I wonder how the Dutch legal system works...if the guy fries his brain on the acid or gets AIDS from his sexual encounter, will he be able to sue the network? Or will he be limited to medical and disability payments from the State?

"We're not setting out to shock, but to inform," said a show producer, Sjoerd van den Broek.

My BS-ometer just went from "all hands on deck" to "man the lifeboats."

Peter;

You're missing the viewpoint of libertarianism, which isn't that this is a good thing, but that it's not a problem against which law is going to be effective. If there's strong enough societal revulsion to get laws passed against it, then you don't really need the law in the first place. And if you can't get the law passed, it wouldn't have done any good anyway.

I'd imagine that your resident libertarians might point out that the Dutch youth channel is sponsored by the Dutch GOVERNMENT so what libertarians think really wouldn't be applicable in this case.

Main presenter Filemon Wesselink, 26, is billed to go on a pub crawl, take heroin in the form of a pill, and try LSD at home on the sofa under the watchful eye of his mother. He will also retire into a locked room and try to establish whether oral sex is better from a man or a woman.

We agree, that kind of selfishness is ugly. He should leave the door unlocked in case his mom wants to watch.

Nice shot, Bret! That just re-enforces my view that the real problem isn't government not doing enough, but government actively munging up the works.

Foos - The medical and disability payments from the state are made in-kind -- heroin, marijuana and prostitutes.

When I was a boy if we wanted to watch the antics of bisexual junkies we looked out the front window. Now everyone would rather sit passively in front of their TV sets instead of engaging with reality.

The Dutch have banned the public smoking of cigarettes, however, so it seems a bit churlish to quibble about trivialities such as the above when they are correct on the important issues.

Does the Dutch government allow competing religious channels on television?

Of course, in a libertarian fantasy, we would all be broadcasting whatever we want on a single channel resulting in a hodge-podge of static. That would be real freedom.

However, in this case, it would also be an improvement.

Cable TV in the U.S. shows similar stuff almost every night.

Is the objection that Spuiten & Slikken is on broadcast TV ?

In a country with legal prostitution and legal but restricted drugs, this seems tame enough.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at September 23, 2005 2:13 AM

Carter: we also have the highest gas taxes/prices in the world and sink lots of money in public transport, esp. rail.

AOG/Bret

You guys slay me. I have this image of you wandering around Sodom and Gomorrah trying to figure out who is on a public subsidy and who is paying for it all out of their own savings.

Peter:

Re-read AOG's first post.

Bret is suggesting that if the government wasn't supporting this channel in the first place, the stuff wouldn't be on on the air.

Remember Piss Christ?

Deja vu all over again.

If this television program wasn't subsidized by the government, it probably wouldn't be happening. The fact that it's being shown on state sponsored television legitimizes the behavior in the public's mind otherwise, I think, most people would condemn it as gross and vulgar in the extreme. Showing porn on cable TV that people must subscribe to is, I guess, eyes rolling, part of our first amendment rights.

The large Muslim community in their midst whose religion is based on the ignorance and superstitions of an 8th century mystic couldn't be more at odds with the lack of inhibitions among the Dutch population, and I think a clash between these two extremes is inevitable.

I also believe that similarly if abortion wasn't subsidized and legitimized by the government, public opinion would condemn its use for casual birth control.

"...but never an adult critique."

M. van den Broek, please see ERP's comments above.

Erp: you'd be unpleasantly surprised by some of the shock TV that was shown on the commercial channels. Although now that channels have an established presence on the Dutch mediascape, they are toning it down under sponsor pressure.

If a thing is subsidized, it no longer has any constraints and the most radical thinkers will take over.

TV commercials bug me as much as anybody and I think they're the reason I never really gave TV a chance to get me hooked, but in the real world where most of us reside, commercial television must bend to public opinion in order to attract sponsors.

That said, I understand that network programming has gotten quite raunchy in language, casual sex, violence and a personal favorite, close-ups of autopsies designed to h/t the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan dumb deviancy down. Do their rating reflect a large viewership? I hope not, but I really don't know.

What do about the appallingly vulgar popular culture? I don't like censorship and I especially don't like smarmy characters like Jack Valenti or George Carlin demagoging the lack of or the fact of censorship. I believe parents should control what their kids do, television consumption included.

Perhaps we've reached the apogee and the pendulum is coming back to a more reasonable place where we won't be forced enact laws against the media, nor will they air programming so objectionable that we will be tempted to do so.

Peter;

And I envision you wandering Soddom and Gomorrah, mumbling to yourself "if I could just get this bill through committee, I'm sure it would straighten everybody out".

Peter,
Jeff Guinn correctly interpreted my comment. If it wasn't for government and subsidies, it's quite unlikely that particular show would have been produced.

erp wrote: "...lack of inhibitions among the Dutch population..."

We have a major contract with a large Dutch company, and I've found that the Dutch are surprisingly conservative in a behavioral sense. They vote for liberal politicians, but in their day to day lives they don't have a lack of inhibitions, in general. Very few of them (percentage wise) actually take advantage of things like the sort of legal marijuana and the like. Indeed, that's probably the reason they get away with those sorts of very liberal laws.

Bret. you're right. I had no evidence that every, or even most, of the Dutch are lacking inhibitions, so I should have qualified that statement by saying their "apparent" lack of inhibitions.

If, as you say and I have no reason to doubt it, the average burgher is conservative, why on earth have they turned over their country to these crazies and why are they allowing their immigrant population to wreck havoc to their orderly lives.

erp,
My Dutch friends are a very tolerant and practical people. While they may not approve of, say, indulging in prostitution for themselves, they are willing to tolerate it for others, and from a practical point of view, in a homogenous society that isn't going to wantonly indulge in prostitution anyway, the most practical approach is just to allow it. They've gotten away with that approach because they are actually behaviorally conservative so their society is somewhat insulated from their policy decisions.

Regarding the Dutch "allowing their immigrant population to wreck havoc to their orderly lives", my Dutch friends are totally freaking out about that to the point of despair. They're starting to understand that the policies of the past based on tolerance and practicality don't necessarily have universal application. They just have no idea what to do about it (or, there are ideas, but no strong consensus).

Note that I'm only speaking for the Dutch people I know, who have all taken classes on how to deal with foreigners, including us right wing Americans, so there's some chance they're telling me what I want to hear. However, they're the client and I'm the vendor, so I don't think so.

Bret, I've read on some Scandinavian blogs that people are literally unable to take a strong stance against lawlessness due to decades of sensitivity conditioning and that men have become, as the governator calls them, girly men.

I hope a strong leader emerges and soon because the longer the inevitable is postponed, the stronger the Muslim's get and more paralyzed by inaction the Dutch and the Nordic people become.

It would intolerable for northern Europe to become a Muslim state. Would or should we send the calvary to the rescue? I really don't know.

Maybe its a plot by the Dutch Government to freak the Muslims out and persuade them to leave.

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 23, 2005 4:17 PM

"We're not setting out to shock, but to inform," said a show producer, Sjoerd van den Broek. "The idea is to treat these subjects like a piece of theatre, to review them if you like. There's been endless idle chat about these matters, but never an adult critique."

"We just want to explain really clearly what all this stuff actually does to you," Mr Van den Broek said.

You can tell this is a government sponsored show by the need to give it a pretense of education. A commercial show would just shamelessly pander to their viewer's prurient interests. The Left has to convince itself that it is acheiving real progress. In a way, it is quite Puritan. No pleasure for pleasure's sake, everything must serve a greater purpose.

I was in Europe again recently. I lived in Italy as a child, it was great, but as an adult, forget it. Too old, too stale, a feeling of being trapped in a a small stodgy place with no energy. Give me Australia any day.

The euros, all of them, need vicarious sex and drugs to sedate them as they slide towards decline and the inevitable christian/muslim sectarion wars of the 2030's. Then Old Europe will rediscover it's joy for life as it indulges in it's most treasured pass time, ethinic slaughter.