all, surely working-class Northern English football fans don't count as a protected group.

In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page.

I thought the absurd US incoherency around "the N Word" (where a teenager's life can be ruined because we have to pretend she learned the word from her racist grandpappy rather than the radio) was the worst it could get.

US ridiculousness + European free speech norms though...

Interestingly, the sentence was in part because in the UK, the -a variant and 'hard r' variant are (in most accents) pronounced exactly the same, so "trigger" and "trigga" have the same pronounciation unlike in most US accents. The judge therefore ruled (iirc) that her excuse that they were two different things didn't count.

I had idly wondered this to myself for a time. Just goes to show how intellectually bankrupt it is to fluff up a particular inflection of a word as a grievous sin.

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