Newsgroups: rec.video.cable-tv,misc.consumers,alt.cable-tv.re-regulate
Subject: Re: Cable TV Consumer Protection Act of 1992
From: jack@myamiga.mixcom.com (Jack Decker)
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 92 13:50:18 GMT
Organization: Northern Bytes BBS - Sault Ste. Marie, MI U.S.A.

On 28 Sep 92, Jack Decker wrote to All:

This is not in response to any one message that has been posted here, but
rather to several I have received.

You liberals really are showing your true colors, especially in netmail.  I
wish that netiquette would allow me to cross-post some of the responses I've
received. Two things have become very apparent to me:

First, there are a few of you who are true hypocrites.  You want total freedom
of speech for any manner of filth that may come across the cable lines, but in
the next breath you want to censor the religious channels.   In your mind you
justify this as okay because SOME of the religious channels pay SOME cable
system operators a small amout to carry their channels (at least this is the
claim that some of you are making), and for some reason you perceive this as
some sort of great evil.

Reading between the lines, though, what you really object to is the "waste" of
a channel that could be used for something that YOU want to watch.

Folks, get a clue... those stations simply WOULD NOT EXIST if nobody watched
them.  Not only do people watch those station, but in many cases they even send
in money to help support them.  If some of that money happens to find its way
back to your local cable system, it might help finance their next channel
capacity expansion (then again, it might not, but that's the decision of the
cable company, not the broadcaster).

Maybe you object to a viewer-supported station.  Fine, do you also complain
about PBS stations?  Your local PBS station runs fundraisers and I'll bet that
they do NOT send a token payment to your local cable system.

Some of you are just displaying plain old anti-Christian bigotry when you
object to the religious stations.  You want to be a bigot, that is your choice,
but please recognize that you are objecting to religious stations mainly
becuase of their content, which you don't like, and not because of their method
of support or the fact that they pay the cable system to carry them.  I'll bet
that if the sci-fi channel paid your local cable system to carry them, there
wouldn't be a peep of objection out of any of you.

The second thing is that some of you just can't stand to hear anyone take a
stand for old fashioned morality without tilting, so you send netmail flames
hoping to get that person to shut up.  Look, you have the right to hold the
opinion that I'm full of baloney, but you DON'T have the right to say that I
cannot express my opinions about something just because they don't agree with
yours.  Nor do you have the right to demand that I back up each statement I
make in excruciating detail.  When I make some statement of obvious fact (for
example, that viewing porno incites some people to commit sex crimes), that's
partly only common sense, which some of you apparently don't have.  But if you
want to be contentious about it, YOU can spend your time going down to the
library and researching the subject.  I have no intention of getting into a
"battle of the experts" here.

(What's a "battle of the experts?"  That's where I go and get data to support
my position, and you go out and get data to support yours, and then you say my
sources [the "experts" I'm quoting] are no good, and I say the same about
yours, and then we waste bandwidth arguing over whose "experts" are more
reliable.)

So I WILL express my opinions, where appropriate, but I am going to ignore
netmail flames that are basically intended to try and convince me that I don't
know what I'm talking about and should shut up.  I know better, at least in
this case.  However, at the same time, I think this thread has pretty well run
its course, and I have to go out of town for a few days anyway (with no net
access during that period) so hopefully this thread will purge itself.

I'd just like to talk to some of you in about ten or twenty years and see if
you've changed your minds.  When I was 20, I thought exactly as some of you do
now (and was just as obnoxious about stating my views, which is why I can't be
TOO hard on some of you).  After seeing what has happened to society in the
last 20 years, I have done almost a 180 degree turn in my thinking.  For some
of you, the realization will come when you have children, and realize what sort
of world you're sending them out into.

Of course, some people never seem to grow any wiser as they get older, and THAT
is the truly sad part.

Jack

Jack Decker                               | No, I don't own an Amiga; I just
Internet address: jack@myamiga.mixcom.com | get Internet mail via a gateway
Fidonet address:  1:154/8                 | system that runs on an Amiga.
Newsgroups: rec.video.cable-tv,misc.consumers,alt.cable-tv.re-regulate