It seems that there are many people here who don't believe that there has been any censorship in this whole issue. I think there has.
Warner Brothers are the victims and the perpetrators here.
Knowing the likely over-reaction to the scenes depicted in the Buffy finale from some sections of the US people, they decided to postpone the show. Now, some people argue that this is their right - and I don't disagree - but if you look at the motive for this action, then it is fear.
Fear of what might happen to them if they did use their own judgement and that told them to show the episode. So Warners were censored. And they passed that censorship on to us. Hence the heavy use of the word 'Cowardice' in John's post.
The real perpetrators are the factions in society who would react to this episode without thinking and attempt to attack Warners through ignorance, or for their own ends. However, Warners have to take some of the responsibility for not having the guts to stand up to these people and do whatever they think is right.
And there's the potential flaw in my argument. Perhaps Warners did honestly and truly believe, without external influence, that it would be in bad taste to air the show.
I don't think so. I think they were afraid, and so they were, in effect, censored, and then they passed that censorship on to the rest of us.
I've just been deeply amused and saddened by the argument "The government is not involved so its not censorship". Since when was the government a pre-requesit for censorship? Many parties can censor many others, as we've seen here.
Postponement is better than cancellation, but ultimately it sends the message that there's something wrong with the show.
Perhaps some people would have found the show in bad taste. "They don't have to watch it" is a cliche. It also happens to be true. What I find in extremely "bad taste" is that my opportunity to watch the show and make my own judgement was taken away. Not even by Warners, but by the faceless masses that they are afraid of. Certainly no one that I elected or gave power over me. Not even anyone accountable to anyone.
Predudice and cowardice combined have terrible results. This is just a TV show - but if you want to live in a free country you have to be willing to fight the small battles as well as the big ones, because those who would take away your freedoms are more likely to do so by chipping at them than by invasion.
I believe Warner brothers acted out of fear. The people who engendered that fear are the guilty party - they're the censors. And we all need to fight this sort of mindless reaction
The digital distribution/copyright/net censorship argument is another essay for another time
Its a Mac PC thing. John is probably typing a ' but his word processor will be using smart quotes to convert it to the curly variety.
The curly quote is a different character on the Mac and Windows, hence the ?. Everything above the traditional 7 bit 127 character ASCII charset can cause this problem.
There's no simple mapping between Mac/PC charsets because DOS uses a different one to Windows and some text editors still favour the DOS charset I believe.
John either needs to
(i) turn off smart quotes (ii) write his text in unicode (iii) write his text in an HTML editor that will convert the curly quote to some sort of &XXX; code.
He definately doesn't want to put if through a mac->pc converter cause then all the Mac people out there will see ? or something similar.
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It seems that there are many people here who don't believe that there has been any censorship in this whole issue. I think there has.
Warner Brothers are the victims and the perpetrators here.
Knowing the likely over-reaction to the scenes depicted in the Buffy finale from some sections of the US people, they decided to postpone the show. Now, some people argue that this is their right - and I don't disagree - but if you look at the motive for this action, then it is fear.
Fear of what might happen to them if they did use their own judgement and that told them to show the episode. So Warners were censored. And they passed that censorship on to us. Hence the heavy use of the word 'Cowardice' in John's post.
The real perpetrators are the factions in society who would react to this episode without thinking and attempt to attack Warners through ignorance, or for their own ends. However, Warners have to take some of the responsibility for not having the guts to stand up to these people and do whatever they think is right.
And there's the potential flaw in my argument.
Perhaps Warners did honestly and truly believe, without external influence, that it would be in bad taste to air the show.
I don't think so. I think they were afraid, and so they were, in effect, censored, and then they passed that censorship on to the rest of us.
I've just been deeply amused and saddened by the argument "The government is not involved so its not censorship". Since when was the government a pre-requesit for censorship? Many parties can censor many others, as we've seen here.
Postponement is better than cancellation, but ultimately it sends the message that there's something wrong with the show.
Perhaps some people would have found the show in bad taste. "They don't have to watch it" is a cliche. It also happens to be true. What I find in extremely "bad taste" is that my opportunity to watch the show and make my own judgement was taken away. Not even by Warners, but by the faceless masses that they are afraid of. Certainly no one that I elected or gave power over me. Not even anyone accountable to anyone.
Predudice and cowardice combined have terrible results. This is just a TV show - but if you want to live in a free country you have to be willing to fight the small battles as well as the big ones, because those who would take away your freedoms are more likely to do so by chipping at them than by invasion.
I believe Warner brothers acted out of fear. The people who engendered that fear are the guilty party - they're the censors. And we all need to fight this sort of mindless reaction
The digital distribution/copyright/net censorship argument is another essay for another time
Its a Mac PC thing. John is probably typing a ' but his word processor will be using smart quotes to convert it to the curly variety.
The curly quote is a different character on the Mac and Windows, hence the ?. Everything above the traditional 7 bit 127 character ASCII charset can cause this problem.
There's no simple mapping between Mac/PC charsets because DOS uses a different one to Windows and some text editors still favour the DOS charset I believe.
John either needs to
(i) turn off smart quotes
(ii) write his text in unicode
(iii) write his text in an HTML editor that will convert the curly quote to some sort of &XXX; code.
He definately doesn't want to
put if through a mac->pc converter cause then all the Mac people out there will see ? or something similar.