THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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The Global Offence Industry strikes again!

The Global Offence Industry strikes again!

Re: “Cultural insensitivity is hurtful and costly”, Editorial, November 24-25.

Yes, but you are backing the wrong horse in this case. The cited video portrays a woman struggling to eat pizza and pasta using chopsticks, and was attacked for “trivialising both women and Chinese culture”. Suppose it had been a Yorkshireman struggling to eat pot noodles with a knife and fork. Would that have trivialised both men and British culture?
In the days before the Global Offence Industry reduced the dramatic art of comedy to the pathetic slapstick “humour” that exists today, the video would have been known as a “joke”. But we live in a fractious new world of fear and loathing, where grim-faced social justice warriors scour the Internet, searching for something to offend them; a world where we walk about as though on eggshells, scarcely daring to open our mouths lest we fall foul of anti-free speech legislation and lose our livelihoods. All power to comedians such as Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson) and Count Dankula (Mark Meechan) who seek to reverse this politically correct Orwellian nonsense with their campaigns to defend free speech.
Offence is taken, not given. For goodness’ sake, let’s lighten up!
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga 

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