famous Jw

by freakshow 65 Replies latest jw friends

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  slipnslidemaster

  Cool!!

  Nice picture! hehehe

  Slipnslidemaster: "The gods too are fond of a joke."
  - Aristotle
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  slipnslidemaster

  oh, and I'm hungover like usual this morning.

  Slipnslidemaster: "The gods too are fond of a joke."
  - Aristotle
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  SlayerLayer

  (WAVING LIKE A MAD MAN AT STACEY!)

  Hey Stacey! Long time no see. It's good to see you posting here.

  Chris
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  bboyneko

  Hey slip-n-slide, thats the picture of the galactic cruiser commander in starcraft isnt it? Didja know his voice and look is modeled after the SDF1 captain in the 80's cartoon series ROBOTECH?
  -Dan
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  Deacon

  Dave Hill, guitarist with Slade..
  I studied with him for a while
  baptised...
  left 10 years later
  remarried
  touring with drummer as Slade 2

  
  guy at front holding leg...

  alt.culture.lm
  CENSORS AND SENSIBILITIES
  If it carries on like this, Jane Austen and Anthea Turner will be all we are allowed to watch.
  National Heritage secretary Virginia Bottomley demands with menaces that broadcasters further restrict the already decreasing levels of violence on TV. The fuddy-duddies of Westminster council slap an old-fashioned ban on David Cronenberg's fetish film, Crash. And fashionable bodies like the Internet Safety Watch Foundation promote new modes of self-regulation on the Net ('choose your own censor').
  So who will speak up for free speech? At a time when many former libertarians are joining in demands for more censorship, we found a few talking heads prepared to peek above the parapet
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  We censored ourselves
  Don Murphy, co-producer of Natural Born Killers

  'The controversy over Natural Born Killers continues today because there is a big lawsuit going on with people claiming the film got them shot, and John Grisham is saying, yes, that's true. As if somehow a film can make somebody shoot somebody. But of course, it can't. Everybody is responsible for their own actions.

  'It has always been difficult getting projects like NBK off the ground. Until Oliver [Stone] got involved it wasn't going to happen. I always want to do films that take chances. The next film we are doing is pretty edgy, it's about a young boy who discovers a Nazi living down the street and they bond. But any film that is chancy is always difficult. It's easier to do some dumb comedy than take a chance.

  'There's already tremendous self-censorship. NBK was already censored before it came out. We couldn't get a certificate unless we made cuts. Contractually you have to deliver an 'R' rating, so when we couldn't get the 'R' rating we had to keep making the cuts until we got it. You agree going into it that you'll make the cuts, and if you don't, well, they can make them for you.

  'Censorship doesn't just mean a Board telling you, yes/no, yes/no. It can be much more pragmatic than that. To get that rating we did censor ourselves. If there was a truly free system you could just put a movie out whatever rating it had, right?

  'The government wants the mandate that we have ratings so we can tell whether a film is suitable for certain people or not. Fine. In America the ratings are voluntary [for audiences]. You don't have to adhere to them, and I can still take a 17-year old to an '18' movie. A mature adult should be able to be responsible for what he and his family see.

  'There should be some level of restraint, just as you don't go into a theatre and shout 'fire!'. There are certain things you should maybe not show, or if you're going to show it at least alert people. But do we want freedom, or do we want the government to dictate what we do? We should be responsible to ourselves as individuals and stop trying to give up our freedom.'

  Don Murphy was talking to Krysia Rozanska

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  The powerless individual
  Simon Davies, contributing writer Wired

  'Governments are saying we do not want to impose legislation that binds the individual, but what we will do is set out a series of expectations. With Internet censorship, they said we are not telling you that you have to censor the Internet, we are just reminding you of your moral obligation, and informing you that if you are not going to do the right thing, then you are the sort of people whom we have to legislate against. This is moral enforcement and it is pseudo-voluntary.

  'What seems to be occurring is a moral com- pulsion that is trickling down the entire community. The individual is subject to all sorts of moral enforcement by every institution from the local newspaper to school councils and the Neighbourhood Watch. If you are going to create an environment of compliance, the only way you can do it is with the lubricant of morality. This is the way the government is proceeding.

  'While this is happening, there is a whole series of laws being passed which absolutely eliminate individual rights. So what we are seeing is a two-pronged approach: the hard, legislative approach, and the moral compulsion which people misinterpret as empowering them. With the V-chip, people talk about being empowered, but there is probably more powerlessness now than at any time in recent history. We are told that the individual is the building block of society and government is getting smaller. But this is a society in which the individual has been subjugated, where gov- ernment has greater power than ever before, and people cannot discern illusion from reality.'

  Simon Davies is the author of Big Brother: Britain's Web of Surveillance and the New Technological Order

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  Ban nothing
  Andrew Calcutt, LM writer

  'The banning of Crash by Westminster council is typical of traditional gatekeeping censorship which may soon become irrelevant. Already it is technically possible to download scenes from Crash via the Internet. The Internet is said to interpret censorship as damage and re-route itself around it. But censorship is also re-routing itself to take account of developing technologies, changing lifestyles, and a new political context. The new mechanisms of control are more insidious.

  'Traditional censorship, as practised by watch committees or promoted by Tory tabloids, is easy to spot and to criticise. But there is no point in being fixated on forms of censorship that are being superseded. When I interviewed James Ferman of the British Board of Film Classification for this magazine (March 1995), he described himself as the last of the gatekeeping censors, and emphasised the new forms of control which the BBFC is helping to devise.

  'The new control methods amount to the creation of an internal policeman inside each and every one of us. The likes of Ferman want to teach us to make 'informed choices', and once we have digested enough of his media studies lessons to qualify as responsible consumers, we will be invited to police our own production and consumption of screen images. Failure to meet our obligations, as laid down by the BBFC and even by Ben Elton, will be interpreted as a sign of criminal irresponsibility. Welcome to the world of self-censorship, which no amount of new technology can circumvent.

  'Even if Crash gets released, the damage has been done. The cumulative effect of recent panics has been to confirm the idea that exposure to screen images is more than most of us can stand. We are advised that it is only safe to consume media images in the presence of a virtual minder, like the Internet Safety Watch Foundation or the Broadcasting Standards Council. They will make judgements on our behalf, because we cannot be trusted to sit alone in front of the PC or TV screen.

  'These degrading assumptions run right through the various forms of censorship, old and new. All the discussions about control and regulation - film bans, broadcasting codes, the V-chip, 'consumer information', the Internet Safety Watch Foundation - come down to the same notion that adults are not really adults, but lifelong adolescents who will always need nannying. But, as an adult, I know I can cope with anything on screen. Ban nothing. Question everything.'

  Andrew Calcutt's book on pop culture and the end of adulthood will be published by Cassell later this year

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  An image-phobic culture
  Julian Petley, author

  'We live in an image-phobic culture in which opinion formers seem fundamentally ill at ease. Other countries do not go through these spasms of panic about the media, and in most other countries the media are far less regulated than in Britain. If our pundits and politicians were put down in, say, Italy, they would have 40 fits.

  'On the day that Virginia Bottomley met with BBC and ITV chiefs, her entire agenda was laid out on the pages of the Daily Mail. Bottomley says there is too much violence on television, she is echoed by the Daily Mail, and then she says "look, public opinion is behind me". It's a self-perpetuating, self- justifying circle. The ordinary viewer is simply being left out of the loop.

  'In my opinion the broadcasters should tell Bottomley to fuck off. They should tell her to read the Daily Mail less, and watch real television more.

  'Self-regulation has always been the British way. The government says "we're not telling the broadcasters what to do". But broadcasters know perfectly well that if they do not regulate themselves in the way that the government of the day wants them to, that government has all sorts of sanctions it will use. They regulate themselves with a gun held to their head. It's what Tom Burns called "liberty on parole".

  'I think consumer information is a very good thing. I am all in favour of information in the Radio Times and on the sleeves of video boxes. The more informed parents can be, the better. I do not think any reasonable person would want children to see material they are not capable of dealing with, or adults to be suddenly confronted with stuff which they do not want to see.

  'We have recently seen a number of liberals recanting. If you are told over and over again by allegedly intelligent people that, yes, the media have these hypodermic or copycat effects, and if you have not got access to the full range of research, in the end the sheer weight of opinion will push you into something that you once did not accept. We are routinely denied access to alternatives in the press, and that is most certainly a form of censorship.

  'There is a concerted effort on the part of certain opinion formers to even more severely limit what we can see. It is no good people equivocating. At moments like this you have got to know where you stand. We are not talking about defending pornography or video nasties, we are talking about defending the most elementary rights. One has got to say to people, for goodness sake, stand up and defend these elementary freedoms.'

  Julian Petley is co-editor of Ill Effects: the Media/Violence Debate

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  Signs of the times
  'A lot of people don't realise that Jesus wasn't born on 25 December, it's just a pagan festival'

  Dave 'Superyob' Hill, Slade guitarist turned Jehovah's Witness, who has banned said festivities from his home. So here it isn't, Merry Christmas...
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  slipnslidemaster

  Hey slip-n-slide, thats the picture of the galactic cruiser commander in starcraft isnt it? Didja know his voice and look is modeled after the SDF1 captain in the 80's cartoon series ROBOTECH?
  -Dan

  Yes, it's from their website in fact. I didn't know that Captain Gloval? was the inspiration. That's cool! I loved Robotech.

  How about Starblazers? There is a website with copies of some of the episodes online.

  Slipnslidemaster: "The gods too are fond of a joke."
  - Aristotle