Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!brspyr1!miket
From: miket@brspyr1.BRS.Com (Mike Trout)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New morality of Communications/Computer Science etc.
Summary: Romancing the First Amendment...
Message-ID: <5767@brspyr1.BRS.Com>
Date: 17 Apr 89 18:05:48 GMT
References: <232@imspw6.UUCP>
Organization: BRS Info Technologies, Latham NY
Lines: 130

In article <232@imspw6.UUCP>, bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) writes:

> From: Clayton Cramer: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA

> >One good reason: there are a lot of people who feel, just as strongly, 
> >that magazines like Playboy and Penthouse should be prohibited because 
> >they provide the same unrealistic, non-consequential view of sex. 
> >Do we really want to repeal the First Amendment?

> Whatever the framers of the amendment DID have on their minds, I know for
> damned sure it wasn't TV.  There comes a point at which you have to take
> a look around you and deal with reality as it is now, and not as it was 200
> years ago.  Playboy doesn't have a push-button, 24-hour-a-day point of
> entry into all of our homes

Yeah, with your _Playboy_ subscription you don't even have to push a button to
get a copy that sits in your house 24 hours a day; it's delivered automatically
each month without you having to even lift a finger--after you've subscribed,
of course.  Jeez, I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Clayton
Cramer...

> which we eliminate only by relinquishing access
> to our news media as well as other, more welcome and civilized fare.  

Why do you have to relinquish access?  If you don't like what you see, change
the channel.  There's no need to scrap the TV set just because one or more
channels are showing something repugnant.

> I would like to think that this point of entry into my home and the homes
> of my neighbors was a privilege,

It is.  You don't HAVE to watch anything you don't want to.  If you so choose,
you may live without television entirely, without fear of prosecution.

> which I might have some say in whether a company was using in a reasonable
> manner.

You do.  Change the channel, or shut the damn set off.  Write or call your
local television stations, the networks, and your elected representatives to
let them know how you feel.

> My reaction to DC's WTTG showing WWF wrestling, for example, would ideally 
> be to remove the privilege and the bandwidth from WTTG and give them to some 
> other company which promised to do better.  I'm sure such a company would 
> not be long in forthcoming.

Who elected you God of the Universe?  Why do you feel that you have the
special ability (which apparently no one else has) to decide for the rest of
the viewing public what they should and should not watch?  What other programs
will be next on your hit list?  You may decide what YOU, and perhaps your
family, watch; you may NOT decide what the rest of society watches.  If an
army of airheads wants to watch WWF wrestling, let 'em.  If WWF is harming our
society, then I'd say we have serious problems with society which are NOT
caused by WWF.  WWF is just an indicator of what's going on; it's the traffic
light blinking red to warn us.  Why go after the traffic light and not the
traffic?  As soon as you got rid of WWF something similar would pop
up to take its place.  We get what we deserve. 

> You end up having to make choices.  I can look at the books which European
> children read, and at the TV shows and video games which American children
> watch and play, the music they listen to and at what volumes, and a hundred
> other things related to culture or, more properly, the near-total lack
> thereof amongst the young in this country, and I don't need to be Albert
> Einstein to figure out what America's position in the natural order is
> going to be ten years down the road; it's not going to be the top of the
> heap.  It all depends on how thrilled you are about the prospects of living
> in the third world.

I'd like to see your scientific, empirical evidence to support all the above
contentions.  Can you cite any specific studies that prove correlation between
lack of your version of "culture" and the decline and fall of the USA?  Can 
you prove significant differences between what European kids and USA kids do 
in their spare time? 

> We've got generations of kids being RAISED by TV sets, which would be bad
> enough under any circumstances, but they apparently aren't even watching
> real shows anymore;  it's mostly these video atrocities which flicker from
> scene to scene ten times a second.  Friends who teach five and six and
> seven year olds tell me they are seeing kids whose attention spans are
> exactly what you would expect from this, about one tenth of one second. 
> They tell me these kids have to be protected from holding their mouths open
> in the rain and drowning, like turkeys. 

This is a subject that HAS been studied scientifically, and your contentions
are incorrect.  The attention span of USA children has not significantly
changed since television was invented.  Children NATURALLY have short attention
spans; in the "good old days" we tortured children to the point of exasperation
with hour-long grammar drills, which I hardly see as any improvement over 
trash TV.  What a handful of teachers tells you does not equal scientific 
fact.  Incidentally, turkeys do not drown in the rain: urban myth.

> I find it a particularly appalling thought that someone with skills similar
> to my own actually PROGRAMMED the hideous arcade games which I observe in
> the 7-11 stores and other public places:  the ones in which people beat
> each other to death with sledge-hammers or which pierce the air with the
> death screams of some bit-blit karate fighter every 5 seconds.  I can't
> picture anybody actually PLAYING one of those games longer than five
> minutes, much less the lengths of time which kids actually DO play them,
> without suffering permanent brain damage.  

There's no evidence of brain damage, permanent or temporary, from arcade game
playing, regardless of the game or the amount of time played.  People LIKE 
these games, even if you and I don't.  I don't go around imposing my likes and
dislikes on other people--that's their business.

> It is very clear to me at least, that the world would profit from having
> the perpetrators of these abominations given some kind of a serious lecture
> on some kind of a new morality regarding communications/culture/computer-
> science etc., possibly at gunpoint.

Who writes this lecture?  You?  Better not let me have any input.  "New
morality?"  Sounds suspiciously like Joseph Goebbels.  And do you
really think anybody hears anything that's being said when there's a
gun pointed at them?
 
> The only other way to deal with this kind of problem which I could think of 
> would resemble what the naturalists are doing when they buy up lands to 
> protect them from yuppies and developers, as several posters on this topic 
> have recently noted: this would involve some humanitarian group simply 
> purchasing the arcade game software and burying it.

There's nothing wrong with that idea, but it's like nuclear weapons design:
once it's been done, the genie's out of the bottle, and nothing you can do will
put it back in.  Somebody will just re-invent similar software.

-- 
NSA food:  Iran sells Nicaraguan drugs to White House through CIA, SOD & NRO.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Michael Trout (miket@brspyr1)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BRS Information Technologies, 1200 Rt. 7, Latham, N.Y. 12110  (518) 783-1161
"God forbid we should ever be 20 years without...a rebellion." Thomas Jefferson