THE DICTATORIAL MIDGET- Authomatic Censorship Thread

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that is all...

 

speaking of, I just got an email from a prince who needs to store his money to a trustworthy person in the states. He offered to share it with me.

Obviously I gave him my routing number and account. I'm going to be rich! :love2: :love2:

 

Seeing all the stars makes me thinks of the IRC qdb.us quote.

hunter2 shows up as stars right?!

 

Darvocet Side Effects

Tyler - you can officially scratch Darvocet off your list of goodies. The FDA moved forward with a ban after 30 years of consumer activist groups petitioning to pull it off the market because of the deadly side effects. Now the drug manufacturer is being sued by people who were prescribed Darvocet.

 

The watershed starts at 8/9pm according to what material it is. Personally I prefer it that way, I wouldn't want kids listening to words like fuck etc. Its hardly censorship, just protecting minors, plenty of things aren't censored past 9. I remember going to France and seeing tits all over the shows at 7pm - do continental European parents not let their kids watch tv or do they just not care?

Anyway, could be worse - I read some American reviews of The Inbetweeners when it was shown on BBC America - some seemed genuinely outraged at the language and jokes involving disabled people (even though they aren't at the expense of the disabled).

 

What's wrong with that? Most European countries aren't as sexually repressed as this one (UK) and a bit of naked female, or male for that matter, flesh isn't the end of the world and isn't going to twist and pervert the viewers fragile mind and turn then into a slobbering sex pest or have the moral majority up in arms. It's called maturity.

As for kids hearing fuck and other expletives, the vast majority of them are using it themselves on the school playground, in the streets or hearing it in the home. Taking it off the TV or dubbing/bleeping it out is the biggest exercise in futility known to man.

 

This.

God forbid a child sees a breast.

 

It depends what context it is in. The advert in question was objectifying women. While this is (somewhat) acceptable to adults, as they can make their own judgment on what is right and what is wrong and don't have fragile minds like you say, kids are still forming their moral compass, which TV often forms a large part of. Kids do have fragile minds.

Reaching maturity is a long and additive process - certain words/situations are fine for a 15 year old to see, but unsuitable for a 5 year old. Removal of the watershed could see a 5 year old being exposed to sex scenes - I don't know if you think that is innapropriate, but I think most people would. Fine for 15 year olds though (as long as its a 'soft' scene though).

I totally agree there is nothing wrong with seeing a tit or a bit of bollock, for education purposes though (ie biology or sex education - but thats hardly prime times stuff anyway). In that respect the watershed is doing badly, I agree.

As for the expletives, most might be doing so yes: but not everyone. The BBC was created to be viewed by everyone, hence the watershed. A parent who doesn't like their kids being exposed to swearing wouldn't be able let their kids watch TV at all. There can be viewer discretion warnings, but they only partly work, they are easily missed - especially if the kids are plonked in front of the TV to make them quiet and left to their own devices as is so often the case. Again, a kid of 5 shouldn't be exposed to expletives, and there would be no distinction without a watershed.

Would you argue that kids should have free reign on the internet?

As an aside, I don't think this country is particularly sexually repressed, and I've grown up with the watershed obviously - if you want any orgy party details I could point you in the right direction :lol:

 

Yes, they do. As a father of two now grown up kids I'm fully aware of this, that's why you should always know what your children are watching and monitor it. TV isn't a babysitter and shouldn't be treated as such.

A 5 year old witnessing a sex scene or listening to a torrent of obscenities is again the fault of the parent, NOT the broadcaster. Irrespective of the time of day that it's shown, if you can't be bothered to take an active interest in what your child is accessing why should someone else? It's your duty of care, not the TV stations.

Again, it's a parents responsibility to monitor what their child is doing on the internet. You can put as many filter and block progs on their or the home computer as you want but these can all be circumvented. If you don't want your children exposed to the darker and more suspect parts of the world wide web then it's your place to sit with them and monitor the sites that they access.

Today nobody wants to take responsibility for anything it seems. All too often you hear the same old tired shit: ''my child has seen sex scenes and is confused/upset/asking questions'' or ''my child is having nightmares after watching a horror film'' or ''my child has picked up bad language after watching such and such''. It's always someone else's fault, be it the broadcaster or the programme/film maker, and the sooner parents and moral guardians realize that it's their duty to oversee their kids viewing and surfing habits and no-one else's the better but it'll never happen because TV is full of spineless right on fuckwits and apologists who haven't got the bollocks to stand up and tell parents to do their job properly and to shut the fuck up. If your kid is fucked up he or she is fucked up because you failed them, no-one else, YOU.

 

Giving kids free run of the internet opens people up to all sorts of legal problems. Given what I've seen people link others to in IRC channels one could easily end up on a sex offender list somewhere and end up as a felon depending on how a judge wishes to interpret interstate commerce law in terms of the internet. People need to police their kids internet time but typically refuse to do it until something bad happens, then they get sue happy. I think 4Chan has demonstrated this one for us at least on a bi-monthly basis.

However I firmly believe that censorship is 100% wrong. It is up to the parents to decide if their kids should watch what is presented on TV not for the parents to sanitize TV for everyone so they no longer have to police what is being watched. Same goes for the internet, force your kids to use a machine connected to a proxy that filters all content but go fuck yourself if you think you're going to tell me what I can and can't do for "the sake of the children" BS.

Ignorance is no excuse. Never has been and never will be. Of note is the hypocrisy that you can show Die Hard at 4PM uncut but with all the "bad words" removed or dubbed over. Remember kids, putting a crowbar through someone's head is OK but don't say "motherfucker".

Addendum:
My parents weren't the strictest authoritarians when it came to censoring media in my childhood. I could play most any video game (my mom had to be convinced that the title "Body Harvest" wasn't something horrific like the future GTAIII was going to be. Saving humanity from aliens=good) and the only TV channel that was blocked when I was growing up was MTV due solely to Beavis and Butthead. I can fully understand why in retrospect but it is far, far tamer than most of what you can find on the internet these days. MTV was unblocked about the time Jackass was on as I was free to watch it. Of course by then I had long figured out that bashing your balls in with a bowling ball had actual consequences.

 

The problem is that a parent can't vet every single thing that their kids may want to see. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to read every book or watch every episode of every program they want to watch. You can get an idea from second hand sources, but they often aren't accurate, differences of opinion occur, and there will be differences between each book, episode etc even if they are part of the same series or whatever. I'm afraid reality takes precedence over ideals. To monitor a kid on the internet properly would mean reading every single word that they do. There aren't enough hours in the day for me as it is, and I don't even have any kids.

In the old days there wasn't such an abundance of media. A spinning top wouldn't shout expletives and show a kid porn. Yet the work load for parents and hours in the day remain the same.

There is the possibility for what you guys are suggesting through digital television - pin encrypted programs, content warnings in an on screen listing. But such a thing would need a standard across all TV sets and would be a difficult thing to introduce right now. Feasible in the near future though, but for now a compromise is needed.

Also, the point that people are too lazy to monitor their kids -very true I agree. It is their fault. But as you point out they won't do anything until something happens, or they are provided with something like the watershed. Unfortunately, for the sake of the national interest, you have to provide for these people who can't be bothered, otherwise their kids will grow up with problems, which affects the fate of the whole country.

 

Then the child or children don't watch those programmes you're unsure of, it's as simple as that. It's not a 'grey' area or open to any form of debate, if the parent is unsure then the parent should have the character to stand by their convictions and not be browbeaten by their offspring. Fuck me, who's the one in charge?

Are you for real? Monitoring a childs internet usage is the easiest thing in the world. What would you need to proof read? If you don't know what's a 'clean' site from one that errs on the side of dubious then you yourself need to be watched. Regardless what you may like to think and regardless of what all the trumpeters of the WWW would have you believe the internet is NOT for everyone. It's not a level playing field and it's full of dark, horrible content and populated by even darker individuals. Give your kids free reign on it and you're a fucking idiot. An adult should supervise any younger user at all times and only allow access to sites that the adult knows are safe. If unsure don't let the child go on it, again, it's the adult who should be in charge not the child. And this will win me many friends I'm sure but any parent who allows a child to set up a FaceBook account is a useless cunt too. It's not fun, it's not harmless and it most certainly isn't promoting friendship and fraternity. I've lost count of the times where it's been reported where children have been targeted by bullies and predators and been either abused, hounded or taken their own lives after months or years of systematic targeting. And what does the parent invariably say when the worlds media picks up on the story? ''We thought it was a safe environment for our child to take part in, how were we to know what was going on?'' You were supposed to know because IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB YOU THICK CUNT. Any activity that your child takes part in should be looked into and vetted by you, if it's not quite simply you've failed.

V-chip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip

National interest? Fuck off. So because some deadbeat can't be arsed to stop their 7 year old from watching, oh I don't know, Shameless for example, then it should be taken off the air or bowdlerized for fear of some scrote watching it? Or The Soprano's, or The Inbetweeners or Hung. The vast majority suffer for the lazy, uneducated few? This country has one of the strictest sets of censorship laws in the developed world because our moral guardians feel the need to protect us in 'the public interest'. Jesus shit, it makes me fucking puke.

 

I'd love to add something to this discussion but Consumed pretty much has it down. Worried about your kids accessing the internet? Don't put a computer in their room with net access, and make sure the family computer is somewhere you can monitor. I don't know, I'm not a parent, but really, is that hard? And even if they do get access to stuff you don't approve of (which is unavoidable), raise them properly in the first place and it probably won't affect them negatively.

It's a strange world when so many sit back and blame an "offensive" stream of pixels for bad deeds instead of parental or societal failure.