I thought the BCCSA was bad news, but they’ve got nothing on the British regulator Ofcom. Once again demonstrating the old maxim that policies undertaken “for the sake of the children” tend to be illiberal in effect if not intent, they’re forcing broadcasters to censor scenes in old Tom & Jerry cartoons in which smoking is condoned or glamourised. This spectacular fit of priggish nanny-state sensibilities has prompted a “voluntary” effort by Turner Broadcasting to “scour” 1500 other classic cartoons for any positive references to cigarettes. Extraordinarily, Ofcom’s crackdown was precipitated by a single viewer’s complaint.

There’s something inherently offensive in the view that people are just mindless automatons who will gladly take up smoking because they saw an animated cat play a cigar-smoking opponent in a tennis match. (It’s reminiscent of the old communist argument that “human nature” is irrelevant, because people can be shaped and inculcated any way the state wants.) I’m very skeptical about this, and I suspect the research Ofcom cites, which purports to show a link between cartoon smoking and real smoking, is a manifestation of the junk science that results from allowing “progressive” political opinions to shape and inform social research. (It’s particularly prevalent in the “soft” sciences.) But if it’s true, there is surely a much stronger argument for removing all positive references to violence and crime than there is for censoring mere smoking. And why stop at cartoons? As the Australian Daily Telegraph pithily observes:

That fellow Shakespeare, absolutely full of the worst kind of filth – pre-marital sex, rape, every imaginable kind of pillage, treachery, murder, even some dubious suggestions of inter-species “petting” in one play, we’re advised. Quite shocking. Let us hope Ofcom is on the case before this fellow – 16th century British, apparently – is read too widely.

This isn’t just a reductio ad absurdum; it’s the logic of “positive social conditioning” taken to its natural conclusion. It’s the totalising road we don’t want to go down.