Censorship

I'm really not sure how I feel about this one.

I'll start by saying when in doubt I'm all about a lack of censorship. As long as you aren't hurting anybody I'm pretty much in line with go do what you will. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone and it's really as simple as that. I can occasionally be a little jaded and dismissive like I am with SOPA but that's because I don't waste time worrying about things I don't think will happen.. Even on the off chance that SOPA were to pass I assume it's enforcement would be rather anemic and limited to attempting to get some sort of curb on piracy, a crime so rampant in our society that if the truth were told we need to collectively get together and discuss it like rational adults. Most of us don't really consider piracy of games, movies or music a "crime" we just do it. It's like jay walking or smoking weed by which I mean while we acknowledge on some level that it's wrong it would never occur to most of us even to chide a friend we saw doing it and most of us do it. (I have a friend who's a bit of a pain about it but to be fair he went to school to be a professional script writer, this is his money we're talking about and even he pretty much limits it to refusing to theatre hop or watch something still in theatres on DL)

If the bill were really about censorship being a bad idea I might feel a little more strongly in support of it. However that's not what the argument is. The argument is that since there is so much porn on the internet that your kid really isn't lying if they claim to have typed in Kim Possible into an image search and (even with the safety mode on, even with saftey mode on strict I just double, triple checked.) and that with all the cable chanels that most of us have it's easy enough to access racy material. While I would debate that (particularly now that USA has evolved from it's late 90's skinemax jr setting) there isn't a whole lot on basic cable that is any racier than some of the stuff between Fox and WB but that's not really the point. The logic here is that since its easy to get nudity and profanity that we should eliminate the FCC.

I'm not sure that logic tracks. We've certainly never followed that logic on anything else.

I'm not against a rating system (I wish we had a single unified system for if not all most media) and I'm not against censorship when it means that ABC can't show porn in primetime. You're not preventing the porn from being made or purchased or viewed. You're preventing it from being in a certain time and location. I'm still with you. I'm a gamer, shockingly I'm more or less with the pro-censorship crowd on not selling M-rated games to kids under 18. (Though I want a quid-pro quo that AO games can get released in the US as a trade) We don't let kids go to see rated R movies unsupervised and I wouldn't shed a single tear if they had to get mommy to purchase their rated R movies as well.

I'm a bit torn on this one. I wanna come down on the pro-freedom close down the FCC side and call it a day but as they already admit I not only have enough ways now to get at tits, ass and more profanity than should be possible to spew at once but I also had it as a kid. I just had to stay up late and make sure I had something plausible on speed dial.