Quote from: shuddemell;1091999If memory serves, the Parental Advisory was added by the industry to avoid having government regulate them. It was voluntary to avoid involuntary labeling and censorship.

Much how video games have their own rating system in order to avoid being involuntarily labeled.

Quote from: pdboddy;1092011Much how video games have their own rating system in order to avoid being involuntarily labeled.

I spent last weekend combing through my nephew's video games. Once upon a time, I scoffed at the rating systems. My thought was that parents should take the time to review the games their kids play.
But being able to snag all the M rated games at a glance was super helpful. Some I knew were not age appropriate, like Grand Theft Auto (A friend gave him a box full of old games, and didn't scour them for content) but some I don't know, and I didn't have the time to play every game myself.

So I've changed my stance on that topic.

Quote from: pdboddy;1092011Much how video games have their own rating system in order to avoid being involuntarily labeled.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1092020So I've changed my stance on that topic.

Frankly - even aside from putting off government control - a rating system just seems like a good business practice for the industry.

Parents are busy, and they shouldn't have to spend an hour or two playing/researching a game before they give their kid the gift that they want. If they had to do that, parents (or grandparents or whatever) would likely just give fewer games to their kids. That's bad for the industry.

There are plenty of industries which self-regulate substantially more than the government actually requires, or more than the government has even threatened to require, because having trust from your customers is just good business.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1092020I spent last weekend combing through my nephew's video games. Once upon a time, I scoffed at the rating systems. My thought was that parents should take the time to review the games their kids play.
But being able to snag all the M rated games at a glance was super helpful. Some I knew were not age appropriate, like Grand Theft Auto (A friend gave him a box full of old games, and didn't scour them for content) but some I don't know, and I didn't have the time to play every game myself.

So I've changed my stance on that topic.

Agreed, the label is useful for parents, you can then decide to buy or not said product for your kids. But it didn't stop there did it? They keep pushing for censorship, just look at what Sony just did to japanese games.

I'm all for rating products, as long as the ratting isn't left to a censor in the government.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1092020I spent last weekend combing through my nephew's video games. Once upon a time, I scoffed at the rating systems. My thought was that parents should take the time to review the games their kids play.
But being able to snag all the M rated games at a glance was super helpful. Some I knew were not age appropriate, like Grand Theft Auto (A friend gave him a box full of old games, and didn't scour them for content) but some I don't know, and I didn't have the time to play every game myself.

So I've changed my stance on that topic.

I was an early reader... my parents were told to feed me by giving more advanced books. So in 2nd grade my mom bought me all of the Sherlock Holmes books. She thought I'd be reading mystery novels like the guy in the deer-slayer hat in the movies!

I remember the first night after voraciously diving into the world of Sherlock I remember asking my dad what cocaine was... Shockingly my dad told me and I was like... Ohhhh. What's a prostitute? My dad told me. I kept reading on.

The next set of books I read was Conan the Barbarian... yeah I was doomed.


This is the same shit. I think it depends largely on the child in question. Most kids are idiots. I was only a mild-idiot.

Quote from: tenbones;1092023I was an early reader... my parents were told to feed me by giving more advanced books. So in 2nd grade my mom bought me all of the Sherlock Holmes books. She thought I'd be reading mystery novels like the guy in the deer-slayer hat in the movies!

I remember the first night after voraciously diving into the world of Sherlock I remember asking my dad what cocaine was... Shockingly my dad told me and I was like... Ohhhh. What's a prostitute? My dad told me. I kept reading on.

The next set of books I read was Conan the Barbarian... yeah I was doomed.


This is the same shit. I think it depends largely on the child in question. Most kids are idiots. I was only a mild-idiot.

The label is there to help the parents decide if give it to their kids or not. By age 11 I had also read all of Sherlock, most of Poirot, all 12 ACE Books Conan novels, Tarzan, Carson, Barsoom, and many of the Sfi-Fi classics that I think most parents wouldn't let their children read. Now this was back in '77. Not sure if we had a parental advisory here in México yet.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1092022I'm all for rating products, as long as the ratting isn't left to a censor in the government.

Definitley agree there.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1092025The label is there to help the parents decide if give it to their kids or not. By age 11 I had also read all of Sherlock, most of Poirot, all 12 ACE Books Conan novels, Tarzan, Carson, Barsoom, and many of the Sfi-Fi classics that I think most parents wouldn't let their children read. Now this was back in '77. Not sure if we had a parental advisory here in México yet.

My parents were the only idiots in the bigger than myself. But you know... I was only in 2nd grade. That's my defense.

Quote from: tenbones;1092023I was an early reader... my parents were told to feed me by giving more advanced books. So in 2nd grade my mom bought me all of the Sherlock Holmes books. She thought I'd be reading mystery novels like the guy in the deer-slayer hat in the movies!

I remember the first night after voraciously diving into the world of Sherlock I remember asking my dad what cocaine was... Shockingly my dad told me and I was like... Ohhhh. What's a prostitute? My dad told me. I kept reading on.

The next set of books I read was Conan the Barbarian... yeah I was doomed.


This is the same shit. I think it depends largely on the child in question. Most kids are idiots. I was only a mild-idiot.

There is a context for why I went through his games that I'm not going to go into here. My nephew is seven, and personally, I'm not too worried about what he watches or sees. He's going to encounter it eventually, and have to process it.
But it's not just up to me, and he has to live in a world with people who are concerned.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1091941So from where I stand Puritanism is about some people trying to impose their subjective values on others by force if needed.

Eh, not always. The actual Puritans themselves, it's worth remembering, left for a new home precisely because they'd given up on trying to win that kind of struggle in England; likewise the Amish, for example, are very Puritan in terms of how little they will compromise their values, but don't try to impose them at all on anyone else beyond teaching them to their own children.

And I'm perfectly fine (as I suspect most people are) with imposing certain values if necessary: the value of the right to life, for example, or the right of women not to be treated as property. Bear in mind that sometimes simply preventing someone imposing his values on you is going to be seen by that person as, in itself, an unacceptable imposition of your values on him; dismissing a clash of elementally irreconcilable values as "Puritanism" from one or both sides does something of a disservice to the struggle to preserve the core values that make us human.

Puritanism comes from purity, the freedom from anything that debases, contaminates or compromises; that's why I think unwillingness to compromise is the defining criterion. What people do about that unwillingness is another question. We don't hear about the non-aggressive Puritans because by definition they leave us alone.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1092034Puritanism comes from purity, the freedom from anything that debases, contaminates or compromises; that's why I think unwillingness to compromise is the defining criterion. What people do about that unwillingness is another question. We don't hear about the non-aggressive Puritans because by definition they leave us alone.

   Pedantry: It actually comes from the efforts to purify the Church of 'Roman corruptions,' but the rejection of the Elizabethan settlement (which is a compromise that reached the point where, as Auberon Waugh once said, "In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody -- from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung -- can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican.") does seem to have been the defining factor. What you have here is a reasonable extrapolation from the historical origins to the term's broader use.

Quote from: GeekyBugle;1092022Agreed, the label is useful for parents, you can then decide to buy or not said product for your kids. But it didn't stop there did it? They keep pushing for censorship, just look at what Sony just did to japanese games.

I'm all for rating products, as long as the ratting isn't left to a censor in the government.

Look at what Squaresoft did to Final Fantasy IV in 1992: removed Rosa's breasts and removed the ability Pray and removed a kiss between her and Cecil because western audiences might not like it. (The pixel art was... not suggestive of anything in the slightest.)

This isn't new. In fact, in many ways, we have made marked improvements.

...but then you get incidents like the one you're talking about.

Quote from: Tanin Wulf;1092037Look at what Squaresoft did to Final Fantasy IV in 1992: removed Rosa's breasts and removed the ability Pray and removed a kiss between her and Cecil because western audiences might not like it. (The pixel art was... not suggestive of anything in the slightest.)

This isn't new. In fact, in many ways, we have made marked improvements.

...but then you get incidents like the one you're talking about.

I believe in both instances it's because of the wrong perception the puritans are more than they are. They are very noisy which might give that impression, they also have infiltrated the media (specialized and Main Stream).

There was an study that found SJWs are 8% of the USA population, lets say the puritans on the other side are what? Double that? So tops 30% of the population, and most of them don't even buy those products, they just want to prevent you to buy them. For your own good.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1091993However, the Parental Advisory label was a hit with teens. It automatically screamed BUY ME NOW!!

In the UK, Channel 4 introduced a Red Triangle sign to indicate which late night films had juicy/adult content. It was very useful when deciding on things to watch!

Quote from: tenbones;1092023I remember the first night after voraciously diving into the world of Sherlock I remember asking my dad what cocaine was... Shockingly my dad told me and I was like... Ohhhh. What's a prostitute? My dad told me. I kept reading on.

A friend of mine asked his Mum what "Frigging" meant, as he had heard the song "Frigging in the Rigging" by the Sex Pistols, her answer was "Ask your father".