Just a week has passed since that bloody terroristic attack at the Charlie Hebdo editorial office in Paris — and in no time this attack was kind of universally considered as a dreadful attack on one of the holy cows of the Western civilization, namely the freedom of speech — and quite an interesting piece of news has come from the UK.
Media say the Oxford Unversity Press banned the words 'pig', 'sausages' and 'pork' from children's books to avoid offence. Wise heads of the OUP have seemingly decided these words can somehow offend Muslims (and Jews, for the matter).
Some questions arise.
Well, what about the Hindus? AFAIK, there are plenty of them in the UK, let alone the rest of the world. Why not to ban 'beef'?
To the best of my knowledge, it is eating pork that is prohibited to the Muslims and the Jews. This is the exact point that reminded a Jewish Leadership spokesman in the Daily Mail:
Yet am I somehow hurted that people around eat strangely looking, smelling and cooked food? No. Am I hurted that people sometimes worship strange gods and prophets, which I cannot call 'mine'? Absolutely no.
As for people, the one and only thing that really hurts me, that I consider a sign of the coming doomsday — is when people say something like "We Ukrainians are better than Russians". You can invent many more possible combinations; as for the post-USSR territory, one of the most severe conflicts was between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. "We are way beter than those pigs", one can hear on the both sides. Yet is there a tiny grain of truth in these statements?
Well, get back to old Europe. It looks like the left hand (freedom of speech fighters) does not know at all what the right hand does (those 'political correctness brigades'), both hands acting erratically and chaotically. I am not a medic to make diagnoses, yet from my personal Russian viewpoint it looks like split-mindedness. Dissociative identity disorder, if you wish it doublespeakfully.
Or, to give things names, schizophrenia. Isn't it?
Post scriptum: Oh, no, uneffingbelievable! How can such a web site exist in the UK today? Ban it! Clean the world of those quite conveniently associated English pigs so that none could be offended!
Some questions arise.
Well, what about the Hindus? AFAIK, there are plenty of them in the UK, let alone the rest of the world. Why not to ban 'beef'?
To the best of my knowledge, it is eating pork that is prohibited to the Muslims and the Jews. This is the exact point that reminded a Jewish Leadership spokesman in the Daily Mail:
Jewish law prohibits eating pork, not the mention of the word, or the animal from which it derives.And it's just logic. There are many of various things in the world.Some people enjoy surströmming, some hate even the idea of seeing a tin of it, let alone smelling it. Some people find insects to be a delicious food; the French eat frogs' legs — for me as a Russian both kinds of stuff are no delicacy at all. By the way, some historians suppose that we Russians just never had that big lack of food that would make us find 'unconventional' meals. Well, in fact, being in Thailand I tasted some fried bamboo maggots (or something of the like), just to tick a checkbox of my life's agenda. Nothing special; it turned out I didn't lose anything by not eaing it.
Yet am I somehow hurted that people around eat strangely looking, smelling and cooked food? No. Am I hurted that people sometimes worship strange gods and prophets, which I cannot call 'mine'? Absolutely no.
As for people, the one and only thing that really hurts me, that I consider a sign of the coming doomsday — is when people say something like "We Ukrainians are better than Russians". You can invent many more possible combinations; as for the post-USSR territory, one of the most severe conflicts was between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. "We are way beter than those pigs", one can hear on the both sides. Yet is there a tiny grain of truth in these statements?
Well, get back to old Europe. It looks like the left hand (freedom of speech fighters) does not know at all what the right hand does (those 'political correctness brigades'), both hands acting erratically and chaotically. I am not a medic to make diagnoses, yet from my personal Russian viewpoint it looks like split-mindedness. Dissociative identity disorder, if you wish it doublespeakfully.
Or, to give things names, schizophrenia. Isn't it?
Post scriptum: Oh, no, uneffingbelievable! How can such a web site exist in the UK today? Ban it! Clean the world of those quite conveniently associated English pigs so that none could be offended!
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