Quote Originally Posted by Letters View Post
Right. Attitudes in society of course change over time, but I don't buy that there's a clear direction of travel towards the sort of degeneracy which would see paedophilia becoming either legal or fashionable.

Some things have got worse - the level of swearing has increased in society and that's reflected on TV. As a kid it was headline news if someone said "the F word" on TV. Now shows are littered with it, and "the C word" is becoming more common. I regard that as a bad thing although not everyone would agree. Society has become more sexualised, the lyrics and videos for music videos now just wouldn't have been allowed when I was young, the internet has meant that any type of porn is available to anyone at the click of a button, kids are exposed to that far younger than they should be and are far less innocent than they used to be. I think that's bad too.
But other "norms" have been disassembled in a positive way. Racism and homophobia were the norm when I was a kid. The punchline of many jokes was Paddy being thick or someone being gay. Those things are now frowned upon. One could argue some of that goes too far, but overall it's a bit lazy when the punchline is a person being of a certain race or sexuality.

In terms of child abuse, there's far more awareness these days. Youth groups have safeguarding policies in place to make sure children and adults are protected (children protected from abuse, adults from accusations).
Teachers are trained to spot potential signs of abuse at home, none of that was in place when I was a kid. I have to do mandatory training about it at work FFS and my role is literally nothing to do with working with kids and is unlikely to ever be so. I'd suggest we are further as a society from any of this stuff being acceptable than 30 or 40 years ago. Stuff like Minipops on C4, was thought "just a bit of fun" and now we look back on it thinking "yeah, that wasn't great". Not every chance in society is a step towards the last days of Rome.
What counts as progression and what counts as a step towards a dystopia is completely subjective of course. However I decided to approach what NQ said from the perspective of it being reasonable to not want our society to degrade into one where paedophilia is acceptable. Now do I think it likely that having women speak on football is a step along a long pathway to that rather hideous outcome? No I don’t. But I’m not going to assume NQ is just being controversial for the sake of it, it could well be something he genuinely fears happening and therefore I’d rather set out my stall for why I don’t agree rather than simply dismiss.
It’s not actually that uncommon a view, there is quite a lot of people who believe that permissiveness has been nothing but a way of laying the groundwork towards something which would horrify us. Now I am 95% sure that’s simply not the case, but the reason I’m not 100% sure is because we are currently entrenched in a battle over the expansion of rights that includes on one side of the argument a complete failure to acknowledge how this would trample on the rights of a larger group.

In terms of what is more acceptable, I think you’ll realise that I have little issue with foul language (though I accept it does not exactly make one more sophisticated and I definitely do not like the idea of swearing in front of kids). Conversely though if you ever read or listen to a linguist expert called John McWhorter who is especially interested in the advent of swear words or taboo words (almost every culture has developed this) you get a great understanding of the stock we put into language and the absurdity of inventing words only then to discourage people from using them down the line.

Language like attitudes are always evolving and I think for many of us as we get older there’s an attitude of stop the ride I want to get off. Without wishing just to placate people, I get it and it’s obvious to a degree that you get it.

What particularly irks me about current social change is the believed necessity of corralling others to believe what they believe. Maybe words like bigot and racist should have very little currency but the fact is they do when in a society where people on the whole want to fit in, don’t want to be accused of these things. And therefore it becomes a form of coercive control…you will only be accepted if you believe what we want you to. In fact that’s a cult mentality right there, now of course there’s nothing wrong with groups forming of people of shared beliefs but then you have the option of opting in or opting out without a fear of being ostracised by the whole of society.

I don’t in anyway need NQ to take a different stance on women pundits, one because I don’t really feel that strongly either way on the subject and two because his view doesn’t impact upon mine so when I asked him why he cares it was from a place of genuine curiousity