Well then, all’s fine as long as they are not messing with gratuitous violence.
No siree, Bob, stay the hell aways fom exploding body parts and crack down on them boobies! After all, you can poke your eye out with one of them things. Or go blind just thinking about them.
Can’t have that. Not in 2004 anyway.
Say goodbye to your cordless phone. It operates on an unlicensed portion of the RF frequency. Say goodbye also to your HAM radio and your 802.11a/b/g wireless networks. So long, garage door openers and keyless entries. Sorry, US military; you don’t have the right to transmit on microwave frequencies with your ship-board RADAR, Microsoft bought those rights last month and traded them to the Chinese Navy in return for a crackdown on piracy.
Okay Llib, your proposal makes a lot of sense, but does that mean you would have a right to be heard only if you have enough cash?
What gets me about this new Puritanism is how it’s directed only at the broadest, surface-level definition of obscenity. Can’t say any bad words, but go wild with the double-entendres. The Simpsons bears this out marvellously – chew through my ball sack, anyone?
Sex and the City is now being shown on TBS. The episodes were edited for nudity and language only; apparently the New Puritans are perfectly happy with the sexual situations and ethics of that show, so long as a dreaded boobie isn’t actually shown, or an F-word uttered.
Idiots. They’re not even achieving their own goal of Improving The Tone of broadcast TV; they’re just doing the barest surface cleanup. Apparently the little ones will be scarred for life if they see a boobie, but it’s perfectly fine for them to see strangers jumping into bed together.
Idiots.
I heard on the Bob & Tom radio show this morning that they are no longer allowed to play “Enormous Penis” by DaVinci’s Notebook. I found that very sad.
I’m glad you said that, because it reminds me of something that George Carlin once said:
In other words, Lib, I agree with you.
God…I feel so…dirty…now. 
I consider myself very liberal when it comes to personal freedoms and generally somewhat conservative when it comes to economic and foreign policy. I think, however, that this is one area where Lib and I are always going to disagree. I believe that some areas and industries are natural monopolies or are better off under public control, such as most utilities, roads, and the like. To me, the EM spectrum is one of those areas that needs to be under governmental control.
That said, though, I think moral crusaders of any stripe are a bunch of idiots.
BTW, the bolding in the Carlin quote was mine.
And Carlin is wrong. The FCC didn’t decide to regulate obscenity on it’s own, Congress gave it that power. And the FCC didn’t decide that obscenity wasn’t protected by the first amendment, the Supreme Court did, in FCC v Pacifica, in which Carlin played a major role.
Both valid points. The only thing to say, in MY defense, is that his quote is SEVERAL years old, and may have been before the SC decision.
Well, the SC decision was in 1978, and the courts have said that obscenity isn’t protected speech before then. I don’t know, off the top of my head, when Congress banned obscenity on the airwaves…I’d have to do some research on that.
I haven’t stopped beating my wife because I never started. I don’t advocate that government enforce anything except peace and honesty. Nor do I advocate that any one corporation take control of it. After all, that’s what we have now. Politicians in government and business already work together for their own mutual benefit. It is in the interest of the FCC to levy fines so that it can have revenue. And it is in the interest of broadcast corporations to contribute to campaigns of politicians who make them promises of special legislation and leniency. I didn’t say, “Let government appoint a private overseer of the EM spectrum.” I said, “Eliminate the FCC”. Just drop it. Just let it go. Just disband it and leave entrepreneurs to figure out what to do with the EM spectrum. It’s probably too late for that now since it’s already all mucked up. I cannot, for example, hear WBT from Charlotte, a powerful radio station with interesting talk that must broadcast directionally after a certain time of day so that its signal won’t interfere with the signal from a station in Omaha. But I can’t hear Omaha either because it’s too far away. So, how is this an improvement over the alternatives?
Well, the Supreme Court isn’t elected either. And what Congress gave the FCC was discretion, not power. It is that discretion that Congress is now trying to remove. And this brings us back to the question of why a group of politicians who dine with lobbyists every day is more capable of making these decisions than entrepreneurs who live or die by pleasing the public at large. A Congressman need sound sensible only periodically — when he’s running for office. But an entrepreneur will go broke overnight if he screws up.
In principle, I agree; but as a parent, I’d like there to be at least some mechanism for anticipating the level of content (as far as is reasonably possible) in advance of it actually being viewed by my children.
That’s the function that censorship should occupy, in my opinion; classification, not gagging.
Do you have any reason to believe that competing entrepreneurs would ignore demands for classification? Would it not give a great advantage to one over the other if it offered classifications while the other did not? Remember that your concerns about his sort of thing are the very life-blood of the entrepreneur, whereas the politician is trying to balance your concerns over classification with things like abortion and gun control. Plus, you won’t hear from the politician for another four to six years. Now, some people will make the argument that private companies are notoriously unresponsive, but consider that that is most true of the most heavily regulated ones, like health insurance or pharmaceuticals.
See, I don’t get this. You’re the parent! You get to have the power to control what your kids watch! (If v-chips don’t give you the ability to completely password-lock the TV, they ought to.) Kids shouldn’t be exposed to some things, but it ought to be the parents’ right to decide what’s ok for their kids and what’s not, and adults should be able to see what they like.
Am I in favor of hard-core porn on TV? No, but I don’t think any corporation would do that anyway. The disgust from the public would probably police that sort of thing just fine. Meanwhile, I think most of the people who are worried about what kids see are probably active enough parents that it’s not their own kids they’re worried about. They’re busybodies who want to control what other people’s kids see. I know you aren’t in that camp, Mangetout, so why exactly do you want someone else making these decisions? Especially when they make them so completely badly?
Exactly, but I can only exercise that power if I am aware (to whatever reasonable degree of certainty) of the content of programming in advance of it being watched; I’m not interested in having a system of complaint and recourse after the damage(real or imaginary is irrelevant) has been done - if I deem something unsuitable for my children to watch, I want to be able to reasonably avoid it, which is why I would like rigorous classification, not restraint.
I don’t have confidence in self-regulation schemes, perhaps unreasonably, but it is my impression that, again, they react, rather than prevent. If I consider that the mere sight of a human breast is irrepairably damaging to the poor vulnerable minds of my children (and I don’t, BTW), then it is no help to me that I will be able to apply consumer pressure after the event; I would want a system whereby I can reliably predict the exposure of breasts and avoid letting my children see them. I think an independent regulator would be able to do this better than an organic structure of competing market forces.
That’s fine, too. But there is no reason that the independent regulator need be an appointed bureaucrat, is there? In fact, it would be a good opportunity for alert entrepreneurs to establish consumer affairs businesses that rate TV shows. That way, at least you would have choices of whom you choose to trust. Besides all that, it would be extremely poor business practice to suddenly pop an exposed breast into a show that you have marketed for children. Companies care about profits, and they would likely prefer a one-time appealable fine from the FCC than an outraged buying public who turns them off permanently. And in any case, the FCC was reactive and not preventative with the Janet Jackson thing.
Actually, you’re probably not going to find a bigger anti-censorship proponent than me and I agree with him. I don’t have any probably with the rated “M” and “TV-14”, “TV-Y7”, etc.
I’m just waiting for a show rated TV-DVDA :D.
You make some good points and I will have to chew this over som more; my reservations at the moment are along the lines that companies seeking primarily to turn a profit might make different decisions about what is necessary than would an appointed body, whose sole purpose was to enforce an agreed standard (and would not be tempted by glittering, but slightly unacceptable opportunities for profit).
As I said though, I’ll have to think some more on this one.