I always find it interesting that no level of violence is deemed inappropriate in the US but nudity has to be avoided at any cost.
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.
-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.
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).
[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.
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.
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.
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.
2 out of the top 100 come from Europe. Good job.
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.
American ignorance at its finest.
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.
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.
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.
I can't believe I'm posting this on Hackernews but it actually is relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AXPnH0C9UA
It's more broadcast standards originally prevented anything, nudity or extreme violence, from being shown, and mature content was exiled to cable.
But nudity is a huge no-no.
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.
"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"
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.
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...)
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.
Nudity was highly sacrilegious for los conquistadores de las americas, but the violence they used was not.
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.
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.)