Fox just got slapped with a fine, because they showed part of a woman’s bare backside on a halftime show. About 50 ABC affiliates didn’t air Saving Private Ryan because of a few swear words (But hey, showing someone’s head explode from a bullet? That’s all right.). Howard Stern spent his entire time on Letterman the other night, railing against the level of absurdity that has cropped up in the wake of the “Teat of Terror” incident. According to him, the FCC is about to enact regulations allowing the “talent” to be fined millions of dollars if someone complains that the talent did something they found obscene and offensive.
(BTW, Stern claimed to have seen more graphic descriptions of sex on Oprah than he’s ever aired. If true, then I think a few complaint letters are in order. Fight fire with fire, ya know?)
Hey, I agree completely, and lament the abuse of reason.
Let’s just try to avoid getting too nuts with the civil liberties stance, shall we? I’m for legalization of drugs, after all, but I wouldn’t dream of saying they’re not a real problem for some folks. Nor would I endorse minimizing those risks. It’s rare when a person is destroyed by addiction of any sort, but it’s tragic enough that an honest assessment of the risks, and education about the signs of trouble, should not be sacrificed in the name of “freedom of expression”.
Wasn’t intending to misrepresent things. Everything I’ve seen mentioned that folks had their panties in a twist because of the language. No one mentioned the violence aspect.
Ah, but that’s not what I was calling bullshit on Revtim. I called bullshit on the "public library part of Hyperelastic’s post cliaming that any 12-year old can pull up scat images in a public library – which has been demonstrated to be bullshit.
But regarding the 12 year old pulling up a scat image, I find I can do a Google image search on “shit eating” and plenty revolting scat images come up. Obviously, don’t try this out at work. Really, I recommend not doing it all, ever, unless you want to lose weight and need a desperate measure to kill your appetite.
Why can’t a 12 year-old do this? Looks like it’s clearly not bullshit that anybody could pull up these images. I succeeded with the most obvious method to find them.
Not all librarys will have these filters. His first link starts with “Although no local libraries reached by The Journal use Internet content filters, the Tompkins County Public Library may start doing so if board members decide they can’t afford to lose federal dollars.”
And even if they have a filter that might block a simple search like the one I made, do you really think it would be difficult to get around it? I have no doubt that a 12 year old with any determination will find a way around it, and email the way to do it to all his friends.
Filters are worse than useless. The kids they are trying to protect from the dirty stuff will find their way around them, and less technicaly-savvy adults will blocked from breast cancer sites and Dick Cheney’s home page.
Within the last few years (possibly before the passage of the 2003 law tying federal money to filters), the public library in Santa Rosa, CA, where I grew up, made a big show of installing privacy screens on all the computers. You can’t see through them at an angle of more than 15 degrees or so. This was done so that people looking at porn wouldn’t expose children to it, because there were no filters on the computers.
I just went down to my local public library. While my three-year-old was tap-tapping away on a PC in the children’s section, I saw a prominent notice stating that the library does not monitor what the kids are looking at in any way, and that “as with the library’s other collections,” it is strictly the responsibility of the parents to keep track of what their kids are looking at. There are no filters, and one could even interpret this as saying the library will not interfere no matter what the kid is looking at. I found the use of the term “as with the library’s other collections” interesting because it implies that the entire internet is one of the library’s “collections”. What was even more interesting is that there is a posted rule against playing internet games on library computers. Why is it all right to prohibit game-playing but not porn? I also note that hate speech is prohibited in the library. One would expect that if the library can bring itself to compromise free speech for these other reasons, there would be no problem in specifically banning porn.
I do not believe filters are necessarily the answer, nor do I want censorship of materials meant for adults. But as it stands, if I had a kid who was otherwise capable of managing himself alone at the library, I would not be able to just drop him off and let him spend an afternoon there - no way. That is a damn sad state of affairs brought on because the people in charge cannot reach a reasonable compromise between freedom of speech and protecting kids.
Look, this just doesn’t happen. There is no great porn epidemic infecting the nation’s libraries. Most libraries nowadays have some kind of filtering technology and I have never witnessed anyone bypass the system at my library.
And before the filters I made it my business to make sure no one was looking at porn. I caught several teens (15-18), but teens like the naked ladies, I don’t think this is a shock.
No system is perfect, but the system that is employed at most libraries keeps the porn off of the computers.