"What the f*ck you doin here you sh*t head c*ck sucker"
--- some 4 year old girl's greeting to me as I went up to knock on her parent's neighbor's door. Never seen the kid before in my life, somewhere she learned to greet strangers like that.
"There's a kid growing up in a house with HBO" I thought. Maybe not HBO, maybe her folks greet people like that. Who knows.
What I do know is kids pick up things they've heard, be it from schoolmates, TV, radio, internet or even (yes, they're actually listening to these too) their parents. Certainly doesn't benefit them to get more of that influence. Nor does it benefit me to have it read back to me. Good thing it was a girl, it was hard enough not to grab the kid's shirt and walk them home for a chat with the folks, I'd probably be on probation now if some little boy had done the same.
Heinlein's an interesting writer, but that "Censorship is forcing grown men to drink skim milk because the baby can't eat steak." is weak thinking, imo. Even so he didn't need to resort to crude language to make his comparison and I wouldn't agree with it any more or less if he had. Take his metaphor further, grown men can go get a steak if they like, heck all they have to do is dial a telephone to have so called 'premium' cable channels like HBO hooked up, or click a button on a remote for a PPV movie. If they can't handle those challenges they're not grown men.
The censorship is pretty soft, just a few words you can't say (or couldn't) and you can't run around completely naked on TV (yet). Other than that you can do or say anything you want on the radio or TV and more importantly in any discussion of censorship, any view can be expressed. The idea of freedom of speech is to protect society against a totalitarian goverment. Moderating how those views or speech is presented within (very loose) community standards is far from totalitarian, even for the most skilled of slippery slopers.
Keep in mind these are standards for over the air broadcasts, accessible without any form of verification. Don't need to sign up for cable, have an account with Dishnetwork for PPV, anything. All you need is a receiver. Aside from the meager hardware requirement of a transitor radio it's as public as actions carried out on the street. If you can't express your art or get your message across in a way that wouldn't be allowed in a public park then you have the option to express it via those other services (cable/dish/probably XM or Sirius/internet)
Doesn't seem like much of a limit on that 'grown man' to me.
Curious though, for those of you saying you're for this, you're also in favor of allowing people to smoke everywhere without regulation too, right? Take away the lung damage aspect of second hand smoke which has some scientific controversy anyway. If only for the smell of smoke alone would you still want people to smoke somewhere away from you? "Censorship is forcing grown men to breathe clean air because babies don't like the smell of smoke" Seems pretty insulting and extreme when presented that way, doesn't it? People using crude language in public are as annoying to me as someone blowing smoke in my face, even though neither will 'harm' me.
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