🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <318F5A28.936@nowhere.no-domain> Jonathon Tidswell,
nobody@nowhere.no-domain writes:
>That all authors of general distribution documents (ie not private email) are >required to >include a content descriptor, which amoungst other attributes includes a >government defined >'rating'.

   This is *not* the PICS system.  The PICS system is supposed to be
voluntary; even then, it is hard to be enthusiastic about something which
at BEST will be used to maintain the ignorance of those children whose
parents are brainburned idiots.

   You see, outside of Australia, people have, or at least are trained to
think they have, the freedom to transmit documents even though they are
not rated by some government bureaucrat, or, to save labor costs, rated
by you in the fear that some government bureaucrat will second-guess you
later and prosecute.  Unrated material is not banned, therefore, under
the U.S. version of the PICS system; it is simply unrated.  Special
censored access would be for those who actually want it.  (which is why
it is so hard to imagine the system _really_ being voluntary, because,
who wants it?)

   However, I continue to take issue with the notion that children are
best kept ignorant.  Maybe it would be easier to swallow if the stuff
they censored was stuff like war footage and Holocaust films.  But any
kid can look at this on the television, and I bet I wasn't the only kid
who ever cried...  There is nothing dangerous at all about stuff like sex
pictures, that diverge from being *completely* natural only by virtue of
being somewhat implausibly innovative.
   A well educated child is one who learns to be able to handle himself
in open communication with anyone; who is mindful of his personal
security and privacy; who has made up his own mind on religious matters
and is capable of holding to those ethics in which he believes; who has
learned to be skeptical.  Children don't start out this way, of course,
but the way to teach them is NOT by withholding the written material for
the lesson, but by providing them with instruction to make sense out of
it.  In other words, by parenting --- not policing.

   Those who are most vociferous about "protecting children" don't want
educated children --- they want ignorant children.  They want their kids
to "know" that gays are Bad, but never to have seen any.  They want their
kids to "know" that Marijuana is Bad, but not to know that it is also
called "hemp".  They want for their children to be as ignorant as they
are, so that they will have perpetuated themselves in their own wretched
image.  You may believe that is their right, but it is NOT their right to
enforce that on others.  YOUR children should have the right to the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Can you handle that?