The President of the Americans for Limited Government (ALG) organization is against the California law at the center of the Schwarzenegger vs. EMA Supreme Court case.
Bill Wilson’s editorial on the subject states that the onus for such enforcement should fall to parents, not the government, an unsurprising sentiment perhaps, given the name of the organization he heads up.
Wilson notes that the law would be so easy to get around that “its unenforceability teaches a terrible lesson to kids: That certain laws may be disregarded.” He adds, “That is a worse message than anything learned from the games. It is one that undercuts respect of all other law.”
The editorial continues:
… this is still just another nanny state intrusion that follows a long line of acts by government to assume the role of parents. In the old days it was hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that focused on violent comic books, which eventually inspired content-based restrictions by the industry like the Comics Code Authority.
Then it was FCC educational requirements and advertising restrictions on children’s programming that has all but eliminated the Saturday morning cartoons that were once a staple when Americans were growing up.
Wilson says that the state of California and “government in general,” need to “keep their nose out of decisions best left to parents.”
Comments
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Man I missed Saturday morning cartoons. Kids today don't know what they're missing. I hope video games don't go down into that path.
http://www.magicinkgaming.com/
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Cartoons prob got tonded down because of people complaining about violence. Same thing could happen with games if the industry looses. Heres a chart of cartoon violence throughtout the ages.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
While I'll certainly agree that some kids' cartoons have been toned down (eg the censorship on old Looney Tunes), the keyword there is "KIDS'". Adult cartoons are more explicitly violent (and racy) than ever. Comparing violent games for adults to violent cartoons for children isn't really a straight comparison.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Wow. I don't think you all are getting what he's saying. He's not saying cartoons don't exist. He's saying that cartoons nowadays are dry and stale (due to trying to be too PC and 'child friendly') than the ones I and he use to watch when we were kids.
It's pretty sad though that you all want to make fun of the guy who is trying to help back us on this whole debacle. Maybe his analogy isn't the best but at least he knows where right and wrong is.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
"He's saying that cartoons nowadays are dry and stale (due to trying to be too PC and 'child friendly') than the ones I and he use to watch when we were kids."
Is that what "all but eliminated" means?
"It's pretty sad though that you all want to make fun of the guy who is trying to help back us on this whole debacle. Maybe his analogy isn't the best but at least he knows where right and wrong is."
He made a false statement. The fact that he agrees with me that EMA is in the right in the SCOTUS case does not make it a true statement.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Don't worry. They're just so used to hating conservatives that they don't know what to do when a conservative is actually helping them.
It's all part of being liberal, I guess.
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With the first link, the chain is forged.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Being called a socialist traitor who wants to force everyone to convert to Islam and get gay married at the abortion clinic will do that.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Sorry, not gonna fly. The fact is, you're just a dick and you're looking for an excuse to be one, by attacking someone who's trying to help.
You want conservatives to stop attacking you? Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth.
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With the first link, the chain is forged.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
You make an excellent point. People should respond in a friendly and gracious fashion to people who say "You're just a dick and you're looking for an excuse to be one."
You first, dick.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Wait, Saturday and Afternoon cartoons are gone? If that is true, then my sympathy goes out to the younger generations.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
"all but eliminated the Saturday morning cartoons that were once a staple when Americans were growing up" -- yeah, sure.
Remind me -- how many 24-hour cartoon channels were there back then?
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Cable tv is not bound by most of the programming guidelines that over the air channels are.
Personally, I am less upset about the change in Saturday morning cartoons as I am about the complete loss of weekday afternoon cartoons.
Basically the law is that any children's programming aired during the weekday block must have some educational value. Saturdays are not regulated in that way.
E. Zachary Knight
Oklahoma City Chapter of the ECA
http://www.theeca.com/chapters_oklahoma
E. Zachary Knight
Divine Knight Gaming
OK Game Devs
Random Tower
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
Well, it certainly didn't stop them in the 80's which, contrary to popular belief, saw the birth of some of the suckiest cartoons ever made. Personally, I'm glad I don't have to endure those anymore. I'm sorry, the original He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers and G.I. Joe sucked and sucked hard. Pretty much all of them shoved ham-handed morals down your throat thanks in part to the aformentioned laws that mandated those shows did so. So in that respect I'm glad they're gone.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
That doesn't make any sense - those shows didn't show the lame moral lessons out of choice, they were required to do so by government regulations. We still had awesome characters fighting each other, with swords, guns and giant robts, yet what do kids have today? Most comments I read about cartoons from the 80s are from people who absolutely love them and so they can't believe how boring modern ones are.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
The problems with a lot of those shows was that the writers were forced to make the story fit whatever moral they were required to illustrate, rather than have the characters' own moral actions frame the story or grow organically from it. Doing it the former way restricted a lot of creative expression, or prevented the show from possibly being better than it could have been. Only a few shows managed to escape this: Robotech (largely by virtue of the fact that the show had been imported from another country and its American distributors had decided to leave the show as it was more or less intact) and Centurions which instead offered fairly informative science information at the the end.
Case in point, I was always disappointed especially with Thundercats as the show to me had a big, epic feel. The pilot showed large infulences of Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and the Arthurian legend. The company who made it, Rankin/Bass, aslo had a good track reocrd for Fantasy, having done well-regarded adaptations of The Hobbit, The Return of the King and The Last Unicorn. I had expected that same level of quality from them for Thundercats with the potential for telling an ongoing, serialized story along the lines of what I had seen from Japanese shows like Star Blazers and Robotech, and instead we got an insipid, episodic kids show. From what I understand, the new show set to premiere in 2011 will be more along the lines of what I had wanted originally, with an ongoing story and much deeper characterization. It's a shame though that the original wasn't like that, and for that I largely blame the laws and practices that were in effect at the time, as it kept it from reaching its potential.
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
I would actually argue that Thundercats alternated between episodes that advanced an overarching plot and ones that were self-contained and episodic -- and that the former tended to be much better than the latter.
(Also, with the exception of their opening 5-part arcs, the last two seasons were pretty lousy.)
Lion-O completes the Hero's Journey from a twelve-year-old in a man's body to a competent, confident leader (particularly in the Lion-O's Anointment five-parter -- for my money the high point of the series), season 2 expands the mythology and introduces new characters who had real potential even if it wasn't realized in most cases, and seasons 3 and 4 introduced the rather clever conceit of Thundera reformed as a dark mirror of its former self by Mumm-Ra, and the Thundercats' efforts to turn it back into the home it had once been.
Again, it didn't always work out (and often frankly sucked out loud), but there was a lot of good stuff in there too.
Truth be told, I put it less down to S&P and more down to individual writers. The best episodes were generally written by showrunner Peter Newman or veteran comics artist Len Starr; the most batshit-crazy were by William Overgard.
All that said, I too look forward to the new series, and hope it's not as uneven as the original (though I have to admit, the goofier eps had their B-movie charm).
Re: Americans for Limited Gov President Backs Industry in ...
"Cable tv is not bound by most of the programming guidelines that over the air channels are."
I'm well aware, but it's absurd to bemoan the lack of Saturday morning cartoons when there are more cartoons on American TV now than at any point in history.
A huge majority of American households -- something like 90% -- have cable or satellite TV. The fact that Spider-Man and Batman cartoons run on Disney and Cartoon Network instead of Fox makes no difference to an 8-year-old.