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

FYI, the fax machine was invented in 1843.

Maybe the practice of forcing workers to undertake unpaid overtime will result in retrospective lawsuits against what will be seen as bullying companies.

Peanut: read the original post again. I'm quite clear on what Savile's being vilified for. The point of THIS thread is that his activities happened at a time when less... rapey activities were illegal, but tacitly condoned, or at least tolerated or regarded as something you couldn't complain about.

"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 "

This is something called a "straw man" argument - you've made up something I didn't say, so that you can argue against it.

How about this: ask your hypothetical 1960s person if they thought it was OK for pop stars to have sex with teenage girls who queued up to have sex with them, or broke into their hotel rooms or tour buses. Something tells me you wouldn't have got the horrified condemnation you're hoping for.

The point of this thread is: Savile's activities happened against a background culture that tolerated older men having an interest in young (but crucially post-pubescent) girls, and we're now seeing people being retrospectively revolted by that.

And I'm wondering what will our children or grandchildren's generation look back at with retrospective revulsion when they think about what THEY (and we) tacitly condone right now.

I think speeding in cars is possibly a good one, although the instinct to speed is a strong one especially in the young. I'd like to think that within 50 years we'll have reached a point where it will seem amazing that we ever permitted humans to control cars on roads at all. Possibly it will seem amazing that we ever sold cars that were capable of speeding, i.e. that didn't simply sense the local speed limit through a combination of GPS and a database, and automatically restrict their top speed to that limit.

I can't see being fat becoming unacceptable. If anything, the trend seems to be more to condone being fat as a valid lifestyle choice, and for society to lie to fat people and tell them it's OK. It would be lovely if being obese became societally equivalent to being a child molester, but sadly I don't think that will ever come about.

I'd like to think that raising a child in a religion would be looked back on as child abuse, but sadly most people are really, really gullible and thick, so that won't happen either, at least not for a few centuries, if ever.

There's nothing wrong with a little topic drift Hoovooloo. Don't be mean.

Actually, I think you're right... given current technology we're right on the way to having self driving cars. This will probably result in faster speeds, not slower and it will also negate the ills of drunken driving. (I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.)

As to obesity (and I qualify as obese but I am slimming... slowly), it's quite telling when you read the weight of 19th century "fat men/ladies" in circus sideshows. You wouldn't blink an eye at many of them today. For example: http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/04/18/americas-obesity-epidemic-bringing-sideshow-freaks-into-the-discussion/

>> It would be lovely if being obese became
societally equivalent to being a child molester... <<

You might wanna think about that one.
The only victim in obesity is one's own 'inner child'.

Anyone who takes exception to a fat lifestyle must
keep their opinions to themselves or risk becoming
a hate-monger. Positive medical advice is obviously
acceptable but being rude and smug is not; now or
50 years from now.

Lynch mobs for fatties? Gonna need a better rope.


~jwf~

"The only victim in obesity is one's own 'inner child'. "

If only that were true. Meanwhile, in the real world, depressingly large amounts of my taxes go to treat fat people for heart disease, joint problems, diabetes and dozens of other complaints they've inflicted on themselves because they couldn't say "no thanks" to that sixth Mars bar of the morning. If hospitals had really, really narrow doors, you'd be right, but you're not, so let's move on.

"Anyone who takes exception to a fat lifestyle must keep their opinions to themselves or risk becoming a hate-monger"

Can you still say "monger"? Or isn't that offensive to... someone? Ricky Gervais, isn't it? I'm sorry, I'm not keeping up.

And yes, right now societal opinion is that you must indulge the chubbers, pretend to them that it's OK and you don't mind, in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY that we used to indulge and not carp on about men shagging underage girls.

" being rude and smug is not; now or 50 years from now."

I disagree. I think being rude and smug is going to be very much the thing 50 years from now. Where our leaders lead, we follow, and a ruder and smugger bunch of aarseholes than our current government is difficult for my limited imagination to conjure.

Your self-described 'limited imagination' notwithstanding
you cannot compare obesity to the violation of another's
physical and long-term emotional well being.

Perhaps if sex-crazed pop-stars were required to shift
the object of their depravity thru 'really, really narrow'
hospital doors before committing assaults on the naive and
love-struck among our juvenile population, then it might
make sense. But for now, the comparison is ludicrous.

If it helps at all, I dare say your tax contributions have
thus far not caused one jolly fat person to lose an ounce.
Nor have they effectively prevented celebrity predators
from doing their thing.

There is some hope that fat people can be convinced of the
error of their ways without resorting to cruelty and violence,
but celebrity predators can only be taken out and shot. Well,
no actually, don't take them out, just shoot them where they
lie/stand/wiggle/waddle/prance or prey.


~jwf~

surely monger just means creator it's a perfectly valid word

I can't see meat becoming frowned upon because there is some land which is simply uneconomical to raise crops on like steep hills or land likely to flood

I can see it becoming more expensive though

I think caged chickens should be a thing of the past both for eggs and meat free range or not at all

The workplace may be where the greatest changes are. Having seen this week's proposals to remove employment rights and give shares instead makes me wonder whether going sick, for example, might become unacceptable. We in the UK tend to be a couple of decades behind the Americans in enployment practice, so I'll look to them for these trends, if not China.

@Anthea - I was joking. Ricky Gervais got in trouble a little while ago for defending the use of the word "mong". Obviously if one did not know that, the joke would pass one by.

It was a bit confusing as he also has raised quite the furor on twitter over his open opinions on obesity (as well as joyfully poking the religious).

I got it, but it took me a few minutes.



(Oh, and his view point on weight has helped me. I don't need fancy diets or expensive programs, I just need to eat human sized portions.)

If medical science can make enough headway in finding methods that guarantee healthy body weight, obesity won't be around 50 years from now anyway, except for a small number of people with psychological issues.

If famines become commonplace fifty years from now, wasting food will be considered unacceptable.

"methods that guarantee healthy body weight"

You say that as though there's some complex mystery at work. There's not.

Eat less. Exercise more.

That's the entire secret of maintaining a healthy body weight in four words. All else is wittering around the edges trying to convince the fatties that yes, that's it, that really is all there is to it, and yes, you do actually have to do it and not just promise to do it, say you're doing it, do a bit and then eat a whole cake as a reward for doing it etc.

Obesity won't be stopped by better medical science. It's better science, in fact, that's causing obesity - food is cheap and plentiful, and sweeter than it has ever been before. The only way to combat obesity is to make food harder to get hold of for the poor - not a popular policy, not really a vote winner. But we in the UK spend a lower proportion of our income on food than we ever have, not because we're eating less, but because it's cheap. And the cheaper stuff is rubbish.

As for famines making us feel guilty - nope. We all settled down to watch Live Aid in 1984 with buckets of popcorn and guilt-assuaging credit card donations ready. Brown people starving somewhere in Africa isn't going to stop a lardbucket from scoffing their twentieth choccy of the day in front of X Factor - you credit people with too much empathy and wit.

Hoo, perhaps I should have been clearer, my response wasn't to your first post it was triggered by Mu Beta's post. But my post wasn't a direct response to him as such, a general comment. Tried to keep things short because I didn't want to make this thread all about Jimmy Savile but niether did I feel I could just not say anything

I was putting forward my opinion that Jimmy Savile's behaviour wasn't culturally acceptable then. I have been clear about that on this thread and the other

Jimmy Savile wasn't 'dating' teenage girls
.
On to our questions, we can ask our 1960s and 70's people two questions

Do you think it is ok to sexually assault or rape teenage girls?

Do you think it is ok to have sex with teenage girls?

These are totally different questions, that difference is one that a person would recognise then. It is one that I think we should be really clear about now

I don't think that a cultural silence about abuse or the inability to recognise, address and tackle a culture of abuse within institutions where it occured is the same as it being culturally acceptable to a population.

I'm not sure where you are getting the horrified condemnation vibe from re your question about pop stars and tour buses. I am not coming from there.

Ah, I see.

And you're right, "Jimmy Savile wasn't 'dating' teenage girls". But... he was able to do what he did because he was spending a lot of his time hanging round with teenage girls.

If any middle-aged celebrity nowadays spent a lot of their time hanging around with teenage girls, they'd be looked at with suspicion immediately. The point is, he wasn't - or rather, nothing much was said about this behaviour because lots of other people were doing it (the hanging around part, not the raping part).

Most of those other people weren't actually assaulting the girls they were hanging around with (probably), although they were probably doing things we'd categorise as abuse, consent notwithstanding.



About those questions:
I'd hope that if you asked anyone, any time, whether it was OK to rape anyone, they'd say no. However, if you ask a lot of men, and you make it clear that we're talking about a case where you get to rape a woman AND GET AWAY WITH IT, a disturbingly large proportion would actually say that yes, they'd do it, which implies they think that on some level at least it's OK. (Can't remember the source for that figure but it was a survey of American university undergrads, not cavemen).

However, if you ask "is it OK to have sex with a willing 14 year old girl", the answer you'd get is MASSIVELY dependent on when and where you ask. For most of history most of the world would regard it as a stupid question. Even today probably most of the world would regard it thus. Even people from civilised, European countries other than the UK might blink and say "of course", perhaps qualifying it with the relative age of the hypothetical partner.

But ask a British person of the 1970s, and they'd probably say "well...." and admit that while it's not technically LEGAL, there are potentially circumstances in which, etc. etc.

Ask a British person today and while they'd probably THINK "well...", a decade or more of media hysteria would force their public response to be a knee-jerk "NO! OF COURSE NOT! HOW DARE YOU EVEN ASK THE QUESTION! I'm not a paedo, please don't print my name and address."

"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?"

Cyberbullying? http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/19960162

Things like drinking and speeding are far less likely to become unacceptable while the ruling classes enjoy them so much.

http://www.avert.org/age-of-consent.htm

There are some surprising places with very low ages of consent. (And some that don't surprise me at all. I'm looking at you Syria and Japan.

If you think eating meat will be banned (Wot, no Steak?) and petrol driven cars, voting mandatory etc, etc, etc and anything else remotely fun then thank christ I will be dead by then........