Stop reading now if you are easily offended. I mean really, really, easily offended.
There was a page on the BBC website yesterday about a man
spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing an “offensive” slogan in a city centre has been warned he risks an £80 fine if he is caught again.
Forklift driver David Pratt was told by street wardens in Peterborough he could cause offence or incite violence.
OK, what caused a potential £80 worth of offence to Peterborough’s genteel street wardens?
“Don’t piss me off. I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.”
I did say you have to be really really easily offended.
Street wardens, and cctv were both brought into play in this incident, according to the debate on the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine show between the man’s wife and a representative of Peterborough Council. I am just staggered that Peterborough is so apparently social problem-free that the words on someone’s t-shirt can cause such a fuss. And that these Big Brother cameras are just there to make sure that any semantic debates sparked by clothing are properly recorded.
As an aside, the almost venomous responses of several people on the same show to the Heathrow climate change protestors were truly shocking. Don’t listen to this if you are easily depressed either by interminable MOR rock or by the short-sightedness of human nature.
It seems like everybody nowadays is complaining about how badly they are offended by this and that. We have Christians complaining about people criticising their beliefs, Muslims reacting violently to depictions of a long dead, illiterate warlord, and Daily Mail readers, well being Daily Mail readers.
People are far too easily upset about petty little things. Grow-up, and take your pathetic cry-baby routines elsewhere.
The annoying thing is that the sensitive easily offended souls never do get told to grow up. Somehow their capacity to be so easily offended gives them power to control the rest of us.
Iin this case, there was a remote possibility that there might be one offended person hiding in the visible world of clearly unoffended people. So that the street wardens were there to protect that conceptual person from being exposed to a conceptual offence.