This may be the oddest story of the day. China’s version of the FCC, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, has banned time travel. Mustn’t give anyone the idea that they can change the future, you know.
CNN.com reports:
New guidelines issued on March 31 discourage plot lines that contain elements of “fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and a lack of positive thinking.”
“The government says … TV dramas shouldn’t have characters that travel back in time and rewrite history. They say this goes against Chinese heritage,” reports CNN’s Eunice Yoon. “They also say that myth, superstitions and reincarnation are all questionable.”
The Chinese censors seem to be especially sensitive these days. But for the television and film industry, such strictures would seem to eliminate any Chinese version of “Star Trek,” “The X-Files,” “Quantum Leap” or “Dr. Who.” And does that mean rebroadcast of huge Hollywood moneymakers like “Back to the Future” and the “Terminator” series are now forbidden?
The Obama administration isn’t worried about time travel. No, they’re looking at the polls and simply wishing they could rewrite the present.
If you could travel back in time, where and when would be your destination? And why?
Source: CNN.com
View Comments (20)
Individuals vs. Governments:
Governments have no imagination; they are locked into a limited, governable analysis. By restricting their dialectical analysis to a linear time sequence, the primary governmental concern is the acceptance of their historical data as the truth. However, imaginative individuals are able to treat such truncated "data" as variables. Such "disrespect" for governmental data (i.e., politically correct data) is any totalitarian's nightmare: The first crack in the official justification of dominance over individuals.
Best Regards,
Frank Hatch
Initial Mass Displacements
Time Travel for Individuals - not Governments:
To break the restriction of a linear time sequence, the Lost need empirical data - uncorrupted, honest data. However, the Lost have filtered all their data with a scientific-religious presumption: a finite universe with a finite number of dimensions.
The Lost do not understand, nor do they perceive their conflict with the Infinite Universe and the Infinite number of dimensions...
"...nothing can be added to it,
nor anything taken from it..."
Best Regards,
Frank Hatch
Initial Mass Displacements
Italy, 79 AD
Gotta be something worth stealing in Pompeii on the day before the eruption, and it's not temporally entangled, being buried for the next 1500-odd years...
Banning time travel is not logical, Captain.
I once wrote a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. (No, they never produced it.) It was interesting to get the list of rules for writing for the show. One rule was that "time travel is forbidden." Time travel plots for ST are only approved when done by their regular stable of writers. As a newbie, it was absolutely off-limits.
Yet, how many did the staff actually do? At least one a season, right? Hell the JJ Abrams movie was all about time travel. LOL
I would travel back in time, and kick Albert Gore, Sr. in the sack really hard.
I HAVE discovered TIME TRAVEL and left this message 6 months from now! Guess what? It doesn't get any better. Sorry. Wish I had better news. Oh and play the following LOTTO numbers... 3 12 21 23 44 59 38. Winnings must be shared with JJJRO. All rights reserved.
What's the Peoples' Republic afraid of? The state owns the means of communication production, I thought that was what every good commie wanted, to own the very means of a thing. Are they afraid that some intrepid chinese might go back in time and find out what POS's Mao and his cronies really were? I'd be worried if I was the man in charge of China too, I have the most people on the planet to worry about, under one big tent, and I have the world's largest community of Christians as well. What if they all went back to Jerusalem circa 30 AD and decided to take on Rome? Things would be a lot dirrerent than they are today! No Mao, no Chinese Cultural Revolution, no Christian slave population to make all the sh*t they sell in Wal-Mart!
They are afraid of losing control. Thus they are loosening the one-child policy because they realize the massive inequality in the boy-girl ratios. They have entire towns without women of child-bearing age. They know this will breed dissent and revolt among the male populace in a couple of decades. Also, you have a bunch of little "Xiao Huangdi" or little emperors running around. Kids who are in their teens, but their parents still wipe their asses for them. (not kidding here, I saw it). China may be up and coming now, but the party foresees disaster looming on the horizon if they don't fix things soon. The libs think we have class warfare here? You should see it there. there IS no middle class. Not like here. You have the uber rich, the getting uber rich then you have the toothless peasants. They always were the ones who revolted in other dynastic coups-d'etats in ancient China. Hell, it was the peasants that revolted and caused the communist party and the KMT in the early 20th century.
Anyone who plans to alter the past and succeeds has already done so- thus the term "past"- and thus we are ALREADY feeling the repercussions of a hypothetical time traveler's journey if he were to depart from the present tomorrow. It's basic science, so why should the Chinese worry? Reality is on their side, unfortunately...
Still, if I could disobey science fact and act as if within popular science fiction, I would totally visit the Third Crusade and knock off ol' Saladin, as much as I respect the man.
Excerpt from Dreams of my Father:
Why my mother chose a prior service US Navy captain to be my father instead of a broke d*ck Kenyen loser, I'll never know, but I am grateful.