President Of The United States and all-round Worldwide Chief Idiot George W. Bush (books/DVDs) has signed a bill to promote and launch technology which can filter out all the naughty bits from your DVD collection.
The bill means that manufacturers of such cack – like self-righteous Utah-based moralmongers ClearPlay - are now immune from prosecution from major Hollywood studios, who quite understandably see this whole charade as a violation of property law.
Jesus. hecklerspray never thought it would see the day when it takes the side of the studios, but … we’ll be goddamned. Here it is.
Apparently the filtering technology ‘scans a movie for objectionable content, then programs that data into the DVD player so it can skip the scenes in question’, as well as ‘automatically muting profanity’.
Okay, okay. Let’s all pick up our special brain-radios and tune into Sanity F.M. Isn’t this whole thing just the teeniest-weeniest bit sanctimonious …. oh, and not to mention just ever-so-slightly pointless?
Let’s face it – are parents across the country going to be sitting their kiddies down in front of heavily-edited copies of Fight Club (DVD) or Henry:Portrait Of A Serial Killer (DVD), safe in the knowledge that they won’t get to see any of ‘the bad bits’? No. Course they’re not.
So why does this technology exist? What possible use does it have? ‘It lets parents decide for themselves what children see and hear on television,’ burbled Texas Republican dinosaur Lamar Smith. ‘
‘Raising children may be the toughest job in the world’, he added (although surely a penniless landmine-defuser in war-torn Central Africa might have a slightly more challenging existence than some Yankee housewife making sure the kids have their lunch money in the morning?).
Lamar then went on to compare the technology to ‘a parent’s ability to flip past offensive passages in a book’.
Woah, woah! People In Texas can read? Well, gosh … you learn something new every day! Unless you’re the President, of course.
In which case you just try to destroy the world.
[story by C J Davies]
