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Stephen Fry on Political Correctness

enoch says...

@ChaosEngine

i do not see anyone here defending anything.

now maybe we can view stephen's commentary "dismissive and belittling" as @entr0py pointed out,but i think the deeper issue was prefaced quite succinctly by stephen in his characterization of american,and western societies,as being "infantilized".

where words have become the final bastion of totality in communication and are judged strictly on a word by word basis.so much so that some on the left have been pushing harder and harder to have certain words removed from our lexicon,because they represent negative thoughts/feelings/actions or they may represent a trauma,or horrific violent memory for some people.

but this is the wrong approach.
excising words will not erase those feelings/thoughts/emotions.this will just force people to come up or use different terminology to express those feelings/thoughts.actions that once had words to at least to attempt to express those horrors and/or offenses.

which will just equate to a whole new slew of verbiage being found offensive and in dire need of being castrated from our collective vocabulary.

yet the left (extreme left i grant) appears hell bent on not only attempting to control speech but to also judge those who DO use speech that they find offensive.

this is censorship with prejudice and to claim otherwise is the lie.

just look at your first comment.
you "used" to like stephen fry's opinion,until he became callous and dismissive with what?

words.

but do you REALLY think his attitude and compassion towards those who have suffered emotional trauma is truly dismissive?

well..i do not think so.i have spoken to you enough times to have a modicum of understandings in regards to you,as a person,that you have far more depth of character.

yet it is the WORDS that have hung you up.

look man,words are inert.they are things that are only given life,meaning and context when we add our own subjectivity to them.

words are inadequate.they will ALWAYS be inadequate.
which is why we admire and praise those of us who have a command of words that can reach into our own understandings and extract meaning in a way that blossoms like a spring flower and can create worlds in which we can play,and even share with other people.

i am intimately aware of this deficiency.i do not have an economy of words,and only on rare occasions can i relay,convey and express with ANY form of reductionism.

i struggle to express not only my opinion,but the intent,humanity and compassion of my opinion.

if the extreme left gets their way,the tools we have to express ourselves becomes lesser.

and in the process,WE become lesser.because the tools for dissent,debate,discussion and even..ironically..to expose the more venal and bigoted of our society,will have been reduced to words that offend nobody.

there is danger here,and no good will come from it.no matter if the intent sounds just and the goal compassionate.

freedom of speech is the right to speak freely.
to espouse our opinions,philosophy and yes,our bigotry and prejudice,with legal immunity,but NOT social impunity.

so while we have a right to free speech.
we do not have a right to not be offended,and maybe we need to be offended sometimes.to shake us from our own self-induced apathy and our adoration of digital hallucinations.

so when the westboro baptist church says the most hateful,vitriolic and disgusting admonishments,all in the name of god.
we can be offended by them,and then ridicule them relentlessly.

would stripping words from the english language prevent this group from espousing their own brand of hate?

of course not.they would just find new words.

so what do we do then?
make words illegal?
criminally libel?

so don't judge mr fry too harshly.
he is just pointing to the dangers of controlling speech and the new trend of the perpetually offended.

the extreme right attempts to control morality,and there is serious danger in that practice.
the extreme left attempts to control how we communicate,and hence how we interact,and there is great danger in that as well.

KEVIN THE CUNT

LiquidDrift says...

"It's the most beautiful word in the English language. It's a fucking complex word too, with fucking so many fucking nuances, even more than the word 'fuck'" And then he talks about Baa'bra's cunt.

This guy is amazing!

Developing Listening Skills in English as a Second Language

Syntaxed (Member Profile)

newtboy says...

Um...try reading again. I see now that the English language is apparently hard for you. Here, I'll go ahead and quote it for you...."I re-read my entire post, and not a single vulgar word IMO. One abbreviation of a vulgar word." I guess when I wrote "one abbreviation of a vulgar word" you read that as "no sign of vulgar language, even abbreviated". You might want to go back to Cambridge and take English 101.

Ahhh, I see...well then a big old F- You right back to you for all your ridiculous vulgar insulting bullshit.

You might want to learn English as it's used...and you might want to look in a mirror. I'm WRITING to someone who not only seemingly doesn't know to read or use the English language, and he's been a smarmy douche about it to boot. "Fuck you" is vulgar, "Hillary is not a convict" is not vulgar. By your definition, your entire post thread is vulgar, as it is certainly lacking sophistication or good taste, is totally unrefined, ignorant, hateful, now vitriolic, sesquipedalian in the extreme, completely devoid of fiscal responsibility or even consideration, and is lacking in all common sense. It is, indeed, the exact mindset of people in a Fox bubble. (Yeah, Fox, you know, that world wide political news giant you claim to have never heard of...talk about ignorance...holy crap, that's not just ignorant, it's ignant. Look that one up.)

So you know what people mean when they say -Vulgar : Making explicit and offensive reference to sex or bodily functions; coarse and rude:

Perhaps you forgot that you clearly wrote that what you specifically meant by 'vulgar' was "cursing", not "Lacking sophistication or good taste; unrefined"...obviously you didn't read your own post, or thought I didn't have the capability to remember. So sad for you. Again, just like Fox bubble people, when your argument is torn to shreds, you just change what you claim your argument was and move on to make more unsophisticated argument.

I'm pretty sure you've broken or burnt out your bulb there, buddy. You WERE amusing until you were contradicted and you got angry and decided to move from being just smarmy on to silly, infantile, completely wrong ad hom attacks against someone you don't know rather than discussion. It's totally not above me to aggravate someone of such a '6 year old spoiled little girl' disposition, but it's not something I intend to spend much time on.

I think you better quit the internet, you're totally doing it wrong.

You've just lost a 'friend' here, one that's helped you repeatedly here already. You can go stamp your feet and scream at the walls in your room now. Expect no further help from me in navigating the site...and expect to be banned if you continue the ad hom attacks against me.

Syntaxed said:

I must admit a certain amount of general amusement in speaking with you, I do love a good solid rant. It brings a unique air of difference into my otherwise droll existence.

You examined your post and found no sign of vulgar language, even abbreviated?


Definition of vulgar in English(Taken from the English Oxford Dictionary)
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/vulgar

adjective
1Lacking sophistication or good taste; unrefined:

I am speaking to someone who doesn't even know the language he is speaking, you see my amusement?

I cant help it if your general ignorance seeps into every pore of your conscious existence, and I must admit it should be above me(or anyone, for that matter), to aggravate someone of such an argy-bargy disposition. However, maybe someday the light-bulb will turn on inside your head, and you might finally see past the world you've been spoon-fed since birth.

Good day:)

Connie Britton's Hair Secret. It's not just for Women!

newtboy says...

Sweet Bastard Zombie Jesus!

You don't think well, and are 100% wrong about both my education and acquaintances, but you, on the other hand, do not seem to have either education or personal acquaintances to draw from on this subject. It seems some militant Feminist (they are not the only brand of Feminist, BTW) left a bad taste in your mouth, so now all feminism, to you, is distasteful. That's like eating a single spoilt sausage and from then on loudly telling people at dinner "meat is all tainted and it all makes you sick...you're just too dumb to know it", and continuing on that vein until they either (from exasperation) either stop eating it in your presence or find a way to ignore you, IMO, because attempting to rationally explain that some improperly handled meat is tainted, but not all, falls on deaf ears.

Dictionaries are where you look up the definitions of words, which is exactly what I did. Because you can't grasp the concept doesn't make it wrong.

Because your mind can't grasp the difference between the name of a movement based loosely on an idea and that idea does not mean there isn't one. Sorry, fail, just like your second paragraph in your last post which included many ANTI-feminist theories along with some overboard militant Feminist theories...I wonder if you can follow that thought since you don't grasp the difference in the words and claim there isn't one.

Equality is not advancement of one group at the expense of the other, it's the discontinuation of that process.

MY dictionary?!? Me thinks you protest too much. What's your issue with the English language (or language in general) that use of one of the main tools of language causes you such consternation and spawns such disrespectful and angry sounding replies? I honestly think you're just angry that I proved your argument's major flaw (that flaw being your inability to distinguish between a loose group's name and an idea...which makes one wonder, do you believe there were roaming gangs of large, dark colored cats protesting and attacking police in the US in the 60's and 70's?), but can't bring yourself to admit your argument had any flaw.

"Cultural fiction of gender"?!? Oh...I didn't realize I was having a discussion with a completely crazy person. If you actually believe gender is a "cultural fiction", there's no point discussing anything with you, because you live in a different reality from the rest of us that actually HAVE a gender, and not just culturally derived gender, and have ancestors that had gender before there was such a thing as "culture". What an insane statement, one that totally missed the point as well.

Spit on me, you'll find yourself in a bad place, and you'll find that many in favor of Women's rights are also in favor of removing ALL involuntary cultural distinctions of gender, a thing that has NOT been done by far, and you wish to stop any advancement towards equality of genders while one side is SO far ahead based solely on their GENDER. (damn, that word again describing a thing that doesn't exist...you must hate that, huh?)

Yes, if you fail to even conceive that, unfairly, there is a gender split in society that 99% of the time favors one gender to the detriment of the other, you by default fall into that opposing force, opposing fairness and equality, and individualism. No question. It's sad to me that you can't see that.

I'll ignore your last 2 paragraphs, I'm not speaking for @bareboards2, she's perfectly capable of speaking for herself, but has intelligently decided that further discussion with you on this subject is pointless...and I see she's likely right, you just want to argue about it, as made clear by your never ending arguments spawning from a simple clarification of what 2 words (spelled the same, but one being a proper name, the other an idea) actually mean...according to THE dictionary, and your insistence that the dictionary is wrong because it doesn't support your position that feminism and Feminism are the same thing. BWAAAHAAHAAHAAHAA!! That's too funny. Thanks for the laugh.

Enjoy exploring that hypothesis further, but without my further input. My points are made, some repeatedly.

Ladybeard/Ladybaby- Nipon Manju

lucky760 says...

Approaching 5 million hits on YouTube. *quality



More from an interview of Ladybeard by Forbes:

Forbes: How old are you?

Ladybeard: I’m five years old. I’m a five-year-old Japanese girl mysteriously from Australia with the appearance of an older Australian man. But Ladybeard is a five-year-old.

Forbes: How the idea of Ladybaby come about?

Ladybeard: The sponsoring company, Clearstone, is a costume maker in Japan. I had been on the cover of Metropolis, which is Japan’s biggest English-language street magazine. The CEO of Clearstone was getting off a plane at the airport and saw me on the cover, flexing in a bikini. He doesn’t speak English so he can’t read the article, but he shows the magazine to his staff, and I just happen to know some people on his staff. So they told him who I was, and he said, “Get him in for a meeting!”
So we go for this meeting, we have no idea what it’s about, and he says, “I really want to do this thing with you. I’ve got these two girls, and I want to put you in a [music] group with them. It’ll be like Babymetal except you’ll be in it. And it’ll be awesome!” That’s how Ladybaby happened.




radx (Member Profile)

oritteropo says...

Thanks for the link, you have my upvote if you would like to post it.

Really he can't say that any Greek bank is insolvent, such a statement would become self fulfilling prophesy.

As for the rest, like you say, it's hard to read.

Schäuble has been quoted by the English Language press as saying that “It is clear that we will not leave the [Greek] people in the lurch.”, but it's possible that there was something lost in translation, and anyway it wasn't obvious what he meant by that. http://gu.com/p/4acjq/stw

radx said:

I just watched Paul Mason's interview with Varoufakis and it's been rather depressing. Most of what he says is perfectly reasonable given the structural confines of the EZ. But it's all based on a belief in "mutual interests", a belief that negotiations can, and will, lead to a "mutually beneficial deal" with the financial inquisition.

Not sure if he's just adhering to his role as FinMin or if he truly believes it. I'd say it's a questionable assumption at best. From over here, it certainly looks like the creditors' position is "pay up, bitch!", end of story. Schäuble is not going to compromise, the majority of parliament is all in on neoliberalism and most of the electorate either doesn't care or even consents. Merkel might agree to a deal, given how she holds no convictions whatsoever except that being in power is better than not being in power. But Schäuble cannot be reined it with half the party being in lockstep with his actions.

No deal worth signing. Either full capitulation or they'll continue this charade with their buddies from PASOK and ND.

Ioan Gruffudd's Very Odd Name

Lilithia jokingly says...

Reminds me of the English language. That's even worse! They write "knee" and "knob", but say "nee" and "nob". They write "bomb" and "lamb", but say "bom" and "lam". "Women" is pronounced "wimin", for §$&%'s sake!
And look at this state name: Arkansas. Looks like it should be Ar-Kansas, right? Nope, it's Ar-can-saw.
You can't just make up your own pronunciation!

ChaosEngine said:

Welsh... mental language.

Seriously, look at this town name: Llanelli.

Looks like it should be LA- NEL-EE, right?
Nope, it's clan ech li. Goddamnit Wales, there is no 'c' or 'g' in Llanelli!! You cannot go around making up spelling!

Stephen Fry on Meeting God

robbersdog49 says...

He is possibly the most eloquent person alive. I can't think of anyone who is able to use the english language quite as well as he does. I could listen to him all day.

iZombie - First Look

artician says...

Hmm. Zombies. So Novel for 1990.

No, I didn't watch the video. No need, because: zombies. Please move on entertainment industry, because it was pathetic 10+ years ago, and today there isn't even a word in the english language that can describe the fail that is adding to this already "dead" genre. (har har)

Grimm (Member Profile)

German Language Compared to other Languages

ChaosEngine says...

Sure it does.
Schadenfreude and kindergarten

Both are in any English language dictionary.

TheGenk said:

@ChaosEngine There are even more words for fluffy, but I heard the english language doesn't have a word for the happyness you feel when a person you dislike encounters a little misfortune or the place you send your kids to before they are old enough for school.

German Language Compared to other Languages

TheGenk says...

The Krankenwagen takes you to the Krankenhaus because you are krank. Simple and logical.
"The ambulance takes you to the hospital because you are sick" on the other hand... now that you should not like the sound of. With a little etymological magic this becomes:
The walker takes you to the guesthouse because you are sick.
That's just silly.

@ChaosEngine There are even more words for fluffy, but I heard the english language doesn't have a word for the happyness you feel when a person you dislike encounters a little misfortune or the place you send your kids to before they are old enough for school.

AeroMechanical said:

So... if I'm sick, the krankenwagen is going to take me to the krankenhaus... presumably for some kranken. I don't like the sound of that at all.

Sage advice on how to prevent cramping

Sage advice on how to prevent cramping



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