Labour and porn
From the Australian last week, via AJ
All internet service providers would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers under a radical plan to protect children being pushed by federal Labor MPs.
Yobbo gets to the nub of the matter; see also Jason Soon and Mark Gallagher.
Why doesn't some enterprising ISP offer a filtered service that concerned parents and schools can use? Surely this already exists? It wouldn't require any technical knowledge on the part of the parents. It also wouldn't impose any additional cost or suppression of free speech on adults who choose not to use it.
If anyone was worried about people accidentally seeing offensive material surely punishing spammers would be a more useful step. Just the other day two people on a samba mailing lists were annoyed by porn spam.
I listened to Hamilton's interview with JJJ, but there doesn't seem to be a transcript available. However, there are similar opinions in this Australian opinion piece.
The report that inspired this Labor move seems to still be secret, but
a gaping nonsequiter is apparent in Hamilton's public statements. He
says that sexual images encourage teenage boys to think about women as
sexual objects — already a
dodgy assumption. But then he
proposes banning only the most hardcore porn, and allowing
good healthy erotica
. Surely if we wanted to
try to make teenage boys not obsess about sex we ought to ban all
depictions of the human form: no page-three girls; no underwear ads;
no olympic beach
volleyball or diving. Burqa, anyone?
By the way: why on earth is a government-funded report secret from the taxpayers who paid for it?
posted Tue 24 Aug 2004 in /issues/censorship | link
Archives 2008: Apr Feb 2007: Jul May Feb Jan 2006: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun Jan 2005: Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2004: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan 2003: Dec Nov Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May
Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.