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Kansas AG Rejects Settlement Discs
RWarrior(fobw) writes "Kansas's Attorney General has rejected 1600 CDs by 25 different artist as part of the music industry's anti-trust settlement. Is this a community values issue, a censorship issue, or just crap music being foisted off onto the public as part of a meaningless settlement?"
Music, good or bad, is an expression. Children checking out cds from a library are not going to turn violent after listening to one or two cds. It comes from other environmental variables, one of which I think is lack of guidance from parents. Censorship is censorship, no matter how you try to disguise it.
This purging of objectionable content is censorship -- pure and simple.
.. It would have been more appropriate for these library resources to be presented as is, rather than withheld. If the AG wanted to "make the local library board aware" of some potentially objectionable content would be one thing (though still highly dubious).
This is not to say a person in Kansas can't go buy the material on their own, it's not censorship in the sense of it not being allowed at all (like say Texas in banning sex toys a few years ago).
Kansas AG is a prime example why some types of people should not be in law enforcement, let alone responsible for enforcement of all laws in a state. If a elected official can not seperate their personal beliefs from his official function as a representative of the government, than they should not be in power (A better example is John Ashcroft).
For a little bit of background, in Kansas, with some exceptions, every statewide office by default goes to a Republican unless that canidate goes outside of a loose centrist feel.
Case in point, Dennis Moore, the only democrat from Kansas in the house, ran against Phil Kline, Alan Taft and a few others since being elected. The only way (and this is a subjective observation) he seems to keep beating the republicans is because the local RNC chapter keeps trotting out hard right wingers like Kline to run against him.
Otherwise in Kansas politics, the republican gets it almost every time (the democrats in the kansas house and senate seem to have less power than the democrats in Texas do, at least down there they have the big red button of denying a quorum if absoulutely needed).
Back to the topic / artical
Other topic, Kansas politics makes for an interesting read on the way the party not in power has to play ball in the midwest. Like the fact that the democrats didn't even field a canidate during the 2002 Senate race. Or the fact that the (late) prior democrat governor (Kim Finney) had several parts of her platform that were planks in the republican party platform (prolife being primary amoung them).
I can't argue that Whitney singing the national anthem is crap. However, many CD's were rejected on decency grounds.
I can't believe that this crowd thinks Outkast is crap music. Outkast has many excellent songs, some of which are very political and some of which are about other complex themes. To reject it based on decency grounds is not only censorship, but it's the rejection of the genre as a whole as invalid for public consumption.
How did you nerds feel when a judge ruled that video games are not expressive speech? Don't come back and reject the speech of another genre based on similarly idiotic premises.
Hye, assnugget, blind people use the web too. I met my blind wife online.
jello.
aka aron.
I am also a Kansas parent, however I belive in rasing my children all by myself. Personally I am getting really irritated by the rantings of what I can only assume are lazy parents that don't want to be involved in the day to day activities of their kids. I see no need in having the government, be it state or federal telling me what is and isn't right for my children. After reading your post I had to wonder, is it that you don't watch what your young daughters listen to, just the older kids? Quote: "I watch what my kids listen to (my older kids listen to all kinds of rap)..but not my young daughters." I would think that screening what your children listen to and watch would be an accross the board situation. Not reserved for the older ones. I would also like to address the first line in your post Quote: "The "settlement" as we have seen in other articles is crap. Most of the cd's are from groups that no one wants to listen to." Let me list a few of the CD's that no one listens to... Alice In Chains, "Greatest Hits," "Live" (according to MTV.com "Greatest Hits" sold 114,000 CD's and "Live" did the same number of CD sales.) http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1453612/20020426/ story.jhtml
Live, "The Distance to Here"
Once again MTV.com states that there were 138,000 copies of that album sold, giving it them a top ten debut.
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1427609/10131999/ live.jhtml
Notorious B.I.G., "Born Again"
According to VH1.com Born Again sold nearly 500,000 copies in its first week of release.
http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/570133/12151999/no torious_big.jhtml
Granted I only looked up 3 of the CD's on the list, but I think that there is sufficient evidence that there are people who like to listen to the listed albums.
something they can recognize in Kansas without a million-dollar consultant. bravo for their AG. this nonsense about "we'll give you product if you just go away and stop biting my ankles," is not a settlement, it's a warehouse cleaning exercise.
you want to make settlements count, three words... Cold Hard Cash. get the cash, not the paperwork.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The music companies basically took the entire inventory that they had been unable to give away for the last 20 years and dumped it on the state attorneys general as "settlement" for the millions of dollars ripped off from consumers during the course of the price fixing fiasco. Nobody can honestly say that the CDs distributed as part of the settlement had a fair market value equal to the amount that was swindled from consumers. I mean look at the list of artists: Michael Bolton, Stone Temple Pilots, and other equally obscure junk. The recording industry laughed all the way to the bank on this one.
So is it censorship if the individual library decides not to carry porn?
Yes.
More disturbingly, is it censorship if the individual library chooses not to carry the latest beheading video from Iraq?
Yes.
Just like it was discrimination when I decided to start dating a white girl instead of a black girl.
Or a girl who wasn't a serial killer. Just another characteristic. Yup.
Is it less censorship when the individual libraries do it, rather than the AG?
No, it's just as objectionable.
My old city library once had someone donate every issue of Playboy to the library. The library kept them behind the desk (didn't want parents angry that their kiddies were leafing through them), but they were in the card catalog and in circulation and could be checked out. Same for a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Frankly, I don't really think that it's a good idea for parents to restrict what their kids read/watch (talk it over with them, give and justify your views, do whatever you want, just don't "keep them from content", because there's only one way that people mature enough to deal with content, and that's experience). However, that isn't really the relevant issue here -- I'm certainly in the minority on this point. What is at issue is that a group of people should not dictate the set of ideas that *other* people can be exposed to -- this goes above and beyond molding and controlling your own child's development, which is as far as the rights of parents extend -- not to the children of other parents.
May we never see th