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"Taboo" may get interesting yet

Acorn Tributor | 07.12.2001 14:53

So far, Joan Bakewell's BBC2 series "Taboo" (Wens eves) has been written off by the critics as predictable, and unintentionally hilarious. Yet...

So far, Joan has examined the post-war cultural changes in attitudes on sex and violence, and as Victor L S pointed out, you could almost tick a list of names liable to come up, and there was perhaps a certain Monty Pythonesque quality in her lecture.
But Joan now suggests that while the taboo on depictions of sex and violence have relaxed, if not entirely disappeared, they have shifted into areas "which most people of her parents generation would have laughed off". She refers to "Hate Speech".
Also known as "Political incorrectness" or "Ideological unsoundness", there is a case to be made here, that this obsession with "bad words" is extremely dangerous, much more so in the age of the internet, where filters can cut out words, sites or whole servers. For example, Virgin Net employed a "bad word" filter which caused much confusion when an article criticising Haider of Austria was unintentionally twisted to appear to be supporting him!
Croatian magazine "Feral Tribune", one of the few critics of the regime there, is unavailable via BT web filters, because, being in style of Private Eye, it was deemed "Tasteless". I have on the "Rogues Gallery" section of my bookshelf, an astonishing isue of "Index on Censorship" (I, 1998), which dealing with Hate Speech, tentatively suggests that censorship might just be OK after all. Dangerous stuff. Dont let the hate- speechers confuse their little perversions with FREE speech! Defeat them in argument, by exposing the rubbish "Hate Speech" is in fact. Blanket bans are counterproductive and pointless. Anyway, many of them are learning the "nice" words instead and amend their formulas accordingly.
I havent seen any previews of the series, so I can only go on what Joan said last week, but the internet seems to be part of the discussion.

Acorn Tributor