h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Rules can be beneficial. We work within certain rules and limitations all the time.

Some rules can be less than beneficial. Right now in Texas, heterosexual people are legally allowed to engage in sodomy, but homosexuals go to jail for it. There's no basis in the Bible for that kind of legal wrangling, and it's not really consistent to claim that these laws inspired by the Bible need to be in place when they've gone so far out of alignment with everything.

Sodomy is still outlawed in many U.S. states regardless of the sexual orientation of the participants. Most of the population feels that these matters should be private, that states should have no concern for the sexual activities between two consenting adults. But the laws remain in place.

This is only one example among many rules that are wrong. When we see rules that we do not agree with, it is our right and our duty to challenge them. This is the process by which slaves were freed, women were given the right to vote, and by which some day gays will be allowed equal treatment within the U.S.

Maybe I'm reading too much into your brief statements above, but I have to emphasize that "playing by the rules" is not necessarily appropriate when the rules are unfair. Ghandi did not play by the rules that were imposed on him. Martin Luther King Jr did not play by the rules that were imposed on him. I only hope our noisy whining meets with as much success as theirs did. (All except for the assassination part.)

I'm sorry if I seem like someone who complains about any change that comes into my life, or who protests for the sake of protesting. But I don't see how a public service based on an excise to all owners of televisions within the UK ought to prohibit languages spoken by some of the people who have to pay for it! These and other rules put forward by the BBC are wrong, and it does not make us uncivilized wags for continuing to protest against them.

As I have said on h2g2, *countless* times now. We currently don't have the manpower to translate languages, nor arrange for them to be translated. That's a fact, not an edict. When we do, we will.

Hi Deidzoeb,

First of all: are the rules the apocryphal "cure for which there is no known disease?" - perhaps. If there is no problem, the rules won't be invoked. Sounds good to me.

When they are, does it really mess up a post to have words s*****d out? Not many that I've seen. If anyone is complaining about it, it should be the moderators! The more we leave them alone, the more chance they have to go back and resurrect our old threads.

Is the English-only rule right? As Peta has implied, the italics and Beebers think it's "wrong", but necessary. As a fringe member of the Deutschesprache group, I feel for them. As (I'm shocked to realise) the author of Edited articles about 5 different non-UK European countries, I regret the parochialism the rule implies - it's not the "Earth edition" at the moment but the "British/US edition". But if it were my job on the line if trust were to be abused - and ultimately, for someone, it is - then I wouldn't take the risk.

Finally, are the rules, in general, "unfair"? Not unfair like apartheid or imperialist oppression. Not unfair like discrimination against people on the basis of their sexuality(*). What those rules did was give some people rights or power at the expense of others. There's none of that in h2g2 - everyone has the same rights to express themselves. They just have to express themselves in ways that won't prejudice the involvement of others in a discussion. What about a 15-y-o whose "net nanny" software (imposed by caring parents) won't let them see a thread because it contains a prohibited word? Why should they lose out? Rules about staying within a widely-accepted code of behaviour are about *inclusion* not *exclusion*.

The old rules were small-company rules. That small company ran out of money. The new, big money lies with the big corporation - and comes with the price tag of some new rules. It's that or no site. No contest.

Anyway, I'm happy to agree to disagree. I've moaned with the PTBs about things in the past I felt strongly were wrong.

I don't remember winning.

GVI

(*) Though I can't let it pass without commenting that anal intercourse - whatever the gender of the "passive" participant - is generally accepted by doctors as carrying a very high risk of serious infection and tissue damage. Indeed, until recently (when European sexual equality laws forced a change), the situation in the UK was exactly the reverse of Texas: male-male sodomy was legal and male-female not.

I have NOT read all of this conversation (you guys write way too much ;-) so please don't hit me if someone already suggested something like this. I thought, this thread was about... Q: How can we change BBC policy? A: I don't think we can change it. Q: Can we try? A: Yes. Q: How? A: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/F63734?thread=105824 I have posted my idea there. Please do go there and tell me what you think there. Thanx. It's a boycot-approach. Please let me know what you think. -Gin Keeper and Mixer of the Gin and Tonic Teletubby of the Guide

GT

I'm more optimistic than you
I think we can change BBC policy, it just takes time and a lot of effort to achieve it.

The h2g2 team seem to have the same concerns as we do, they also however have to deal with the internal workings of the BBC.

We will get the rules changed given time by working within the community and showing the new (to us) bosses at the BBC that it is sensible for the rule changes to be made and does not consitute a risk to them.

Hi BB

You're right - we're all working to the same ends here.

Let's work together, not try to p**s each other off. That won't help at all.

GVI,

>It's that or no site. No contest.<

It's not black and white. BBC can change. There's nothing wrong with asking them to change.

Why were you unable to "let it pass without commenting" on the health effects of anal intercourse? Do you think governments are justified in regulating the behaviors between consenting adults which may be debatably harmful to their health? Would you place anal intercourse higher on a list of dangerous behaviors deserving legislation than consumption of tobacco, alcohol, red meat, twinkies, Kit-Kat, Tubby custard? How much longer should people be in jail for anal intercourse than for failing to wear their seat-belts while driving?

Where I live, you will be given a ticket for driving or riding in the front seat of a car without seat-belt, but you may serve jail time if prosecuted for sodomy. Does this seem justifiable to you, in light of the "very high risk of serious infection?"

Gin, take time to smell the roses and read the conversations. We're in this fight because we LIKE being able to write way too much, and we don't want BBC to abbreviate us.

Deidzoeb,

I'm aware we're way off topic, but since you ask: I do not favour imprisonment or any other sanction against anyone for anything they do which does not infringe, or carry the risk of infringing, the rights and freedoms of others. I do not believe there is any logical or moral weight to "victimless crimes".

I believe that people should be allowed to drink, smoke or inject whatever they like - but subjected to appropriate punishment if they then kill people by driving, or if they steal to support their habit, or are otherwise anti-social, and their "lack of control" should not be seen as mitigating circumstances because *they* induced it. On the other hand, I would allow employers complete freedom to drug-test employees where they can demonstrate that drug use would affect their performance (they have a right to a fair day's work in return for a fair day's pay).

I am equally easy-going on what consenting adults choose to do to one another in private - and indeed their right to express emotional attachments publicly, up to and including the legalisation of same-sex marriage. I'm also absolutely certain that legal prohibition in the bedroom is even less effective than attempts to ban alcohol in the USA in the 1920s.

I am strongly in favour of unbiased information being given by governments and non-partisan groups on the health (and other) dangers of any or all of these practices. In reality, I think that unprotected anal intercourse is almost certainly less dangerous in the short term than alcohol. In the long term it may be safer than tobacco use or not wearing a seat belt, I really don't have enough facts to have an opinion. I'm pretty certain it's considerably more dangerous than eating KitKats.

I am strongly against special interest groups which seek to promote dangerous or damaging practices for profit (eg tobacco & alcohol advertising, the national lottery), or to suppress genuine information which is vital for making decisions affecting one's health - from those who claim that at is "anti-gay" and therefore politically unacceptable to state facts about the dangers of certain practices, to those who would deny sex education to teenagers on "moral" or religious grounds.

I hope that makes me rational, caring, liberal about individual choices and intolerant of exploitation. I am not some kind of rule-obsessed fascist as you seem to think.

I am, however, a bit of an intellectual elitist. I believe that the coarsening of the common vocabulary leaves us without serious enough terms to describe adequately when things are really f****d up. I believe that it is good for us to exercise self-discipline, and to try to set a good example for the younger visitors here, whilst acknowledging the hopelessly narrow cultural background that shapes my concept of a "good example".

If that makes me an old fogey or the Man in the Shack, so be it. I've been young and radical, and old and comfy is more fun.

GVI

Subcom. Deidzoeb

I don't see this as a fight with the BBC, in fact I regard picking a fight with them to be a pointless exercise, see my earlier example involving elephants and pea shooters.

All of the protest activities I have seen campaigned for over the last few weeks seem to be of the "cutting off your nose to spite your face" variety or are going to annoy those who we need on our side, rather than anything which is likley to cause the BBC to see things our way.

What we need to be doing is persuding those that make the rules to see things our way.
Then they will feel safe to let the h2g2 team relax the rules.

This is going to require a lot of diplomacy from us and the team at the towers.

Well said Bald Bloke,

We really are working as hard as we can on this behind the scenes. It just won't happen overnight. But progress *will* be made. Watch this space!

GVI,

For all it's worth, swearing is the first plank of the platform that we'll probably drop. In discussions of how to revise the Zaphodistas demands for a toned-down petition, I have recommended that we drop the bit about swearing, because it doesn't seem as important as allowing the use of off-site images or restricting users to English only.

Sorry if I jumped the gun on imagining you as a fascist, but your comments on the "risks" of anal intercourse seemed conspicuously close to justifying sodomy laws.

However, for the sake of argument, I don't want to drop the discussion of swearing just yet.

You wrote, 'I believe that the coarsening of the common vocabulary leaves us without serious enough terms to describe adequately when things are really f****d up. I believe that it is good for us to exercise self-discipline, and to try to set a good example for the younger visitors here, whilst acknowledging the hopelessly narrow cultural background that shapes my concept of a "good example".'

It sounds as though you don't feel that swear words are inherently evil, but that they must be used sparingly so they don't lose their power?

I just don't see why vocabulary needs to be hoarded. And the idea of a language being "coarsened" is pretty absurd and old-fashioned. Has the English language become coarsened in the hundreds of years since the F word has been in use? What is the actual detriment to the English language, or to the power of the word, if it is used too often?

At the time it came out, the movie GoodFellas was clocked as one of the most rapidfire purveyors of profanity. Does it harm people to hear the F word that often, or reduce the power of the word?

I'm thinking in terms of the long haul, the evolution of languages. We absorb words that seem useful from any other language. Incorrect usage of words eventually erodes and destroys old rules of grammar. Ain't that right? Think about A Clockwork Orange, or the recent projections that Chinese will become the main language on the web within ten years or so. Twenty or thirty years from now, our children may be speaking an amalgamation of English and Dutch, English and Cantonese. After all this effort to suppress the few English words (that every school child already knows), these children will abandon our antiquated jargon in favor of swearing in Yiddish or lord-only-knows.

The words that become more taboo and less taboo over time are like fads. A few decades ago, you would never hear a cartoon say, "This sucks," or imagine a Broadway show with "funk" in the title. People who want to use swear words are accused of being childish, but I really think it's childish to be concerned about these old taboos. If a child can say "poop" or "ca-ca" or "faeces," and communicate the same thing as when she says "s**t," then why all this juvenile fuss? It's just a taboo. Most children will learn not to belch or fart when grandma is around, and they'll learn just the same not to swear in situations that would be inappropriate. In fact, I think most kids are ahead of adults in this silly game. They already know what words are bad by four or five or earlier, and they know that they will be punished when they swear in front of adults. When alone or away from adults, when in the presence of friends who won't tattle, they'll swear up a blue streak, every foul word they've learned from parents or relatives.

The same with Santa Claus. Most kids by the age of five or six hear from some ne'er-do-well child that Santa doesn't exist. Then they persist at playing this silly game for another five or ten years to humor the grown-ups. Swearing is comparable.

Anyway, I'm not trying to argue in favor of swearing so that people will be free to call each other "f**k head" on message boards. I understand how these words can be manipulated within art, and I want them available to the masters. Norman Mailer shouldn't have to write "fug." Kurt Vonnegut Jr. should be able to use all words at his disposal when describing the atrocity he lived through in Dresden. Meanwhile, all the budding, young apprentice wordsmiths in h2g2 ought to be able to use all the tools at their disposal.

Of course, it's not going to kill them to have asterisks in the middle of their stories, or to move their stories to "more appropriate" settings. But I still feel that this is a perfectly appropriate setting, and that up-tight parents ought to be prepared to explain things to their children. We should not have to suffer just because some parents are squeamish about explaining things to their kids.

Hope we can continue this conversation in a more level-headed tone than in the past (than I have been guilty of in the past). I also think that KitKats may be more dangerous than anal intercourse. I hadn't heard of anal infections being a higher cause of death than heart disease. ...But that's a whole nother discussion.

Bald Bloke,

Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X dilemma. Diplomacy gets more respect and may help influence the people in control. But sometimes you have to show how strongly you feel for the people in power to take any notice.

At this point, the first action I want to take is to form a petition so the decision-makers understand how many h2g2 researchers feel their restrictions have gone too far. I want to use some diplomacy first, and save other actions for later, when we may want to bring change "by any means necessary."

Still, I worry that using diplomacy on elephants will be even less effective than pea-shooters in forcing the elephants to change course. We just have to hope that BBC is not a bunch of elephants. (That's as close to a winkeye smiley as I'm willing to use here.)

Hi there guys. This thread seems to be veering off course a bit.

So, to head back on track, here's a question for y'all:

Deidzoeb and others of the Zaphodistas have commented on not being allowed to use off-site images as one of the big problems. This is one of the issues that really isn't all that important to me, but I would like to hear others' views on how we can address the BBCs concerns that have lead to the policy.

From what I've gathered, the main reason for the no-offsite pictures rules is the copyright liability. While many people would likely just use the feature to post pictures of their babies or kittens, or of their own artwork, the BBC concern is that people will post pictures whose copyright is owned by someone else (i.e., a picture copied off of another website without explicit permission). This is actually rather similar to the Napster issue -- even if individual users are posting the material, the website can still be held liable for allowing the public access to copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder(s).

As a general rule, it's much easier for the moderators to check for copyright violations in text than it is in pictures. Hence, moderation isn't really a practical solution to this question.

One suggestion has been for the BBC to open their photo archives and allow us to use their photos to illustrate our entries. The pragmatics here seem pretty iffy, plus I can't quite see the BBC opening their vaults like that -- not to say it's impossible, just doesn't seem incredibly likely. Unfortunately, even this potential solution wouldn't address the issues of people wanting to post their own pictures and/or artwork.

Any other suggestions?

Mikey

Hi Deidzoeb,

I'm enjoying the reasoned debate, too, and will do my best to ensure it stays that.

> It sounds as though you don't feel that swear words
> are inherently evil, but that they must be used
> sparingly so they don't lose their power?

That's partly true. However, we do have to recognise that "profane" words carry emotion above and beyond their literal meanings. As you yourself point out, there are synonyms for the actual objects or actions - faeces, copulate etc - which are generally accepted. So if it's the object or action you're referring to, why not use those synonyms? And if it's not, then why use these words which apparently refer to them? The only answer can be for the "shock value" they carry.

These convey strong emotion, and often confrontation (as in your "f**k head" example). They're fighting words. The gangsters in Goodfellas use the F-word as an audible badge of power, like a gorilla beating its chest. How often do the non-gangsters swear in that movie? The maddest, most out of control of all of them, the Joe Pesce character, uses it constantly - a deliberate device by Scorcese to show us just how close to the edge he is. Eminem is exactly the same. For him, the F-word says, "I reject your society, I am dangerous." Of course he isn't, really, he's just a jumped-up little white boy with a modicum of talent and a nose for self-publicity, but there you go.

Do you think that children should be exposed to these levels of confrontation and violence? They swear between themselves, and that's natural. They are establishing their own power structures. But imagine a 12-year-old who will quite happily swear amongst friends, confronted in the street by an adult who shouts at him to "F**K OFF". I bet you he will still be scared, even though it's a word he might hear every day.

There are a lot of parallels here with sex. Children, even pre-teen, mostly "discover" sex with people of their own age, taking only hints from the world of grown-ups. Normal, natural and really rather sweet. When adults impose their sexuality on those same children, I hope we'd agree that it's a different story. A big problem with the Internet is that people interact with no visible signs as to how old they are, or how able they are to cope with strong language or sexuality. It is therefore awfully difficult to protect the vulnerable against a "mismatch" which could be frightening or even damaging. Exposure to the wrong images at an impressionable time can actually cause an imbalance in a developing personality. It is best to err on the side of caution.

As for the English language, I think it will look after itself. In a hundred, maybe even twenty, years' time this discussion will seem quaint and even puzzling - or it'll be outlawed because the fundamentalists have taken control. Things will have moved on. I happen to think it'll be in English, through sheer inertia: there are already more English-speakers in China than in the USA, and the more keyboard-friendly nature of an alphabetised language will carry the day, but's that's a separate issue.

Oh, and where the words are use in a legitimate artistic context, there is already an exemption - see, for instance, the winning poem in The Post's Christmas competition, where "jack s**t" went uncensored - but how much "art" is really to be found on h2g2?

And finally...
> the idea of a language being "coarsened" is pretty absurd and old-fashioned.

Guilty as charged, and proud of it.

GVI

I thought I would need a long reply to your latest, but I think I can sum up all my feelings quickly.

You wrote, "but how much 'art' is really to be found on h2g2?"

ALL OF IT.

I don't trust myself or you or the BBC to define what is not art, therefore it all might be art. Or rather, if you let one piece slip by because you call it "art," then it's really absurd to censor other bits because you judge them not to be art.

Um, excuse my interrupting, but I wonder if you debaters would be interested in seeing a suggestion I've just posted next door on the "Third Way" thread. It is intended to be a possible compromise between the points of view of the Zaphodistas and the Beebs.

Subcom. Deidzoeb, I am especially interested in whether you, as leader of the Rebellion, see this suggestion as acceptable, given your "demands".

GTB

As has been shown by BBC banning all threads on "The General Election" in h2g2 but allowing them in their own "Great Debate" site (without a link back to h2g2) They are not interested in maintaining h2g2 but simply want a greater market share of community users. The plan seems to be to merge h2g2 into the bbc sites. h2g2 will be kept on as a kiddie site with anything important being moved elsewhere.

Users will be encouraged to leave h2g2 to take part in forums elsewhere on the bbc (and not really encouraged to come back). We are fighting a loosing battle. What will be next to fall? Maybe all relegious threads will be moved to "The Greatest Debate" forever gone from h2g2.

GTB,

"My" demands?! Hell, you signed your name to them too!

(On my way over to check out "Third Way" forum.)

Subcommandante: Yes, I signed them, proudly, but you wrote them, and for that I give you credit, and I thank you. [bows low]

GTB