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

Obviously Savile related...

Fifty years ago, it was tacitly acceptable for men to have... relations with willing underage girls. Rock stars and similar were expected to have groupies.

Today, doing something sexual with someone any time up to the day before their sixteenth birthday is regarded with something like kind of horror once reserved for necrophilia or homosexuality. How it is that attitudes change.

So... in fifty years' time, what behaviours that are tacitly acceptable today will be the sort of thing to get people firebombing your house or desecrating your grave?

Eating meat

I hope that eating meat will be considered unacceptable. Also pushing your religious beliefs on others, and indoctorating children into them.

Driving internal combustion cars.
Not voting (expect to see this made mandatory)
Mentioning someone's race/skin colour/religion

Drinking alcohol in public is already frowned up, I have heard even forbidden by law, in some US states. Just as smoking has become something you go outside and shiver to to, drinking will become something you retreat into red lit dens to do.

Maybe even driving a car with only one person in it, or throwing things away will become completely taboo.

I can't see alcohol consumption, ending quite that far 'underground', I believe its been tried before, and didn't work, booze is too well enground in too many cultures... IMO...

I just hope I'm dead before society gets any more anally retentive than it already is, once life is too horrible to live, there isn't any point living it

I just wonder how ancient, the technology of today, might look, in say fifty years, ... as ancient as that fifty years ago from now, looks to us, maybe...

Smoking is something I'd put money on

Perhaps I've not been clear. Do you really think in fifty years time it will be a scandal that, say, Jeremy Paxman ate meat before presenting Newsnight, possibly even ate meat ON BBC PREMISES?

Eating meat and drinking alcoholo are not things we TACITLY accept, they're perfectly normal, legal activities.

I'm looking for things that perhaps aren't legal, or are barely legal, and in fifty years time when it turns out some of us did do them, that will be a scandal.

I think they are legal but accepted, but likely to become legal but frowned upon.

I think the big change in motoring will be speeding. Now it's very unacceptable to drink and drive but not to speed, soon it will be unacceptable to speed in the same way.

Maybe fiddling ones taxes? Illegal but accepted.

It pains me as always to agree with Hoo, but it's the big attitude shift that has really bugged me about this whole Jimmy Savile thing.

Now, OK I was only alive for the last three months of the 1970s, but I have plenty of books, films and other media dating back to the late 40s that make pretty much a joke out of men dating suspiciously young women. Society has taken a big moral step and completely forgotten what it left behind. It surely isn't coincidence that all Jimmy's big charity work started in the 1980s - presumably he realised that he could well be vilified for what was once culturally acceptable and made an effort to do something good. Why should his name be desecrated for that.

By the by, seeing John Peel loaded onto that bandwagon has made me feel somewhat depressed.

Race relations has undergone a similar transition. Nowadays you can't even refer to a person of ethnic minority using the word 'black', let alone an assortment other words. But these were normal, inoffensive words just a couple of generations ago. One of my favourite films, Top Secret, made in the 1980s, is never shown on TV because it makes a couple of questionable jokes about the race of one of the lead characters.

Fat people will be the next to suffer, mark my words. Being fat will become an abnormal social taboo.

B

No, I can see eating meat being scandalous in 50 years. The pressure on resources growing exponentially as it is means the idea of wasting land for grazing will be unacceptable.

Granted, we'll see a rise in farmed fish so we won't be totally meat-free.

If anyone remakes Gigi (1958) I seriously doubt this song would be included today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-hkjEMRZfQ

But as to what will be similarly culturally outrageous in 50 years? I honestly don't know. What's left? After the Politically Correct campaigns of the 80's and 90's I can't think of many things we tacitly condone like that.

Jimmy Savile is not being vilified for having 'relationships with underage girls'. The issue of consent in the case of Savile is not one that simply they were underage and therefore unable to give their consent. He is being vilified because they did not give their consent at all.

I am convinced that if asked people in the 1960's or 70's 'Is it ok for for an adult to 'interfere' with young girls' or someone in the 1980s or 90s 'Is it ok for an adult to sexually assault young girls', the answer to that question would be the same across those generations

~*~Not voting (expect to see this made mandatory)~*~

Like it or not, a truly free society means you're free to *not vote.* You're also free to *not care,* *not agree,* and generally *not fit in.*

Honestly, while I don't encourage the practice, I'd be much more concerned about a government that restricts your right to ignore it than I would be about apathetic citizens.

Peanut that's true. All the criticisms of Jimmy Saville were about the lack of consent. But I have seen other stories relating to rock stars and consensual relationships being vilified.

(From my reading of this story there is no concern that the relationship was non-consensual, exploitative yes and she was too young to give consent in legal terms, but she did say that she was a willing participant. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2216453/John-Peel-got-pregnant-I-15-Woman-claims-month-affair-DJ.html?ito=feeds-newsxml )

I recognise that there are differences between John Peel and Jimmy Savile and that is more for the other thread

I just feel that it is important to specifically define in our terms what the nature of Jimmy Savile behaviour was and the language that is now being used is that of of 'predatory sex offender'

This wasn't culturally acceptable in the 60's and 70s anymore than it is now. Even though how we discuss it, deal with it and try to prevent it has evolved over time

So while Mu is upset that John Peel is being discussed in the same breath as Jimmy Savile, I am upset and disturbed that Jimmy Savile is being discussed in the same breath as John Peel,

if you see what I mean.

There are a whole list of driving offences that seem to be tacitly acceptable to a lot of people. Speeding, parking offences - there are quite a lot of them where the attitude seems to be "Ok, but it's not *really* wrong, *everybody* does that!"

Speaking of which, here it almost seems not just tacitly approved but legal to kill s. I often read of cases of obvious negligence on the part of a vehicle driver, often making a left hand turn directly in the path of a motorcyclist, and getting nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Often they receive a small monetary fine and that's it. And what really gets on my last nerve is how newspapers and television newscasters always make a point of noting whether or not the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet. (I always wear my helmet, but in many states, including Texas it's not required). With wrecks like this, it often doesn't really matter if they were wearing a helmet but by making a point of whether they did or didn't, it implies that the motorcyclist is always at fault just by being a motorcyclist. (And if ANYONE calls us "organ donors" you can go .)

There are campaigns in various states to get stiffer mandatory sentences for such cases of reckless driving so I'm hoping the tide is changing.

Sorry, but I'm not giving up "Thank heaven for little girls" no matter what! It's my favorite song from "Gigi."

As for driving too fast, I doubt that it would become scandalous. But driving gas-guzzlers? That could become an outrage. As for driving with just one person [the driver],that is already being solved with the advent of tiny super-efficient cars that only hold one or two people. The Smart Car and the Fiat 500 are quite tiny.

I don't think we'll be driving at all, anyway (well, I won't - I'll be pushing up the daisies.)

Predicting the future is always a fickle art. No one ever foresaw the fax machine, which is quite revolutionary (most of our orders at work still come in by fax), and, of course, the concept of texting which pervades (and in most cases, simplifies) every aspect of our lives is never mentioned in any science fiction stories of the forties, fifties or sixties.



Careful with the spoonerisms up there.