You know apart from the Internet mono feed its now almost impossible to pick up BBC surrey from my hiltop location, even though I'm less than 300 yards from the surrey boundary with Kingston Upon Thames. There are two fm stations, buth compromised by adjacent commercial crap, and as far as I'm aware no DAB either. However one can pick up BBC London for miles around the place. It does seem a bit unfair to me. Brian
The new local Surrey mux (which will carry BBC Surrey) is due to start testing next month. Initial Tx sites will be Crystal Palace, Reigate, and Guildford, the coverage map, which obviously you can't see, shows Kingston and the surrounding area very well served
What about BBC Surrey 1368 kHz Medium Wave from Duxhurst ?
Pop, crackle, whistle, muffled, and after dark, 'monkey chatter' ?
You're not allowed to call the wogs monkeys nowadays. Shame on you.
Bill
I really don't know why you felt the need to type that. Unless there's a Fawlty Towers Major's voice smiley you forgot to add.
Richard.
The thing is, some of us have got a sense of humour, and also we don't really like it when PC prodnoses tell us what we can and can't say.
Bill
OK, I understand that, but I think the "PC" you are reacting against is the extreme form, often quoted in the media, based upon both real and sometimes imagined events out there in the public sector.
To be blunt, I think we need PC for as long as there are people who consider it acceptable to say "wogs" in general conversation. Bill, I'm not suggesting that you're in that group.
Our country is particularly full of otherwise likeable, decent people who will lament how "they" have stopped them saying what they want but despite that seem to have no trouble displaying textbook racist (for example) language and behaviour. At the same time, I'm clear that nobody has the right not to be offended.
OT, sorry.
Richard.
Anyone who works for a local authority, health authority, or education authority, will tell you that 'the extreme form' of PC has great influence. It causes resentment and makes ordinary people sceptical of PC values in general, whether they are sensible or not.
We don't need PC at all. PC attempts to impose a narrow set of behavioural and speech norms on the community as a whole, despite the fact that these norms are set by a small clique. Before PC we had something called 'good manners'. This was based on a general consensus which was fairly flexible but had the purpose of not hurting the feelings of other people. As a system it worked well. Since the 'rules' were based on a broad consensus and not on the views of a small leftist-liberal elite it didn't cause resentment. There was no feeling that 'they' were telling 'the rest of us' what we could say or think.
The fundamental problem with PC is that a lot of people don't agree with it. In the pre-PC days if you said something offensive (in the pub for instance) the vast majority of those present would disapprove. Now, if you say something non-PC a significant proportion are overtly or covertly pleased you said it. So PC has actually worsened the situation, because people's resentment of it causes them to sympathise with the non-PC (and also by previous standards downright rude) person because of their resentment of PC as a whole. To be non-PC has become, for many, deliciously naughty.
I realised how true this is when I was in the audience at a pub where there was a dreadfully racist comedian. And he really was dreadful. It was cringe-making. The audience were just ordinary working people, but they absolutely lapped it up. They weren't racists, but they enjoyed the breaking of the rules. They enjoyed defying the PC rules. It was a bit like the way Victorian music hall audiences lapped up a bit of sexual innuendo. I'm pretty sure afterwards the people in that audience would ask themselves, 'Why the hell did we laugh at that? It was bloody appalling.' But they did laugh at it, and that's how the imposition of PC as a replacement for normal civilised good manners has turned us into a nation of hypocrites.
You see, there you have it. You wish to impose an inflexible rule on people's private conversations. You have no right to do that. It's actually reminiscent of Orwell's '1984'. If a group are gathered together and they all know that no-one will be offended by a word, they have every right to use it. It's no-one else's business.
Bill,
Well, I'm sorry to disillusion you.
As I said above the existence of PC actually provokes racist language (for example) in people who are simply not racist. They don't have a racist bone in their body but if they want to refer to 'the wogs' they will do so. The people you refer to ARE 'decent people'. It's just that they've had a bellyful of a small clique trying to tell them what to think. The British are temperamentally fair-minded and tolerant, but they can also be a bit bloody-minded when it suits them. Put me in that group.
Bill
You are quite right. It's just a means used by politicians and journalists particularly to suppress discussion of ideas they don't agree with. The "racist" tag is another.
Hijacking words is another ploy they use.
All an attempt to control people's thoughts. As you say, totally counterproductive.
Yes, well I think there is a lot in this. I get very annoyed when I read statements in documents from, say councils, that contain some very odd language. It appears that for a time a few years ago, Disabled people were not disabled people, they were differently abled people.
In fact to my mind disabled is better as it is the environment that causes us to not be able not always the actual ailment or condition. There is also a hell of a lot of spin about just now to dress up a reduction in services as an improvement, ie Empowering decisions , which means taking away a service so they have to do it themselves of course.
Brian
No, I don't want to impose anything. Anything is OK in private. But if I encounter something offensive in a pub conversation or here in a newsgroup, it's not me doing the imposing. My problem is not that the conversation happened, it's the assumption that the whole audience are happy with, and complicit in it that annoys me.
I wanted to make it clear that I wasn't having a go at you personally, because the point I was making is more general.
I'm sure they are decent -- I said so -- but the idea that people can be provoked into (for instance) racist language without having "a racist bone in their body" is so far from my experience that I don't know how to reply to that.
Richard.
So long as they were "the right kind of people".
Again, I remind you... "No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish"
You seem to be conflating the reactionary redtop media perception of "PC" (usually followed by "gone mad") with basic equality. The vast majority of people most certainly DO agree with that.
John McCririck? Is that you?
No, of course they weren't. They just found jokes celebrating racism _amusing_.
Nothing whatsoever like. Innuendo has no victims. Innuendo doesn't encourage and celebrate violence and discrimination.
Why on earth would somebody who "doesn't have a racist bone in their body" do that, unless they were so utterly pig-thick as not to realise the massive offence that they would cause to a massively wide array of people?
Of course, many of those taking offence wouldn't count, since they're either wogs themselves or lefty-liberals, so only one step above...
Yet it seems to be entirely right and proper in the eyes of most of those who decry the use of such terms to accuse vast numbers of people of whom they have no personal knowledge of an irrational fear - ie they use the term "islamaphobia" whenever anyone dares to seek to question whether the speed and nature of expansion of Muslim populations is a source of unalloyed joy.
This is Oceania and it is double plus good?
Its is a closed loop.
Those that name others 'discrimanators' are excercising discrimination to select them in the first place.
Dylan as usual summed it up pithily:
'Them that don't hate nothin' at all Except hatred...'
I'm 80 years old, and lived in or near London for the first 30 years of my life. I never, ever saw this legendary notice, despite innumerable visits to Kilburn and its environs, then essentially an Irish colony.
I would have thought it would be a foolish notice to put up, more or less guaranteeing a rock through one's window.
Indeed. The notice would have been put up in places without a strong Irish community.
that was what was on the phone adverts for accommodation in the small ads.
Not pinned in a window.
Bear in mind that your definition of racist language is based on PC values, which many people don't share. It's possible to use the same language in a non-racist way. You take the PC line that racism is in the ear of the hearer. I take the view that it is in the mind of the speaker. My dad was recently in hospital and he was assigned a young male Afro nurse who he immediately christened 'Darky'. They got on like a house on fire and when father was discharged 'Darky' put his arms round him and said he was the nicest patient he'd ever had. There was absolutely nothing racist in the name in father's mind. It was like calling the man 'ginger' or 'paddy'.
Had father called the man Darky as a term of abuse that would have been racist and horrible, but the fact is he didn't.
Bill
No, anyone. Obviously. Please don't make assumptions that ordinary people are racist. They aren't.
WTF has that got to do with it?
Yes they do because that's basic decency. It isn't PC-originated. Ordinary people have civilised values that are nothing to do with PC.
Not me, but you make my point. People like it because it's naughty.
Bill
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