OFF: Gigs to be rated?

[M Holmes]

Horse Whisperer writes:

> The _brats_ complain because they wanna be adults and nobody let's them.
> Deaths and injuries from alcohol occur about 300 times more commonly
> than from drugs, and about 6 million times more than from loud and
> allegedly offensive music.

The injuries from loud music aren't very obvious until years later. I've
hit the age where hearing problems start to show up and I have obvious
high frequency problems showing up in slight tinnitus and an inability
to pick out one voice from a babble during pub conversations. Odds are
good that loud music in my 20's was a primary cause of this. I eschew
headphones as much as possible now and sometimes stuff my ears at gigs
in order to minimise any exacerbating of the problem.

> Drink laws have a good commonsense grounding.  Age restrictions on what
> you can see and hear?  Watch the news and see steaming corpses,
> beatings, hear graphic descriptions of rape and murder.  Let's hear your
> arguments for censoring that.  There are more 24 hour news channels than
> there are 24 hour music stations, so why don't we look at them in the
> same light?
> Which can you see in legislating against music - commonsense or paranoia
> & bigotry?

Information wants to be free. The censors are eventually going to have
to deal with that. Protecting THE CHIIILDRUUUN is going to have to
amount to teaching kids how to deal with it if they encounter offensive
sounds or images. Of course that should have been the method of choice
anyway. It should be done by the folks on the spot, the parents, rather
than having the government dumb down the world to the level of kids and
politicians.

> Chris.

FoFP