What do you think?

[TheWildOne]

"In imminent defense of freedom of speech. The self retains the inalienable right to express itself as it choose, on any topic that it chooses, the right to empathized with friend or foe (shall we call that treason?), to assent and to deny, to offend, to express its conscience and to express no conscience, to be offensive, vulgar, vicious and even evil in the object and manner of it expression, at any and all times.

Aritistic expression, political expression, pronography, hate speech, blasphemy, etc. should all be protected.

-William T. Vollman
In his book about means of violence.

What do you think?

I am asking:

What about the violence used to produce said art?

(Ex. Child Pornography? )

[G L Wilson]

Freedom like most things is limited. To be beyond the limit is to be beyond tolerance. The problem is that different people put different limits on freedom. For an artist to breakthrough to the truth therefore, he or she must go beyond tolerance to the truth.

[Panglossian]

What do you think?

Violence is a form of communication everybody listens to. (The threat of violence also.) Anders Breivik communicated his warped message with violence and the world took note. NATO is currently communicating with violence in Libya. The imagined and simulated violence in artistic expression may influence real physical violence but to what extent is difficult to know.

What percentage of video-games contain gratuitous simulated violence? 50%? 60%? higher? Kids seem to love the idea of violence.

[cl154576]

I think the violence in free expression would not disappear on its own, and if it were artificially suppressed there would be bad results ... I don't believe in censorship.
The American media does have a tendency to over-report violence, however, which can also be negative. (For instance, most days scrolling through the headlines there are long lists of some number of people killed in some country, someone's body found in a river, etc.) A more balanced approach might be better.


Kids seem to love the idea of violence.
Yes, very much. I'm a kid. Apparently it's considered "cool" to show no sensitivity to violence and to exult in the bloodiness of it.