Usefully Useless

Answer? They’re all repressive power-mad regimes and they all want to censor Google. Wait, Australia?

Oh yes. Australia continues to hurtle along the line of a government approved Internet only. Clueless Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants mandatory ISP censorship of any content ‘refused classification’ by the government and recently set his sights on dissenters on YouTube.

Wanting Google to filter YouTube of any comments critical to the rulers, Conroy stated in the state-filtered media “Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government,” moments after trying to justify it with “in Australia, these are our laws and we’d like you to apply our laws” where it’s clear that Conroy admires the Great Firewall of China and wants to build his own Great Internet Barrier Reef.

Google, naturally, told the repressive regime to go screw itself. Conroy’s comments come just days after Google’s spat with the Chinese authorities and Google’s decision to stop self-censorship in China.

The idea is that the Australian govermnent wants to block anything it doesn’t like the smell of using the Australian movie, video games and entertainment ratings board. If the government gives out a “Refused Classification” notice, said content disappears from the Internet.

Australia, you are a tiny economy and a negligible player on the world stage – Any prestige you may have was inherited from us. If you want a policy of isolation, don’t be surprised when people treat you as the totalitarian hell hole without respect for basic human rights that you are. You’re already facing huge skills shortages and let’s face it, a land which is variously deadly venomous or on fire isn’t an attractive target for skilled workers. Adding a power-obsessed regime into the mix makes it not just unattractive, but a place to avoid.

Ever watched Mad Max (Road Warrior in some territories), the Mel Gibson-led movie set in Australia which won pretty much every award around? Three Kings, a glorious drama with George Clooney? What about Fight Club, the meme-spawning classic with Brad Pitt? How about Bruno, Cohen’s latest comic masterpiece? What about Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s glorious sci-fi adventure?

You have? You’ve actually seen one of these forbidden films?

Congratulations, you’re a vile fetishist and a danger to society. According to Australian lawmakers, in a law passed to cover “violent pornographic fetishism” and to “protect children”, any movie with an R18+ rating (BBFC 18 here) cannot be promoted, advertised or displayed. Such movies must be displayed in “plain packaging”, which is defined as a blank cover with merely the name of the movie displayed.

Organisations such as the Labour Party (who have already banned “violent pornography” with a wonderfully broad definition which means the Sharon Stone movie “Basic Instinct” is now technically illegal), Conservative Party and Internet Watch Foundation seek to bring such laws to the UK. Should we support them?

It’s just before dawn and you’re getting out of bed, ready to shower, make breakfast and go to work.

Just then, government forces with submachine guns break down your door and forcibly bundle you into a vehicle with blacked out windows. You’re taken to jail on suspicion of a crime – They think you’re a subversive, you might believe things the government says you’re not allowed to, but you’re not allowed to know what.

You’re denied bail and you still don’t know what it is you’re supposed to have done. The government considers the evidence to be secret, such that you can’t see it. Your access to a lawyer is only a few minutes a week, even if he was able to prepare a defence for you, which he’s not allowed to do.

Which country are you in? Iran? Zimbabwe? Maybe Orwell’s fictional 1984 dystopia?

No, you’re in Britain. Manchester, to be specific.

It took senior judges to point out the clear injustice and absurdity of what happened when, to two men from Manchester, this ostensibly western government turned on them.

When evidence, facts and truth do not fit in with what the Government wants, simply sack those who’re promoting them! Not wanting sound scientific and medical principles clouding his judgement, home secretary Johnson has got rid of the head of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs, Professor Nutt.

The home secretary said that Nutt had been “lobbying for a change in policy”, citing this as his reason. Now I don’t know about you, Mr Johnson, but I thought the entire point of independent scientific advisors is to tell you politicians – and you are politicians, not medical professionals or scientists – what you should be doing. If that’s “lobbying for a change in policy” then the people doing things wrong are the politicians, not the scientists and doctors.

Alan Johnson, home secretary in question, stated “I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy” – yet he did not explain why policy is running contrary to scientific advice and if he thinks that science is at the whim of one man or is in any way belief based, he is sorely mistaken, because Nutt’s successor is going to be telling Johnson (or, more likely, his Conservative replacement) the exact same things based on the same data, the same evidence, the same reality.

This has been coming ever since Brown took office and started spouting nonsense like “Cannabis is lethal” and “Cannabis kills”, to which the Advisory Committee got back to Brown saying “we’ve reviewed the evidence, the medical data and there’s just no support for your claims” – Brown was not happy. How dare reality not respect Brown’s beliefs? It is the hallmark of failed leaders throughout modern history that they ignore independent scientific advice, from Napoleon’s dismissal of the steam ship to Bush’s promotion of “abstinence only” sex education. If a policy is not science based, not reality and truth based, then what exactly is Brown basing his policies on?

For his part, Professor Nutt is predicting that more of the ACMD advisors will be quitting, citing government interference in the scientific process. In this case, it seems the impact of facts and truth with politics has left reality in the worst shape, with politics blundering on as usual.

Nutt in particular believes that politicians wanting to appear “tough on drugs” for simple popularity reasons is undermining the entire purpose of drugs regulation:

There’s no point in having drug laws that are meaningless and arbitrary just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down hard on drugs. That’s undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws.

That’s right folks, Brown and his motley gang have no intention of making useful and working laws, they simply want to hoodwink people into liking them. I can think of another party which does the same, headed by a certain Griffin.

News: The US Senate has cancelled the F22 “Raptor” project.

My thoughts: About flippin’ time. The F22 was a disaster to begin with, an extremely temperamental superiority fighter (i.e. a Cold War relic) with an utter dislike of anything moist (the radar absorbing paint was ruined by rain, mist, fog, clouds!) and needing upwards of one day’s maintenance for each flying hour.

The only reason it got to production was the contractors spreading the work piecemeal out to almost every state in the US to maximise their lobbying opportunities! This, of course, increased expense and maximised the economic impact of the contract being cancelled. Used to sucking from the government teat for so long, shielded from the realities of a free market, military contractors are reportedly in disarray.

News: Ireland outlaws blasphemy

My thoughts: This will not end well. Ireland’s constitution is a legislative nightmare, guaranteeing free speech with one sentence and outlawing it with the next. The constitution itself both guarantees the right of free speech, but at the same time criminalises blasphemy.

Until last week, Ireland had quietly brushed it under the rug. If they were to define blasphemy by Catholicism, they’d have a whole bunch of very angry Protestants, Jews and Muslims who were outlawed. Define it by any one faith and you’ve just outlawed all the others. So the Irish legislation, mandated by its idiotic constitution, plain criminalises free speech, anything that causes “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents”. Now I don’t know about you guys, but there’s not a lot out there that DOESN’T cause outrage among a substantial number of adherents of ANY religion. The Northern Irish lot have been at it for GENERATIONS!

So who wanted this law? Crazed Catholics? Postal Protestants? Mad Mullahs? Rabid Rabbis? Violent Vicars? Well, no. The Irish politicians realised that their constitution demanded it and so put it into law. This is the danger of having a constitution in the first place, changing it is much more difficult than changing a ruling party, especially when it’s holding your nation to ransom. Worse still, a “paper dictator” always reflects the views and ideals of the time it was created, regardless of how outdated they may be today.

The Irish constitution is fundamentally incompatible with a free society and must either be discarded or amended. The Irish constitution weighs in with the following: The preamble says that all state authority is derived from the “Most Holy Trinity” and that public homage is due to “Almighty God” and that blasphemy is an offence that shall be punishable by law.

In more detail, the constitution is actually incompatible with itself.

Article 40.1 guarantees equality under law, protecting one group by oppressing another is not equality under law. Article 44.2 states the state shall not make any discrimination on the grounds of religious profession, belief or status which is clearly going on here. Article 44.2 further states that the people have the right to freedom of conscience and religion. The law moves the burden of proof to the defendant (who must prove he did not intend to cause outrage), a violation of the Irish constitution’s Article 38 and of the European Convention on Human Rights (Schedule 1, Article 6).

So as mandated by the Irish constitution, Ireland must violate the Irish constitution!

Between the European Parliament and the local elections taking place on Thursday, we learned quite a few things. The first and most obvious is that the people have completely lost their support for New Labour.

This turn of events is not at all surprising as people look for someone to blame for the financial crisis, it’s easy to blame the government. This isn’t all, however. Tony Blair oversaw a fundamental shift in Labour’s political stance. Prior to about 1997 or so, Labour were a leftist party which championed the rights of the common man in contrast to the Conservatives, who sought to undermine those rights in the interest of security.

Now the roles are reversed. Blair’s revolution shifted Labour to becoming a conservative party, politically almost identical to the US Republicans, they removed a great many rights from the people. Firearm ownership was banned (and gun crime went up), police gained the power to search anyone on the street without any form of warrant (and concealed weapon crime like knives went up) while economic regulation was abolished (and we entered the worst economic crisis anyone can remember); These are all very reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s rule.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party has become what Labour once were. Now they champion economic regulation and seek to restore the rights of the people, which is exactly what Labour used to be.

Not only that, but Labour fostered a culture of fear. We’re told to be scared of terrorists and that the police need all these new powers to help combat terrorists, it’s blanket coverage all across the media. Yet in the 1970s and 1980s when the IRA was bombing the shit out of city centres nationwide, the police didn’t need these powers.

The plan was that a scared populace was an obedient one, first noted by Julius Caesar and again stated by Herman Goering at the post-WW2 Nazi trials and by Donald Rumsfeld in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. As people naturally do not want war, the government simply states there is a danger to the people, denounce the pacifists for exposing their country to danger, and the populace will support whatever they’re told to – it worked in the US, Bush gaining his second term – but has not worked for Labour.

It has worked, however. People are scared of foreigners, usually Muslims but anyone who looks a bit tanned is suspect. They do not, however, support Labour, they’ve gone to support the British National Party, a hilariously named bunch of neo-Nazis who share ideology with banned German extremists: They are not British and the core values we hold dear as British values are hated by the BNP. They hate Britain and all it is, wishing to transform it into a dystopian hellhole.

Proof? The BNP gained tremendously in the European Parlimentary Election, even gaining a seat. If they continue their advance, we are all screwed. Nationalism can only work on fear, it always has to be attacking someone who’s different to the majority, so long as it retains the veneer of protecting the majority, it’ll remain in power. The BNP in the past have attacked blacks, Jews and Muslims, blaming all kinds of maladies on them. Their entire political viability is based on the politics of fear.

So let’s say they kick every Muslim out of the country and all the “foreigners” (basically, non-whites) – the BNP have stated they will do this, first by “voluntary repatriation” of non-white Brits, then by forced expulsion. Who do the masses fear then? Probably Jews, Nick Griffin is on record stating his belief they’re everything wrong with the world. So we perform a second holocaust, set up concentration camps and gas chambers (oh yes, part of their manifesto is to bring back the death penalty). Then who do we fear? Likely homosexuals. We imprison them all or just execute them. Then who do we fear? Probably Catholics, so we ban its practise and raze its churches, outlawing public protests. Then who do we fear? The Irish, so we invade and annex them. Then who do we fear? Dissidents who obviously want to weaken our nation, so we outlaw elections and imprison the dissenters. Then who do we fear? Intellectuals, the educated, the “elitists”, so we imprison or exile them. Then who do we fear? Well, there’ll likely be not many people left.

In the process we’ll have lost our ability to get these idiots out of government when they banned elections. We’ll have lost our ability to protest against the government, that’s banned too. All the foreign professors, scientists and engineers we attracted will have fled to other countries during the repression of the elitist intellectuals, crippling our economy and innovation.

Britain would be destroyed and we’d be its destructors, the British values we stupidly thought they’d protect would be obliterated. That is why we cannot continue playing the politics of fear. That is why Labour has lost its support to the BNP.

Vincent Nichols is the soon-to-be Archbishop of Westminster and, like his peers, has a somewhat amusing disconnection from reality. Though seen by many as “progressive”, in a more respectful than I’m about to be BBC News article, he continues the Catholic foetus fetish.

The gist of things is this:

BCAP [Broadcasting Committee on Advertising Practice] said the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health had called for the changes after a rise in teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

It pointed to figures which showed more than 11,000 under-16s were diagnosed with chlamydia, herpes, gonorrhoea, syphilis or genital warts from 2002 to 2006.

Seems to be a right and honourable aim, yes? Wonder why the Catholics oppose reducing STIs? Of course they have this whole “must be useless in bed until marriage to properly disappoint your spouse” thing going on, but reality is reality and STIs exist and spread. We need to get that information out there when teenagers are going to be watching.

We know Catholics oppose all forms of birth control (it gets them more Catholics), but their reasons are most amusing. Hot on the heels of the Pope himself saying that condom use spreads AIDS, Nichols has these gems to share with us.

“They depict casual sex on the street corner and drunken sex. I do not think these things do anything to genuinely help young people to understand themselves in their own dignity and in the proper meaning of what human sexuality is about.”

Said casual sex among teenagers is the reason we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe and increasing STIs. The advertisements have isolated a problem and are aiming to address it. What is it with Catholics wanting to fuck with kids?

He said while the media often claimed its role was to “reflect reality”, it also had a “responsibility to put something in front of people to which they can aspire”.

When you’re a Catholic Archibishop, you have absolutely no authority to tell anyone else to “reflect reality” because you’re so far divorced from reality you’re capable of saying stupid things like this.

Since when is it the media’s job to be role models? The media is there to tell us the truth, not some pink fluffy deception that tastes good. In just one quote, Nichols has contradicted himself.

The archbishop – formerly the Archbishop of Birmingham – suspected advertising involving abortion services would present it as a “simple solution”, he said.

“But in fact it has traumatic implications in women’s lives,” he said.

“Reflect reality” indeed. Any woman knows that abortion is extremely traumatic, this is not just common knowledge, but colloquially both fact and obvious. Who needs to be reflecting reality again?

We continue to get another side of the story, journalistic balance indeed.

Marie Stopes International, one of Britain’s biggest independent pregnancy advisory services, whose clinicians also perform abortions, has said it would immediately consider running adverts.

When the proposals were announced last month Simon Blake, chief executive of Brook – which offers sexual health advice and services to young people – said the move would help people obtain accurate information.

“Clear, honest, factual advertising about services which provide honest messages is clearly going to be part of shifting the balance away from this over-sexualised media,” he said.

Over-sexualised media my arse. Over-violent perhaps. We have censorship that only the Americans can top when it comes to sexuality on TV yet frequently glorify police brutality, torture, murder and other acts of violence against our fellow man.

I’m all for factual, truthful information being out there without anyone’s political or religious slant but teens will be teens: They know absolutely everything and it “won’t happen to me”. Teenage pregnancy ruins lives, not just the mother’s life, but the child is many times more likely to live in poverty and become a criminal. It’s a social problem and the right information out there can help us with that problem. Instead we seem obsessed with making criminals and sex offenders out of our teenagers by inventing new crimes for them.

But John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said the move would “further commercialise the killing of unborn children”.

If only someone would commercialise the killing of stuck up moral ideologues who like to force their own perversions on everyone else.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Press Association, Archbishop Nichols added that the Catholic Church’s teaching on sexual morality presented a “high ideal”. He said he acknowledged the “struggle” in people’s lives to live in accordance with “the dignity that God has given us”.

Sexual morality? What the fuck is that? Your church can keep the hell out of my bedroom, you have no place there. Sexual imprinting, which is what the Catholic church practises, is evil, immoral and robs people of one of the great things of life. Presumably a great thing which their God gave us and then doesn’t intend us to use.

Asked about Church teaching on gay relationships, the archbishop said “respect” was due to everybody, regardless of sexual orientation.

That’s the sound of an embarrassing question being asked to a bigot.

“In good Catholic eyes a person’s sexual orientation does not matter. Where morality comes in is in their behaviour.”

WE’RE SINKING, MAN THE LIFEBOATS. Sure sexual orientation doesn’t matter, but acting on it and being actively homosexual is “immoral”. So homosexuals must live a life of celibacy or live a lie according to Catholics. What was that about morality again?

When will, indeed will ever, Catholics ever realise that their declining numbers in Western Europe is largely due to their own hatred, bigotry and intolerance coupled with a love of human suffering? They go to Africa to fight on the side of AIDS against those hoping to control it. They come here to fight on the side of syphilis. They everywhere fight on the side of unplanned pregancy and impoverished children.

Why? Because they know that people who suffer will turn to them for comfort, it’s good business sense to quietly encourage the suffering. Happy, content and safe people tend towards the irreligious. Remember this when you next hear a Catholic clergyman babble on about morality and wonder how someone who lacks it can preach it.

A report from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (specific to the UK) concludes that “Awful things are said to happen on extremist websites and in Internet chat rooms, but few are able to identify what exactly it is that causes so much concern. As a result, many of the policy proposals that are currently in circulation are either irrelevant or unworkable.” (clicky for a longer analysis)

They go on to say that content filtering is likely to drive extremists underground and that extremists online anyway simply attract other extremists: Preaching to the converted. Recruitment and indoctrination are done offline, like with all religions.

This isn’t dissuading our insane Home Secretary, who seems determined to force on her political beliefs to everyone’s Internet by censoring anything she doesn’t like.

In case you guys haven’t noticed, I’ve been pretty outspoken in the past against net censorship. So I couldn’t help but notice when Irish ISPs decided to voluntarily censor out peer to peer networking sites, such as the popular Pirate Bay.

These sites aren’t illegal, though they typically index content that is. Movies, music, games and so on. However, they also index content that isn’t. In The Pirate Bay’s case, it’s a free-for-all where users post links to whatever they feel like, whether it’s a bunch of MP3s or their personal photographs. Ireland has had enough of that and is cracking down on it.

Because it worked so well in New Zealand, that is. Yep, the plucky NZ guys raised such an outcry that the prime minister stepped in and said “Woah, stop this, we’re being pricks”. Well, not really, but he did “delay” the legislation which is as good as killing it in NZ. I can imagine Eircom’s subscriber base falling through the floor as other ISPs step in with more complete service.

This starts a rather fun precedent. None of these blocked sites have been found to be illegal in an Irish court so essentially, Irish ISPs have been given the “freedom” to block access to anything they don’t like the look of or they think smells funny, illegal or not. Nobody should have that kind of power. Ever.

OMG TEH CHILDS! BBC News is reporting that many broadband subscribers “still have access” to child abuse images. Predictably, the NSPCC has a wonderfully idiotic statement to make:

“Allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted.”

Is that so, NSPCC? What about when the very censorship you’re trying to force down to throat of ISPs, at their expense, openly admits that it only “helps prevent inadvertent access”?

Note the use of weasel words. “real children” “seriously assaulted”. Do you know what’s also illegal? Computer generated images, drawings and paintings of not-real under-18s. Quite a bit of fine art is technically illegal, such as Boticelli’s Venus, for which the model was 14. Is that a “real child” being “seriously sexually assaulted”? What about that Blind Faith cover back in December? Was that? Cut the bullshit, NSPCC, and get back to doing your damned jobs – Protecting real children.

Let’s see what Zen Internet have to say about it:

“We have not yet implemented the IWF’s recommended system because we have concerns over its effectiveness.”

No shit! According to New Zealand the system doesn’t work and according to the operators of the system itself it helps stop “inadvertent access”.

So the onus is on the NSPCC to show us how a system that doesn’t work and is only meant to stop Joe Bloggs from accidentally seeing something that might scare him helps prevent “feeding the appalling trade” in child abuse.

I thought the NSPCC would be better than tabloid scaremongering to get their point across. I thought they’d be better than lying to us and deceiving us to get their point across.

Advocating useless censorship is not going to help anyone and, indeed, will drive abusers further underground making them more difficult to dig out. One has to wonder whether the NSPCC has self-preservation in mind, given that Government statistics show this type of child abuse at record low levels.

Update: This article at PC Pro reveals much more of the story. It has an interview with some guy from Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety. In it, he lets slip the real reasons he’s wanting the ‘net censored:

“It was intended to block the guy in his office at home one night, pi**ed, mildly curious, who could get himself into jail by going off and looking for it. It’s meant to stop the accidental exposure,”

There you have it from the horse’s mouth. It’s not about protecting children – the NSPCC are liars according to a group they themselves are part of, it’s not about children at all. They don’t give a damn about the kids one bit. It’s about stopping us going to jail, which I have to ask a few questions about:

1. If I stumble across such material, who’s going to know? Are there people monitoring my every move online? If so, that’s a clear violation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ Right to Privacy.

2. If that’s all it takes for a guy to be sent to jail, then we have severe problems with the laws. Why aren’t these charities screaming for changes in the law so that police have more resources to go after the depraved individuals who create this stuff, who do the abusing to begin with? Surely that’d be more effective in protecting children.

Right now, all I’m seeing is an overbearing “you should do what we say and nothing else” Big Brother sort of attitude. It’s unacceptable that these so-called charities get to do utterly nothing to protect children and instead force our ISP bills up for useless filtering that doesn’t work. Seems they got into an ideological jihad instead of doing their jobs and helping kids who need help. Next time I read a story about some kid who was abused and/or killed, I’ll be wondering why these ‘charities’ didn’t do anything about it. Then I’ll come back and read this post. Great work, guys. Your mothers must be so proud.