IkoStar

This is what you get if you try to access Twitter at Dubai airport:

Dubai may have

• the tallest building in the world, who cares? you can’t use Twitter
• ship-sinkingly expensive archipelagos of man-made islands, but so what? you can’t use Twitter
• any number of modern wonders, but at the end of the day they account for nothing because an ugly stain of doctrinally mandated religious morality is on the place. You’re treated as a child. Someone else decides what you’re grown up enough to see, or say

“Religious, Cultural, Moral and Political values”? Please. Give me a fucking break. These “values” allow some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet and Dubai has been built on what approximates to slave labour… and have you actually read Twitter? It’s just people talking. That is all it is. People twittering.

So I was sitting there getting all wound up about this… then remembered that I am guilty of censoring Twitter myself, after a drunken rant about (ironically) censorship. I deleted my comments because I was suffering from post-alcoholic regret/paranoia. I thought that they could have been interpreted as being aimed at a single person (they weren’t). Yea. Well. I’m not suffering from post-alcoholic regret/paranoia now. This is what I said (in response to this video)

• Who decides this censorship bollocks? It’s fucking pathetic
• It would’ve been better if he’d said “fucking fuck off you cunting cunt” like any normal UK kid
• Bleeping isn’t done to protect children. It’s to protect parents who are too fucking weak to be honest with their kids
• Seriously - Richard Burton (the real one) advocated learning the swear-words of any foreign language first. This is what kids do. I was one
• Nothing personal mind

Which I will concede is an over-reaction etc, but given how drunk I was, I think I got off fairly lightly.

Later that day I was gently reprimanded by a friend who suggested I show tolerance… and on one level he was right. I am of that (difficult) age where we feel irritated at the cheapening of the language - a major emotional objection to bleeping out expletives is that it’s an insidious American meme that is gradually infecting our culture… not that I have a problem with American memes per se (I’m a musician after all) but this one is different. It’s a meme-blocking meme.

On a more visceral level (and more importantly), it pisses me off that some cunt has decided that their “morality” trumps everyone else’s and that they have assumed the right to “protect us”. Or maybe they’re just trying to cover their arses. Maybe they’re responding to an imaginary censor that they’ve internalised by repeatedly hearing the bleep meme… but fuck them. There is a continuum (because it’s underpinned by the same arbitrarily annexed moral authority) between bleeping-expletives, to blocking Twitter, to The Bonfire of the Vanities. Every bleeped word is a byte-level-book-burning.

Ask not for whom the bleep bleeps. It bleeps for thee. You are affected.

Swearing, taboo-breaking (and the hopelessness of self-censorship) make up a fundamental strand of the UK’s evolving comedic culture - from the “ooh missus” horror of this:

to the busted-damn debacle of this:

to the unbalancing genius of this guy:

And to have some anemic cunt think (for whatever reason) that they have the right to step in with their repressed 1950s ideas of “right and wrong”… to be dictated to by someone who’s not content with repressing their own sexuality but who needs to repress everyone else’s as well… now that I really do find offensive.

When I was a kid, my mate’s dad was a member of the New Zealand Rationalist Society - it took them decades of campaigning and lobbying to free us of the ridiculous blasphemy laws - something that happened all over the globe (hand in hand with the abolition of the death penalty) in civilised countries at about the same time anyway. And now the British government has rolled them back. Now it’s illegal to say things that might offend either imaginary beings, or the self-appointed representatives of imaginary beings. It’s happened in the same aftermath of global panic over “terror” which has been the carte-blanche excuse to undermine civil and human rights across the board.

It’s bullshit and it feels like we’re going backwards.

The Janet Jackson incident (she flashed a nipple) attracted a fine of $550,000 (later appealed). It was later found that 99% of the avalanche of complaints came from a single source.
A conservative activist group concerned with (other people’s) family values.

And so on.

There are certain lines where my liberal live-and-let-live ethos fail(-whale)s and I Stop Tolerating. The measure of civilisation of a society can be gauged upon entering its prisons. For me there’s a bottom line: the anxious face of someone shivering and waiting, naked, hurt, alone and out of site in the corner of a cell somewhere. Although there’s precious little I can do - I do not (can not, will not) tolerate cruelty: no, nor censorship neither.

None of it.