Category Archives: Political Correctness

The Associated Press article Pa. school district can keep Redskins name, but logos might go reported that the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission has ordered the Neshaminy School District in Bucks County, whose sports teams nickname is the Redskins, to get rid of all logos and imagery that negatively stereotype Native Americans, although they may keep the nickname (often shortened to simply the Skins). So what will their logos and imagery be? Redskin potatoes?

I graduated from Pennsbury High School in Bucks County in 1961. Neshaminy was our bitter rival in all sports, especially football. In all of the years I lived in that area, I never once heard anyone complain about the nickname, the logos, imagery or anything else about Neshaminy being offensive to anyone.

This decision is political correctness garbage at its worst. And by the way, there are currently eight school districts in the WPIAL that have Native American nicknames (four Indians, two Warriors, two Raiders including Uniontowns Red Raiders), and logos/imagery ranging from Indian heads to feathers and arrows, such as the Aliquippa Quips, who use an Indian head logo. Apparently, we in Western Pennsylvania are not as PC as our neighbors to the east (thank heaven).

I suppose it wont be very long before other social justice warriors choose to attack any school district that has the nickname Devils as promoting satanic worship (there are three in the WPIAL). That might even generate a lot of support in our increasingly Godless society.

David Reese, Mt. Lebanon

Wile E. Coyote Democrats

The Democrats newest made-for-TV investigation into President Trump is turning into another Wile E. Coyote cartoon, this time starring Adam Schiff. The Dems spend most of their time plotting some way to capture Trump, and it seems every one of their schemes blows up in their faces.

This is the third episode of the same story in the past three years. First was Russia, Russia, Russia. The explosion from the Mueller investigation is just beginning to sizzle. It will really catch fire as soon as the preliminary report of the investigation into the Obama administrations attempt at a coup detat is released.

The second act was the Democrats failed attempt to destroy Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, thus demeaning Trump. But the stories told by the witnesses were unable to be verified. Criminal referrals against several of the storytellers remain unaddressed, according to nine Republican senators who wrote a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray in October, seeking information on where the investigations stand.

And now we have the ever-indignant Schiff bringing an assortment of bureaucrats whose feathers got ruffled by Trump on stage to tell us no criminal nor impeachable activity occurred in his dealings with Ukraine.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Wile. E. Coyote blows up again.

Bob Jacobs, Unity

Wolfs veto of abortion ban

Gov. Tom Wolf on Nov. 21 vetoed a bill, passed by the state Legislature, that would have prohibited abortions because of a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis.

I believe that any abortion, with the exception of saving the life of the mother, is out-and-out a murder. Not only are Wolfs statements about this subject discriminatory, they are wholly against Gods word.

When I watched the governor of New York sign the states law that allows abortion even up to the moment of birth, I saw in his face nothing but evil. To Wolf I ask this question: Do you want to stand before the supreme judge of us all and be asked why you did not defend those that God gave life to and why you determined that those with Down syndrome were especially pointed out?

I am praying that Wolf has a change of heart and does not have to answer these questions before almighty God on that great day of judgment. The decision for good or evil is up to you, Gov. Wolf; it is your immortal soul that hangs in the balance.

I have done what God has laid upon my heart to do and that is to send this letter as a warning from him. Those who are born with no health issues and those who are born with Down syndrome: Each is given special gifts from God and to abort them is to deprive the world of those gifts.

John T. Watson, North Huntingdon

Charter school misinformation

In the article Freeports cyber charter school is helping district save money, officials say, Freeport Area School District Superintendent Ian Magness said, In an outside cyber charter setting, there is very little accountability, and that is common knowledge across the commonwealth. This is a common misconception, but its not true.

Cyber charters are held to even more stringent standards than other schools in Pennsylvania. Cyber charters are governed by the same state and federal education mandates that apply to all public schools, plus additional oversight groups that school districts dont answer to, including the IRS, the Department of the Treasury, the auditor general, watchdog organizations for special education and civil rights, and more.

Unfortunately, due to this kind of misinformation, Pennsylvania now faces a school choice crisis.

Gov. Tom Wolf and Education Committee Chairman Curt Sonney are considering legislation that would force families to pay out-of-pocket if they send their children to charter schools outside their home district. They believe district-run charter schools are better than outside charters. But as a former brick-and-mortar schoolteacher who now teaches at a cyber charter, Ive seen that this is untrue. Fortunately, Ive also seen students who were unable to get the support they needed from their home districts eventually become thriving learners after their families found the right cyber charter school that actually serves their needs.

Why should these families be forced to pay a penalty, or feel trapped by the same districts that have been letting them down?

Peter Mysels, Monroeville

The writer is a PA Distance Learning Charter School social studies teacher.

Trumps interference with Navy is dangerous

As a former Navy enlisted and officer, I am highly concerned with the commander-in-charge-of-White-House-chaos interference in Navy matters.

The commander-in-charge-of-White-House-chaos overruled the Navys decision to demote Chief Petty Officer and Navy Seal Edward Gallagher. Gallagher was convicted of posing with a dead detainee. President Trumps rationale was that he was standing up for our military. Trump also overruled the peer review ordered by Rear Adm. Collin Green, head of the Navy Seals, and by doing this he is undermining the Navys chain of command and adversely impacting discipline within the Navy. The peer review would have been conducted by senior Navy enlisted personnel.

The commander-in-charge-of-White-House-chaos, who knows nothing about our military, might have Navy personnel in command second-guessing their authority, which could be detrimental to naval operations in the world and could adversely impact our national security.

Donald Moskowitz, Londonderry, N.H.

Religious beliefs and adoption

I am deeply troubled by Pennsylvanias Department of Human Services, which refuses to grant a religious exemption to Catholic adoption agencies who place children with a family of a man and a woman (Catholics halt adoption, foster care programs in Greensburg, Pittsburgh over state rule.) According to a 2016 American Academy of Pediatrics report, Fathers do not parent like mothers, nor are they a replacement for mothers when they are not at home; they provide a unique dynamic and important contribution to the family and children. Same-sex couples do not give a child the unique parenting of both genders, male and female.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child advocates that the well-being of children should be of utmost importance in considering public policy. Apparently, Gov. Tom Wolf did not take children into consideration when he signed the executive order that included a nondiscrimination clause on sexual orientation and gender identity.

All adoption agencies must sign a contract to place children with same-sex couples who are interested in adopting, regardless of what the studies show is best for children. Religious and conscience beliefs of the agencies are not even considered.

Bernadette Cymbor, North Huntingdon

We need nurse practitioners

Ive been the patient of a talented and caring nurse practitioner for 30 years. I am writing to respond to the recent back and forth between nurse practitioners and doctors regarding full practice authority for nurse practitioners.

I trust my nurse practitioner, Cathy Grant. Shes the best health care person I ever went to. My wife, brother and grandkids feel the same way. When I go in for an appointment, she sits down and really listens to me. Sometimes she catches things I missed. If I ever need to see a specialist, she sends me to one.

I support House Bill 100, which would give Pennsylvania nurse practitioners full practice authority. We have plenty of people who need health care. We should do anything we can to make it convenient and affordable for them to get it. Right now, a lot of them have to wait for it or travel long distances, especially seniors.

I dont believe the naysayers for one simple reason: The bill only lets nurse practitioners do what they already do in other states like Maryland. If there was a problem, wed have heard about it by now. There are always going to be people who oppose change. But we need more health care, and it should be up to patients to decide where they get it. For me thats a nurse practitioner.

Charles Hoak, Slickville

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Sounding off: When will political correctness end? - TribLIVE

For Leftist disciples of ruination, like a synod of croaking frogs sitting on a lillypad in the DC swamp, are selling counterfeit definitions in the market of persuasion, unleashing a whole catalogue of social deviance and belligerent hypocrisy and defining it as progress.

Leftist regressives, deaf to every imagined merit but their own, rude and disruptive like a swarm of flies on a dinner table, have created an environment of perpetual anger and conflict that swells the bank accounts of lawyers and psychologists and has emptied the US Treasury. (D. Brooks, 17 Nov.) (K. Parker, 24 Nov.)

Todays victimhood culture requires constant vigilance and self-restraint, placing everyone in only one of two categories, victim or oppressor.

Political correctness (drop failing school label, 17 Nov.) is designed to give lies the false appearance of truth.

Jesse L. Warmack

Piedmont

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Leftist policies create anger, conflict - Anniston Star

In the decade of identity politics, words like toxic, woke and snowflake came to define us

Deep fakes, influencers, viral fashion we live in a world unrecognisable from the one we stood in ten years ago. As a chaotic decade comes to a close, we're speaking to the people who helped shape the last ten years and analysing the cultural shifts that have defined them. Explore the decade on our interactive timelinehere, or headhereto check out all our features.

Its hard to cast your mind back to ten years ago, and think about the ways that language was different. But there are a whole bunch of words that we say often now and didnt really use back then, like nonbinary or woke, for example. In fact, thinking about which words shaped the decade, it seems a lot of them are to do with who we are, or the way that we view ourselves, which makes sense given that the 2010s felt like the decade of identity politics.

Why was that the case? Well, a global swing towards populism and the rise of someterrifying right-wing leaders left a lot of us feeling disillusioned with traditional party politics. Perhaps growing inequality and wealth dividescoupled with a sense of injustice or oppression along race, class and gender lines made us reexamine our political affiliations and look to one another.

Or maybe, in the decade when we used more social media than ever before, we just got really, really self-obsessed.

Either way, despite what the right might say about the left (political correctness gone mad!) or what boomers might say about millennials and Gen Z (that were just a bunch of pathetic snowflakes), a lot of good actually came out of the shift towards identity politics in the 2010s. It made us more conscious about relative privilege and intersectionality, and it contributed to the energy of important social movements like SlutWalk, Black Lives Matter, trans and nonbinary visibility, and #MeToo and #TimesUp. And in return, these movements gave us new words that helped us to see the world differently, more clearly.

Below, we take look back at the decade through the lens ofeight of these new(-ish) words.

Ok so woke is not a new word. It comes from stay woke, used in African American communities to mean keep yourself aware to political injustice, mostly racism. However, its use by Black Lives Matter after the movement was officially founded in 2014 propelled it into much wider circles, and the word was soon co-opted by white people, as well as brands and marketeers. Its meaning also morphed slightly; woke kind of just became a byword for politically correct.

That a word which literally means stay aware about racial inequality was culturally appropriated seems beyond irony, but also sadly quintessentially 2010s. This was the era of blackfishing, tokenised diversity, and everyone everywhere saying yaas and fierce like they were in a Harlem ballroom. That so many people say woke without thinking about where the word actually comes from makes it another casualty of a hyperspeed internet culture where people constantly take and borrow without crediting or researching the facts.

Wokes rise in popularity in the 2010s also points to enduring racial inequalities in America, highlighted by some horrific moments including multiple police shootings of black Americans, Dylan Roofs mass shooting in a Charleston church in 2015, and the Unite The Right Charlottesville rallies in 2017, along with the ensuing car terrorist attack on counter-protesters.

In 2019, the word came full circle when Barack Obama, Americas first black president, criticised woke culture. It had basically become call-out culture, he said, with people cancelling others online to virtue signal how woke they are. This idea of purity and youre never compromised and youre politically woke, and all that stuff, he said, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.

Over the course of the 2010s, feminists worked hard to take the word slut and reclaim it from an insult into a symbol of sex positivity, so the idea that women should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies, without worrying about the kind of societal double standards that tell us men can sleep around and women cant, for instance.

On January 24, 2011, a moronic and misogynistic Toronto police constable called Michael Sanguinetti ushered in a new, not-so-progressive decade by giving a talk on campus rape at a Canada university. I've been told I'm not supposed to say this however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised, he told students, in a giant step back for mankind. But we quickly realised this view was common when just a month later, a Canadian judge in Winnipeg called Justice Robert Dewar made comments during a rape trial implying that the woman who was raped was partly responsible.

In protest of these incidents, Canadian activists Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis organised a rally: We want Police Services to truly get behind the idea that victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and sexual profiling are never acceptable, Barnett said. Taking place on April 3 in Toronto, over 3,000 people showed up to the march, some wearing fishnets and underwear to make the point that women should be able to wear whatever the fuck they want in public.

If SlutWalk has a legacy, its the work it did to erode societys deepseated Madonna-Whore complex

The demo was called SlutWalk, and the concept quickly spread: by the end of 2011, sister events had popped up in Melbourne, London, and cities across the US, as well as Iceland, Korea, India, Brazil and other countries. In 2015, ex-stripper, ex-girlfriend of Kanye West and feminist campaignerAmber Rose started her own SlutWalk in LA (she called it Amber Roses SlutWalk a classic Amber Rose move).

The punk spirit of SlutWalk slogans on a bare chest, balaclavas, unruly female anger aped groups like FEMEN, the Ukranian radical feminists who protested topless at the end of the 2000s, as well as Pussy Riot. Its message reflected other anti-slut shaming campaigns or voices that sprung up in the 2010s too, like The UnSlut project, a campaign to countersexually aggressive bullying in schools after the suicides of threeyoung American girls, or the work of writer and journalist Karley Sciortino, aka Slutever.

#Slutwalk was a key moment in ushering in fourth-wave feminism, and its global reach paved the way for the #TimesUpRally and the Womens March. If SlutWalk has a legacy, its the work it did to erode societys deep-seated Madonna-Whore complex, but in the criticism that it garnered, partly from sex-negative feminists who thought that slut wasnt a word worth reclaiming, it reminded us that the work sex-positive feminists have to do is a long way from over.

Imagine a time when we thought troll meant a dwarf or giant in Scandinavian folklore inhabiting caves or hills. Well, thats what life was like in simpler times, before 2014, which is when the dictionary revised the words meaning to include: a person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content.

Today, we think of trolling as simply winding someone up not just online but also offline. However, for a while, it felt more sinister. In 2014, trolling seemed to converge with harassment as #gamergate, an anti-feminist attack on female developers in the video game industry unfolded. #gamergate was basically a bunch of anonymous creeps and angry alt-right bros sending women rape threats and doxing them. Not quite trolling, no online harassment is illegal, trolling is not but it did make us stop and consider what these kinds of keyboard warriors were motivated by. (Clue: misogyny).

At some point, while ignoring the pond scum of the internet, we realised that we actually cared much more about what the more politically correct voices online thought of us

Trolling as a concept sums up two difficult truths that we learned way back in the early days of social media, the 2000s: that we are willing to behave in dramatically different ways online than off, and that this behaviour is hard to moderate. Twitter was meant to be the Roman Forum, instead, we got the Colosseum a load of people savaging each other for sport.

Over the 2010s, we came to understand that yes, some trolls were extremists, but a lot of trolls were victims of bullying themselves, or just people crying out for attention. Dont feed the trolls, we were told, until at some point while ignoring the pond scum of the internet, we realised that we actually cared much more about what the more politically correct voices online thought of us. Suddenly, getting cancelled became a much scarier fate than getting trolled.

It wouldnt be a list of words of the decade without this defining piece of marketing jargon. We all know what influencer means: someone who wields the influence, particularly in the digital sphere, to encourage their army of loyal followers to buy something. If the late 2000s gave us Instagram, the 2010s gave us its stars; the Bella Hadids, Kylie Jenners and Luka Sabbats of this world, and the modern parable of Caroline Calloway.

These influencers sit at the intersection of so many other would-be words of the decade: they sell us wellness, theyre usually clad in athleisure, they take a shit ton of selfies, they apparently invented sadfishing, and if they fuck up badly enough, they become scammers, whether they meant to or not. But in some ways, havent they been scamming us all along?

Arecent article on Wired remembers how, at the beginning of influencer culture, in about 2006, we were outraged and concerned that bloggers could be sent products for free or given money to try to promote something to us, unsuspecting consumers. Rules were put in place to improve transparency, but then we gradually got desensitised to scrolling through seeing murky spon con all day anyway. As we viewed more of it, influencers multiplied, and so did their paychecks (Kim K can reportedly charge$1 million for a post), and with these rewards came the problem of engagement fraud, and the pressure to buy followers.

We already knew that influencers didnt make us feel great about ourselves, but in the second half of the decade, shitstorms like Fyre Festival and Calloway made us question the authenticity of influencers as a concept, while things really entered a surrealist parody hellscape around the time we got given nonexistent CGI influencers. Then, with the invention of micro-influencers, the influencer concept was democratised into pointlessness. Finally, when thePope called the Virgin Mary an influencer, we knew it had basically lost all meaning.

And yet, somehow, as we enter the 2020s, the influence of the influencer prevails: a recent survey of American kids found that, for 86 per cent of them, it wasa dream job. If thats not depressing, what is?

Its the cusp of 2020, and there are still less nonbinary celebrities than we can count on two hands; Jonathan Van Ness, Sam Smith, Asia Kate Dillon, Tommy Dorfman, Amandla Stenberg, Lachlan Watson and Ruby Rose being the main examples. Its a strong reminder that identifying as nonbinary was most definitely not a thing we really knew or thought about back in 2010, despite versions of the term like two-spirit in Indigenous North American communities or X-gender in Japan being around for a while. In fact, they/ and them pronouns were onlyadded to the dictionary assingular, non-gender-specific in September 2019.

Nonbinary people will know well the eternal agony of trying to have their they/ them pronouns respected by people who are slow to grasp or just unwilling to learn. But on a wider scale, even some of the most so-called progressive countries in the world when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights and gender equality are not embracing the legislation or social changes required to actually recognise nonbinary peoples existence. Countries like The Netherlandsand Swedenhave all fallen behind in pan-European rankings on LGBTQ+ rights, failing to show progress in termsof howgender is legally recognised.

Yet, the fact that more and more people are identifying as nonbinary in the public eye or otherwise is slowly eroding the conception that everyone falls into one of two gender categories. Merriam-Webster recently reported that searches for they increased by 313% in 2019 on 2018, meaning that more people are looking into its meaning.

In spite of a hostile climate fortrans and gender-nonconforming people right now, the work nonbinary people and their allies are doing to dismantle the gender binary and the stereotypes that come with it will change the way that we think about gender in the 2020s in ways that we cant yet imagine.

Trending around 2016, adulting makes the list of words that changed the way we see ourselves because, despite the fact you may not have actually heard it, or if you did, you probably found it incredibly annoying, it sadly encapsulates the generation that came of age or rather didnt in the 2010s.

According to some definitions, adulting meant holding down a nine to five job or saving up for a mortgage. So, you know, doing traditionally adult things. But it was also used to describe the more silly cultural signifiers of adulthood, like having a supply of wrapping paper in your house. Or else just really banal life things, like cooking dinner and doing your washing. The fact that adulting needed to exist as a phrase at all was telling: growing up was no longer a given, but something we needed a stupid neologism for.

Post-2008 recession, we saw a continued shift back in the West, at least of the age at which people could afford to buy a house, get married and viably have kids. The proliferation of convenient apps for everything, like Deliveroo or Uber, infantilised us while giving us a new way to waste the small amount of money wed never be able to do much with anyway, while the rise of dating apps like Tinder and Hinge made it feel less like there was a One andinstead quite possibly many.

Demographers have always placed us in generational categories. But it feels like we became increasingly obsessed with doing it for ourselves in the 2010s

We were no longer hitting our life markers, no longer meeting a life partner at 18 and settling down at 21, as per the now bizarre seeming old standard. Adulting described a group of economically challenged and emotionally stilted people, simultaneously broke (at least compared to their parents) and yet spoiled for choice.

Demographers have always placed us in generational categories. But it feels like we became increasingly obsessed with doing it for ourselves in the 2010s. (See quintessentially millennial TV shows like Girls and viral phrases like OK boomer.) Adulting was in some ways born out of this obsession. But it didnt take us long to feel grossed out by how twee, middle class, and according to some people, sexist the phrase was. Maybe it was just too on the nose.

Or perhaps, ironically, we just outgrew it; Gen Z, supposedly more self-aware than Gen Y, know better than to think cooking yourself dinner is anything to be particularly proud of, especially when the world is burning.

The phrase toxic masculinity has been around for a few decades, but the 2010s was the era that the media really picked it up as a kind of catch-all term that speaks to the social pressures put on men to be aggressive, dominant or competitive. Its a phrase that defined the decade because of the #metoo movement, because of men like Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.

But you dont have to be an (alleged) rapist to be a solid example of what toxic masculinity can look like (however studies have found that sexist attitudes do lead to sexual violence). Some other examples are also quintessential 2010s buzzwords: mansplaining, gaslighting, and in the extreme, incel culture, incels being involuntary celibates: men who feel rejected by women so seek out revenge.

When Gillette made an advert about toxic masculinity in January 2019, the response and backlash it received showed divisions over the idea of dismantling toxic masculinity. Some praised the advert as groundbreaking, arguing that the pressures of toxic masculinity weighed so heavy on men that theyre probably contributing to high rates of male suicide in Britain and America. Others said that the video simply reinforced the idea that men are all violent thugs or abusers, while Mens Rights Activists argued that men should be men, and act how they want.

The debate took a real dive when certain women waded in to defend men, like Meryll Streep, who claimed that we hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. Women can be pretty fucking toxic Its toxic people. Ok, so that might have one small strain of truth, but this is also the woman who wore a T-shirt that said Id rather be a rebel than a slave and told the Berlin film festival were all Africans really. Two real low points of the 2010s.

How could a list of the words that made the 2010s be complete without snowflake? It was 2016 when Brett Easton Ellis famously used it to describe easily offended and overly entitled millennials, while he was defending an article written by an LA Weekly journalist about Sky Ferreiras sex appeal. Oh, little snowflakes, when did you all become grandmothers and society matrons, clutching your pearls in horror at someone who has an opinion about something, a way of expressing themselves thats not the mirror image of yours, you snivelling little weak-ass narcissists? he asked wryly.

The same year, snowflake was named a word of the year, and we got a lengthy analysis in the book I Find That Offensive! by Claire Fox, which asked, how did we become so thin-skinned?

As much as theyd probably love to claim it, the snowflake conversation was much bigger than Ellis and Fox. Remember no-platforming? It was the argument about free speech that peaked back in 2014, when a speaker making pro-Israel comments was booed off stage at Galway University, and in 2015, when students at Cardiff University tried to stop Germaine Greer appearing in a debate, due to transphobic comments she had made in the past.

Quickly, someone came up with broflake: when a man gets upset by progressive attitudes that dont align with his more conservative views

The idea, a simple one, was not to give a stage to hate speech and especially not to let it into spaces that were meant to be safe. But a lot of people considered this outright censorship, throwing cultural appropriation and trigger warnings into the same boat while they were at.

By 2017 snowflake contorted from a slur thrown at liberals by people on the right (and especially the alt-right) into a more general political insult, as people started to call Trump a snowflake. (Quickly, someone came up withbroflake: when a man gets upset by progressive attitudes that dont align with his more conservative views.)

Like a lot of the words of the 2010s, it lived and died quickly, as we soon found something else to argue about. But in many ways snowflake is a lightning rod for how the culture wars of the 2010s played out: a never-ending screaming match over who is allowed to say what and an ongoing competition over who was most offended. Heres to the 2020s!

Read more:

Eight words that changed the way we see ourselves in the 2010s - Dazed

December 17 2019, 12:01am,The Times

James Marriott

One day we will look back at the era of political correctness on Twitter and wonder why we took it all so seriously

Its almost six years since the worst day of Justine Saccos life. During a long trip from New York to South Africa she tweeted a few dumb jokes to her 170 Twitter followers about cucumber sandwiches, British peoples bad teeth, a fellow passengers BO. And, of course, the one everyone remembers: Going to Africa. Hope I dont get Aids. Just kidding. Im white! Then she got on the plane to Cape Town.

When her flight landed, she turned her phone on and discovered she was the number one trending topic in the world. Her tweet, which was pretty obviously a misjudged parody of racism, had been interpreted as racist. By a lot of people. Tens of thousands of them were calling for her to be

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The woke revolution is burning itself out - The Times

Did Franklin have answer

for seasonal greetings?

Words of wisdom were in the recent Take It From The Tinkersons comic strip. In the first frame, two children are walking along the sidewalk and the girl comments, Saying Merry Christmas offends people who dont celebrate Christmas. The second frame continues with the boys reply, Really? Then just say Happy Holidays. In the next frame, she responds, Well, Happy Holidays offends the people who celebrate Christmas. In the final frame, the boy says, Wow. Adults ruin everything.

I think we all can agree with the kids in the comic strip. However, there might be a solution in an 1839 edition of a small book containing essays and letters by Ben Franklin. The book was found in a sale at the old Petersburg Library perhaps 50 years ago and, as I recall, sold for less than one dollar. Once in a while when bored, I read an essay or two.

Franklins unedited writings often include unfamiliar, obsolete words and ancient spelling. One observation that stuck in my head was his spelling of holiday. Franklin spelled it holyday. If nervous retailers and purveyors of anti-Christmas political correctness would consent to using Franklins all-inclusive spelling, the problem is solved. For his holyday spelling is applicable to both Christian and non-Christian religious observances. Happy Holydays!

See more here:

Letter to the Editor, Dec. 17, 2019: Did Franklin have answer for seasonal greetings? - Richmond.com

In spite of all the left-wing vultures flying around in hopes of finding some kind of road kill, I must put the jackass agenda aside and move on to my annual holiday greetings. (Yes, there are some insertions.) We, the United States, are benefitting record highs on may items, thanks to President Trump.

We are in a much better place today than the previous administration left us. One particular phrase that President Trump reintroduced is Merry Christmas instead of some other political saying that to them was deemed more fitting. (Obamas legacy.)

At this time of year we must thank our maker, God, for giving us the many freedoms that the radical left are trying to take away from us. I thank the framers of our Constitution. They were inspired to construct it for the good of all mankind (even the left).

So I am saying Merry Christmas and a happy, prosperous new year to one and all.

I have no doubt that the year of 2020 will be a benefit to us all in spite of Satans (the far lefts) agenda. We, the United States of America, will be yet better off thanks to President Trump.

Story continues below video

The left has done nothing the last three years except to waste you precious tax dollars, and for what? An empty Christmas stocking you pin on the sofa in hopes for goodies you can really enjoy? How about a lump of coal. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas and happy new year. No political correctness here. (Just reality).

Link:

New year looks bright under President Trump | Letters to the Editor - The Herald Journal

We shape language as much as it shapes us. And it's constantly evolving.

The top 10 words and phrases that defined this past decade arent all necessarily new, but they did gain mainstream popularity, relevance, and acceptance between 2010-2019. To crown these winning terms, we consulted with a swath of experts, including internet linguist and author of Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch; Ponoma College sociolinguist Nicole Holliday, as well as Dictionary.com's lexicographer Heather Bonikowski and senior research editor John Kelly.

Whether or not the following words and phrases and the many more they spawned over time (bolded throughout) have short or long lives after the decade, they certainly captured the ideas and phenomenons that ruled this moment in our zeitgeist.

Over the past decade the hashtag changed the way we use social media, launched revolutionary social movements, and bled into IRL vernacular.

Tech innovator Chris Messina first told Twitter it should use hashtags in 2007 to create "channels" people could use for discovery. The nascent social media platform reportedly told him "these things are for nerds," doubted they'd become much of a thing, but then eventually embraced them anyway in 2009. By 2010, not only did Instagram also start using hashtags but they became integral to organizing a number of social movements on Twitter, from the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and later Occupy Wall Street.

Twitter helped sound the alarm on important global issues.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

That legacy continues to thrive to this day, with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo leading to revolutionary social change because their message can spread online on a global scale. Hashtags and the activists behind them used this power to bring widespread awareness to phenomenons like police brutality and enthusiastic consent, making room for citizen journalism and (from the more cynical perspective) slacktivism.

But outside that monumental impact, hashtags forever changed the way we shared experiences and information online. They enabled real-time, live-blogging of breaking news, like that time some guy on Twitter accidentally broke the news of the Osama Bin Laden raid.

Ironically, hashtags also opened the door for Twitter Moments and Trending Topics, which similarly gather conversations around a single topic, but without relying on the hashtag to do so. The hashtag still has pull at the end of the decade, but there are new ways to lasso together our fast-paced online conversations, too.

Every generation needs a derisive label for their trendy young people.

The peace-loving boomers in the 1960s were called a bunch of long-haired no-good hippies. Millennials in the 2010s became the vintage flannel and skinny jean-wearing hipsters who fetishize retro-tech like polaroid cameras. They come in various subcategories, too, whether it's lumbersexual, normcore, or nerd.

Dictionary.com traces the word hipster back to "hepster," first used in the late 1930s in reference to an in-the-know (aka "hip") "person who is knowledgeable about or interested in jazz." That still aligns with our modern stereotypes of arrogant hipsters blindly following of-the-moment trends who were, like, totally into that alt indie-pop band before everyone else was. Apparently some scholars even speculate that "hipster" eventually became "hippie," before then coming back again.

Aside from millennials, hipsters are also closely associated with the phenomenon of gentrification. Affluent, usually white young people take over low-income neighborhoods, spiking up the cost of living and displacing the communities that were there before. That's why the "hipster coffee shop" has become a favorite strawman to deride liberal hypocrisy.

We were over hipster before everyone else was.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

According to Dictionary.com, the connotation that hipsters appropriate marginalized cultures was there early on, too, as evidenced by Norman Mailer's popular 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.

The exact parameters for what a hipster even is changes depending on what's en vogue at any given moment. But one specific shift we're seeing at the end of the decade is the notion that all hipsters are millennials. After killing just about everything else, soon millennials will see the death of their own relevance as the target demographic, giving way instead to Generation Z.

Ok Zoomers!

The modern concept of an American culture war dates back to the early 90s. But the polarizing "battle lines" only truly seem to have solidified in the 2010s.

Perceived threats to one's race, gender, religious, and cultural identity are one of the only commonalities shared by both sides.

Generally-speaking, partisan politics used to be defined by economics. But the past decade saw a sharp rise in increasingly personal and identity-driven political divides. Identity politics doesn't just refer to its derogatory connotation of social justice warrior snowflakes advocating for cancel culture and political correctness (though that's part of it). The rise of the alt-right, modern white supremacy, and men's rights activists show how perceived threats to one's race, gender, religious, and cultural identity are one of the only commonalities shared by both sides.

In truth, definitive, hard facts about the culture war why it began (like online echo chambers), when it began, or even the exact nature of its existence are kind of impossible to determine in any level-headed manner while we're in the thick of it.

But what's undeniable is its impact on language, with each side forming its own set of distinct terminology: problematic, microaggressions, virtue signaling, toxicity, gaslighting, safe spaces, triggered, red pilled, Q-anon, incel. In a world of alternative facts, when even words like fake news coined for the specific purpose of trying to objectively measure our post-truth existence lose all meaning, it's hard to be sure of anything.

Throughout the decade, climate change deniers like President Donald Trump have been claiming that "they" (whoever the fuck "they" are) changed the name of environmental collapse from "global warming" to "climate change" because the earth isn't getting warmer.

He is wrong.

Scientists have pushed for the switch from global warming to climate change since 2005 because it more accurately describes the fuller scope of what's happening. Global warming is only one factor within the larger umbrella of climate change. Before even that, in politics the switch happened under none other than former President George W. Bush for more dubious reasons, with one memo suggesting it be used because climate change sounded "less frightening" than global warming.

They were actually right. Studies have shown people to be less responsive to the term climate change. That might be part of why the general public's adoption of the term has been much slower than the political and scientific communities. But it seems the general public has latched onto climate change more in recent years. Comparing the two terms using Google Search trends shows climate change has overtaken global warmings search popularity since 2015.

However, to offset some of the psychological disadvantages of climate change, the advocacy group Public Citizen urged people to retire climate change in lieu of "climate crisis," and notable publications like The Guardian have followed suit. The idea is to remain scientifically accurate while also bringing back the sense of urgency and need for action appropriate to the scale of the calamity. Climate strike was even Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2019, since its usage shot up 100-fold from 2018 to 2019.

Still others encourage even more dire language, with teen activist Greta Thunberg preferring terms such as "climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency."

News alert: climate change isn't always warm.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

In his 1996 essay "Content is King," Bill Gates rightfully predicted how the internet would usher in a revolution in the way we think about, produce, supply, and monetize information and entertainment. With the hindsight of the 2010s, we can now say this bold title undersold exactly how radical that shift would be.

In the age of content creators, content marketing, #sponcon, influencers, vloggers, bloggers, streaming services, cinematic universes, and binge-watching, content isn't just king. It's everything from the peasants to our higher power.

Of course, people were blogging and vlogging basically since the internet's inception. But 2010 saw the first-ever Vidcon, an indication of content creation's growth and professionalization. With it came the idea that anyone can create content, proliferating the conceit of a personal brand, an acknowledgment that our online personas are curated ideals rather than our authentic selves.

While Netflix and Hulu launched their streaming services in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Netflix changed everything in 2013 with the release of its first slate of originals, including House of Cards. In 2019, we're still in the thick of the streaming wars, with old media mega-corporations like Disney only just now beginning to enter the fray.

Content is Prison.

Image: vicky leta / mashable

Alongside all that came the mainstreaming of expanded universes, a concept previously relegated to nerdy niches like comic books and fanfiction. But cultural phenomenons like Marvel and Game of Thrones gave way to the rise of IP (intellectual property) as the cash cow corporations feed with a never-ending stream of new content.

Content is the vague, ephemeral, yet omnipresent digital material that rules us all.

Internet culture obviously predates the 2010s (just ask AIM, Livejournal, and Tumblr). But what is new to the decade is a more complete interweaving of digital and pop culture. Digital culture became even more trendy, resulting in two distinct categories of people: those who know all the memes and are very online, or those who well... arent (aka locals).

As is to be expected, often this divide falls down the demographic lines of those who are "pre-internet" (adults before the web), "full-internet" (grew up alongside the web), and "post-internet" (born to a world ruled by the web). But the normalization of social media platforms made it so that following or not following the norms and memes of internetspeak is more of a choice now rather than predetermined by age.

Grandma can be very online if she wants to!

Image: vicky leta / mashable

For better or worse, the democratization of content creation on the internet also led to a blurring of lines between internetspeak and slang from marginalized groups. Some phrases like "on fleek" and "yaaas queen" have clear origins in black culture and queer drag culture respectively. Similarly "woke," "lit," and "throwing shade" all trace back to black culture, but following widespread generic online adoption theyre often deemed dead by the communities that originated them. Brands and influencers go on to make money by parroting them anyway, effectively whitewashing or pinkwashing their origins.

The question of whether the vast majority of internet slang should be considered cultural appropriation has no easy answer. But recognizing that the marginalized groups who popularize them are often quickly forgotten as the originators tells us a lot about the limits of a digital democracy.

In the 2010s, emoji became the most popular form of online gesture communication (though GIFs can serve a similar function as well). All that means is, in order to offset the lack of physical information we usually get from an IRL conversation, we started using symbolic images and icons.

From eggplants to prayer hands, the meanings of emoji took on a life of their own outside of just what each literally depicts. Some have even made it into IRL vocabulary, because we all know what "heart eyes" means when a friend asks if their outfit is cute.

And for that we're .

To reiterate, while most of the terms we're including in this section were coined decades ago by scholars, we're pointing to their popularization in the mainstream discourse outside of academia during the 2010s.

Inclusivity and intersectionality arrived in a big way on the mainstream stage during the 2018 Academy Awards, and not without some backlash. Much of their history and original meaning was lost in translation of their widespread adoption over the decade, leading some to criticize them as catch-all, meaningless buzzwords that lead to only superficial politically correct checklists.

Many wrongfully believe inclusivity and intersectionality can be used interchangeably.

New terms help give marginalized identities a voice.

Image: bob al-greene / mashable

Intersectionality specifically describes the often overlooked and unique discrimination experienced by people of multiple overlapping marginalized identities, like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. It enables us to address the subtleties of colorism, or the need for nonbinary and genderqueer versions of Latin identifiers like Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Chicanx

Inclusivity, on the other hand, is a more broadly applicable framework to ensure spaces and policies take all forms of identities into account to avoid discrimination and oppression. The past decade saw some promising linguistic growth around more widely-accepted inclusive language, with the American Psychological Associations official addition of the singular they/them and Merriam Webster naming the pronoun their Word of the Year in 2019.

Inclusivity allows us to call out TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and bi-erasure, for example, or to encompass a fuller spectrum of gender and sexual identity with a +, as in LGBTQIA+.

Intersectionality, inclusivity, and online activism became the defining components of what some now call fourth-wave feminism. Often associated with the #MeToo, Time's Up, and Women's March movements, it focuses on addressing the systemic power imbalance embedded in issues like sexual harassment, body shaming, slut shaming, and rape culture.

Back in 2011, we could do little more than scoff at the liberal leaderless protest movement that occupied Wall Street for months. Yet by the end of the decade, it's become clear just how effective it was at not only bringing widespread but long-lasting awareness to the movement's core issues.

"We are the 99%.

In 2019 many of the slogans (the 1% and we are the 99%) and concepts (the corrupting force of money in politics and widening income inequality) popularized by Occupy Wall Street continue to take center stage in national conversations like Democratic primary debates.

The Occupy protests evolved and matured beyond their initially more anarchist messines, and now an "eat the rich" and "fuck you pay me" mentality rings out in certain corners of the internet with a regularity we couldn't have predicted nine years ago.

We didn't just rail against the injustices of old establishments throughout the 2010s, though.

While the rest of the country still languished in the consequences of the 2008 recession, Silicon Valley and startup culture saw exponential growth. Another piece of tech speak coined in the 1990s went on to take over in 2010s: disruptive innovation.

Everything from Uber (which beta launched in 2010), tablets (the iPad released in 2010), rise of the cloud (iCloud launched in 2011), the proliferation of smart devices utilizing it (aka the Internet of Things), and various dongles (popularized in 2013) to connect them changed our ways of life.

Disruption, uh, isn't always great

Image: Vicky leta /mashable

The sharing and gig economy took over so rapidly that laws and policies still have yet to catch up in any effective way. Internet privacy concerns finally became unignorable with the cloud, and the seedy underbelly of Big Data profiteering showed itself through Facebook. A framework to ensure people's right to be forgotten is only just starting to emerge.

In 2010, society-shattering tech began to feel more inescapable than inspiring. Its unstoppable influence and power led to a general disillusionment with the utopian ideals the tech industry pedaled about connecting in a digital democracy.

Weve been through a lot over the past ten years. But we made it! And we lacked no ingenuity in the words we used to describe the journey.

Read more:

The words and phrases that defined the decade - Mashable

The Tauranga City Council has finally voted in favour of "giving some mana back to iwi" by gifting contested land back to tangata whenua after a year of going back and forth.

Photo: Google Maps

Cheers rang out in the public gallery as Tauranga City Councillors voted in favour of 11 Mission Street being gifted to the Otamataha Trust, to be perpetually leased to the Elms Foundation.

Councillors moved a resolution in September for the land to be given to a joint entity representing both groups.

That was put forward after public consultation in December 2018 showed 58 percent of people were against the land being returned, with some of the submissions opposing land being put back in Mori hands.

But a newly elected Tauranga City Council has now opted for the original proposal.

Three councillors voted against, including Andrew Hollis who accused those voting in favour of political correctness.

"If as councillors you decide to gift completely to Otamataha Trust, then you better look hard at yourselves and decide whether integrity truly matters, or whether you're operating within a framework of political correctness, putting some sort of virtue signalling ahead of the community as a whole."

But Mayor Tenby Powell, who voted in favour, said it wasn't about political correctness, but having "moral courage".

"I do believe it is time to do the right thing and to have the moral courage to do so, and to give some mana back to iwi and at the same time to bring the city together."

Otamataha Trust deputy chair Peri Kohu can't remember the last time a piece of land was gifted back to the hap.

He said tangata whenua have been pushed out of Tauranga for too long, but this has given them hope that they can have true partnership.

"The mayor is really encouraging with the krero that he's betraying because at least he's taking a leading role in bringing some of that together - we've been ready to do that for a long time, we've always been saying, "Where's the partnership?"

The Elms Foundation will lease the land from the hap, and build an education centre.

Chair Ian Thomas is relieved the council has finally made the right decision.

"So much time [has been] spent by Otamataha as well as us over the whims, the changing whims of the council which haven't helped anyone at all, their processes have been pretty poor really... but here we are, we've stuck with it."

He said the foundation will have regard for tikanga in all the work they do.

Next year, the trust will begin demolitioning the existing property at 11 Mission Street, and the connecting property at number 7.

Follow this link:

'It is time to do the right thing': Tauranga Council gift land back to tangata whenua - RNZ

Perhaps nothing is stranger, more visually fascinating, than human deformities and abnormalities of nature. Before television brought everything into the home and political correctness made drawing attention to the out-of-the ordinary taboo, traveling shows filled with characters such as the four-legged woman, elastic man, Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy, and the albino family drew curious crowds of all ages.

Such is the world of Madame Velvets Cabaret of Oddities, Nancy Stohlmans flash-fiction novel that is this seasons Wheat Ridge Reads selection. A finalist for the 2019 Colorado Book Awards in Literary Fiction, the book alternatively amuses, shocks and challenges its audience.

The book requires the reader to be an active participant in the story, says Stohlman. Unlike a traditional novel, which takes its time unfolding, flash fiction requires one to be awake, pay attention, or it will fly right by you.

Stohlman discovered the emerging writing genre while attaining her Masters of Fine Arts degree at Naropa Institute a dozen years ago. She struggled with writing a novel of 80,000 words or so, and finding flash fiction was an enormous relief, she says. I can get rid of the part that Im bored to write, that connective tissue that is necessary to tie the long novel together. Now when I write, I think about what I can take out.

The technique also known as micro-fiction reduces a story to 1,000 words or less. Madame Velvets is a series of these stories carefully choreographed to make the whole, using white space as much as words.

Using white space is an intentional negative, letting what you have written resonate against what is not said, explains Stohlman, exhibiting a page where the written words take up less than a quarter of the space. Flash fiction gets at the essence of a story in a tight, hard-hitting, sharp, fast manner that is over quickly, she says.

Stohlman herself is larger than life when she performs. With her expressive eyes, bright red lips, and crisp, clear voice, she has a presence that commands the stage.

Her readings and discussions for Wheat Ridge Reads take place 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, January 15, at Swiss Flower and Gift Cottage, 9890 W. 44th Ave., and 9:00 a.m., Thursday, January 16, at Ye Olde Firehouse, 3232 Depew St. The events are free and open to the public. She will also be presenting to students at Wheat Ridge High School as part of the WR Reads program.

In addition to being an author, Stohlman is a lecturer in University of Colorados Program for Writing and Rhetoric and is the lead singer in the jazz metal lounge band Kinky Mink. She has published four books and her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. She leads writing retreats all over the world and is the creator and curator of The Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series at The Mercury Cafe.

Wheat Ridge Reads is a citywide book club sponsored by the Wheat Ridge Cultural Commission in partnership with the Wheat Ridge Library and Wheat Ridge High School. Presented annually, the program promotes literacy and a shared reading experience throughout the city. Complimentary copies of the book Madame Velvets Cabaret of Oddities are available at the Wheat Ridge Recreation Center and Swiss Flower and Gift Cottage as well as Little Free Libraries throughout the city.

See the original post:

Wheat Ridge Reads Features Flash Fiction - The Know

Jonty Pearce throws his support behind the RNLI as he reflects that 2019 has not always been smooth sailing for the charity

As I write my RNLI charity Christmas cards my day is darkened by the thud of a Self-Assessment Income Tax Calculation landing on the doormat.

We are all well accustomed to paying our taxes, be it willingly or under duress. The harvested money passes to the Exchequer, who we trust to spend our hard-won cash with care and diligence.

We are all different, with diverse priorities, and government expenditure might not always match up with our approval and preconceptions of fiscal prudence; such is life.

My attention was distracted from my card writing as I picked up the word RNLI on the radio. It was an appeal for donations, though unusually the words shortfall in funds were actually mentioned.

Now, charities come under a slightly different category to taxes in that our contributions, donations, and legacies are voluntary; we can pick and choose and opt for those we feel are the most deserving.

Any charity needs a management structure, and there is great responsibility in running such an organisation based on other peoples donated or willed monies.

The RNLI is facing a shortfall in its funds

All expenditure has to be justified, employment levels scrutinised, and the just causes supported need to be in line with the mission statement.

It is wise to keep politics, personal crusades, and correctness out of the planning process. It is a tough and winding path to follow, and it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

Occasional wobbles inevitably will occur. The RNLI appears to be under the spotlight for such a slight wobble from its traditional role.

On the back of crew suspensions and personnel tribunals its finances are reported to be stressed. As a result, some 135 employees have been given notice of redundancy. Is this exceptional?

Probably not, given the current pressures the world of business exists under.

What seems to have upset the apple cart is the expansion of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute into an international sphere.

Continues below

Jonty Pearce continues his cruise north of Ullapool and the Summer Isles in Scotland

Rounding the fearsome Cape Wrath in Scotland proves something of an anti-climax for Jonty Pearce as he cruises north of

We are told that this accounts for only for 2% of its expenditure, but hecklers have already called for the National part of its title to be changed to International. RILI does not trip off the tongue so easily.

So, what is this dastardly activity that has triggered this unrest?

The answer appears to be drowning prevention support in other countries. Now, while drowning prevention is unarguably benevolent, the overseas aspect is the nub of the unrest.

For an organisation whose mission statement (in 2013, anyway) used to be The Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) is a charity that saves lives at sea around the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland, the Channel islands and the Isle of Man, as well as on selected inland waterways the addition of work in Mozambique and Tanzania seems outside the stated remit.

Im sure that the mission statement has, of course, been updated, but, as a long-term RNLI Offshore supporter, this fact had slipped under my own radar.

I must admit that I have more compelling concerns in my life, but this activity has upset others, and the fact that it came to the surface of public consciousness just as the charity announced a multi-million shortfall in its funding could be said to be unfortunate timing.

In 2018, the RNLI had a 6.3 million shortfall in funds and its legacy income fell for the first time in five years by 8.5 million.

With invested reserves also reducing by around 10 million due to the challenging economic climate, the RNLI was regrettably unable to keep a firm hold on spiraling costs; its spending increased by 4.5 million. Ooops.

To its credit, in response the RNLI has launched the Perfect Storm appeal to raise 1.8 million by mailshots, emails, and direct response TV and radio advertising such as the clip that caught my attention on Classic FM.

So, should we all just stand by and moan about this organisations manpower and wages bill and beef about overseas lifesaving activities even if they are not in the mission stations small print?

No! This worthy cause needs our support, and we should rally to uphold the worlds greatest lifeboat service.

And be assured, even a cursory glance at the RNLIs response to recent criticism shows that its eye is definitely back on the ball, and that all efforts are being made to restore the Royal National Lifeboat Institute back to its former iconic charity leadership position.

In response to mediaarticles criticising the charitys international work, the RNLI issued these questions and answers:

Why are the RNLI spending money on overseas projects while cutting 135 staff in the UK?

The RNLI has always been dedicated to drowning reduction. The World Health Organization estimates that 320,000 people drown each year worldwide and we believe that with others, we should use our lifesaving expertise to try and help tackle this. Our work so far has shown that simple, inexpensive solutions are very effective; a relatively low investment in overseas projects goes a long way and makes a big difference.

We currently spend less than 2% of the RNLIs total annual expenditure on our international drowning prevention activity and we actively seek donations specifically for this work, including the Isle of Mans International Development Fund and Department for International Development in the UK, both of which have made substantial donations to our international work this year. Providing the very best search and rescue service in the UK and Ireland remains our priority but we are also proud to use our expertise, knowledge and influence to help others save lives across the world, particularly in countries where drowning rates are high.

Since 2012 there has been a steady increase in international expenditure that reflects the increase in the number of projects the team are involved in. However, all areas of RNLI work including our international budget are being looked at and we are reducing costs wherever we can as part of an organisational wide programme of activity to get us back to living within our means

RNLI response to criticism that the charity has misled donors who thought they were donating to save lives in UK and are now surprised to learn that money is being spent overseas?

We greatly value our supporters and have not misled them. The RNLIs international work has been reported in detail in our annual reports going back several years and information is also available from the RNLI website and regularly reported elsewhere. The financial commitment to our international work is reported separately and there has been no sleight of hand.

The RNLIs priority is to provide the very best search and rescue service in the UK and Ireland, but we are also proud to use our expertise, knowledge and influence to help others save lives across the world, particularly in countries where drowning rates are high. Our founder, Sir William Hillary, had the vision that we should extend our views [of drowning prevention] from our own immediate coasts, to the most remote quarters of the globe, and to every neighbouring state. This remains relevant today.

Why are the RNLI involved in doing International work?

We dont operate RNLI lifeboat or lifeguard services overseas instead, we support the work of partners to build local capability. Our international drowning prevention work currently includes educating children in water safety and survival swimming; training personnel in lifeguarding, search and rescue and lifesaving leadership skills, and international advocacy to champion the drowning prevention cause at a global level. Our aim is to increase the number of people who can make a difference to the safety of others in their communities, and share their skills so the lifesaving legacy continues, as well as to call for greater awareness, resources and action at a global level. We cant do this alone, so are working in partnership with other organisations to increase our impact.

Why are the RNLI funding burkinis?

The Panje Project teaches women swim survival skills in Zanzibar. The burkini, which is a full length swim suit is an innovative (and cheap) way of enabling girls in strict Muslim countries, to get into the water without compromising their cultural and religious beliefs. The RNLI have been involved in the Panje Project with the majority of the RNLIs involvement funded by a donor who specifically wanted the money to go towards this project.

Why is the RNLI getting involved in creches?

The Creches for Bangladesh programme helps reduce childrens risk of drowning by ensuring they have close supervision throughout the day. Around 40 children a day die from drowning in Bangladesh.

Children are most vulnerable to drowning between 9am and 1pm when parents must work to feed their families, and are unable to provide close supervision. Community-based creche facilities provide a safe environment for children aged between 1-4. Run by local women, these facilities provide a secure place away from open water for children to play and learn important skills.

Access to a free creche place reduces a childs risk of drowning by an incredible 82%, as well as providing essential early childhood development. We work in partnership with the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research Bangladesh (CIPRB), who are experts in injury prevention and drowning prevention. Alongside CIPRB we have already helped to fund 10,000 creche places for some of Bangladeshs most vulnerable children. All public donations to our recent appeal were matched by the Department for International Development.

Are there any changes or cuts happening to the RNLIs international work in the current climate?

All areas of RNLI work are being looked at as part of our programme of activity to get us back to living within our means, this is underway and we cant confirm any details or figures at this stage.

The main priority is ensuring we can maintain our world-class domestic search and rescue service. Any work we do on top of this will not detract us from our core purpose.

Respond to criticism that the charity has become too hung up on political correctness

As an emergency service, the RNLI must adhere to the very highest standards of safety and behave in a way that meets the expectations of a modern emergency responder. And as a charity, we take our ethical and legal responsibilities very seriously. This means that we expect our staff and volunteers to behave appropriately towards each other, supporters and members of the public. We do not consider this political correctness. We are a charity that our volunteers, supporters and those we rescue can trust to do the right thing whether thats rescuing those in peril, keeping our volunteers safe or making sure anyone who is part of the RNLI feels welcome and valued. And were proud of our volunteers professionalism and our organisations commitment to being a modern emergency service and principled charity.

Read the original:

Jonty Pearce: Musings on the RNLI - Yachting Monthly