Hugo

I shall reiterate: "She joined the wrong party, it's my opinion that she's a Liberal through-and-through and I have no interest in a second Liberal party." It is foolish to imagine that the Conservatives will ever win simply by copying the Liberals as you suggest. Why would any right-thinking person vote for an untried Conservative party with an inexperienced leader to do exactly the same things as the Liberals have done? The re-elections of Chretien have proven that the electorate is prepared to be very forgiving of lies (GST, Gulf II) and corruption (Auberge Grand-Mere). For the Conservatives to simply offer an untried and untested version of the Liberal party won't get them government. Even if they can promise less corruption and lying, recent elections show that the electorate just doesn't care. To my mind, the only option the Conservatives have is to actually be a different party and do things differently. Dalton McGuinty won an election saying "I'm not that guy", but I don't think anyone could win one saying "I'm the same as that guy."

She is just like Paul Martin, and that's another problem. A Conservative party with Stronach at the helm won't have much to distinguish itself from Paul Martin's Liberals: two parties led by multi-millionaire executives with socially liberal policies and tendencies towards fiscal conservatism without wanting to upset the applecart too much by actually putting any radical changes into place. The key difference being, of course, that Martin is a highly experienced politician and public servant whereas Stronach is a complete and utter neophyte. Furthermore, Stronach also epitomises everything that the NDP and other leftists say is wrong with conservatives: nepotism, reward for birth and money and not for skills and personal attributes, big business interests on a pedestal, and so forth. Those who know me here know I'm a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, so I say without hyperbole that if Stronach wins the leadership race I'm going to find another party to support. She joined the wrong party, it's my opinion that she's a Liberal through-and-through and I have no interest in a second Liberal party.

Harper hasn't even seriously started his campaign yet, he only just announced his candidacy. Harper is very smart and very good in debate, and Stronach has no experience and no ideas. I shall take schadenfreude in seeing her torn to pieces. So far, she hasn't really had any opposition. I know you like Stronach, maplesyrup, but it concerns me that her website and her speeches are full of trendy buzzwords popular with 30-something go-getters such as her but very, very thin on ideas and policies. Anybody could seriously embarrass her in a debate by just asking "how?" every time she suggests something.

I'm sure NAMBLA will have absolutely no problem getting what they want given a little time. Pedophilia is already legal in Canada. 14-year-olds are legally children in this country (can't vote, drink, drive, work full-time, drop out of school, live without an adult caregiver, consent on their own behalf to medical procedures etc), yet the only circumstances in which an adult of any age cannot have a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old is if there is a relationship of authority (e.g. teacher), or the relationship is homosexual. Oh, and that last proviso isn't the case in Ontario and Quebec - it's just dandy if a 50-year-old man is regularly buggering a 14-year-old boy as long as he isn't his teacher, priest or anything like that. I'd suggest that people damning NAMBLA take the beam out of their own eye first.

This is an outright lie. I challenge you to find me one conservative who truthfully believes in economic anarchy and completely free markets, without submission to law or morality. Even Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalist thought, never supported the idea of a completely free market and always accepted that capitalist economics must be regulated by just law and ethics.

The Liberals won the last election with less of the vote than that - and you think that this proves that "Abortion is not the burning issue that it used to be"? I'm sorry, but the figures you are quoting do not fit the point you are arguing. Abortion is very far from dead and shows no signs of dying even more than 30 years after the fact. I'd expect that after 30 years of gay marriage the debate will be raging just as strongly.

Abortion rights are still hotly contested in Canada, despite the fact that we have been living with abortion for well over 30 years. Read the full report There's no reason to believe that either gay marriage or abortion will ever be accepted in the same way that, say, universal suffrage has been. I have read that the latest polls show that support for gay marriage is down since the Ontario court decision. In June it was around 54% in favour, but in December that had fallen to 32% (National Post).

In this case I don't think I'm presuming anything. You went to great lengths to explain your personal circumstances, enjoyment of porn and feelings about it, so unless you lied, I am not being presumptuous in assuming you tolerate more than me. You enjoy hardcore videos and want them to remain legal. Hardcore videos sicken me and I want them to go away. Ergo what I said is true, so stop blustering. Let's not get all worked up about human rights and freedoms when all we are talking about is dirty magazines and videos. I don't feel that the freedom to watch videos of other people in the sex act is a particularly important one, especially when what hangs in the balance is the moral decay of society (at least in part due to this), which costs us in terms of STDs, teen pregnancies, abortion deaths, and so on. Strippers are a more tame form of prostitutes in that they are selling their bodies for money (and if you see no difference between this and Vogue, try getting peepshow clients to accept Vogue as a substitute), but merely a look rather than the whole 9 yards. Prostitutes are prostitutes, that needs no further definition and doesn't need to be called "porn" since it plainly isn't. You are trying to obfuscate the issue and I don't appreciate it. We both know full well what porn is, and you know the difference between a hardcore videotape and a stripper. One is a magnetic tape which, when played back in the correct device, will produce an image of the sex act. The other is a human being taking her clothes off in order to titillate pathetic men for money. Stop trying to sidetrack the debate. Banning alcohol is invalid since alcohol alone does not cause drunk driving. Banning cars is invalid since cars alone do not cause drunk driving. What we do is make drunk driving illegal. To make correct use of your analogy, we could ban video cameras (alcohol), but video cameras aren't just used for porn. We could ban paper (cars), but paper isn't just used for porn. Or, like you said, we could use the legal system to control the individual by banning porn, and porn alone. Thank you for making my point for me. I don't see why. The same rules can apply in these fields. If the sole point of the material is to cause sexual excitement, it's porn. If the sole point of material with swearing or violence in it (i.e. no real artistic point) is shock value, then ban it too. I don't want to ban genuine art, but I don't want my culture flooded with filth, either. I would expect that these rules would result in the banning of absolutely no material containing swear words (unless it's just a single obscene word on a piece of paper), since with something like Chris Rock videos you can easily demonstrate that they have artistic value and the foul language is incidental. I'd also expect that it would result in the banning of only the most pointless and graphically violent movies. Saving Private Ryan or Man Bites Dog have definite artistic merit and don't use violence purely to shock.

Whatever your reasons for that, the fact is that we both have things we consider beyond the pale. They're on the same scale, my high-water-mark is just higher than yours. Therefore, any assertion that you are freedom-loving whereas I am a control freak is ridiculous. The question then becomes, what is it about your position on the scale that makes you right and about mine that makes me wrong? There are, after all, pornographers out there who think you are a control freak - why are you right, and not they? Not necessarily, because the video is a medium and therefore can be pornographic. Well, if there were anti-pornography laws, the pornographer would have to defend his position that it was not made to titillate to the satisfaction of a court of law. Pornography used to be illegal. The current law was cobbled together by the PCs in 1993 and rushed into law. If you want to see how, take a look at the child porn law - it doesn't make sense. Your claim that a jury decided the law and that I don't like it, is false. I liked the law the way it was. You like the law the way it is.

It could be 3 executions, but from the video, it's impossible to tell what's going on. From the warblogging site: A weapon, unless it had recently been fired, would be at the same temperature as it's surroundings and so wouldn't show in an IR picture. These men might have been armed. The video can't answer that question. The SAS used to use the double-tap firing rule: hit the target with two shots. They abandoned that in the 80s and took a new rule, which was to continue shooting at the target until he stopped moving. In the Iranian embassy siege, some terrorist corpses were found with over 30 bullets in them. The reason is that a wounded man can still raise and fire a weapon, activate a detonator or any other number of things. The only way to ensure a man is not a threat is to kill him. From a military perspective, the helicopter gunners were correct to kill the wounded man. Furthermore, as the blogger admits, it's also perfectly possible that the men are setting up a mortar, planting a bomb or so forth. Maybe the truck contains a bomb. Since the video doesn't show what these men were doing before they were fired upon we just can't tell. The HUD info on the video is unreadable. The time is impossible to ascertain, but because this is IR footage it was probably a night engagement. So, we have three men, sneaking around at night after curfew, combined with the other factors above, which makes it less likely that these are innocent guys out for a stroll and more likely that they are up to no good. To judge anyone from this video is a huge leap. It could be a shooting of three innocents, but it also could be a legitimate engagement of three terrorists or guerillas preparing to attack US soldiers or Iraqi policemen and civilians.

Not really. "As long as it is legal" basically means you'll swallow what the lawmakers say, so if I became elected PM in 2004 and banned porn, you'd go along with that because it was law? If I also passed a law outlawing private property, would you go along with that? More to the point, let's say I legalised child porn as long as the child 'actor' had parental consent. How about that, would you approve of child porn made with the consent of the parents of the children involved, if it were legal? No, she isn't visual material, she's a person. You see how porn has twisted your outlook? I do say that with my tongue in cheek, however, it's somewhat telling that you can view actual people as pornography. I don't particularly like the idea of lap dancers either, however, for pornography to exist there must be a medium (hence: material) and in the case of provocatively dressed individuals there is none. The relationship is direct. Read my definition again. The intent to cause arousal must be there. If the material was made with the intent of causing sexual arousal (e.g. hardcore video), it's porn. If it was not (e.g. biology textbook with illustrations of naked bodies), it isn't. If it's disputed, then put it in court in front of 12 good men and true, and see what they decide. What the viewer of the porn finds arousing is irrelevant, the intent of the pornographers defines the nature of the material, not the reception of the audience. Some people find train crashes erotic (Sylvestre Matuschka), but footage of train accidents is not porn despite this. So, once again, you are reiterating that whatever the lawmakers say defines your moral outlook. I think you are lying. Here's why: You said that here. It's not that you approve of what is legal, it's that what is legal happens to coincide with what you want. There is more than legality behind your reasoning - define it. Otherwise, you have shot down many of your previous posts here.

That's a lousy excuse to avoid the problem. If something needs to be made illegal, and that law needs to be enforced, and you don't have the police resources to do it, should you 1) increase police resources to deal with it or 2) just forget it, and leave it as it is? What if the problem were not porn but international terrorism? We need increased vigilance against terrorists, but we don't have the police to do it. According to you, then, we should just forget it and let the terrorists go about their business unhindered. You and Mod are forgetting that we are not living in a moral society. This culture is highly amoral, devious, manipulative and Machiavellian, for instance, people steal music from the internet not because they think theft is OK, but just because they can. Lawyers fight for huge cash settlements for their clients not because their clients deserve them, but because they'll get paid more if they do. Women have abortions not because they have considered the questions of that issue and decided that the unborn child is not a human being, but because it's legal and readily available and they want one. Therefore, you won't get any change in outlook as long as it is legal. If you criminalise porn, people may start asking why that is, and asking moral and ethical questions about it. Until that time, nobody will bother.

Of course it would not work, just as criminalising murder, rape and theft have not stopped the incidence of those crimes. However, what it might do is to reduce the extent of the problem. Illegalised porn might not deter dedicated users, however, it might well deter casual users and do a better job of keeping it away from minors. What it also does is to make a stand, in law, about what we do and do not want in our society. Our laws reflect our ideal society, if everyone were law-abiding, our society would be perfect in our eyes. Because of that I don't see why pornography should have a hallowed place in law. Furthermore, if you believe that laws against drugs and child porn have been so unsuccessful, shall we rescind them?

Heavy emphasis on private savings has been a key driver in the success of the Japanese economy. I think it wise to cast one's eyes around the world and learn from the successes and failures of other countries, however, Canada apparently doesn't care for this and seems to be modeling its economics on the Soviet model (an abject and total failure). It all seems to stem from petty jealousy. Canadian systems are designed to punish the rich and successful with heavy taxation and the deletion of options to use wealth to your own advantage e.g. to buy better healthcare. What is so wrong with this? If the use of wealth to buy better things for oneself is so evil, then why aren't we banning luxury cars, big-screen TVs and large homes? Why is it better to spend money on these things than on one's own health and the health of one's family?

OK, KK, where do you draw the line? Heterosexual porn is evidently OK with you, so lets go down the list of pornographies: Teenage? S&M? Homosexual? Snuff? Felching? Rape? Child porn? Maybe you only watch the cleanest of porn available, but I am sure you draw a line somewhere (unless you're about to tell me that you approve of snuff and child porn). Therefore, for you to insinuate that I am an over-protective busybody is highly hypocritical of you. No, I do have a hard rule. You need a dictionary. "Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal. " No, actually, you are. The things you mention are not pornography, anymore than a virgin-mary is an alcoholic drink. Please clarify this - are you retracting your earlier statement that you have no "wish to allow another to tell me what is a good or bad activity for myself in private", or are you instead saying that you believe that the police and secret service would be unjustified in "regime-changing my ass" (sounds like one of your videos to me) for privately making biological weapons?

I believe porn contributes to sex crime only in as much as it encourages a deviancy that is already there by simple reinforcement. This is in much the same vein as videogames and violence i.e. that they can be a factor, but what differentiates a videogamer from a psychopath is the fact that in the latter case these media are influencing an unhinged mind. I believe the threat to society from porn is more insidious. My thoughts are that it contributes to the sex-saturated nature of our society, that it devalues relationships and marriages and dehumanises men and women alike. I think porn is a factor in the rise of casual sex and STDs, the fact that 14-year-old girls feel that giving oral sex is an acceptable way to make $10 (and better than babysitting), that the teen pregnancy rate refuses to fall, that one in three Canadian women will have an abortion and so on. Basically, porn teaches us that casual sex is great, that everybody can basically be reduced to genitalia that walk and talk, and reinforces the idea that if it feels good, you should do it and therefore is also a contributor to the problems of substance abuse and lives wasted in general. Of course, porn isn't the source of all these problems. It's a result of them as well as a contributor to them. However, it's my opinion that we should be breaking as many links in this chain as we can. You might feel that, as a viewer of pornography, that you are immune to these things and that porn has not cheapened your relationship or devalued your s/o in your eyes, however, you are more intelligent than most people (not an idle compliment), and you might also want to consider that most children probably first experience the sex act and a naked body of the opposite gender (at least, in a sexual context) through pornography. If you start young, you can seriously warp a mind. Just look at the Hitler Youth or Mao's Red Guards. I disagree. Your language shows that you don't truly believe this, you are perfectly capable of distinguishing between pornography and dress. Porn laws are not about telling women how to dress, they are about limiting the production and distribution of material explicitly depicting sexual acts. I don't see how you equate telling women how to dress with telling them they may not sell an explicit video of them having intercourse with a bunch of men. Fine - then you won't object if I construct a biological weapon in private, and strike up some private friendships with Al-Queda members, and privately donate lots of money to those friends.

You are completely missing the point. I am not saying that porn drives people to sex crimes, what I am saying is that porn does not make an alternative, "healthy" outlet for the sexual urges of those who would commit sex crimes as shown by the fact that sex offenders almost invariably have huge porn stashes - clearly, as I said, it wasn't working as an outlet for them. Are you seriously telling me you see no difference between the absence of a burqa and "hardcore anal barely-legal teen sluts" and so forth? This level of argument is beneath you. Yes, just like everything else in society. You can sleep with your girlfriend but not your sister. You can masturbate at home but not on the bus. You can smoke a cigarette but you can't smoke a crack pipe. You can drive a car on the road but not the sidewalk. The law is full of "this but not that" and "here but not there" rules - do you want to strike them all down?

Great! I vote Michael Flatley be the first Prime Minister of this wonderous new country.

It's odd that whenever the police arrest a pedophile or rapist, a raid of their house always seems to reveal copious amounts of child porn and snuff movies. Evidently, this stuff wasn't working as a "safe" outlet for them. Porn is, for a would-be rapist or pedophile, simply Pavlovian behavioural reinforcement. Subject gets sexual urges about children, subject watches pornography involving children, subject gets sexual excitement/gratification from the said pornography, which merely reinforces his urges towards children. I believe this is why people believe that violence in the media encourages violence in people. It doesn't make sense that where sexual acts in the media are concerned, they would have the opposite effect.

Why is it that leftists think that having the government run so many things is a great idea? The theory is that government has the interests of the people at heart more than those greedy, evil corporations, however, it's clear that they don't. Witness the terrible corruption of Chretien's government, and the steadily increasing numbers of government employees and their steadily increasing salaries as, by and large, the work they do steadily drops in quality and quantity. Take a few examples. The education system, for one. Teaching is an extremely cushy job, with a high salary, very long (paid) holidays, short hours, benefits, a union and the whole works. However, educational standards are slipping. This is well documented and oft lamented, so it would seem that teachers are doing a worse job of educating our children year upon year - but far from being sacked and disciplined for their poor performance, they are being rewarded with salary increases. Where's the accountability? Where's the interest in the public good? Take employment insurance. While government discusses what to do with surpluses from this programme, unemployed people are forced to wait 6 weeks for their first cheque and that is only for around 50% of their income (maximum, many get less). This is supposed to be "insurance" - it would be outrageous for a car insurance company to take 6 weeks to make a payout for a write-off, and for that payout to be less than 50% of the value of the car, however, the EI system basically scams all it's clients in this way and gets away with it, scot-free. In fact, the EI staff are probably getting pay increases too. My point is that everything the Canadian government touches turns to crap. It's a bizarro Midas touch. The Canadian people should be fighting to salvage as much as they can from our greedy, bumbling government, not begging them to take on more so that they can deepen the public coffers from which they help themselves with both hands. Corporations may be greedy, however, the free market maintains a choice and they have to serve the public what they want or people vote with their wallets. If your car insurance company scams you, cancel your policy and go elsewhere. Spread the word, their business will suffer, so it's in their interests to try and treat you well. If the EI system scams you, hey, them's the breaks and there is nothing you can do about it. What incentive do they have to treat you well? None.

To be honest, I don't mind if tax money keeps murderers alive. Human life is not to measurable in monetary terms anyway. What's a life worth - a million dollars, ten million, or only a thousand? Is my life worth more than yours, or less, and how do we determine that? The mind boggles at these questions, because life and money are not comparable. To my mind, the money we pay to keep the scum of the human race alive is a price we pay to preserve our souls and our moral superiority to them. That cost is symbolic of the fact that we can see beyond financial costs and that we are compassionate and ethical enough to wish to preserve life at any cost. I don't believe prisoners should be educated or rehabilitated while incarcerated. Law-abiding citizens have to save and borrow tens of thousands of dollars to get an education, and I don't see why they should have to pay for what a criminal gets for free. That is not fair. Criminals are imprisoned in order to be punished. When one of my sons has been naughty, I don't punish him by letting him play some videogames and eat some candy, I punish him by assigning some menial chore, sending him to his room, or banning him from videogames or TV for a time. Punishment means hardship. Otherwise, what's the point? I believe prisoners should do hard labour 14-16 hours a day, the profits from which (if there are any) can be split between the state (to offset the cost of their incarceration) and the victims or the families of the victims. Food, clothing, housing and medical care should be the minimum necessary to preserve life. Why should criminals be rewarded with cable TV, for instance, when there are hard-working and law-abiding people who can't afford it? Rehabilitation comes after prison. I think that after a prisoner is paroled, it is up to the parole officer to help the prisoner find work, or get an education at his own expense. This makes the criminal no more privileged than other citizens - anyone can get help finding work or education. But while in prison, let the prisoner be punished for what he has done. This gives us a two-pronged attack on repeat offences, first, the shock of a miserable prison life to deter criminals from wanting to go back and then second, help to build a life without resorting to crime. Of course, release should be only if the prisoner cannot reasonably be deemed a threat to society.

To be honest, Morgan, I actually don't care if you are right. Torturing people for tax evasion would probably be an effective deterrent, too, but there are some things I could never sanction. I did not say that all lives were of equal value. What I said was: And I stand by that. Every human life is precious, not only for itself, but because we strive to be a compassionate culture that values life. So, we should not put a price on a human life. What we effectively do when we sentence a man to die is to say that his moral "debts" outweigh the value of his life, so his life shall be taken from him. The only thing that can outweigh a human life, is more than one human life to be saved in the balance against it, and once a man has been sentenced to life in prison there will be no more lives in the balance against his. Like abortion, this also puts our society on a dangerous slope where we have decided that some lives are worth preserving, and others not. We do not worry about the "feelings" of murderers. Life in a state penitentiary is pretty much a living hell. The "justice for the victim" is in the fact that the criminal has been stripped of his freedom and civil liberties and will never again take any pleasure in his own existence.

I do not favour capital punishment. As Brainiac has correctly said, it is not the sentence but the likelihood of being apprehended that deters crime. In medieval Europe, crime was rampant despite the fact that virtually all crimes warranted an often grisly and agonising death sentence, because there were no real police forces. It is the case that the cost of the endless appeals and legal fees of executing a criminal costs the state more than it would to inter him for the rest of his life. In this case, to execute is the more expensive option and deprives the state of even more resources. We cannot really do away with the appeals because they are necessary checks and balances in a judicial system that has the power to kill. In a society that truly values human life, any life, even the life of a pedophile, a mass murderer or drug dealer is valuable. To advocate the death penalty is to state that you do not find all human life precious, and you are in favour of awarding an individual or group the legal power to decide whether another individual lives or dies. I'm just picking upon this because it brings up a fallacious argument, to whit, what if it happened to you or your friends or family? If your daughter were brutally raped, tortured and murdered, what would you have the sentence be? Of course, most people would probably want to vent their rage and grief on the perpetrator and wish him to be killed in a way that reflected the pain and misery he had inflicted on others. However, once it becomes a personal issue all objectivity is lost. This is why it's required that jurors have no connection with the defendant. While the feelings of the victims and their families are perfectly understandable, they cannot be allowed to influence the course of justice.

Some very interesting comments here, from both sides. Allow me to stick my oar in again. In response to this, I posit that the sort of mind that would be affected by music, a movie or a videogame to the extent that it would cause antisocial action would have to be pretty unhinged anyway. The children who shot up their classmates didn't do it because they played Doom, they did it for a variety of reasons, the largest of which was probably that they were deranged and had no respect for human life and the smallest of which was probably that they played Doom. The real danger is not that anyone will be pushed off the deep end. The problem is that all this influence gradually changes a society towards one that does not respect life, views violence as a way to solve problems, treats women as whores, and seeks beauty and enjoyment in the grotesque. There's probably more, but you get the point. That depends upon whether or not they are actually part of the problem. I'm a parent. I do what I can. I closely monitor my kids' TV viewing and use the parental lock feature on my digital box. My eldest son has his own computer with an internet connection, but that connection is firewalled out unless you enter a password that he doesn't know. His computer is in the den, three feet from my computer, so he can't look at anything dodgy in seclusion. They are banned from watching TV after 9pm in all circumstances (even Teletoon gets more adult after the watershed). Their videogames are scrutinised by me before they are loaded. However, as a parent there is a lot I can't do. As I said, the only McDonalds with a playground in town is next to a sex shop. I can either drive my kids past a window full of S&M outfits and dildoes, or I can just cancel Saturday afternoons at McDonalds with the playground for them. There are many more examples from my own life, but unless anyone really wants to hear them I will save time and leave it to everyone else's imagination as I'm sure you all have your own examples anyway. You can blame parents if you want, but it's very difficult to be a responsible parent in a culture awash with media violence, sex and foul language. To blame parents is akin to blaming somebody with absolutely no gymnastic experience or training for falling off a tightrope - sure, they did it, but the odds were very strongly against them not doing it in the first place. Absolutely. Just look at the way things are progessing. The director's cut of Robocop was X-rated, and Paul Verhoeven had to cut it down to get an R when it was first released. I have the original cut on Criterion DVD, and let me tell you, it is nowhere near as visceral or graphic as Saving Private Ryan, for instance, but Saving Private Ryan got its R and had no trouble with either theatrical or video release. Jerry Springer started out as a downmarket talk show, but now it has progressed to a game called "how many topless women can Fox fit into a one-hour timeslot without actually becoming the Playboy channel". Cops is advertising their special "topless episode" and "hooker episode". Even Star Trek began as a perfectly respectable family show (the only boundaries it pushed were for ethnic and gender equality), but the first episode of the spin-off Enterprise had a gratuitous shower scene. It was not explicit, but it was completely unnecessary for advancement of the story or character development and obviously only in the show for one reason. It seems that the only way to go is down, if you want to sell, and that's what these people are after. Springer candidly admitted in an interview that he knew he was making absolute garbage, but he says he is not interested in critical acclaim because he wants the money. This is why I say that capitalism is only a good system when matched to just law and/or staunch moral fiber. Currently, we have capitalism with unethical law (or, at least, the practice of it) and a moral sewer, and this is where it is taking us. Pertaining to that, I see two possible choices - either we rein in the capitalism (censorship of media, watersheds and basically saying "thou shalt not" to record companies, movie producers, authors, playwrights, and so on - just law), or we get some moral backbone as a society and just refuse to buy this stuff. If it stops making money, it'll disappear. Records and movies habitually cost hundreds of millions to produce and promote nowadays, and if the products of that process are net losses, the companies making them will pull out. I would personally prefer the latter, because even if someone finds a loophole and releases something nobody will be interested. I am not a fan of censorship, and I would not want a legal system that would prevent the release and dissemination of genuinely artistic yet controversial pieces. Lady Chatterley's Lover was once banned, but D.H. Lawrence is not a pornographer. Fight Club is an excellent and well-crafted film that has a great deal to offer on many levels and is definitely not just another mindless, violent summer blockbuster. Yes, it is shockingly violent, however, the movie would not work without that. While I wouldn't want kids or even squeamish adults to watch it, I do think that for those who can stomach the violent imagery it is a genuine piece of art that can be enjoyed as such. However, this is for most people a personal choice. The authorities that stand for moral fiber are no longer heeded, the authorities that people listen to now are usually the people making money from moral sewage anyway.

But we aren't talking about law, we are talking about rights, and my view of human rights is that they are unchanging and inalienable. They are also somewhat separate from the law, which is why the US, Canada, the UN and other countries feel the need to have declarations of human rights which are separate from and different to their legal codices.