Crap is crap

Personally, I do not care about sex and violence in my entertainment fodder, unless it is really functional to the story.

I wouldn't censor anything - as long as racy elements do not become an excuse to pull back on the writing efforts., everything is fine.

When they become such an excuse, "Crap is Crap is Crap" - there is no need to have an office of censorship. I rather watch "The Hogfather" than "Striptease" because the first is a nice small TV movie with a good story from one of my favoured authors,  and the second is just a crappy exploitative piece of nothing.

I accept the fact that kids are often attracted by crap, so a restriction to their access to shifty material may be reasonable - it doesn't take away that some kids would probably be better off looking at well done porn than they are with a lot of TV supposedly made for them (better a "happy porn", possibly from a woman director, than "1000 ways to die", if you ask me).

But that's it... once something is "VM-18" (or whatever its name where you live),  no more censoring actions should be needed.

The whole British"Video Nasties"  idiocy and, currently, the UK law criminalizing possession of violent pornography are travesties, ass-pulling and demagoguery well representing that country's ruling classes obsession to keep "the plebs" under control.

If something is crap, and one has problems watching it, he should just avoid it on his own.

For example, "1000 ways to die" whole premise irks me, so I have never watched more than a couple of minutes by accident, while surfing the TV.

But I have never thought that it, and any other show following a similar premise, should be banned (among other reasons, because I do not know enough to be really sure about that show's very own merits - it could even not be the absolute crap that I think it is).

Yet, if we look, we see that the world is full of censors, small men deciding on their own what others can watch and read, usually on the base of conservative agendas that are little more than pandering to old folks' prejudices.

We shouldn't accept it.

When somebody asks us to endorse this or that censoring initiative, we should flatly say "no".

Adults do not really need someone hiding crap from them, and any suggestion that they do should be welcomed with extreme suspicion..

Because, we know what is the crap that first gets hidden (wikilieaks was surely among the first sites censored for "child pornography" in Australia, when the country enabled its anti-paedo filtering system) and what those laws are really used for, in the end (harassment of anybody that the authorities do not like, usually).