The coarsening of the public square

David

No, she's not.

"Mr President, don't you think that $10 pornography available on every street corner is too high a price to pay for freee speech?"

"No. But I think $10 is too high a price to pay for pornography."

cuffleyburgers

I would agree that society is most definitely dumbed down, and coarsened, but I don't agree with her proposed solution, effectively censorship.

That will not fix the underlying problem which is that people are increasingly growing up unaware of the basic decencies or politeness.

There was a time when if a child said "bum" for example, he would get a whack around the ears. Now he just raises a laugh, and any parent who does manage a whack around the ears will end up in jail.

The problem is far more serious and difficult to fix, than this, apparently rather silly, woman supposes.

Paul Lettan

Yes! I wholeheartedly agree with her. It's been a private beef of mine for the past five years. I was standing at the check-out of the now defunct Safeway in Bloomsbury. My 2 year old son was stretching forward from his buggy trying to reach a newspaper. It was only after I had paid that I realised he was trying to pull aside the knickers of a hirsute topless model on the front page of the Sport!

I blame my own, Saga Boomer, generation for the coarsening of the public realm. A whole generation has been brought up to find Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand's toilet humour funny. The lad and ladette culture of the past decade is a blight on our society.

Tanuki

I don't know who this 'Louise Bagshaw' woman is - but she certainly doesn't sound like the sort of person whose face would fit at any of my parties.