Terms like breastaurant are not used in normal discourse. That's something that you do a lot: use words that you seem to perceive as widely-used in a given context (see: breastaurant, Anglo-American) when, in fact, most people are probably not using those words often or in that manner. But then you also take it a step further and feel the need to define many of the terms you're using, which would normally come off as condescending if it weren't so damned funny. Reading through your posts is a constant struggle between laughing and trying my damnedest to give you the benefit of the doubt and take you seriously. But then you do things like say you've learned so much by reading TV Tropes, and it becomes infinitely harder to do the latter.
How exactly am I to explain why I like certain music? It's entirely subjective, and clearly we have differences of opinion in this regard. Sounds you describe as strange or weird I might find interesting or inventive. You said it yourself: "we differ on some things." And we differ on something pretty fundamental to our worldview: our threshold for offense. It takes a lot less to offend you than it takes for me to reach the same reaction. What you view as a deal-breaker hardly phases me.
I'm not here to tell you that your moral viewpoint is wrong. I might at times think that it's black and white in a juvenile way, but you're perfectly entitled to it (just as I am entitled to my judgment of it and vice versa). However, I respect your right to have such opinions. I'm not going to force you to listen to Lil' Wayne giggling and dropping f-bombs. That said, despite your assertions to the contrary, your insistence on a stricter labeling system amounts to censorship that affects my ability to listen to certain types of music. I know you say that the idea behind your labeling is meant to be aimed at children, but you're not considering the consequences of aggressive censorship.
If you need an example, look no further than video games. The ratings system effectively functions as censorship as to what can and can not appear in a video game. Games are rated from E to AO. But wait, you might say, video games only go up to M ratings. And that's effectively true. Despite the existence of an AO rating, no company will develop a title with such a rating for mass markets because it is effectively financial suicide. No major retailer will carry AO games.
What's more, the content that would land a game an AO-rating is frequently featured in R-rated movies. Graphic displays of sex occur fairly regularly in R-rated movies. It's not even always tastefully done; take a look at The Hangover 2 for examples of more full frontal male, female, and transexual nudity in sexually lewd (and humorous if you're into potty humor) contexts. If Bioware rendered so much as a nipple in a sex scene in Mass Effect, the rating would have gone right to AO, and nobody would have sold the game. As it stands, when the game came out with two exceptionally brief sex scenes, neither of which showed any more nudity than you see at a community pool, the media exploded at how inappropriate this was and there was a lot of misguided backlash against the game for it.
Your type of ratings system for music could potentially cause the same thing. If you restrict music so widely on certain points, and restrict the sales of such music so aggressively, you'll start having retailers refuse to sell those albums which receive said warnings labels altogether. Oh wait, this already happens. Walmart doesn't sell anything but the censored "clean" versions of the albums. When retailers stop carrying albums because of warning labels, producers stop producing albums with content that "necessitates" such moral flagging because they're not financially viable. Very quickly, such content disappears because of decisions made by the few and not the many. It is a financial blockade to free speech in art, and that is wrong.
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Originally Posted by Raistlin
