Up Front: Young and Sort of Free
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cannabis remains prohibited
Canadian tourism just took a big hit (no pun intended)
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Opt-out is absurd.
And can't you just see the spin now "Oh yeah, well our records show <<insert-generic-enemy-here>> opted-out of internet filtering. Guy loves his child porn obviously"F'n'ay.
However, if your objective is to get people to 'voluntarily' do something they don't want to do, opt-out is perfect. Like religious instruction in schools.
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However, if your objective is to get people to 'voluntarily' do something they don't want to do, opt-out is perfect
Especially if what they see is a generic error message rather than a specific "this page is blocked by cleannet here's how to opt-out" message.
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Especially if what they see is a generic error message rather than a specific "this page is blocked by cleannet here's how to opt-out" message.
Hello, Telecom? Yes, I'm having trouble with my internet access. I seem to be mainly getting 404 errors when I'm surfing. What websites? Ummmm, nevermind.
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cannabis remains prohibited
When I was in Canada a couple of years ago I smelt it often enough just wandering around the streets that I assumed it was legal.
Apparently not, just not policed very aggressively a friend told me.
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I'm no kiddie-fiddler, but I certainly didn't find that picture (Kevin Rudd's "inarguably disgusting" example at http://avatar.bardicweb.com/files/ghetsuhm/PAS/art_monthly_37085a_37197t.jpg) disgusting at all. In fact it looks rather sweet and innocent. Some people seem to have trouble separating nudity and sexuality, methinks.
When I was a lad in flares and paisley, the first Blind Faith album cover caused a similar fuss; you can read the artist's explanation at http://www.angelfire.com/wi/blindfaith/vvcov69.html
Even if there is porn on the web, I trust people to exercise their judgment; shouldn't politicians also treat the voters as adults?
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cannabis remains prohibited
When I was in Canada a couple of years ago I smelt it often enough just wandering around the streets that I assumed it was legal.
Apparently not, just not policed very aggressively a friend told me.
And so it has always been - I had dinner with my high school literature teacher once, a couple years after graduation, and he was trying to describe where a new addition to the school had been build. "Near the North entrance" he said - I drew a blank - "Where that housing development was planned but vetoed" - again, no idea where he meant "where you kids used to toke up before you came to class" to which I responded "Oh, I know where you mean".
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In fact it looks rather sweet and innocent. Some people seem to have trouble separating nudity and sexuality, methinks.
To be sort of fair on Rudd, this came straight after the furore over the Bill Henson photographs. (That link has NSFW pics in the sidebar, but it's a good discussion of the issues.)
I'm finding the Art Monthly cover very useful, though, for showing people who are absolutely sure they can define porn. You can't ban or filter it, after all, if you can't define it to start with.
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I'm finding the Art Monthly cover very useful, though, for showing people who are absolutely sure they can define porn. You can't ban or filter it, after all, if you can't define it to start with
And how do you define "offensive content" -- seriously, the ten minutes of High School Musical I forced myself to watch would have been seriously offensive in its social and gender stereotypes if it wasn't also so crushingly banal. Not something I'd want my child exposed to without a loaded gun held to my head.
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Slightly off topic, but there was a timely article in the weekend Herald relating to medicinal use of cannabis in California:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10530801
Wiki has the answers wrt to the legal status in Canada here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_legalization_in_Canada
And one of Canada's biggest exports to the US is now BC Bud:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,682290-2,00.html
I read somewhere recently (but can't find the source - think it might have been McMafia) that NAFTA basically put a lot of Canadian loggers out of work, and they now mainly make a living cultivating cannabis and exporting it to the US.
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So are they gonna block all of flickr or just bits of it ?
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And how do you define "offensive content" -- seriously, the ten minutes of High School Musical I forced myself to watch would have been seriously offensive in its social and gender stereotypes if it wasn't also so crushingly banal. Not something I'd want my child exposed to without a loaded gun held to my head.
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So, you shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material you understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, but you know it when you see it?
Well, Rich, I sure don't think my life would be worth tweenie spit if teh interwebz was being filtered to my standards of "offensive". But I was trying to ask a serious question, and I think the Potter Stewart Test is a good way into it. Not quite so problematic when you assume you're living in a homogeneous society were everyone's cultural, social, religious and ethical norms are pretty much in the same place.
But I've living in a pluralistic, multi-cultural society where things I find utterly innocuous (websites containing headshots of women wearing cosmetics, advice on how to slaughter and dress cows and pigs, fan sites about Harry Potter) that are eye-wateringly "offensive" to other.
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Craig, I get that you were asking a serious question - 'how do you define "offensive content"?'
My point, albeit somewhat clumsily made, is that the Potter Stewart test appears to be the best we can come up with - there is no convenient empirical definition of what is 'offensive' or 'pornographic'.
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the Potter Stewart test appears to be the best we can come up with
Just to clarify, after "I know it when I see it", Potter said, "and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." And he wasn't defining 'obscenity' but 'hardcore pornography', which he believed was the only thing the First Amendment permitted to be censored. It's since been replaced by the Miller Test.
The thing is 'I know it when I see it' can't be used as a legal basis, because it requires that everybody see the same thing.
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It's since been replaced by the Miller Test.
Which is problematic in much the same way. Who the hell gets to define what an "average" person is, or what constitutes "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value"? I wouldn't seriously argue Lady Chatterly's Lover meets the SlAPS Test. (Then again, I'd have to stretch a point to describe it as pornographic, because it's hard to imagine anyone getting aroused by Lawrence's clotted prose, let along achieving any kind of orgasm.)
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(Then again, I'd have to stretch a point to describe it as pornographic, because it's hard to imagine anyone getting aroused by Lawrence's clotted prose, let along achieving any kind of orgasm.)
My copy of The Rainbow actually got eaten by a bookworm. I didn't ask it how much it enjoyed the experience, I was just surprised it could digest the prose.
Which is problematic in much the same way
Yep. It's subjective, which is the essence of the problem. It's a gray area, which is surely why we should let people make their own decisions about what's 'offensive' as much as possible.
Even censors seem confused about what censorship is.
(Disclaimer: god-awful job, wouldn't want to do it)
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Hamboy:
How long before an MP here promotes it here?
Trevor Rodgers attempted to 'censor' the Internet nearly 15 years ago, but Parliament had the good sense to bin it and have a quiet guffaw.
And in relation to Justice Stewart's famous remark, J Edgar Hoover will be forever remembered for this:
I regret to say that we of the F.B.I. are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce."
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I once in the context of my academic lab job, made the mistake of searching the internet for 'muscle anatomy'*. Fortunately I was alone in the office at the time.
You can bet Clead feed will not be applied by the Universities, so all you need is a student account or a Uni job and Bob is your kind under the counter Uncle.
*The lab copy of Grey's Anatomy was rather old and I needed up to date figures on variations in it in humans.
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It seems pretty clear that trying to censor porn on the Internet at ISP level is not going to be very successful or desirable. Then this raises the question as to why governments are so keen on it, rather than promoting computer level filters?
IMO the issue is then getting into the issue of concerns about preparing the way for politically-motivated censorship by governments. Is this something we should be worrying about, or is it just that the Aussie government is misguided in its aims to censor net porn?
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Is this something we should be worrying about, or is it just that the Aussie government is misguided in its aims to censor net porn?
Can I say one from Column A and one from Column B? I've seldom seen a politician who could resist blundering through the fashionable moral panic de jour like an elephant in a flock of sheep, have you? Especially when you've got some Helen Lovejoy wailing "Will someone please think about the children!"
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Filtering is a nasty business. If parents want to delude themselves and install filtering software in the hope that it'll actually function with 100% accuracy, thus saving them from the need to do their fucking jobs and be involved in their childrens' internet experience, so be it. Better to take the time to encourage safe browsing habits, and a close relationship such that if the child comes across something they don't understand they'll talk to dad and/or mum about it. But that would require parenting above-and-beyond the call of the television babysitter, and we can't have that.
For the rest of us, fuck that shit! It's not that long ago that Watchdog was blocking non-porn sites that might be offensive to the delicate sensibilities of the fundamentalist Christians whose bigotry was being parodied. Google is replete with examples of outright censorship on the part of companies that run the back-end systems on which filters are based, including AOL blocking the Democrat Party website.
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I can only hope I never work out how to 'press P on the internet' so I can avoid getting punched in the face by bingo-porn.
Maybe the guy was pressing the 'pee' button?
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It's not that long ago that Watchdog was blocking non-porn sites that might be offensive to the delicate sensibilities of the fundamentalist Christians whose bigotry was being parodied
It's a sad truth that the people most eager to control what my children can access are the very people I'd least trust to do it.
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I'd be curious to know how other PA posters guide, control, censor their kids' internet experiences - and tv/movies, come to that. i suspect Ive been rather lax, in some people's eyes. My youngest son was 10 when we got a computer, we've never had filtering. They know I can track where they've been and would do random checks. For pre-teens, they simply wouldn't have internet access in my house.
Basically, I've tried to get across that there is a huge scale of possibilities and where offensive/dangerous begins varies according to the viewer/reader. They've had my own values demonstrated of course - like turning off particularly gross episodes of nip/tuck, or mutterings of "we don't need to see that" over whatever I feel is unnecessary. They bring those values to their experiences. I don't have or watch porn, violent blah etc, but I have painted naked bods and they're up on the walls.
I simply do not believe that censorship or any form of pretending the world is different to what it is helps prepare them for dealing with reality. I teach them discrimination by example and discussion. And, hey, if they really want to see something, they'd just go to someone else's house on the quiet - can't control what other people do.
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