Well twiddle my knobs!

There seems to be two strands to this thread, the issue about things being imposed upon you, such as other peoples music being played too loud and the issue of censorship.

There are laws and prohibitions to prevent the former but that doesn't appear to be effective as the enforcement of those regulations present problems. A good example of a bad law, is one that is not supported by the majority of people and therefore cannot be enforced. An example of this is in the UK when the wearing of seat belts was made compulsory, if the majority of the people had not thought it was a good idea it would not have been enforceable.

As for censorship, could anybody seriously suggest that banning has ever had anything but the opposite effect? Would we have ever heard of most of the songs mentioned, had they not been banned.

History has demonstrated repeatedly that all that censorship or prohibition has created is a (profitable) demand for whatever has been banned. One thinks of alcohol, drugs and pornography.

The area were there is a problem in not having any censorship, is when it comes to what we want our children exposed to. This creates all sorts of problems and we get in to all sorts of tangles about age limits and suchlike.

Maybe the answer is not to try and protect our children from seeing all the things that adults (and they too will) find interesting. Not to continue to pretend that the world is not what it is and as a consequence expose them to our hypocrisy, which I would suggest is even worse. By all means physically protect them from the dangers of our world but not to inform them of the real nature of those dangers is to put them more at risk. I know innocence sounds better that ignorance but it amounts to the same thing.

It's a bit like the people who would ban the Net and all it's wonders because children might find out that it used for pornography.

The fact is that if you take the forbidden element away from pornography, it is very boring and that applies to the other things too, including the songs.