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September 5th, 1999: The Latest Insanity Out of Washington
Originally, this month's editorial was to be about the current attack by the media on the First Amendment, particularly with regard to gamer's rights. This is an important issue, but it will have to wait, because Washington is once again trying to deprive you and me of our First Amendment rights. For further information, please read this article from The Freedom Forum:
A New Law Designed to Have a Chilling Effect on Freedom of Speech
The fact of the matter is, fascists in Washington, people like Tipper Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Bill Bennet and Orrin Hatch (it is a really long list, too long to go into here) have become ever bolder and more open in their assault on the First Amendment. Well, why not when they've been able to inflict such an Orwellian piece of technology as the V-chip on the American population. For anyone who doesn't understand why the V-chip is Orwellian, allow me to detail its operation here. The V-chip will be present in every television set sold in the United States from now on. The people who will activate it (at first, because I'm sure the next step we be to have it preset as active) will be people who have found no reason to disagree with the current government policy on the First Amendment. The people who people like myself most need to reach. This is the operation of the chip: a government controlled ratings board rate a TV show for "objectionable content" which will be pretty much mean whatever they choose it to mean, this show then has a coded signal transmitted along with the show, and TV in which the V-chip is activated are blacked out upon recipt of this coded signal. The people who get the blacked out screen have no way of knowing why their screen has just come up with the "ratings limit exceeded" blackout screen, they just know that they are being protected from something that the government finds objectionable. The government will find away to turn this to their political advantage, in fact, that's the only reason to set up such a thing since people already have ample information to decide what TV shows are violent and what TV shows aren't (no one flips on the Sopranos or NYPD Blue every week without already knowing what they will be getting) is to control people politically.
Of course, even the V-Chip and forcing ever greater and more obtrusive ratings and warnings on every kind of media available is never enough. The government is currently engaged in a terror campaign against the people in this country who would speak out against them, it is no coincidence that people like Oliver Stone (who I disagree with, but who has been consistently critical of the excesses of the US government) are the ones who are being targetted by would-be government censors. It is naive to think that Natural Born Killers is more violent than say, 8 Millimeter or Silence of the Lambs, and yet it is Oliver Stone who is constantly under attack for this particularly political movie, a movie which is his attempt to demonstrate the perversion and hypocrisy of a media establishment which on the one hand condemns "violent" movies, TV, and video games while at the same time dwelling on every morbid, prurient detail of the Jon Benet Ramsey case.
In my opinion, the current situation in Washington is the result of the cozyness between the two political parties which have dominated the American political scene for far too long. The Democrats and Republicans believe that they know the future, that one or the other party will always dominate American political life. Therefore, both groups are working hard to put into place measures that will insure their political dominance into the forseeable future. The best way to do this is to suppress the political rights of people who are neither Republicans nor Democrats, and therefore are not cozy with the media establishment which is made up almost entirely of tools for one of these two parties. The oligarchs are working hard to create an authoritarian state in which their rule is unquestioned and the opposition to them has limited opportunities for success. They will continue to chip away at our Bill of Rights (which, I might remind everyone has served the American people far better than either of the two political parties in the 200 hundred years of its existence) as long as they feel that there is no consequence for their malevolence. The solution is no long writing to your congressman or Senator, the solution can only be an end to the two party system in this country. Vote Libertarian, or in the future you will no longer have the right to do so!
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