Who is covered?
I’m curious about Police Scotland now, because of their high-handed persecution of Marion Millar.
In case you haven’t seen the post earlier today:
So I looked at their Twitter and I didn’t have to look far.
They say “A hate crime is any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by malice & ill-will towards a social group” but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think they act on reports of hate crimes against women. The new hate crimes law (which is separate from this incident, which cites the Malicious Communications Act) doesn’t include women as targets of hate crime. I guess women are the new men? We’re the ones with so much social power and physical strength and general dominance that we can’t be the targets of hate crimes?
It’s never International Day Against Misogyny. Why is that exactly?
I’m guessing this question is rhetorical.
But we have the equation we need: TWAW. That’s all we need to know. Literally all we need to know Men: the new women, better than the old women.
There’s just not room on the calendar. What with 365 days of the year being reserved for “International Day of Misogyny”, we can only manage to squeeze it in on that extra day on leap years. Unless the aromantics want it … then we’ll probably have to give it to them.
‘A hate crime is any crime which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by malice & ill-will towards a social group …’
I try not to sneer at wrongly placed commas and other minor crimes against language. Really, I’m trying—glass houses and all that for starters. But it’s an indicator, isn’t it? If you don’t know how to do commas, you probably don’t know how to do other writing tasks—encoding thoughts into words and so on.
Perceived? Have they thought that through? Any other person? That includes a lot of people.
That violent bloke at the pub perceives my looking in his general direction as motivated by all kinds of things unsupported by evidence. And if I ask this victim ‘what pronouns do you use?’ when he confronts me about my hate crime, he is likely to perceive malice & ill-will. But someone in that tiny subset ‘any person’ would perceive malice & ill-will if I fail to ask that question.
The perception of ‘any person’ encompasses every error, confusion and madness that exists.
Yes, it damn well is an indicator. I silently removed another “wtf?” comma in something else I quoted today, and it was as random as that one or more so. Commas aren’t a kind of spice or ornament, they do something.
I find it hilarious when quotation marks are used on handwritten signs to denote emphasis, when underlining, italics, or bolding would have been better.
“Free” coffee (What’s the catch? What do I have to do to earn my “free” coffee?)
“No” photography allowed (Nudge and a wink. I’ll get my camera then!)
“New” car (Exactly how many trips to the moon and back has this vehicle been driven?)
In this same spirit, I’m perfectly willing to “agree” that misgendering is “actual violence,” and that “controversial” stickers “require” police “attention.”
“Ankh-Morpork people considered that spelling was a sort of optional extra. They believed in it the same way they believed in punctuation; it didn’t matter where you put it, so long as it was there.”
Since almost every email I see from our English faculty contains commas in odd, incorrect places, I have just about decided that we are in a hopeless situation. I still correct my students on their commas, semi-colons, and colons (they underuse semi-colons, replacing them with commas, and overuse colons, using them in places where no punctuation is appropriate). I have seen a lot of professionally published books lately that stick commas in just any random place, and often leave them out in places where they belong. I don’t know if the books aren’t being edited, or if they are being edited badly, but it is an extremely annoying thing to have to read a sentence several times to figure out what it means, when one reading would have been adequate with appropriate punctuation.
The proof copy of my latest book is littered with sticky notes saying “comma”. Either needing one, or one needs left out. Almost no one I know in the writing community would bother with those, especially when I edited the book five times before it went to the publisher. But there are a lot of things you see in print copy that you cannot see on screen.
Having been the editor on two anthologies, I learned that other writers are not as diligent. They scanned the proof copy, told me looks great, and I went through and found the misspellings, the comma errors, the wrong spacing, the misspellings they missed.