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Your point about the game telling the player that Amelia has "extreme" opinions without saying what those opinions are reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago. Supposing the journalist Alice wants to smear Bob because Bob said something Alice doesn't approve of. The thing is, while Alice doesn't approve of it, she knows that most people agree with Bob, so simply stating what Bob's opinion is (e.g. "I don't think trans-identified man belong in women's prisons") won't work as a smear tactic. Instead, Alice talks about Bob's opinion in a circuitous way: "Bob has faced criticism for his political opinions, which have been widely characterised as transphobic". This allows Alice to get away with implying Bob said something hateful and in so doing turn her readers against him. The longer this goes on, the more Google search results get clogged up with articles about how hateful Bob is but without quoting anything he's said, and the harder it gets to find out what Bob actually believes. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of people asserting that JK Rowling is transphobic would, if pressed, be wholly unable to cite a specific opinion she has expressed on this issue.
Likewise here. The people who made this game knew full well that the opinions expressed by people like Amelia (e.g. "it was outrageous that the police turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale etc. for so long") sound perfectly reasonable to most people. Actually having Amelia express such opinions in the game would have the opposite of the desired effect, in much the same way it would if Alice attempted to defame Bob by quoting him directly. The only way to get away with it would be for Amelia to jump off the slippery slope by having her express extreme opinions (and naughty words) wholly unrepresentative of the modal British conservative activist.
It definitely reminds me of one of my journalistic pet peeves, which is the one you describe in that Substack post. A news story will tell me that someone said something offensive, or made comments interpreted as offensive, without ever telling me what they actually said. This irritated me at first because I want to know what the person said so that I can decide for myself whether I agree that it's offensive. Later on I concluded that it's just because the outlet does not want me to decide for myself, but would rather I passively accept this judgement.
Sometimes this is relatively inconsequential. I'll use a local example. Last year a football player was suspended after using a 'homophobic slur' on the field. Notice how nothing in that article tells you what Rankine actually said. You can go and click all the links down the bottom to related stories, and none of them tell you what he actually said. Fortunately I chased that one up and what happened is that, during a game, he called another player a "faggot". That's it. That one word. I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard". Given that AFL players are young men (Rankine was 25) in a highly-masculine competitive environment, I expect a bit of salty language from them, so I think this particular incident wasn't a big deal, and doesn't warrant much more than maybe the team captain saying, "hey, keep it under wraps on the field, okay?" But the news story does not report what actually happened, and it looks like the AFL wanted to signal how much it hates homophobia, so Rankine was punished disproportionately.
Once you start noticing this sort of circumlocution, it appears everywhere. I think the policy that I've adopted is that if you want me to be outraged about something someone said, the first requirement I have is that you tell me what they said. You can censor it if you like - you can bleep it, or say "the N word" or "the F word", or whatever makes you feel more comfortable - but I don't get outraged on faith.
I'm sure everyone here has noticed similar. In this case, "hateful opinions on immigration" is a category that can cover everything from a person just saying "I think we need less migration and more border protection" to a person saying "I hate all Pakis, they're cockroaches and we ought to drive them all into the sea". What we know is that Amelia has wrongthink, but if we've come to learn that wrongthink is a category that covers everything from advocating mass murder to politely stating facts that someone else finds inconvenient, the category itself loses its force.
I'm not sure how you don't see why the left might find the use of "faggot" objectionable in of itself. Obviously supporters of LGBTetc. would object to the use of homophobic slurs as a general-purpose insult, as it strengthens semantic associations between homosexuality and undesirability.
Oh, I can see that. But all insults are objectionable in and of themselves - that's the point of them. This particular one is not an insult I would use myself. In this particular case I think that the punishment for the insult was grossly disproportionate, and even if you disagree with me, I came to that conclusion on the basis of looking at the insult itself and the context in which it was used, which are things that the news story strategically concealed. It's that concealment that I'm objecting to.
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