November 19th, 2008 | 
Author: It’s 24 years late, but 1984 has arrived on Queen’s University campus:
Your friend’s new fuchsia fedora might be hideous. But don’t call it gay, or you might get a language lesson from the conversation cops.
Students at Queen’s University who sprinkle their dialogue with an assortment of “homo” or “retarded” could find out the hard way that not everyone finds their remarks acceptable.
God, what’s next? Am I, as a departmental IT admin, going to have to start monitoring what my users do online? How long before we start turning each other in for a reward?
Given yesterday’s announcement of budget cuts (20% over three years!), how can this be a wise use of scarce campus resources?
Colour me fracking disgusted. Just call me Winston Smith.
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That is so gayly retarded. And it throws like a girl.
Sam Lowry and Harry Tuttle come to mind as well.
Did you catch the other bad behaviour “If a student avoids a classmate’s birthday party for faith-based reasons.”
If that isn’t way too vague. As worded, skipping a party to go to the Church/temple/etc. of your choice would be wrong.
oh this is frackin ridiculous!! why don’t they add swearing to it too? And anything anti-gov’t? So if your conversation can be overheard it’s not private? So what do we have to do.. whisper?
And I agree with it carrying over into social behaviour modificatrion like the birthday avoidance. What happened to it being YOUR choice what you do socially and with whom???
Man I would LOVE to test this out..
hmm What happens if someone doesn’t want to talk to the “facilitator”? kicked outta school?
grrrrr
It will be very interesting to see how far they try to take this. I can see this one getting very ugly: there’s nothing that says you have to stand there and listen to some holier than thou prick lecturing you about your language.
Where does “geek” fall?
They are paying for it with the extra $300,000 (Riot cop fees) from canceling Homecoming…
I’d turn you in for five bucks Gord! Heck, I’d turn you in for a loonie!
Gary, I AM a loonie.
I use “retarded” all the time, but only because so many thing are…
It seems this is getting attention in a lot of circles (mostly more conservative leaning).
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/letters/story.html?id=c92f9bfc-e0f1-48b6-a9b1-e6f04eff3ade
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/11/20/national-post-editorial-board-thought-police-are-thought-police-not-facilitators.aspx
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/11/21/stephen-taylor-the-lessons-of-queens-university.aspx
http://www.mindsay.com/comments/notyourbarwench/301845
http://stevejanke.com/archives/278496.php
I would have thought there’d be more Libertarian pickup, but there doesn’t seem to be that many of them out there …
In the spirit of being PC I will bite my tongue now before I say something about the [derogative of your choice] people who thought this up. How can they possibly have thought that this would look anything but bad no matter how many trips through the spin cycle they put it?
Mind you by using a wildcard I’ve probably offended everyone!
These language monitoring policies keep coming up. It’s like administrators have never heard of irony or thought through the dystopian implications of having speech monitored for ‘correctness’. This topic was also discussed on CBC and I was amazed that only one side (the administrator’s) was even represented. It’s as if the CBC thinks the only other possible position would be bigotry itself.
It’s being rounded ridiculed just about everywhere except the CBC, Marian. I heard the Patrick Deane interview yesterday and I was horrified by the interviewer’s position. How anyone could think this would be a good thing is beyond me.
Pitty the Air Farce are off TV, they could retread all of their “Tongue Trooper” bits.