Fair enough. I felt like you were talking about generalities about how you felt we give too much power to people who are offended. I didn’t realize your points were limited to the discussion of this case only.
Do you know why people are “offended” by the word “assimilate”? There are people walking down the street who were targeted by a government program that had a goal of getting them to “assimilate” under which they were taken from their families and put in schools where many were physically and sexually abused. They grew up without parents, many were beaten if they spoke the language they learned as children. I can’t possibly list the horrors here. The last residential school closed in the mid-90’s. This isn’t about reminding people of something that happened hundreds of years ago, it’s about something that happened to people walking down the street looking at the licence plate today.
If you don’t understand this context, then I can see why you wouldn’t think “assimilate” is such a horrible thing to say, but it’s pretty much on par with “watch your parent commit suicide” as a licence plate. It’s obvious that some people who lived through that experience are going to take that pretty hard.
So if your concern is entirely that the people who were offended by this licence plate were too “easily” offended, you should probably know that the person is driving it in a province where “assimilate” would be a direct reminder of childhood emotional, physical and sexual abuse to tens of thousands of people. This isn’t about an undergrad student freshly angered by an introductory class they took.
If you think that absolutely anything should be allowed on a licence plate I’ll accept you have a radical position. But if you think that some things should be disallowed for being offensive, then I think you probably just don’t realize how offensive this plate is.
Yeah, but as you note in your next paragraph, you should probably be thankful that they can’t do the same to you. That’s why I don’t think any contact is appropriate in this case. In your personal life you have to deal with assholes, but when assholes violate rules and you report the violation, you should be able to count on the people who enforce the rules to do their job (which may include doing nothing if you were way off base).
But more seriously, compared to (say) Russian, English word order is pretty inflexible. Chinese OTOH —while normally extremely inflexible in word order— can even handily flip between SVO and SOV* order without sounding Yoda-like. But in terms of overall word order flexibility, English is mid way between those extremes.
I live in a similarly tolerant place. But there does need to be a certain level of assimilation with local cultural norms in terms of baseline public behaviour or things get stressful. An example — I grew up in the UK, which is culturally a ‘free flow’ pedestrian culture with no particular preference for the right or left side of a path. You simply walk through the gaps in the crowd, trying to avoid obstructing or touching anyone else and use body language to signal intent. Australia and New Zealand OTOH are ‘weak preference for left’ pedestrian cultures. So when we moved to NZ and until I understood that (and still sometimes when not thinking) I created annoyance by walking across people trying to keep left.
And having waded through the whole thread, I reckon on balance I’d let the guy have his plates. But only on condition that he puts a custom Borg paint job on the vehicle and adds a nicely sign written “Resistance is Futile” above the plate. If he can’t or won’t, the plate gets pulled. If he does then he’s truly a fan, the Star Trek reference is made blatantly obvious and anyone offended deserves the misery of professional victimhood.
Fair enough. Cultures need to adjust themselves towards each other to the point of mutual respect: if someone from a culture which allows smoking in public buildings comes here, they have to understand that’s generally not considered acceptable, and if I go to Japan, I need to understand that certain things barely worth notice here (like wearing shoes indoors) are considered extremely impolite there.
But, from how I understand the word, “assimilation” goes past that, to the point of wanting to extinguish all that is “other” about a person and make them conform to the larger culture. And, as a habitual nonconformist, I just can’t support that.
He already had a plate cover saying “Resistance is futile” in the picture from the article; I’d think that the reference was already quite obvious to anyone who would understand it.
However, this may seem like blasphemy, but not everyone is a Star Trek fan.
I live in a tolerant part of one of the racially-divided and mostly self-segregated cities in post-industrial America. We manage to have dozens of ethnic enclaves who celebrate their culture publicly and peacefully, and also a loud and violent culture of bigots of all colors, religions, and opinions.
(Every day I am thankful that the city isn’t burning [yet], and that in my part of it, people are mostly kind and decent.)
In the name of assimilation, in a certain country, a policy was put in place in schools in order to uproot local languages, to eradicate them in the exclusive favor of the One Official Language of the country.
Any kid caught speaking a forbidden language had to wear a mark of shame, the Symbol, and was to keep it until another kid was caught, including through denunciation by the wearer, which was of course encouraged.
The Symbol took various forms across different regions. In some places it was a sabot, pinning the wearer as a backwards hick for speaking such a filthy, primitive language.
This strategy spanned several decades and generations, and while it hasn’t succeeded in totally eradicating its targets, and has been abandoned since, it damaged their locutor base enough that, to this day, the long-term survival of several of those languages is quite uncertain.
Yup. Good ol’ colonial times. But it didn’t just apply to colonies: mainland France regional languages were treated the same way: Breton, Occitan, etc.
It’s a strong undercurrent of French culture at play. I call it “Narrow-minded Universalism”.
