[LINK] Helen Lovejoy Gets Her Way [Was: Why the IWF was wrong to lift its ban on a Wikipedia page]

[Stilgherrian]

On 14/12/2008, at 11:05 AM, David Boxall wrote:
> Do the hysterical child-porn extremists realise the harm they do?

No, they do not. They are monomaniacs, completely obsessed with their  
particular battle against Evil. Seen through their prism, the world  
consists only of those like themselves who Understand How Much Evil  
There Is and those who refuse to fight this terror.

To quote Child Wise's Bernadette McMenamin earlier this year in  
relation to Conroy's Rabbit-Proof Firewall:

     If filtering of child pornography cannot work then why is there
     so much anger, fear and resentment to any attempt to block child
     pornography and other illegal sites? This is what I don’t  
understand.

     http://stilgherrian.com/politics/mcmenamin_on_filtering/

Yes, we should try things even when we know they do not work. This is  
utterly irrational.

OTOH, at the forum on Internet filtering the other week at UNSW's  
Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre, the representative from Save the  
Children Australia -- a charity that's actually rolled its sleeves up  
and gotten on with the hard, dirty work of protecting children since  
1919 -- spoke AGAINST mandatory Internet filtering because the best  
way to protect children is to educate them and their parents and  
empower them to avoid problems and threats, and the best way to deal  
with the small but disturbing number of child abusers is to fund the  
law enforcement agencies.

As an aside, this morning I rediscovered this excellent piece from New  
Matilda, "The Pursuit of Innocents": The authors of The Porn Report  
explain the who, what and how of the "child porn" industry.

     http://newmatilda.com/2008/06/06/pursuit-innocents

The meedjah more naturally talk to people like McMenamin rather than  
Save the Children, though, because the (Industrial Age) Journalistic  
Myth of "Balance" requires them to present "both sides" of the story,  
and the "hysterical child-porn extremists" like McMenamin are  
guaranteed to deliver a shock-horror sound bite and quote terrible,  
terrible statistics... stats which have, of course, been  
comprehensively demolished by Irene Graham.

     http://libertus.net/censor/resources/statistics-laundering.html

Stil


-- 
Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
mobile +61 407 623 600
fax +61 2 9516 5630
Twitter: stilgherrian
Skype: stilgherrian
ABN 25 231 641 421