Download this page in PDF formatCute …
Hasbro and Mattel try to preserve their copyright of Scrabble, asking Facebook to pull a cloned version of it, and within a day there’s a group with 13,000+ people on it all protesting.
Someone instructs people to go out and assault and kidnap people in wheelchairs, and the response is … crickets chirp.
You’d think there’d be more than a few angry posts on a handful of message boards to the latter topic, wouldn’t you? Or at least something a little more demonstrative. If people can get that hyped up over a game being pulled, you’d think they could at *least* put the same level of collective energy into protesting someone advocating violence.
Google shows 544 hits for “Rod Liddle wheelchair” … and 40,200 for “Scrabulous protest”. When you see 13,000 people protesting a game, and a handful protesting hate speech, I seriously wonder at just how fucked up people are. I’m pretty sure there has to be more than 13,000 disabled people in the UK, so where are they? I’d be curious to know just how many people with disabilities in the UK have signed up to try to “save” Scrabulous but haven’t actually done more than whimper into their beers at how unfair the world is about Rod Liddle.
Sometimes, I really hate nailing it right on the head.
(With apologies to the “usual suspects”, i.e. that handful of people who actually do try to make a difference in the UK, as opposed to the apathetic majority that sits back and expects those same usual suspects to carry all the load for them while the scroungers sit around bemoaning their lot publicly.)
And let’s not forget the media’s culpability in all of this! Rod Liddle’s article didn’t generate a squawk, possibly because it’s considered bad form to tell a fellow journalist they’re naughty – But look around the leading online news sites, and there it is, the fight to save a Facebook game.
I bet if Rod Liddle was a Muslim and had posted it, the media would be all over it. Likewise, if the article had advocated violence against gays, lesbians, blacks, or republicans, the media would be jumping on it like flies on shit.
But no, a journalist going out and telling people to attack people in wheelchairs isn’t really “news” compared to people trying to spell badly online, a much more important segment of society.
Which came first, the media’s apathy or the apathy of people with disabilities? It could be said that either of them feeds the other, that if people were disabilities were more vociferous in demanding prejudice against them be jumped on, the media would find it more newsworthy, or that people with disabilities might be more interested in protesting acts of discrimination if the media bothered to cover them more.
And people wonder why prejudice continues.
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