From: John K Clark (johnkc@well.com)
Date: Thu Dec 25 1997 - 22:42:27 MST
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Brian D Williams thinks censorship is moral, I think it's an obscenity.
I can't prove It's wrong, I can't prove murder is wrong either and don't feel
I need to, I would put both in the same category. There is no disputing
matters of taste however so I will try to concentrate on practical
considerations.
>I hardly think the constant barrage of illegal gun usage in the
>media constitutes an "Idea"
Don't be ridiculous. You may not like the "guns are sexy and fun" meme and
I'm not too crazy about it myself, but it certainly changes peoples behavior
and it can be sent over a wire, so of course it's an idea.
>and "Idea's" are banned all the time.
Sure they could be banned, government thugs pass laws like that all the time,
but making laws is easy, enforcing them is not.
>Let's just incorporate it into the so called "Safe Harbor" ruling
>that confines erotica to hours between 10pm and 6am.
If you believe that if your children see a picture of 2 people fucking or
even seeing the word "fuck" will ruin them for life then it's your
responsibility to stop them from seeing it, not mine. Personally I don't
think the matter is important so I won't lift a finger to help you, but
they're your kids so I won't try to stop you either, however if you use that
tired old excuse to limit my freedom I will fight you with everything I have,
including violence if I think I could get away with it.
>Now it's not banned, "just confined to reasonable hours."
By the same token books are never banned, they are only burned because of a
lack of "reasonable readers", the government of course determines who is
reasonable and deserves a readers licenses.
>Besides with over 20,000 gun laws in this country, which in my
>opinion is quite an effective ban, whats wrong with one little law
>striking at the source.
For one thing, such a law has nothing to do with guns, it has to do with
speech and the inability of government to convince people to do what they
want. The only solution these gangsters can think of is to use force to stop
citizens from hearing the other side of the argument.
For another thing, if we have 20,000 idiotic laws that are largely ignored
then having 20,001 is unlikely to improve the situation.
>By the way, it would be trivial for the government to stop this in
>the mass media, (TV and Movies).
If the thought police in the USA stop people from printing books or making
movies they will simply do it in a country that has more freedom, and there
would always be such places because of the considerable financial reward
that would result. Smuggling has always been lucrative, and now with trade
becoming international and several trillion dollars flowing across "sovereign"
borders every day, and doing it in every direction, it has become even more
so.
The government has shown that it is utterly incapable of stopping even
something as concrete as an object from coming into the country, an object
like hundreds of tons of cocaine or many thousands of tons of cannabis.
Encryption is just Mathematics and a cryptograph program like PGP is not an
object, it's a sequence of bits. If you can't even stop objects from entering
the nation how on earth are you going to stop bits, bits that can be
duplicated endlessly at virtually no cost, bits that can be easily and very
effectively hidden with encryption, bits that can make use of the new
communication channels that open up daily to every part of the planet?
>Some cable companies as well as TV stations already have voluntary
>anti-gun policies.
A cable company with a anti-gun policy? A cable company without CNN, NBC, ABC,
CBS, FOX, HBO? A cable company that volunteers for bankruptcy?
I think not.
>What it might do is put an end to "Hollywood Hippocricy" i.e.
>Sylvester Stallones conscientious objector status during the vietnam
>war only to make million's playing a big gun shooting war hero later.
The man is not a war hero, the man is an actor and that's a perfectly
honorable profession. He showed intelligence in getting out of the Vietnam
war, more intelligence than most. When it's a question of survival, when a
bunch of goons want your labor and try to enslave you so you can perform a
very dangerous, unpleasant, and pointless job for them 12 thousand miles away,
you do what you have to do to remain free. I wouldn't have held it against him
if he shot off his big toe to prevent it, or bribed someone, or pretended to
be insane, or showed up at the recruiting office in a strapless evening gown.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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