Two more articles on Internet Censorship

02 February 2009 in Internet, Politics by Stilgherrian | 7 comments

Crikey logo

Two more articles from me about Internet censorship today. And it’s only Monday. I wonder what the rest of the week will produce?

Google Takes a Slash and the world ends in Crikey, which riffs off the weekend’s glitch at Google and yesterday’s Internet outage in Melbourne and concludes that a glitch in ISP-level filters could cause massive problems.
Christian Lobby: The New Lions Of Clean Feed in New Matilda, which looks at the dodgy arguments being deployed by the latest pro-censorship warrior, Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby.

Hey New Matilda, I know I haven’t included your logo, just Crikey‘s. But I couldn’t be arsed doing pixel-pushing just now. You’ll cope.

Possibly related posts

Tags: acl, censorship, fallacy, google, jim wallace

7 comments

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anaglyph on 03 February 2009 at 7:24 am

It’s amusing, isn’t it, that if you’re against the ‘Clean Feed’ then you are, ipso facto, a pedophile. Or worse, in some people’s eyes: a Communist.

Reply
Stilgherrian on 03 February 2009 at 9:49 am
@anaglyph: Indeed. The fact that thay’re continually attacking the people with a bit of old-fashioned name-calling instead of addressing the arguments clearly demonstrates the weakness of their position.

Since writing the New Matilda piece I’ve realised I should’ve added a couple more points in response to Jim Wallace.
- The filter-mongers continually jumble together two unrelated issues:
  1. Stopping the creation, distribution and consumption of child pornography, which is about stopping a small, deeply-hidden network of people whose activities are completely criminal underth law; and
  2. Preventing minors from accessing material which isn’t appropriate for their age, according to the wishes of their parents or guardians, but which is legal for adults access.
  These are two very different problems and are likely to need two very different solutions.
- The filter-mongers have not demonstrated that central ISP-level filtering is the most effective way of tackling either of these issues.
I’m sure there’s more…
Reply
Fitzroyalty on 03 February 2009 at 12:02 pm

I did a fancy influencing and negotiating course at a uni business school not too long ago and the basic premise of all negotiation is that both parties must be willing to discuss the issues and be capable of rational debate. The willfully ignorant and tecnically clueless pro-censorship filteristi fail on both these criteria, hence rational debate cannot occur.

Reply
Sean the blogonaut on 03 February 2009 at 1:59 pm

Liked both of those articles.

I am planing on doing a series of posts on Wallace and his rather right wing views, espoused on youtube.

Reply
Stilgherrian on 03 February 2009 at 4:26 pm

@Fitzroyalty: You’ve nailed it! Geeks are used to dealing with logic and clarity of expression: computers simply won’t respond to rhetoric. So when they (we) see an argument which consist mostly of rhetorical tricks we try to bring it back to facts and reasoning. Jim Wallace judo-flips them out of the way each time.

I love the word “filteristi”. I can’t see it without hearing “fistula”. And you know what that leads to…

@Sean the Blogonaut: If you’re posting about Jim Wallace, also check out Syd Walker’s notes. The Australian Christian Lobby is not what it seems.

Reply
Stilgherrian on 05 February 2009 at 10:37 am

There was a glitch at New Matilda which didn’t leave my article open for comments. It’s been fixed, so you can now comment over there on Christian Lobby: The New Lions Of Clean Feed. Please give them some comment-love (in a Christian manner, of course).

Reply
Jon Seymour on 07 February 2009 at 3:29 pm

Filteristi isn’t bad, but it does use the F-word.

How about the censorati?

jon.

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