Generally I agree with you. I think the point you just mentioned last is the one where I stop agreeing with you:
In my opinion censorship does more harm than having disgusting and discriminating movies and games and books.
To understand my view, you must begin by thinking about your home. Not your country, but the house you live in, and the family you live with (if you don't yet have your own family, think back to your childhood). Your home is not a free-for-all. There are strict censorship rules in place. Your parents undoubtedly told you things along the lines of "there is to be no swearing in this house", and you will probably tell your kids the same, if you aren't doing so already. Similarly, your parents would have probably punished you severely if they caught you with a porn magazine - and if you have any sense, you'll do the same with your own kids. It would never, even for a second, occur to us that this may be harmful - it's plain and simple common sense, you want to raise your children to be good people, and that involves exerting influence over them. What's more, it would never occur to you as a kid, or to your kids, to protest against this. Hands up if you've ever heard a kid tell his parents "it's my constitutional right to swear!". No - kids may disobey, they may in secret read and watch the things they're not supposed to, they may sometimes swear at their parents just to show how rebellious they are, but they do not ever claim they have the right to these things. They understand, in fact, that what they're doing is wrong.
Society, meanwhile, is a group of families working together. In the same way that a father can decide to deny his kids access to porn, so a group of fathers can get together and determine to do the same thing more effectively, as a group, by outlawing porn entirely in their society. This is not wrong, nor is it harmful. It's perfectly reasonable. To understand this, you must consider the fact that you yourself support censorship happily on many counts - for example, while you might say that violent games are all right, you'll most definitely object to somebody plastering a giant piece of child pornography on a billboard outside your window. And you're not in the wrong, you're perfectly right. But if you're perfectly right, then you must acknowledge the fact that it would in fact also be perfectly right and acceptable to ban violent games - or online games, or games featuring purple elephants, or anything else that enough people consider offensive (especially purple elephants...). A society has the right to take such a decision, and while you can object to the merits of such a decision, you have no right to object to them having the power to make the decision in the first place - unless you are indeed so liberal (or rather, so demoralised) that you are willing to take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, and admit that you have no right to stop someone from setting up that child porn billboard outside your window. And remember, that's not really the limit - beyond child porn, there's a variety of more disgusting things. It is indeed a slippery slope...
So, I think that before we can really talk about censorship, you must actually figure out what your view truly is. I suspect that in reality, you are entirely in agreement with me - your claim that censorship is harmful is nothing more than empty words, a facade to give your complaints a moral background that they most definitely do not have.
In general, "freedom of speech" is a funny thing. Many people claim to be in favour of it, but in practice we all agree that it must have strict limits. In truth, there has never been a society where freedom of speech exists - and we are all very grateful for it. This, by the way, also applies to America (where you can go to jail for claiming that you will kill the president, for example), although they are indeed on a slippery slope... towards total freedom. Recently, the US Supreme Court overturned a California law banning the sale of violent games to children under the age of 18, because this law supposedly violated constitutional freedom of speech - how does that make sense? And why did the games industry celebrate this as a great victory?
You ask, where the limits of censorship lie, at which point does it become oppression? The answer is simple - it becomes oppression when it's not the will of the society as a whole, but of individuals who impose their will on society. And this can go both ways. In the same way that you can oppress a child by forcing him to watch some disturbing TV show that gives him nightmares, so you can oppress society by forcing it to accept "speech" that society deems unacceptable. Porn is a great example of this - if you were to conduct nation-wide referendums about banning porn, the result in most countries would be in favour of a total ban. And yet... in most countries, the supreme/constitutional court would then overturn this ban, claiming that it violates constitutional freedom of speech. That is, in fact, oppression.
It is similar in the other direction, the one that you were asking about - it's oppressive to ban something that society considers acceptable. For example, it most definitely would be oppressive to ban criticism of the government (though most societies impose a limit on this - you can criticise the government, but you generally are not allowed to insult its members; you can say what they're doing is wrong, but you can't say "so-and-so is an idiot"). It would also be oppressive to ban all games, or all movies of a certain kind, or music, or whatever.
To bring this all back to games - as you might have worked out from that reference to the games industry celebrating the overturning of that California law (not merely celebrating - it was a games industry body that went to court to get the law overturned), I don't much approve of the general stance of the games industry, which can be loosely translated to "we should be allowed to do anything we like". And it's not merely a case of the immorality and hypocrisy (game developers are parents too...) of this view - it's a matter of basic stupidity. If game developers continue to undermine the right to impose censorship, sooner or later society will find itself defenceless. That same Supreme Court ruling that told California it cannot ban the sale of violent games to minors in fact opened the door to a court ruling that would tell other states they cannot ban the sales of pornography to minors - same logic applies. But when that happens, society is not going to meekly accept the fact that they must give their kids access to harmful materials. Quite the opposite - society will move to change the constitution and restrict freedom of speech, but then government will probably get excessive power to impose censorship where society does not want it. I don't think that's in anyone's interest...
In short - gamers and game developers need to get with the program. They need to accept... well, not so much censorship, as the fact that they already accept and approve censorship and therefore have no right to claim they oppose it. Only then will gamers be able to get out of their current defensive stance, and get into a proper discussion about what should actually be acceptable, and what should not be.
Whew... it's been a while since I've written a reply this long
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Ok, I am European (and so are you, Quarto, if you want to call yourself like that, I know many Polish people don't so no offense) and most Europeans seem to have a different view on censorship than others (for example Americans or Japanese), and there are various reasons for that.
Hehe, I don't think I've heard of any Polish people taking offense at being called European. Some Russians will - Russia has never been able to quite decide if they prefer being a part of Europe or a part of Asia. Poland, though, firmly considers itself to be Europe - the only bone of contention is whether we are western or eastern Europe
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