bks » Thu Oct 31, 2013 7:52 am wrote:peartreed wrote:
The use of obscenities is a vocabulary crutch evidencing the absence of more articulate, literate or descriptive alternatives to convey thoughts and emotion. It is a sloppy and offensive habit that is indicative of ignorant, low-brow and unnecessarily abusive banter. It is also an unfortunate disregard of decency, propriety and politeness. It requires I edit and delete discussion viewed here by my family, including curious children researching current affairs topic discussions for educational edification and schoolwork. Consideration needs to be given to the wide and varied audience seeking more mature, sophisticated exchanges here.
You are right that obscenity should never stand in for analysis or clear thinking. But the use of obscenities by itself it does nothing to damage children's sensibilities. That's purely a matter of reception. (I have a three year old who, due to my predilection and to the mild embarrassment of my partner and I, has quite well mastered when to use the phrase "fucking dammit!" Now I'd really rather he didn't, since it surprises his preschool teachers. But when I ask him why he said that, on multiple occasions he told me, "I'm frustrated," a word my partner had taught him).
Nor should maturity and sophistication be conflated (if you are conflating it) with absence of emotion or - more importantly - outrage. Ahab is right to quote Churchill: the Tories are a conspiracy to suck your blood dressed up in the finest haberdashery. They are a plague on the planet and a leading scourge of mankind. The proper response to them, when they have success debilitating the rest of us, is outrage. Toning down outrage suggests that their actions are not outrageous, which is the most vile and dangerous thing of all.
Your own view is unfortunately laced with particular judgments presented as natural facts. Everything is in the reception, friend. Words are nothing on their own. Of course they're never ON their own, but the milieu into which they're interjected is not fixed or even all that stable. Receiving "obscenity" as less problematic may in time make it so. Who/what is served by upholding the fiction that it's "indecent" to say "fucking damn it" when the sheer injustice of something calls for it? Obscenity is a particularly good way of punctuating outrage, and there's nothing wrong with that, kids.
I wonder if it isn't concern for order that's really your concern here, where a faulty determination is being made that because a person spouts profanity he might act violently or take revenge against the target of his profanity if he could do so with impunity. I wouldn't worry about it, if so. The great unfairness of it all is that if somehow the earth convulsed and persons like us were positioned for a moment to move the levers of power, the Tories would not have to fear for their safety or their social security in the slightest. My outrage
now wouldn't blind me to their humanity
then; compare that with the fact that it is their own coolness in the face of criminal expropriation that has always been the very
condition of their ascendancy within their own class, and which is also the best evidence that their own vision of the humanity of others has been occluded. The real problem is - the OUTRAGEOUS problem is - we are still living in THEIR world, in which policies resulting in the murder (mostly abroad) and slow death (at home) of huge swaths of people are treated to theatrical chin-rubbing on television by a media class created
just for that purpose, to give the appearance of depth and reasonableness to what is essentially a parasitic conspiracy.
Posted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 10:57 pm