Hobbes, Censorship, Kiwis, and Teaching

So I'm teaching political philosophy right now, and we just finished a unit on Hobbes, who is famous for trying to justify an extremely totalitarian state. One of the elements of the totalitarianism is that the sovereign has total rights of censorship (that's supposed to keep the peace!). When I used to give these lectures in the US, the students got a kick out of that. Here they take it more seriously.

After all, we have a state censor here in NZ. You get the usual areas of concern being censored, which I guess isn't too surprising, but the whole thing freaks me out a little bit. The worst part is that during the daytime, movies with the equivalent of an American R-rating are banned from TV. That's right--I pay for movie channels, and I can't see the movies I'm paying for. For example, last Saturday Monster was showing, but I couldn't watch it. It's not a parental control thing, although it is aimed at kids, because I have no choice but for my cable box to ban it.