Today's award goes to the Hyatt Canberra Hotel in Australia's capital city.
A leading Australian hotel has been forced to apologise after it offered lunchtime diners a "grilled Moroccan Aborigine and rocket salad" – apparently following a spellcheck error involving the word “aubergine”.
The Hyatt Canberra, a colonial-style five-star hotel frequented by government leaders and diplomats, included the error on a card accompanying a dish on the lunchtime buffet.
. . .
The hotel chain initially responded by joking about the mistake.
Its official Twitter account @HyattConcierge said in a tweet: "Definitely a unique menu option! Hope it's as good as it is complicated :) Have a fabulous day at Hyatt Canberra".
The tweet has since been deleted.
The hotel restaurant quickly removed the offending label and issued an official apology.
. . .
The incident sparked discussion on social media, where others shared their experiences of spellcheck-affected menus.
“I saw Stuffed Aborigines on a menu in the middle east once, as well as Chicken With Herpes,” said one tweet.
There's more at the link.
In one sense, the mistake is funny: but given the history of racial discrimination against Australian Aborigines, including numerous massacres, and historical and current problems with racism in that country, the hotel probably couldn't have been more insensitive if it tried! The last thing it should have done was to joke about it. Particularly in Australia's capital city, that has to be the definition of 'politically incorrect'.
Peter
7 comments:
Well, at least they were gluten-free aborigines.
Me, I give them credit for NOT being politically correct.
It was a mistake. Everybody knows it was a mistake. The "apology" was an attempt to cover an embarrassing mistake with a joke, knowing that nobody really thought the hotel was advocating the cooking of people.
No need to come crawling back, begging and whimpering for forgiveness.
I will say, though, that I think they should have just fixed the menu and not said a word.
Auto-correcting spell check can be quite evil at times. Sometimes I wonder if Monty Python has branched out into programming spell check programs. But yes, the restaurant should have fixed the menu as quietly and quickly as possible, then they should have fired their menu printing company.
Charlie Mitchell +1. If they had done it deliberately, then yes one should consider the history of racial discrimination against Australian Aborigines, including numerous massacres, and historical and current problems with racism in that country. But it wasn't deliberate. It was a typo, not an intentional assault on aborigines. And there is nothing wrong with responding humorously to such an uproar about a type. No reasonably intelligent person is ever going to believe they are actually advocating grilling aborigines. That they even felt the need to apologize is a sign of just how overboard we have gone on being PC.
This is what happens when you get fancy with eggplant .
How long do you have to cook an aborigine? The ones I've seen in films seem pretty stringy.
Exercise a little healthy scepticism with regard to supposed racism in Australua.
The victim-industry is alive and well, one of the most obvious current outcries against so-called "racism" being by a millionaire sportsman with a reputation for a prize sook, whinging because fans are booing him....... yet not booing dozens of other players of the same race.
Much of the supposedly racist history of Australia is unsupported........ An analysis of the so-called "black war" in Tasmania , for instance, found that over the 30-year period in which it was supposedly most intense, the casualty rate amongst aboriginals that can be verified in the manner that historians normally apply as reliable , was approximately 4 per year for the whole colony.
This in a situation in which theft by blacks from whites was common (documented) remote dwellings and the women and children living in them were very vulnerable....... and there is a considerable body of correspondence from those living in remote areas arguing that the government was not doing enough to deal with black aggression.
Another issue is the so-called "stolen generation". Supposedly, that was the policy of government to take aboriginal children from their parents in order to remove them from their culture and marry them off to whites in order to "breed out the black".
It sounds horrific, but not one inquiry with proper standards and not one court case has ever found that this was government policy as claimed. Nor have those supporting the myth been able to produce as many as TEN people who experienced such "stealing". Examine the evidence and you inevitably find that the children were either removed from abusive and neglectful situations - as we would expect of any non-aboriginal child in a similar situation - or voluntarily given into care by family members unable to care for and educate the children themselves.
One of the results of this myth-making is that children are now being left in appalling - even fatal - situations because they are black and the officials responsible are terrified of being seen as "stealing".
Political -correctness gone mad.
The Left would apparently rather see aboriginals as some form of living museum-exhibit than successful individuals fully capable of looking after themselves in a modern society.
Oh and yes...... I have aboriginal relatives.
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