Cyprus-Forum.com

[Sega]

"We have fought hard in the West to sustain freedom of speech .The UK media , TV , newspapers etc are on the whole pretty fair when it comes to racial issues."

Yes to some extend, but much of the television programs are coming straight from the US and seem to be quite insulting in parts. The UK is too tolerant in my opinion. However when it comes down to Sky TV it seems that the programs they show are to a very low standard and in-parts insulting and can be seen as racist, I am not really sure why.

"immigrants must respect the native culture or piss off ."
I think you got it wrong. This post is not about immigration, as far as I am concerned this post is about the quality of television programs and if they should have more censoring. Is their a relationship between bad television and social impact. And whether this has a link to freedom of speech and censoring television. 'miltiades' is you have issues on immigration please go to another post and do not post anything here regarding immigration as it does not apply.

[villawagen]

borat and ali g is a strange issue. for start sacha baron cohen (or whatever his name is) who plays ali g is not black !! however the people who he interviewed accepted him as black.
the strangest thing is that he is a jew, so he is kind of turning anti semitism around on himself when he plays borat

i also liked borats sister as she won an award for the 5th best prostitute in kazakhstan.

i did wince a bit when he had a nekid fight with that fat bloke

[Damsi]

I think Borat's aim was to expose American society, not people from Kazakhstan. Someone would have to be very dim to actually think people in kazakhstan were like Borat by watching a movie. As for South Park, again it aims to expose society. It's total satire and from what I've seen of it, it makes fun of everyone and everything, no exceptions.
These days some people make a career out of being offended. Being offended by a joke is a personal choice. I am Irish and I have yet to be offended by an Irish joke.
There are times when political correctness is necessary to protect minorities, and times when it is just plain stupid such as:

The Hart Male Voice Choir was told not to sing the line "Birthday greetings, bottle of wine", when they performed Paul McCartney's song When I'm Sixty Four, in case they caused offence to Jehovah's Witnesses who do not recognise birthdays.

The Bishop of Hulme called for the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country to be banned because he thought it was an example of the dangerous increase in nationalism in Britain.

MP Philip Davies in his maiden speech to Parliament said: 'Whoever said 'the customer is always right' never worked for Asda. I encountered the customer who accused Asda of being racist towards Irish people because we sold "thick Irish sausages". Trying to persuade her that "thick" related to the sausages and not to the Irish was beyond me.'

Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax banned visitors from cooing at new-born babies following a staff advice session which highlighted the need for respect and dignity towards patients. Signs were displayed in the hospital saying, "what makes you think I want to be looked at?"

The director of education at Wirral Council told staff not to describe children as gifted or talented because he thought this suggested exclusiveness.

A puppeteer in Broadstairs was rapped for portraying Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as villains in his Punch and Judy show.

Police in London were told they could no longer refer to people as a good egg or a bad egg as it could be construed to be racist.

Council staff banned a woman from giving daffodils to librarians because the colour of the flowers could be construed as a sign of support for the Liberal Democrats, whose logo is yellow. Medway Councl eventually apologised to the woman.


PS. Zan
If you want to see a few clips of South Park they post them at comedy central, which also produces the most excellent Daily Show and Colbert Report.
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/sout ... ndex.jhtml

[GorillaGal]

i think alot of the racial stuff on tv is more aimed to get people to think about how stupid it actually is, and in a strange way, to change it.

personally, i never understood why blacks in teh USA are allowed to call each other the "N" word, but if a white person uses that word, it is a big freaking deal. then erase the word--and NO BODY use it.....

[cypezokyli]

my opinion on the subject is that freedom of speech is really valuable. i have expressed this opinion a number of times before (drawings of the prophet , the popes speech , etc ). especially about satire , i am against sencorhsip .

one can find borat funny or not funny , but i would never agree sencoring the movie.

[zan]

Thanks Damsi I will check it out.

People are intrinsically shallow. I went through my early working life hearing black people being called Nig_Nog and Sambo because of a program on the TV called "Love thy neighbor". This program was supposed to be satirical to show how shallow white English people were in those days but people being shallow did not get it. Not the ones on the building sites anyway. It was not just the words being used but the blacks were actually being bullied. In those days the blacks were generally more scared to talk back to the big white man and I suppose felt that because they were in someone else’s country they could not speak up, especially when the police were in the same frame of mind as the rest. Although I started by saying it was in my early working days this program started airing when I was still at school and it went on then. I saw a change when the black people that were born here and felt part of this country, began to fight back. They took back their respect. They were no longer seen as a weak "Sambo" that would not always be the butt of peoples jokes but be bullied as well. I noticed this because in our school the Greek and Turkish Cypriots would not stand for being called "Bubble" and the like and took control faster. WE were actually feared by the English kids, on the whole, because when we lost our tempers, all hell broke loose. The black people were much more placid and it used to brake my heart to see it and I would defend them whereever I saw this injustice. I believe that we in the UK deserve the criminal element of black society that we have because we did not give them a chance. I saw bosses on site refuse jobs to them just because they were black and these bosses were very vocal in how proud they were of their decision after the black person had left. I was a young worker at the time and everyone seemed much older so it was more difficult for me to speak up. It still broke my heart though. The time I noticed a change was when the "alternative" comedians came about. Before then there was a very popular comedic program called the (yes you've guessed it) the "comedians". This was full of the same types of jokes that used words like sambo and nig nog. Bernard Manning was a prime example and is often used to highlight the point even today. The alternative comedians came on and were in general much more clever than these traditional comedians. They went on to actually make fun and ridicule these other comedians and the general public began to wake up and feel embarrassed about their old fashioned racist comedy. It was no longer "cool" to be racist. Thank god. There was a bit of a war going on between these two types of comedians as you can probably imagine and sometimes it was a very public one. I went to the Circus Tavern a good few years’ back, and was given a dirty look by the comedian on stage for not laughing at his old and racist jokes. He picked on the one black person in the audience and gave us the very old racist jokes that had been done to death long before. This Tavern is in the Romford area where the older and stupider white English share a brain cell.


Anyway..... The moral of the story s that the comedians seemed to have sorted out the problem themselves. Not by sitting down and talking about it but by the more educated ones using satire against those that thought it fine to degrade people in order to make a living. Censorship would mean that you would also have to stop the alternative comedians from basically taking the piss out of racists as well. So it would certainly be counter productive in this instance.

[GorillaGal]

it never ceases to amaze me what the radio stations do to certain songs. i can understand them beeping out the four letter words, or the "N" word, but the other day i noticed in Pink's new song--"U and UR Hand" she says something about a cock fight, and they beeped out "cock". in another song by someone long forgtton, they beeped out the word "rape," while Green Day can't use the word "fag." these are not bad words. and you can't shield the children from reality. i am not sure i understand the reasoning behind all this. it all sounds so Beavis and Butthead to me.
just say NO to censorship!

[devil]

I was censored on a forum (not this one) the other day. I tapped in 'grasshopper' and it appeared as gr*****pper, the equivalent of being beeped out. I remonstrated with the admin who told me that a derogatory word meaning a posterior orifice was verboten in any form, but he wild-carded after the 'o'.

Maybe this forum needs a whole raft of derogatory words to be ****-beeped, though. In my forum, I have done it only for derivatives of f*** and c***, but I don't have a real problem there because the average user does not need to show his ignorance by the use of obscenities regarding fellow-members.

[Damsi]

I had the word Shiite bleeped out on one forum but oddly enough it didn't bleep out the word shit

[Damsi]

Check out Bill Maher's rap Translation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pm2wTGgYAw