The Coming Fight Over TV Violence 324
gollum123 writes "Time reports the guardians of decency are warning about new trouble, with a capital T, which rhymes with V, which stands for violence. The Parents Television Council (PTC), the group at the vanguard of the TV-sex wars, has lately focused on prime-time blood: power-tool torture on 24, serial killing on Criminal Minds, vivisection on Heroes. And the FCC has prepared a draft report suggesting that Congress authorize it to regulate broadcast violence, as it now does obscenity, and possibly force cable companies to let subscribers opt out of paying for channels that run brutal content. In short, torture is the new sex. Jack Bauer is the new Janet Jackson."
Not really "news" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not really "news" (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, it's silly to imply that 24 has a place in the chain of command (as if Jack Bauer gives orders for real-life military torture). It's also scary that they could possibly think 24 has more sway than direct orders. Thus, I believe they want it off the show not to discourage torture, but because 24 puts current military practices in a bad light. Bush etc. have already ordered torture (although they refuse to call it such - and to think Clinton's "is" definition was once considered significant).
Now we have a concerned group of citizens doing this PR work for the army. If the people don't see it, they're safer/happier/etc.
Re:Not really "news" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not really "news" (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not a fucking 'failure' at all when something is deliberately planned.
Re:Not really "news" (Score:4, Insightful)
I read an interesting account of what it was like to experience waterboarding. It was written by a US prisoner captured in Korea. There was no question in his mind that it was torture.
But I'm sure the US president would have no problems with captured US soldiers undergoing waterboarding.
absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Some private who finds a guy on the field and starts torturing him because his CO saw something cool on 24 and told him to -- is a crime. Nothing more, nothing less.
Re:absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
Reports of torture have come from all the US-run "terrorist" prisons, so we are talking about a universal pattern, not a couple of bad apples. Overall, I think you're being too optimistic about the US government.
Depending on which version you believe, you get to choose between different kinds of bad. Either senior people authorized torture, or junior, untrained people were encouraged to "get results" and a blind eye was turned as to methods.
So, rather than the parent being "absurd" (which means "logically impossible", rather than "factually untrue", by the way) it seems that you are either naive or uninformed. It really is bad. Governments do torture. People don't handle power well, and if you hide them away in a secret place, remove oversight, and pat them on the back for being a bit rough, they will in short order torture people to death. It's not about being American, Iraqi, or any indictment of the Bush Doctrine--it's just human nature. Read about the Zimbardo prison experiment, or Milgram's experiments, the book Ordinary Men [amazon.com], and so on. People can be savage if you put them in a situation where it's condoned and rewarded. That inner moral compass isn't as reliable as we like to think. If we had more cynics and less optimists when it comes to human nature, we would recognize that power corrupts and minimize the situations in which torture is likely to occur. Your optimism is exactly what we need less of.
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The example is absurd. The military/DOD has professionals that do this. That was my point.
The threa
Re:Not really "news" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not even going into the absurdity of your commparison - if said IEDs routinely killed 10 times the number of your own civilian people as the "enemy" (and that being no accident, hence the distinction beween "war" and "terror") - then, absolutely, yes, that's a "real bad guy".
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And if you dont belive me, just do some research on the subject in psychological journals.
24 does appeal to those who crave authorotarianism (Score:5, Interesting)
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Are you sure it wasn't because they wanted to run an ad encouraging people to tell their representatives to vote to extend the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act?
Later in that same season it would be revealed that 24's US President Charles Logan was behind the events of Day 5. Of course, that was not revealed until long after the vote to extend the rea
I'm a sci-fi geek (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but what I find scary here is that a month or so back, the pentagon had asked 24 [huffingtonpost.com] to cut down on torture, ostensibly to discourage its practice by the military.
[...]
a concerned group of citizens doing this PR work for the army.
I considered 24 to be part of the pop-culture pro-torture propaganda. So I find it odd, not scary, that the pentagon is now telling them to cut it back...
I don't watch 24, but I did see a member of congress on tv (ok, the Daily Show) say that since so many people loved Jack Bauer, and that Jack Bauer uses torture, therefore the American people have spoken and declared torture to be fine. I'm thinking it's stuff like that that prompted the Pentagon's distancing. Getting people desensitized to the idea of to
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And anyone who disagrees with me should be shot, drawn and quartered, and I'LL DROP KICK THEIR FACE IN! I'M NOT VIOLENT AT ALL! ARGH!
The author had it right when he said... (Score:5, Interesting)
'nuff said
Re:The author had it right when he said... (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I agree with you on this. Real world issues should be given a lot more attention than a stupid nipple slip that hurt nobody.
That being said, the real world and what's shown on the telly is not disconnected and independent. In particular, I've been thinking lately of how 24, and Jack Bauer, started to normalize the usage of torture and bring into the consciousness of the viewers that, perhaps, torture is actually OK in some cases. When you've started to accept torture against certain terrorists, typically in scenarios very very far from those of the real world (known terrorist got the code to stop the bomb in the kindergarten and there's no other way omg!), then the step of accepting it against general terror-suspects isn't too far, and eventually, people in general are going to accept the kind of stuff that's been going on in various US secret prisons, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and so forth. Slippery slope you know. Eventually, torture against your local drug dealer is gonna seem kindof acceptable. And then what? Maybe Al Gore is a terrorist drug dealer, humm?
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(What I mean is, we are, as a society, more humane now, in general anyway, than we have been pretty much any time in history ever, so maybe we shouldn't worry about a slippery slope that we have been *climbing* for 5000 years.)
Also, the best argument I have seen regarding the slippery slope is that we should just make it illegal all the time, and then if it is actually needed
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If?! People take normalization cues from everywhere...TV, movies, friends, people on the street, etc. The psychologists have pretty much got that covered.
What I mean is, we are, as a society, more humane now, in general anyway, than we have been pretty much any time in history ever, so maybe we shouldn't worry about a slippery slope that we have been *climbing* for 5000 years.
Perhaps, though recently on this one issue of to
No, that works (Score:2)
This would also work really well against police brutality. If any cop who injured a civilian went to jail, regardless of necessity, there wouldn't be very much unnecessary brutality.
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This statement is so naive it's funny!
Every Society has always claimed to be the "most humane". Concepts like "humanity" and "morals" are extremely subjective terms that are constantly redefined based on the the society in question's ethical standpoint of the day.
To many other societi
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Second: One could come up with countless examples of those "laws" contradicting each other (e.g. what if your 'job' is that of a thief?, the institutional theft from and murdering of the Jews was permitted by Nazi law, most still consider those acts immoral)
Third: The entire assertion is simply false. Some societies don't view "not doing your job" as immoral, some societies deem lying as exceptable (e.g. white lies)
You have just taken a
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What if my aunt had balls? She'd be my uncle...
This is a game that I find stupid because it's easy to counter with; You are the presumed terrorist and someone like Bush believes that you have the code to save the children...and they just torture you until you die because the know you have the code. All you're hopping for is that someone gives you the code so you can just blurt it out.
I guess you believ
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what if the trrist got a bomb with a code
Exactly. The western world already has exactly something to deal with a ticking time bomb.
It's called breaking the law and throwing yourself the mercy of the court.
We don't need goddamn exceptions to laws just in case horrible things are going to happen. Do we have exceptions to speeding for people rushing someone to the hospital? Nope.
Why? Because if you got a ticket for that, you could trivially demand a jury trial, present the fact you were trying to save so
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The glorification aspects is troubling, but people can be so fundamentally blind to what is going on out there, any sort of exposure seems somehow helpful. Now we just need The Seige [imdb.com] to be required watching on NBC primetime.
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I believe, however, that humans, or at least the vast majority of us, are inherently violent. Even if 24/Eminememem or whatever the hell his name is/etc. weren't around... well, look at past generations. Before TV and the media were even invented. Kids played, what, cowboys and indians. Mimicry of the brutal slaugh
Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the issue appears to be more that violence has been a public part of our culture for a very long time. Both violence and sex have existed longer than humans have. However, violence has always been more acceptable publicly. Violence is as much an instinct as sex is - as long as there have been members of the opposite sex, there have been fights over who gets to mate with them!
Violence is always about being nasty to someone - you can't have violence without hurting someone, which provides a moral dilemma about when violence is suitable. Sex however, is normally about being nice to someone. This isn't so much a dilemma, as an education issue - providing both (or more) parties understand what they are doing. The chances of hurting anyone are minimal.
Why is it that you see children as better able to solve the moral dilemma surrounding violence, than understand the basics of responsible sex?
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Sure, that can be in the context of sex. It can also be in a lot of other contexts.
What makes sex special other than the fundie interpretation of its magical powers?
Stew
Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see why some forms of sex might be controversial, but is there anyone who really disagrees that two married people having really good sex is a good thing? I can't think of any sane person who does (although I'd go further and say that any two people who like each other makes it OK), yet society seems quite happy to have scenes of graphic and extreme (and in many cases sexually perverted) violence play out on screen, but people go mental if it is even suggested that you show a scene of Mr and Mrs Happily Married having a good old-fashioned fuck. If you don't want negative images of explicit sex on TV shown to children, then that is fine by me, except that a large majority seem to think that any images of sex are negative.
The argument that you don't want children to do it is silly. Most children would like to drive a car, and watch all sorts of cool cars being driven on TV all the time. Yet they know that they are not allowed to drive a car until they are older. The same goes with sex. Like all men, I could think of little else when I was 13, but I knew that going all the way at that age was likely to cause all sorts of trouble that I didn't want to be in.
Our society is full of repressed puritans who are so scared of their own sexual desires that they feel the need to repress everyone else with a socially enforced psychological chastity belt.
And it doesn't work. Every young fellow knows that the girls who put out the most and in the most enjoyable and abandoned fashion tended to be drawn from the daughters of the strictly religious.
And pretty much every kid has seen porn, so it's not as if they don't know already. Treating healthy sex as a subject of shame and guilt just confuses young people. For one thing, if you are going to protect them against real perverts, you really need to point out what kinds of sex are acceptable, and which are not.
Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Now look at the modern porn, the result of the conservative reaction of the last decades. It didn't diminish in numbers - oh no. Instead it just became lots more violent, mechanical, apersonal. Zero body contact except in genital area. Zero feelings except simulated rage. Wooden faces of actors who know that what they are doing is absolutely nasty and just want to show us HOW nasty it is. The word "nasty" itself is the most common in port vocabulary today; words like "love" or "nice" are avoided. Those who do porn today are certainly NOT enjoying it.
And sadly, that kind of porn IS detrimental to children, much as violence is. It is a perfect straw man for social conservatives fighting to outlaw porn and make it forever connected with violence in our minds. What they fail to understand is that THIS kind of porn is a direct result of their social conservatism.
It does not HAVE to be like that. We must change it back.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Something that I've never understood, is the nature of swear words.
For example "fuck, dick, wank" etc are considered unacceptable words to use, are censored, and children who use them are usually chastised. We all do these things or possess a part of the body that's referred to. We enjoy them, and to not enjoy them is widely accepted as dysfunctional.
However, such words as "murder, kill, maim, torture" etc. have no censorship, have no disapproval in polite conversation, and children can cheerfully use them frivolously in the playground to express themselves. However, to actually do any of these things is horrific and would rightly get you a long term in jail.
Just never made any sense to me at all. It surely desensitizes us to violence, and creates repression in the sexual sphere. It's lose, lose.
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Re:Surely this is good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Violence that is realistic and could be done by "easily acsessable weapons" is imiedatetely classified as at least a 15, and sometimes an 18, depending upon several different cr
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We all know the reason why this is so. The Christian religion has serious issues with sex: that's pretty much the long and the short of it.
The association of sex with sin is embedded much deeper, and has far fewer accepted exceptions, than the prohibition against violence.
Criminal Minds (Score:3, Insightful)
They are annoyed that they depict serial killers... in a show following FBI profilers. Isn't one of the core purposes for profiles to deal with serial killers? I know they have other roles, but come on.
I'm not a big fan of violence, I tend to stay away from gorey thrillers and horror movies, but "Criminal Minds" isn't bad. Most of the violent scenes are implicit: victim turns around to see man with knife, knife starts to swing through the air, end scene... protagonists fi
Not a new battle (Score:5, Interesting)
You allready got that fucking V-chip in your TV (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the otherhand, it's about time they went after violence on TV. It was always kind of weird that you could have horrible violence on TV in the US, but sex was totally not allowed. When sex is psychologically less harmful for kids to see than violence.
jack bauer (Score:5, Funny)
Simple Solution-- (Score:5, Insightful)
The adult(s) in the household should slink their obese rear end off the couch, reach for the remote on the end table, and press the power/channel change button, thus eliminating objectionable programming being displayed on the TV monitor.
This will negate the need for more government censorship over the airwaves.
Re:Simple Solution-- (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was quite a young child, my parents let me and my sister walk down to the local shop on most Saturday mornings, to buy some sweets. They knew the area well enough to know that the danger was limited. However, they gave us the freedom to do this. If they did not know the area well, then it would have been irresponsible at that age to allow us to do that. TV regulation, means that the parents can do the same thing with the TV - they know that before a certain time, they can give their children the freedom to watch TV alone.
Being a good parent, is not about constantly watching over what your child is doing. It's about making sure that they are unlikely to end up in a situation where the risk is high. And making sure that when they do end up in a risky situation, they know what to do.
too much risk (Score:5, Insightful)
TV is not like walking down the street in your neighborhood. Television is a 100% voluntary action you and your kids engage in. You do not need it to survive and in fact, many people don't even own a television. Guess what? They still raise kids and they still survive quite nicely.
The idea that you should impart restrictions on what society can show on TV so your kid can "safely" watch TV, is ludicrous. You should not expect society to accommodate you so the TV can be your babysitter. If you think TV - as is, as well as whatever it becomes - is too risky for your child to view, then you should not participate. Just turn it off and assume that if you turn it back on, your child will burst into flames.
See how that works? You are happy because you have avoided risk. And we are happy because we get to see stuff blow up. If you do it the other way around, nobody is happy but you.
More sense than sex (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a proponent of censorship but if you really want to censor something, censor excessive graphical violence and not sex and nudity.
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Re:More sense than sex (Score:5, Funny)
That is going to be some awkward mastrubation.
Re:More sense than sex (Score:5, Insightful)
Paradox (Score:3, Funny)
Next up: The coming orgy over TV sex, and the coming euphoria over TV drug use!
Surely Jack Bauer is the new.... (Score:2, Troll)
More boobies less drills (Score:2)
But that said I'd prefer everyone got a little more de-sensitized to sex and boobies and a little more sensitive towards torture.
Opt out? I want Opt In! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, the horror! -sarcasm
I've got ~5 channels right now, because I refuse to pay for 20 crap channels in a "subscription package" when I want 3 or 4 of them!
Especially since I've got o subscribe to several packages to get the ones I want, leading me to pay for 30-40 channels to get the 3 or 4 channels I want.
We've got digital tv now. The technology to let subscribers pick and chose individual channels are there.
Screw the companies that won't let you choose which channels to subscribe to. Give them a big finger and choose *not* to subscribe to their crap!
Uh. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a bad parent, and you have a good kid, they'll know better than to kill someone because they saw it on TV.
If you're a good parent, and you have an idiot kid, you'll be able to regulate their exposure to violence. If you're concerned about TV violence, just don't let them have one in their room.
If you're a good parent, and you have a good kid, you'll be just fine.
The one thing those four have in common is that if the parent cares, the parent can act on their own. These parents need to stop regulating the world to make up for their lack of parenting. If anything, they need to regulate themselves. People shouldn't be allowed to have children if they're too stupid to handle them.
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You're right, environment has nothing to do with how people turn out, contrary to all established psychology.
And now you know they'll never quit (Score:5, Insightful)
The Parents Television Council (PTC), the group at the vanguard of the TV-sex wars,
Whether it's sex education, abortion rights or teaching evolution in schools, the religious right won't ever quit. If they win in one area, they'll just start pushing their religious agenda in a different arena, and they'll keep it up until the government is enforcing religious principles. The American Taliban.
Pick your side because there's no compromise position they'll respect.
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I'm a little surprised, actually. This sort of group also tends to be very pro-violence, pro-war, pro-big government. Desensitizing Americans to torture and violence and preaching the message that hurting people for a good cause is justifiable sounds like an important part of their cause. I can see them wanting to censor sex and other things, but not violence.
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Pick my side, well personally I'd suggest:
Sex: No limits on showing 'normal' sex. Its natural and if the prudes stopped running the country people might have a healthier attitude. A nipple is not a cause for censorship.
Violence: Ban all the unthinking use of extreme violence on TV, including 24 and any show where anyone fires off 10,000 rounds with no thought of the consequences. Its fairly obvious that the majority of US citizens are incapable of realising its not real and not an indication of what y
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But those arguments are dismissed as silly, and interracial couples act outraged at being compared to gays, polygamists, and beastial.. ists..; Eventually opposition gives in because they never actually did come up with a counter-argument to "the government has no business saying I can't marry whoever I want" better than the non-argument "If we let
Trouble, with a capital T (Score:5, Funny)
Questions? (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people have died because of violence in Iraq?
And lastly... How many children's lives have been ruined by the former and then the latter?
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A new name (Score:3, Insightful)
I suggest they call themselves Fundamentalist Victorian Americans. They seem to share the same extremist views that other fundamentalist groups share, but posture for a "value" set that seems to have only been held by the upper class of Victorian England.
Oh no! A child has been spanked somewhere!!! Quick, to the Lawmobile! We have to save them before they're scarred for life.
I've always found it weird... (Score:2, Interesting)
couldn't agree more (Score:3, Insightful)
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But the U.S. attitude is no more absurd than the European attitude. Both systems are rigidly authoritarian, and only an authoritarian would find one more "reasonable" than the other.
Let's make a deal! (Score:2)
Curse this V-chip (Score:2, Funny)
All I got was:
The ****** ***** over ** ********
I tried to post the entire article censored, but slashdot's "lameness filter" wouldn't let me. Honestly! I think that says it all.
Dangerous for soceity (Score:5, Insightful)
Happily, my totally hot girlfriend and I made it out of there and to the orphanage, where we help feed very cute poor kids who are "trapped by the system". Disappointingly, the criminals were released due to a technicality.
The funny part: the same thing happened last month.
Just about all television programing sucks, with sparse few exceptions here and there. The easiest way to attract viewers to such a lousy program is to show a powerdrill going into a guy's brain, or a lady with revealing outfits, or the old car blowing up after a fender-bender.
If you can't attract viewers with quality, attract them with something that they'll remember: boobs, blood, and bombs.
If network TV continues to fail, it certainly won't be due to censorship - it will be due to the networks' inability to address their piss-poor programming.
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What disturbs me even more is the possibility that the TV networks are actually producing what the average American wants to watch. After all, the networks are in the business of making money, and so are likely to be at least *trying* t
Skeptics, roll your eyes now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial interests invariably mean that content creaters and broadcasters are almost always tunnel-visioned into producing content that is ever more graphic, explicit and/or biased. The result is a medium that too easily can either desensitise its audience or misrepresent facts. You'd have to be blind to miss that that's a serious problem.
Take just two examples: the fictional drama 24 and actual television news.
Firstly, 24. There's no doubt that 24 is one of the most popular US shows of the decade, and that Jack Bauer is a generational role model - a tough guy who'll do anything and everything in his power to do his job and protect his country - but it's almost impossible to imagine what 24 would have looked like even 10 or 20 years ago.
Compare the violence in 24 to that of, say, 1990s episodes of NYPD Blue or 1980s episodes of Miami Vice. It's like comparing chalk and cheese.
Then look at some of the dangerous messages that 24 sends us: torture is quick, torture is effective, and torture is fine when it's carried out for patriotic reasons. Whether you believe the last of these statements is down to your own moral compass (I can tell you that I certainly do not), but any expert will tell you that the first two are wishful thinking.
In fact, the show's messages on torture are so dangerous that "the US military has appealed to the producers of 24 to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they are having both on troops in the field and America's reputation abroad." [independent.co.uk] If even the US military can join the dots between Bauer's fictional planting a powerdrill into bad guys to get his info and the reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, illegal killings, etc, then you know it's time to be worried.
But, hey, if you're a TV executive and it keeps the viewers glued to your channel and your ads, then it's all OK, right?
Secondly, television news. We live in a world of instant global news, and it's a good thing. Or it would be, if the news that we got wasn't so watered down and/or distorted. Wars are bloody and brutal things, but you wouldn't know it from the actual footage that you see on your evening news reports, which (on the few occasions that they do show footage from war zones) invariably show clean, precise military operations, which paint a picture that's rosier than a flower show.
The realities of war - the death, the destruction, the senseless waste of it all - are kept hidden away, because if you showed that stuff people would soon get turned off... and change the channel. And if you're a TV executive putting out news that's so real that it makes people so uncomfortable that they'll watch whatever the competition has to offer then you've lost your ratings war, which is the only war that counts when it comes to selling those ads.
So, clean-cut, folksy, sham news is good, and hard-hitting, real, tell-it-how-it-really-is news is bad. The ridiculous subliminal message that war is no big deal that this sends is so messed up: if you showed the naked truth then more people would really start to take an interest, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the issues that will possibly shape their children's lifetimes.
Of course, you'll always have people who'll deny everything. President Nixon believed that Nick Út's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the Napalm attack on Trang Bang [wikipedia.org] was staged, despite there also being overwhelming supporting evidence, including television footage, that it was the simple truth. (A US President so out of touch with reality: who would have thought it possible?)
But without being shown the truth, how can
What are they talking about? (Score:2)
Politics (New Politically Correct) is SOS .... (Score:2)
The PC magic-trick spin,
convert lies to votes.
Sex=Sin=Morality=Damnation=Votes
Crime=Reality=Theater=Violence=Votes
Diseases=Dogma=Punishment=dirty=Votes
Addiction=Drugs=Corruption=Evil=Votes
Slang=Music=Destruction=Lies=Votes
Poor=Laziness=Uneducated=Flaw=Votes
A spun-truth is a story told that
will never recognize the truth;
therefore, never solve a problem;
however, will provide PC votes.
Who voted for George Bush?
Why
ITS THE COMMERCIALS STUPID!! (Score:5, Insightful)
BUT, the fact that they show CLIPS OF PRIMETIME stuff in their commercials during the DAY is driving me freaking nuts...I can't even sit down to watch a basketball game with my young son without the network putting clips full of sex, violence, guns etc in their commericals during the program.
ITS A JOKE.... The fact that a program can be rated as TV-G but hey can cut to a commercial rated TV-MA because they are totally unregulated is the single biggest thing that makes the rating system a waste. My TIVO still displays TV-G and on the screen is people shooting each other and naked people rolling around on a couch.
They need to make the COMMERCIALS have to also comply with the rating for that time period. If you can make THAT HAPPEN, then I say we can have a free-for-all after 9pm as far as I care.
And It's Getting Worse (Score:2)
It's gotten to the point that I don't even want to watch TV most days. I find that when I do, it is upsetting. The commercial networks are all busy chasing each other down the gory path. I don't see them finding anything better on thier own.
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They LOST the sex wars! (Score:3, Insightful)
What you don't see is nipples and genitalia, because regardless of the context, you know, that'd be BAD!
So you can watch couples faking orgasm between the sheets, but it's apparently not SEX, because any thing so naughty as an ass crack is blurred out. Even better is when they do that for a completely non-sexual context, because:
nipples = sex
genitals = sex
buttocks = sex
sex != sex
Screwed up country.
About time too (Score:2)
I don't mind, but... (Score:2)
Public vs Private space. (Score:3, Insightful)
I also disagree with the "If you don't like it, turn if off" crowd. As an American, I have the right to speak out against those things in the culture I find offensive, and I also have the right to petition the govt. for redress. Since the govt is the owner of the airwaves (as custodian of the people) then it is a violation of my rights to say I cannot petition them. While I think the media reflects culture, not creates it, I still reserve the right to democratic change of our public institutions.
For those who think I'm a prude or a busy-body, I actually favor more sex to be allowed on TV, I think the current rules are dreadfully restrictive. However, the current rules have been arrived at in a democratic fashion (albeit imperfect), and I respect that.
Consider for a moment what liberals might think if one of the major networks went to "all white supremacist" content. How long would it take for them to try to get it shutdown? They are already trying to re-instate the fairness doctrine on radio due to the success of conservative talk radio (and the subsequent failure of liberal talk radio).
Re:How will the left behave? (Score:4, Insightful)
American politics always makes me chuckle.
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It's not that different in your country. In fact I'm not from the USA either, but please, tell me what country does not censor anything on TV, the press or anywhere else.
If by "country" you mean "government", Denmark is one example. We prefer to do our censorship using rabid Muslims instead. They are cheaper and more entertaining. Especially their vengeance. "We will draw your queen as a pig". Cute, are we supposed to be shocked by *that*? Not that I ever understood what Muslims have against pigs, they are quite charming creatures in their way :)
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Why, in the country of Slashdotia, of course!
Slashdotia, where the email is encrypted and spam is censored, but the TV is broadcast in the free and clear, with violence and boobies for all!
Slashdotia, where the minimum salary for perl haxors is eighty thou., and hiring Indian programmers is strictly prohibited!
Slashdotia, legendary home of
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This is however beside the point of the discussion at hand.
Nonsense (Score:3, Funny)
Information wants to be free!
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Often reported as "suicide by cop" in the U.S.
When it gets dicey for me is when you have a lone guy with a knife surrounded by cops, no hostage, it drags on for hours and it seems like a decision gets made, "Hey, this is getting into a lot of overtime costs and he's blocking a street so let's shoot him and be done with it." Perhaps a good reason to develop something like a Taser with a 50 yard reach?