Egyptian girl strips to protest; western media censors her photos

SAM:

sciforums is not obliged to adopt the policy of any external news medium, mainstream or otherwise.

Besides, none of the images you posted were censored. They were just converted to links with appropriate warnings, thus providing readers with a choice as to whether or not to view them.

Where I live, when any TV news report showed the Abu Graib torture photos, the report was always preceeded by a warning that some viewers might find the images disturbing. Such warnings are commonplace in the "mainstream media" where I live. Once again, the aim is to give viewers a choice about what they wish to view.

I wonder whether they have ever brought a case for the right of children, say, not to be exposed to certain imagery. I imagine they have. I guess you wouldn't think they were doing such a fine job there.

Maybe you'd have more.

That's not my position.

It is unfortunate that these children have choice removed from them. The solution is not to remove choice from children elsewhere as well.

This all seems a little too hypthetical to you. It makes me uncomfortable.

I often read letters from parents to mainstream media outlets complaining about how their children are, against the parents' wishes, routinely exposed to violent and sexual imagery. Do you really think that the media have NO role to play at all when it comes to children's exposure to such things? You put the entire onus onto parents?

And differences between what was considered appropriate in 1970 compared to 2011, perhaps. Other things that we consider inappropriate today were also considered appropriate in 1970. Take drink driving, for example. There are many others.

And your solution is to subject children who do not live in war zones to the same horrors, by proxy.

Not at all. In fact, it worries me profoundly that you seem to regard children as roughly equivalent to adults in terms of what you feel they ought to be exposed to. I feel that we have a duty to protect children.

How old were they? It is good to know that they were supervised. What does that suggest to you?

Only in barbaric, backward countries.

I do not have a choice in paying taxes.

I do have a choice in which political party I vote into office, but that is a choice I have to share with somewhere between 10 and 20 million other people, some of whose opinions differ from my own.

To assume that the party that is elected in the end will automatically reflect all my personal opinons is naive in the extreme. To assume that the party currently in power is the one I voted for is naive. To assume that I agree with all the policies of the party I voted for is naive.

In short, this is a very weak argument, even in comparison to your usual standards.

That's one reason. There are others, some of which I have mentioned above more than once.

The two mainstreams newspapers that I regularly read NEVER publish "uncensored" full-frontal nudity, male or female, under any circumstances. Why? Because their readers prefer that they do not do so. It is considered inappropriate in a respectable news publication.

Hard to comment on this without the context, but my first impression is that any banning of small breasts was probably in response to concerns about the depiction of young children (girls) in sexual contexts.

I don't know how old this story is, or whether these supposed "bans" have been rolled back or exceptions made for certain types of publications. Even your own source seems to say that the adverse consequences were unintended.

What impact has this had on the sexual culture of Australians? I'd estimate: none at all.

As is normal with you when bringing up Australian stories, you are woefully ignorant of "Australian culture". Usually, you're also years out of date. I haven't checked this one on that score.

You'll have to take it up with Apple. I don't speak for them.

 

I am an equal-opportunity demonizer. I have never set Islam up as being qualitatively worse than Christianity and Judaism.

You once again misunderstood me, but another member did too so I obviously did not express myself well.

I was commenting on what appears to be the attitude of the leaders of fundamentalist Islamic societies: that men are incapable of controlling themselves sexually, so if they encounter a woman who is not completely rolled up in seven layers of cloth AND is not under guard by her father, brother or husband, then it must be assumed that those men will rape her at every opportunity. This is why when a woman is raped it is she who is prosecuted and punished, and the men (at least in some publicized cases) are not even tracked down, much less arrested. The rape is her fault, for being so foolish as to show her face in public or to drive a car.

How can Western men and Eastern men be so dramatically different, that we can be trusted and they can't? My point was that if this attitude is based on the actual behavior of these men, then they must be qualitatively different from the men in Western countries. We spend every day mingling with women who are not guarded by their male relatives and who (by the standards of those other countries) are dressed provocatively and (again by those standards) behave flirtatiously with us, even touching us and hugging us and using dirty language. Yet very few of us rape every woman we can get our hands on. In fact I, personally, have never even raped one woman, once!

My question was whether we are to believe this assessment by the Islamic leaders of the character of the men in their society. I made the suggestion that we should be able to figure that out by studying the behavior of the many men from those countries who have emigrated and now live among us. If the mullahs of Iran, Saudi Arabia and other countries are correct, then Iranian, Saudi and other male immigrants in America must have rap sheets an inch thick of all the rapes they've committed in our country.

So I asked if anyone knows whether, in fact, they do. It was a snarky question and we all know the answer. Even if we didn't, the fact that they're not all serving life terms in prison for their second rape conviction gives it away.

My wife always lays her head in her hands and laments the fact that I was born without the enzyme to digest sarcasm. I never get it when I hear it, and when I try to produce it I never get it right.

Sorry, folks.

 

Bells:

Two wrongs don't make a right.

That's not what I recall. I recall constant warnings on TV news reports about images that may disturb, plus carefully selection of the images published in newspapers and the like, plus blacked-out portions of certain photos (e.g. to hide faces and in some cases genitals and injuries).

Maybe you viewed different media from me.

See my reply to SAM, above. In the newspapers I read regularly, ALL full-frontal images like that one are routinely pixellated or blacked-out, if they are published at all. Again, maybe you rely on different media. But with only two major newspaper companies owning all mainstream newspapers in Australia, I seriously doubt it.

Certainly. I'm entitled to my opinion as much as you are entitled to yours. So is Fraggle, for that matter.

Please cite the relevant content and link to the posts and we'll take a look together, if you like.

Also, your assumption that I acted only because Arthur wanted me to doesn't credit me with much independence of judgment, does it? Is that really what you think?

From memory, I was quite careful about what I said, and that wasn't it. Moreover, if by some chance I wasn't clear the first time, the next two or three times I was crystal clear about the whole "garbage" thing. Yet you seem to insist on still misunderstanding my meaning. Why?

I did that this time, before editing anything or handing out any infractions.

Frankly, I doubt that mature discussion about the general issue of media censorship is possible here. So never mind. We can just continue in this thread.

I did read the entire thread. I told you that in my last post. But obviously the thread I read was different from the thread you read. In my opinion, the Abu Graib images were introduced by SAM for no reason other than to twist the knife further in the belly of the "evil west".

As it happens, for the first time in about two weeks I had a couple of hours to sit down surf sciforums in one stretch. So, relatively speaking, yes. A slow day.

Why do you think it is important that we in the evil west see her boobs and vagina? Is her story not complete without us seeing them? Won't we get the gist and the point of her protest if we don't see them?

Please explain, because I'm obviously not getting this crucial point and I really want it explained.

Those things were all censored in the news media I viewed - both on TV and in newspapers and their online media sites.

For example, take the sexual assault case you mention - I think I know the one you mean. What I remember seeing was some grainy footage selected from an entire lengthy recording. The footage shown did not show any sexual acts, but merely a girl surrounded by that bunch of school boys. Some taunts were heard. I can't recall seeing any of the actual sexual assault footage, though I'm sure that it was ALL filmed.

Footage from East Timor and Rwanda was also "censored".

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. No, I do not equate nudity with pornography.

Yes. And so we cater to some kind of "average" in society. While SAM (and you, I guess) would be quite happy for violence and sex in its worst manifestations to be splashed all over out nightly 6 pm TV news bulletins, this is not the view of the majority in the society in which you and I live. Call me old-fashioned or prudish in this regard if you like, but in this instance I happen to be part of this majority that doesn't want my children exposed at 6 pm to Rwandan mutilated corpses or images of the abuse of a young girl.

 

Of course they will. You forget the fact (I'd say that you conveniently ignore it but that would be to accuse you once again of intellectual dishonesty) that in France it is, for all intents and purposes, virtually illegal to identify people by religion.

I would certainly do it in the USA, and I don't care if they're Muslims, Jews, Christians, Rastafarians, Scientologists or atheists. We are not comfortable with people who hide their faces, because in our culture (except on Halloween or in below-zero weather) that can only mean one thing: they are robbers.

This raises a point I keep meaning to bring up. One of the problems American soldiers had when they first invaded the Middle East was distrust by the local people because they all wore sunglasses. They did not feel comfortable making agreements with people whose eyes they could not see.

This is exactly the way we feel about women who completely cover their faces. We cannot trust them.

When are you going to stop pretending to be an expert on Jewish culture, religion and politics? Every time you open your mouth you stick your foot in it. A quick Google would have listed articles that disagree with the ones you refer to. This issue has toggled back and forth over the decades. Today Zionism has considerable religious support, although I can't say whether it's a majority--and I'm certain you can't either. Particularly in the USA, most of the older, Orthodox Jews are passionate about Zionism, while a large number of the younger, Reform and nonreligious secular Jews are rather disgusted with the State of Israel. Considering that our country houses more than one-third of the world's Jewish population, almost the same number as live in Israel, the opinions of our Jews matter a great deal statistically.

It's a fucking ninja outfit! Did you never go to the movies when you lived among us, learning so much about our culture and politics that you're now an expert???

Oh wait, I guess you didn't! You've never seen a Western, or you'd understand why we don't allow people to walk around in masks.

This is a long thread and I'm sure not too many people have read the whole thing. It's easy to misinterpret a post. They may not have realized that I was referring back to my own post, since I didn't quote it.

But the history of our species has been to transcend nature, both the external environment (turning rocks into tools, taming fire, domesticating animals, building roofs over our heads) and our own internal nature (giving up the nomadic hunter-gatherer life for which our instincts are tuned, learning to live in harmony and cooperation with people outside our family, letting wolves cuddle up with our children).

Our uniquely massive forebrain grants us the unique ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior. Unlike all other vertebrates, we are most emphatically not slaves to our instincts.