I find that violence doesn't really feel real to most Americans, and I think one of the main causes of this is that the US is so isolated from world events.

WWII, Vietnam, etc. all happened "out there somewhere", and aren't really considered by those who didn't actively participate. Veterans of such conflicts are acknowledged as being deeply affected, but the rest of the populace effectively shrugs as if to say "sorry, I don't get it", and go about their lives.

Terrorist attacks and Mexican cartel atrocities affect less than 0.00001 % of the population. (Assuming perhaps 3,200 people per year, which is quite a high estimate.) To the rest, it's just a special effect display or soap opera drama on TV. Street violence in poverty-stricken communities is the closest thing people have to experiencing violence in the US, but that only affects a relatively small portion of the country, and those with little influence.

tl;dr: I think violence is acceptable in US media because most Americans have no true comprehension of violence. It's all a video game or a movie to them.

>Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

-Marshall McLuhan

The Vietnam War was the only one which was so honestly broadcast to the American public. Since then, the media has realized that real violence is not good for ratings, or the war effort.

True enough. But there is still an element of detachment involved. It seems surreal.

The way it's depicted, especially in more modern productions must contribute a lot too. Little wonder it seems like a game when gun battles (and often fight scenes and even car chases) now all look like parody.

I think you mean 0.001%

Ha. So I do. So much for my maths degree. :P

What I find interesting is that, de facto, global services like Facebook, are following and imposing to the rest of world the American cultural norms.

It could have been a worse country, but that is a new twist on soft power (or at least in a new medium and in a new form).

Not only American norms.

For instance, some critics of extremist Islamic ideas are regularly banned in Facebook because their posts are reported as islamophobic (even if they themselves might be Muslims). This is not an American norm.

Yeah because all of Europe sucks at making good web tech for some reason. Seriously - look at the top 100 websites in the world; not a single one produced by Europe[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites

Edit: Downvote all you want. I'll redact my statement if someone can show me that Europe does not suck at making web tech. But you can't, because Europe is not competitive in the web tech scene. I don't know why, but that's the way it currently is.

> look at the top 100 websites in the world; not a single one produced by Europe[1]

Did you actually read that link before you posted it? On that list there are sites hosted by companies based in Cyprus (xHamster), the Netherlands (booking.com), Poland (onet.pl, xnxx), and the UK (BBC).

It may surprise you to learn that all of those countries are, in fact, in Europe.

BBC and Onet are not in the top 100, but sure, I'll give you the other 2.

2 out of the top 100 come from Europe. Good job.

I think it rather means you should retract your statement.

It's a bit skewed to assume e.g. Google produces everything in the US; Google and many of those companies are multinationals, with both legal and development entities all over the world, including Europe. There's also the fact that a lot of European-based startups incorporate themselves in the US because of legal issues - it's easier to sell a US company's software in Europe than the other way around. A lot of US companies are required by law to only use US-made software, too. Probably leftovers from the Cold War.

> it's easier to sell a US company's software in Europe than the other way around

Well maybe this is the reason Europe's software is not generally competitive? If Europe discriminates against the sale of its own software, it's no wonder.

Apart from the Web itself being invented by a European at a European research center?

Debatable. Everyone loves to take credit for the invention of any revolutionary innovation. And indeed, credit can be spread all around.

It's like Europe claiming sole credit for the invention of the PC because Alan Turing was British even though Americans invented the integrated circuit and actually built the first viable PCs.

First you make an absurd statement as absolute fact, but now its "debatable". It looks to me like you are backtracking. HTTP came out of CERN... what exactly is it you want to debate about?

It's not an absurd statement, it's the truth. Europe can't compete with American web tech (and probably even software in general). Think about it. In your day to day dealings with computers, what percentage of the software you use is American/European? I'm betting it's something like 99:1 (unless you try to make the claim the Linux is Finnish even though the majority of the developers for it are American and the creator himself is an American citizen). Compare to cars, which are more evenly split between countries (Japanese, European, American, etc.).

I'm not backtracking on that argument.

OP made a poor attempt to excuse Europe's lack of competitiveness in the software/web tech scene by waving their hands and saying "We invented all of it" (which is highly debatable). Claiming that Europe invented the web because HTTP came out of CERN and some European person envisioned a global network is bogus. Those are only tiny parts of what make up "the web". You conveniently sweep ARPANET, TCP/IP, and other core web technologies under the rug.

Most software and languages I deal with are open source and the names I see associated with them seem very european to me. Im also pretty sure that these are the same tools that my fellow american developers that you are putting on a pedestal use as well. Just walk away, you really are backing yourself into a corner.

Yes, if you try really hard, you can pretend that Europe contributes just as much to the tech scene as America does.

I would say about half of the stuff on this list was either written in Europe or by Europeans that learned to code in Europe... and I didn't really have to try really hard or pretend, but by all means keep clutching to your silly nationalistic pride. https://www.quora.com/What-is-Facebooks-architecture-6

Spotify? Soundcloud?

American ignorance at its finest.

It's not competitive. Obviously every once in a while Europe will be able to make a popular web app. But for every European example I can give you 20 American examples.

I don't think you belong here.

To some degree that's a compromise. There are people who want neither nudity nor violence on TV, but they've lost the violence fight (somewhat: there are still limits, see http://screencrush.com/avengers-rated-r/ ), while winning the nudity fight.

Often when laws don't make sense, you'll find the law was forged as a compromise, rather than a logical overmind creating it. the constitution is a clear example of this.

Also the censorship of a few spoken words on TV while showing gore and other violent scenes are not a problem. I find it weird also cause when the word is censored as a viewer you already know that's what the character was meant to say.

Gore is a problem, yeesh. The whole "americans love violence" is overrated. The love of violence is a worldwide thing. Not like John Woo, Dario Argento, or Takashi Miike are american.

The amount of clean, bloodless violence against faceless enemies (watch any Hollywood movie) is a kind of soft propaganda IMO

i didnt say Americans love violence. my point is that if your tv show is targeted to adults (due to its violent nature for example) then how is allowing those words uncensored a problem?

"I find it weird also cause when the word is censored as a viewer you already know that's what the character was meant to say."

A feature that can be utilized to make boring dialog really funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhJNwKpS6OU

Edit: This just made me realize you can bump G rated content up to PG-13 just by adding beeps and blurs. I bet that's how most reality TV content is generated.

> Edit: This just made me realize you can bump G rated content up to PG-13 just by adding beeps and blurs

I can't believe I'm posting this on Hackernews but it actually is relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXPnH0C9UA

I'm always late to the party but I get there eventually :) I'm curious though, if this were officially release on TV in the modified form would it actually get different rating? If so, it would mean the beeps and blurs themselves are viewed as a form of suggestive dialog.

violence in their movies... violence in their cinemas

But the kids don't! Think of the kids!

Um, plenty of violence is deemed inappropriate. I doubt much of USA broadcast TV even comes close to a hard R rating. I'd also point out that Italy in particular has had little problem with making hyper-violent content like giallo movies, in addition to showing copious nudity, and Norway has quite a few violent horror films under their belt.

It's more broadcast standards originally prevented anything, nudity or extreme violence, from being shown, and mature content was exiled to cable.

You'd be amazed what some shows can pass through the censors. Watch NBC's Hannibal to see what I'm talking about.

But nudity is a huge no-no.

(Kinda gross Hannibal spoilers below)

There's an episode where a man's skin is flayed off his back and turned into metaphorical wings, which are then used to hang him from the ceiling.

In depicting this from behind, you could originally see the man's buttocks. NBC censors objected, so the "fix" was to digitally add a massive amount of dripping blood to cover them up.

The absurdity of that has always stuck with me.

You may be right. It's just interesting that on Sunday afternoon they have no problem showing movies where the hero kills dozens of people with pleasure but even the slightest hint of nudity or swear words is not OK.

To be fair it is child nudity in this case, which has different legal ramifications in some situations. Also the views on nudity vary a lot from person to person in the US.

Only if deemed to be pornographic. I think it's fair to say this picture doesn't meet any of the requirements to be deemed as obscene (at least in a sexual sense; using napalm on people is another matter entirely).

Very applicable Apocalypse Now quote:

"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene"

Actually it's child violence. The nudity is incidental.

All the messages from Facebook seem pretty clear that it's the nudity in the image that's the problem. Have you seen something else from Facebook claiming it's the violence?

EDIT: Here's the orignal post, which contains an image from Facebook. http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I-am-...

That image says:

> We place limitations on the display of nudity to limit the exposure of the different people using our platform to sensitive content. Any photographs of people displaying fully nude genitalia or buttocks, or fully nude female breasts, will be removed. Photos of women actively engaging in breast feeding or exposing reconstructed nipples for awareness are allowed. We also make allowances for digitally produced content for educational, humorous, or satirical purposes, and for photographs of real world art. We understand that these limitations will sometimes affect content shared for legitimate reasons, including awareness campaigns or artistic projects, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

> Therefore I ask you to remove or pixelize this picture.

That's pretty clearly about the nudity.

Nudity is far easier to be identified algorithmically than violence.

Honestly to me it's more Facebook in this case; of the larger social networks, they tend to be one of the more restrictive when it comes to nudity in general. This hard-nosed attitude has come back to bite them on occasion. (See: the long-running "breastfeeding pictures censored" controversy.)

I wonder how much Facebook rely on algorithms to do their filtering these days. This is one of those cases where I can easily see those algorithms scanning the image and detect "child nudity!", resulting in the takedown. Algorithms aren't great at knowing context yet. (Even not every human reviewer would know context, even though it is pretty easy to reverse GIS and find out, oh, this is a Pulitzer prize winning photo...)

This image doesn't even get caught by the UK filters, which tend to be pretty strict on images of child nudity.

The image of nude and burning Phan Thi Kim Phuc appeared on the front page of the New York Times on June 9, 1972.

I'd be very curious to see what would happen if NYT had posted this.

Actually, in most cases they are not judging the level of violence, but the graphic nature of the outcome of that violence.

Lots of bad guys that have gray dust instead of blood being shot up in your movie? PG, PG-13 at worst.

Lots of bad guys with thirty gallons of blood pumping through their veins being shot up in your movie? R.

Perhaps this phenomenon is a result of the religious imperialism which first reigned over the New World.

Nudity was highly sacrilegious for los conquistadores de las americas, but the violence they used was not.

I remember watching Airplane! and seeing boobs go by during the freak-out scene. And that was rated PG at the time I think?

At the time there was a huge distance between PG and R since there was no PG-13. It was likely judged as not gratuitous.

I think the Airplane scene was completely gratuitous :)

Oh, well, true. I meant sexually.

Blame it on the Puritans. Their moral baggage has been carried along in tandem with our national ethos, for better or worse, over the centuries.

Citation? The Puritans thought sex was a wonderful thing within Christian marriage, and on at least one occasion excommunicated a man for neglecting his wife sexually, based on the Biblical command that a husband's body belongs to his wife and vice versa. Contrast this with Catholics, who still require celibacy of priests in 2016, and who imagine the Virgin Mary remaining a virgin her whole life, despite being married, because this, in their view, is part of her holiness.

http://www.ligonier.org/blog/sex-in-marriage/

> The Puritans thought sex was a wonderful thing within Christian marriage

Ok.

> Contrast this with Catholics

Who also think sex is a wonderful thing within Christian marriage.

> who still require celibacy of priests in 2016

"Celibacy" means "not being married", requiring priests to be celibate (which, strictly speaking, Catholics do not [0]) is orthogonal to beliefs about whether sex is wonderful within Christian marriage.

[0] The Catholic Church does not permit priests to marry, but does not bar married men from ordination to the priesthood (it does bar married men from ordination to the episcopate, however.) The Latin Rite of the Catholic Church has a particular discipline which requires that only unmarried men may be ordained to the priesthood, a discipline that was adopted to deal with particular disciplinary problems that arose during the Middle Ages, but which has never been held to be theologically necessary (and which isn't applied within the Church outside of the Latin Rite.)

I've been curious how much impact they have had on our current culture; a people who (to paraphrase Robin Williams) were so uptight they got kicked out of England.

Christian mores definitely still drive our cultural mores, and while there is some easing of the restrictions there, sex is still much less acceptable than violence. As a simple example of this, attempts to reduce the violence in highschool football are as vehemently opposed as attempts to provide more than "abstinence only" sex-ed.