>Midget Gems renamed after claims name is hateful towards people with dwarfism
>Marks & Spencer has changed the name of the favourite childhood sweet Midget Gems to avoid offending people with dwarfism. The retailer dropped the term midget and has rebranded the sweets Mini Gems after a leading disability studies academic warned it that the word can be “highly problematic”.
>Dr Erin Pritchard, a lecturer in Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope University, has condemned the term midget as a form of hate speech which is deeply insulting to people with dwarfism. The academic, who herself has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, has criticised other UK retailers, including Tesco, for continuing to use the word.
>Dr Pritchard said: “The word midget is a form of hate speech and contributes to the prejudice that people with dwarfism experience on a daily basis. Having spoken with various firms about the use of the word midget, it’s clear that many companies are simply unaware of just how offensive the term is, and I’ve had to explain to them why it’s such an issue.”
Even the Bible calls a cripple a cripple. Problem is that short of outright hate speech (which is by far not the same as calling a spade a spade), our language has gotten far too soft. Everything needs to be wrapped in cotton wool somehow, and a 50-strong vociferous angry Twitter mob taking offence at even the most slightly dodgy choice of words is mistaken for (silent) majority opinion.
As an oldlad, I still remember a time when TV phone-ins or an angry letter to a newspaper or magazine were almost the only way you could publically express grievances as an ordinary person. And in a way, it probably had a cooling effect on many minds that there were some hurdles to expressing your opinion in such a way. In an age today where you can just run your mouth off on twitter at the click of a button and get an instant potential audience of tens of millions, people tend to not take time to think. And it has repercussions across the length and breadth of media culture, and won't even stop at suddenly finding product names offensive that bothered literally no-one for decades.
Another recent example is the rebranding of Uncle Ben's rice and condiments to Ben's Original.
I have literally never in my life encountered a black person who took offence at the brand name Uncle Ben's or the image of a cheerful elderly black person being used to promote it as part of its logo. That it got changed in the aftermath of George Floyd's violent wrongful death, of all things, borders on satire.
>>70229 Of course, if we all started calling Ellie Simmonds and Peter Dinklage "Mini Gems" in a scornful and derogatory way, they would have to change the name again. It's never about the words themselves.
But I wonder: if we all boycotted the new name, would they change it back?
>>70229 >Even the Bible calls a cripple a cripple
Pretty sure the Bible wasn't written in English and this whole argument fails to take into account how even if it was, language and the context around it changes over time.
>I have literally never in my life encountered a black person who took offence at the brand name Uncle Ben's or the image of a cheerful elderly black person being used to promote it as part of its logo
No, but they will take offence if you call them a spade.
What a stupid post.
>>70229 >In an age today where you can just run your mouth off on twitter at the click of a button and get an instant potential audience of tens of millions, people tend to not take time to think. And it has repercussions across the length and breadth of media culture, and won't even stop at suddenly finding product names offensive that bothered literally no-one for decades.
I think an element missed here is that a lot of the time it's not necessary for people to actually care. Twitter takes all those stupid idle thoughts you have when you're not doing anything and asks you to write them down for a dopamine hit. So you'll write down that Uncle Ben reminds you of Tony Benn or some bollocks and then someone else will come along and read that as though you'd written it with some kind of purpose, that you really believe and care about this because after all - you wrote it down - but you didn't write it down, you tweeted it. It disappeared from your feed the minute your cat made a funny face because that was the next thing you could bang out in the unconscious hope of some retweets. It's trivia.
Twitter is full of mad people for a reason: Because Twitter is designed to drive you mad.
>all those stupid idle thoughts you have when you're not doing anything and asks you to write them down for a dopamine hit.
That dopamine hit, next to all the attention whoreism, is 80 percent of how social media actually works. Getting your mental bum rubbish out there and noticed by untold millions is a chance to pretend for a bit that your insignificant-as-shit life isn't so insignificant after all, and that your existence actually matters.
Anyone else frightened by such a thought? I feel like the moment I become properly famous my life would be destroyed forever. Not because I've done anything particularly bad aside from people noticing the idiosyncrasies based on the lies I've told but because everyone expects a famous person to be moral paragon.
i think social media will legitimately be the downfall of the human race. it fuels nothing but pure narcissism, which I earnestly believe to be one of, if not the single most unhealthy and toxic trait in the whole spectrum of human emotional capability.
I think the internet should exist under forced anonymity. if not that, then at very least it should be forced pseudonyms, fuck, give everyone a mandatory fursona for all I care. but the further we get from self important twats spewing out disingenuous horseshit for clout and then getting high on the smell of their own farts all day, the better.
on the other side of the coin, though, a few weeks ago I wasted a couple of days of my life browsing through kiwifarms. honestly it depressed me. not because of the "lolcows" of internet stardom themselves, they're just dickheads; but the people who have nothing better to do with their lives than obsessively follow said dickheads for some kind of catharsis. their own lives must be truly empty and miserable. these people are the definition of "terminally online", but it is broader internet culture (i.e normal cunts being on social media) that enables them.
the internet of today is largely just full of the exact same shit as news of the world was in the before times, only an order of magnitude more mentally poisonous for all involved; and people want to compete to be at the focus of that shit show.
>I feel like the moment I become properly famous my life would be destroyed forever.
A lot of people can't handle fame on a good day, and that is greatly exacerbated by the fact that, again, somebody slagging you off as a celebrity nowadays can do so to a vast audience on twitter, whereas back in the old days, if you felt that Kim Wilde was an overrated bint, your best hope was to make it into the reader mail section of NME. Which was then probably actually read by Kim Wilde, because there were only a handful of music magazines that really mattered. But in terms of sheer scope, it was nothing like getting crapped on by thousands of twitter users worldwide every single day.
>>70229 It is all ridiculous. I wonder, maybe it is a stretch, whether we are at the other end of the horseshoe already. These corporations, at the behest of the baying unwashed masses, have removed minorities from all their packaging. Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Land O'Lakes, etc - all changed. While packing that has white people like Quaker Oats and Sun-Maid will still remain. How this is not seen as removing minorities from the wider culture (of mainly the US) is mindboggling. What is next? Full on segregation? I really hate identity politics.
Sort of a weird one to get your head around. On the one hand, advertising has become more diverse and inclusive in that more ethnic and social minorities are featured as consumers of a product in the pertaining adverts themselves, but when it comes to representing those minorities via the brand name itself, all of a sudden it becomes stereotypical and offensive.
The problem IMO isn't that language or the extent of ethnic stereotypes have become more offensive in our time. With the last ten years of wokeness, I think we can all agree that quite the opposite has happened. But what we're dealing with nowadays is a younger generation of bored and underbusy teenagers and twentysomethings with absurdly high ideals who have conditioned themselves to get all red and blue in the face and take their rage to twitter and other social media in droves as soon as somebody utters something that can even remotely be misconstrued as racially, sexually or politically offensive. And not only that. They are out for blood each time, and ideally want the person who is guilty of maybe just one single transgression to never be part of society again or even find gainful employment. Which also ties in with #metoo. Not saying that sexual wronguns shouldn't be brought to justice. They very much should if they sexually abused another person. But what is different nowadays is that at least in a figurative and symbolic way, we have reverted to the days when an angry mob with pitchforks demanded that they be burned at the stake.
And it's by and large the post-9/11 generation, and there have been numerous studies that they are spoiled cunts who were wrapped in cotton wool all their childhoods by their parents as the ever-present global climate of fear unfolded, fuelled even more by things like the Financial Crisis which saw all vestigial sentiments of living in a safe world vanish. That, and the fact that their parents pampered them as luxury lifestyle accessories and failed to set rules and boundaries that people older than that grew up to mind and respect.
>>70241 I think the main problem is that so much of it is fundamentally hard to understand. To phrase it offensively, because that's more fun, if a man wants to cut his dick off, I guess we can all support that if that's what he wants. And if he wants to be referred to as "she" from now on, well, okay. And if she now says it's offensive to say she's a man, that's okay too, even though I don't fully understand. And at the absolute most extreme points of understandability, maybe don't remind Caitlyn Jenner that she won the Olympic decathlon as Bruce.
But at all points, there are bastards out there who take pride in their ignorance. The world's only female decathlon champion will always receive abuse from those who actively refuse to consider things from her perspective. And there are thousands of them, so there need to be thousands of us to fight them and defend her, even if we have no idea really why Bruce Jenner changed his name and cut his bollocks off.
So we challenge the people who laugh at spastics and retards, without ever fully "getting" it. You don't need to know every intricacy to fight the good fight. But then the little fat-headed goblins say it's also offensive to call them midgets, and we don't really know what to do. We have been wrong before, and if one person really hated the word "moist", it wouldn't be hard to not say it in front of them. But to never say it anywhere, even when they're not around? You don't know who's listening sometimes; will you say it then? Some people will because fuck the cripples and the mongs and the darkies. But others won't, and they'll see those who do as the same bastards as before. And war will erupt. And that's where we are now.
>>70243 I would also like to add that I think changing the name of midget gems to mini gems is moronic, but I felt the same way about those golliwogs on the marmalade. And we all got used to that.
I have seen tweets which address this, saying that black people don't want to play Batman, they want to stop being strangled to death in the street by police. But of course, that's exactly what I want to hear, so maybe most.people don't actually feel that way. That's another issue with social media echo chambers; you can't always tell when you're in one.
>>70238 There's another site, basically KiwiFarms for the MumsNet audience. Constant sniping and bullying and mockery of Facebookers, Twitterers, Instagrammers, all that shit. I forgot the name, googled "site where you slag off influencers", and it was first result. Tattle Life. Awful shit.
It's just the left-wing version of "they've banned Christmas" or "you can't play conkers any more because of health and safety".
All tribes need their rituals to identify the in-group. Those rituals cannot be rational, because then they wouldn't serve as a signal of commitment to the group. For the right it's obvious lies about Brussels Bureaucrats and asylum seekers, for the left it's endless handwringing about what to call things.
Additionally, it's very difficult for young people to rebel any more. You aren't going to piss your dad off with your horrible taste in music if his loft is full of Happy Hardcore 12"s. You aren't going to horrify your mum by getting a tattoo when she's got half a dozen already. If you can't shock your parents, then at least they can shock you with their hopelessly old-fashioned attitudes. In a society that permits everything, the only rebellion left is to create and enforce a new orthodoxy.
>Additionally, it's very difficult for young people to rebel any more. You aren't going to piss your dad off with your horrible taste in music if his loft is full of Happy Hardcore 12"s.
Which is one reason why I struggle to believe in the genuinity of the Fridays for Future movement. Sure, we need to save the planet, and that, you won't hear me say that that's not a big fucking problem in our time, but there has never been a youth protest movement that had their parents marching at the front. All the while posting selfies a gogo about it on facebook and Instagram.
>Way back in the 90's 'the internet' was predicted to change our lives, it did just not necessarily always in a good or positive way.
Honestly, I occasionally miss that world of 56k dial-up modems, blocky real player video that you patiently sat and waited to finish downloading, as well as geocities webrings, and having to pay several quid an hour to surf the web at a break-neck 5 kilobytes per second. Geocities in particular was a world of the weird and wonderful. Where people had fringe opinions too, but it was all sort of more benign. There were no hashtagging social media mobs, and a handful of brainfarts by some daft people on a webring didn't result in major companies changing names of their products.
I hate to use the term "gatekeeping", but honestly that's what kept the internet good back in the day. the bet period of internet was when it was cheap enough not to present much of a class barrier (internet cafes also being a thing), but nerdy and sad enough that it didn't attract many mud-caked, shit-flinging normie apes.
inclusiveness is a nice concept, but in practice the truth is the majority of humanity is wankers, so inclusiveness really just means filling your community with arseholes. I say that even as a committed lefty-lad. i'd go so far as to suggest that in seeking some kind of omni-cultural melting pot where everyone is welcome at every table, we're making the ends of the horseshoe connect in the most ultimate and logically concluded way.
when everything is diverse, nothing will be diverse.
You're saying all this on a website that no normal person will ever find. Even on normie sites, you can have weird nerd groups, you just have to know where to look. Tumblr isn't really 'our' type of thing, but it is a large site full of a very particular type of weirdo.
Not really lad. Any lass under 26-ish grew up looking at all kinds of shocking and extreme porn on tumblr, fucking loved it, and that's why they're all mad kinky slags nowadays. Total "normies", but just amongst their generation, probably one in three of them has a fetlife.
Anecdotal of course but it goes along with the normalisation of meme culture, dating sites and whatnot. Even totally hardcore nerd pursuits like DnD and WARHAMMER. At some point nerd culture became cool, and that was only exacerbated the normie accessibility of the internet.
Why has nobody mentioned rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk. If deep rabbitholes are your thing, you can spend entire afternoons in parallel universes there. It'll make mumsnet seem like a tepid debating club.
i THINK IT'S A TESTAMENT TO THE CHARACTER OF THIS WEBSITE HOW RARELY YOU'LL ACTUALLY SEE THIS FILTER INVOKED. EVEN OUR OCCASIONAL IMMIGRANTS FROM OTHERPLACE OR RUDGEWICK WILL SOMEHOW INSTINCTIVELY AVOID SAYING IT.
EITHER IT'S BECOME OLD HAT BECAUSE AS A RELIC OF LATE 00'S ERA CHAN CULTURE, SO NEWFRIENDS DON'T USE IT, OR IT'S SO HEAVILY POLICED ELSEWHERE THAT IT'S BECOME AN INSTINCTUAL NO-NO ON PAR WITH THE GAMER WORD.
>>70282 I just don't think the word ever really caught on much in Britain in general. Not when you have poofter, bumder, bender, gaylord, shirt lifter, fudge packer, knob jockey and so on. Why restrict yourself to the unimaginations of Americans?
Fun fact - a bassoon is called a fagotto in Italian. One of my Italian friends at uni whose English was a bit patchy when she first arrived here told me that her brother was an avid fagotto player back home. Which was a bit bewildering, and the hand gestures she was making to explain the word "fagotto" to me weren't helping.
