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Old 01-20-2005, 04:18 AM
Cyrus Cyrus is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Tundra
Posts: 1,720
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This is easy. Or, it should be. One need only examine "The Producers" - what do we do, ban the satire of the swastika? And if we don't ban the satire, where do we draw the line? And what about symbols resembling the damn thing? I could point out half a dozen runic symbols that could be used instead. You see how it goes.

This quickly degenerates into having moral rules dictated by the majority - which is one of democracy's dangers.

But I'm afraid there is a momentum in Europe to ban the swastika, driven by a combination of guilt and misguided politics. In Germany, all symbols, names and references to the Nazis are already banned by law. I find that to be a stupid law, and, what's more, a law that attains the opposite effect of what it aims for. I hope I don't have to explain why.

There was a Crossfire show, years back, when Frank Zappa was on, along with some Washington Times forgettable asshole journalist, and they were debating whether banning certain "obscene words" from rap songs would be a good thing or not. You can guess where Frank stood on the subject - and how convincingly (and hilariously) he made mincemeat of the hapless opposition! Frank's motto for the evening was, "It's just words and you guys want to ban words!"

Now we wanna ban drawings. Either we are out of arguments --which would be a sorry state of affairs if we cannot argue convincingly against Nazism-- or we are getting just plain sillier.
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