In the UK spoil-sports and busy-bodies use the forces of the compensation culture (the fear of being sued) and those stormtroopers of humourless jobsworthyness - Health and Safety Officer (those with a vested interest in finding and regulating “danger”) – to ruin everything from unprotected sex with teenage secretaries in the server room to lighting the bosses chest hair at Christmas parties.
In the USA there is an even more sinister phenomenon. The organised pressure group.
We have pressure groups here in the UK too (known as “campaigns” and the people who apply the pressure are known as “campaigners”), but thankfully most are utterly stupid (except Civil Liberties campaigners like me) and they are very badly organised.
Not so those US spoilsports. In the USA it is perfectly normal for the tiniest of minorities to ruin fun for the most enormous of majorities.
Here is a case in point, from Slashdot Politics:
Lone Activist Group Submits 99.8% of FCC Complaints
From the vocal-minority dept:
“Mediaweek is reporting that complaints to the FCC are rising. Powell spoke before congress, detailing that the complaints are up from 14,000 in 2002, to nearly 240,000 in 2003. There were only 350 complaints during 2000 and 2001. Powell failed to mention however that 99.8% of those complaints came from
PTC (Parents Television Council). The article does mention he may have been unaware of this fact. Jonathan Rintels (president of the Center for Creative Voices in Media) commented, ‘It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio.’”
Now that is a pressure group! We are doomed if our lot ever learn how to operate like those yanks. Look what happened when the local socialists (or pseudo-Tories) borrowed even a few ideas from the US political machine (Hint: 6 years and counting of Labour rule).
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