This essay first appeared in Cliterati on July 28th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
The moral panic over porn has been ramping up for some time now, so it was inevitable that it would eventually engender state action; no government can long resist its sick compulsion to control its subjects’ lives in still another way, and when some useful idiots are practically begging for “protection” from scary pictures and naughty words, it’s like offering an alcoholic a tall, cold glass of rum punch on a blisteringly hot day. But UK Prime Minister David Cameron says this isn’t censorship because the internet is dangerous, and besides it’s “for the children!”
Every internet user in the country will be asked whether they want to have access to pornography, David Cameron will say, as he warns that hardcore images are “corroding childhood”. A joint British and American “task force” will…tackle obscene websites, while Google and other search engine providers will be required to draw up a “blacklist” of the most depraved and illegal search terms …The initiatives…also include…measures to stop children accidentally stumbling across explicit but legal pornographic images in public places…The six biggest companies providing access to wireless internet in cafés and railway stations have all signed a deal to block legal pornography where children could view it. The roll-out of “family friendly Wi-Fi” is expected to begin from the end of August…
Though the majority seem to recognize this censorship for what it is, and some point out that it can’t even work as promised, I’ve already heard others asking how this is a big deal, since adults will be able to “opt out”. But that’s not every time they sign on to the internet; it’s only once, when service is established. In other words, the decision is kept permanently in the records of their ISPs…records government can have for the asking, and which prosecutors can trot out at “sex crime” trials as evidence of their “perversion”, and which police may be granted powers to study for the very type of witch hunt authorized by another section of the PM’s initiative. As for the concept of “family friendly wi-fi”…have you ever tried to use filtered internet service? Cameron and other censorship advocates like to pretend that so-called “porn filters” only do what their name implies, but that’s far from the case; they usually block any- and everything containing certain taboo words, which includes a great deal of medical and psychological information, GLBT and sex worker rights resources, and people, places and companies whose names contain banned syllables such as “sex” or “cunt”. At the Desiree conference last month I discovered that even my blog, which is not remotely pornographic but does discuss sexual topics, was blocked by the filter at a donut shop in Las Vegas. But at least I can guess why mine is caught in the net; some companies are blocked for no discernible reason, and getting themselves unblocked is incredibly difficult. And then there’s the slippery slope; I hope I’m not the only one who shudders at the phrase “illegal search terms”.
But as important as they are, censorship issues aren’t the only reasons to oppose this horrible nanny state expansion; as I’ve pointed out before, such schemes inherently infantilize women. Dr. Brooke Magnanti writes:
…many such discussions treat women exclusively as victims or potential victims, with no more control over their own lives than toddlers. With the endless ongoing campaigns to ban boobs in the Sun or ban whatever type of porn is being presented as a cause for panic this year, no one ever asks – what if we ban this, and attitudes towards women don’t improve? What then? Because there are plenty of places with considerably less sexual freedom and access to porn than here, and they are not exactly bastions of gender equality either…
Censorship, as Robert Heinlein famously observed, is “like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.” It is dangerous tyranny to restrict the activities of adults to those which our self-appointed masters determine to be appropriate for children, and (as any sex worker or drug user could tell you) impossible to stop people from seeking out avenues of pleasure by banning them. After five years of trying, Australia gave up its plans for a national porn filter last November; even the notoriously-puritanical United States seems to recognize that putting the djinni back into his bottle is impossible. The UK should heed these examples and shut down this ill-considered pipe dream now, before it has resulted in the waste of millions in addition to all of its other bad effects.
My work at the NSW Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) was on a legacy system that had been modified from one developed fifteen years earlier by another programmer.
That programmer had a website on which he documented a lot of useful information about the system that would have made the initial stages of my job much easier and quicker, but I couldn’t access it from work due to the internet filter DETYA applied.
The problem was the programmer’s name: Stephen C. Essex.
Oh well, they were paying me by the hour so if they wanted to make my work slower …
BTW, the filters didn’t stop several of my workmates from surfing for porn on DETYA time.
In other words … Get ready for another “white knuckle” effort to stop the Earth from turning.
These would-be censors take it as self-evident that pornography (depicting adults) is harmful for children to view. Is there ANY evidence that this is the case? I’ve never seen it.
None whatsoever.
I can remember my childhood curiosity, and I can say, the damage would have to be pretty severe to be worse than that!
I was about six when I found my uncle’s stash of Hustler, and I think I turned out OK. I’d write more, but a kitten in bondage gear is demanding my attention.
OK, j/k, but really, I’ve managed to avoid doing the things neofeminists claim porn will make men do, so yeah.
I’m sure that fellow from last week who was shocked! shocked! by the pornography ads at CLITerati will be very pleased about this turn of events.
For a while, in the British Library, the text of the play Hamlet was blocked, until a researcher protested. Why would this great work be blocked? Violence;
Is easy access to all sorts of porn bad for some people? Yes. Some people, some adults, are idiots. Children are mostly, by nature, unable to deal with many things adults supposedly can, because of lack of experience. But there are adults who can’t manage, either, and they go crying to be protected.
If a child happens to stumble onto porn on the internet, then it’s a teaching moment, a moment to explain. It’s not the end of the world, and there’s no reason that the child would be immediately “corrupted.”
but… but… SEX! Evil nasty contagious SEX! The CHILDREN!
You’re spot on CC! I checked my son’s cellphone once and I found a number labelled … “My Bitch”. It was his girlfriend’s number or rather one girl he wanted to be his girlfriend. Something about the culture – and could be porn, that confuses young boys about the nature of girls and how they should be treated.
Anyway I took it as a teaching moment and he got it with full volume the “Krulac Way”. LOL
I did it for his own good – guys who treat women with respect get LAID more than those that don’t!
One question: Why ever did you check your son’s cellphone? My guess is you permanently lost all authority and credibility right there, and rightfully so.
Cameron is a mouth-fighting buffoon who is long on talk and very, very short on action. Unless this is some kind of joint scam with the US federal tyranny there is a lot of distance yet between the cup and Cameron’s pendulous lip.
Everybody should still make the maximum effort against any such nonsense as this.
Robert A. Heinlein’s Grumbles from the Grave details his censorship battles over his children’s fiction. Sometimes, the lady at his publisher would send him back notes over symbolism she imagined in his books. Sometimes it would be political stuff, for example whether older children should be learning how to use firearms in a Martian Frontier Colony. It all finally came to a head with the much maligned Starship Troopers, which Heinlein originally conceived as what we would call teen fiction today. Finally he got fed up trying to work in the constraints of kid lit, and rewrote it as a novel for adults and sold it to another publisher.
A shame the censors didn’t win with Starship Stormtroopers.
I quite liked Heinlein as a kid. For a decade or more I thought “By his bootstraps” was the bee’s knees of time travel paradox short stories and I enjoyed most of his novels until he started getting really pretentious about his notions of gender (e.g. ‘Time enough for love’).
But even as a 12 year old I’d could see Starship Troopers was a load of badly plotted crypto-fascist xenophobic crap (though I didn’t use big words like that back then).
I reckon it was that story started the sub-genre Spinrad sends up so well in “The Iron Dream” and which finally reached the bottom of the sewer when Orson Scott Card added a dose of homophobia and excreted “Ender’s Game”.
Right, except it wasn’t the pro-militarist stuff the censors had the problem with. Really, if you pay attention in the US, Ayn Rand got The Fountainhead made into a major Hollywood movie with Gary Cooper, while Dashiell Hammett was blacklisted.
Censors never have the same priorities as you.
It wasn’t so much the militarism – I’m pretty militarist myself.
It was partially the implicit racist delight he took in terrorising and killing off ‘bugs’ and ‘skinnies’ but mainly it was the mickey mouse plotting that he tried to hide under a constant drone of triumphalist jingoism.
If he’d self-censored a bit I would have had a far better opinion of the guy. I really enjoyed the first few books of his I read but probably would have stopped at ‘Starship Troopers’ if my school library had more food for my insatiable 12yo sci-fi habit.
Is there someone on the planet that took Starship Troopers seriously?
My God man that’s like trying to read something deep in Adam West’s BATMAN series. ST and Batman series are the same.
I loved watching the bugs “splat” but I never looked for the meaning of life in it.
Holy batfuck krulac, are you telling me you missed the barely hidden messages in that series?
More seriously though, anyone who thinks readers will get their jollies from a hero who chucks a bomb into a church full of skinnies which then announces (in the local language) “I am a delayed action heavy munition. I will detonate in ten seconds, nine, eight, …” is a pretty sick puppy.
It was so non-serious they made the sequel a cartoon.
Fuck I don’t even remember what a “skinny” was in the context of that movie. To me, a “skinny” is an African IslamoFascist – at least in the circles I turn in.
Maybe they left the skinnies out of the movie but in the book they were the humanoid ‘Italians’ to the insectoid ‘Japanese/Germans’ of the bugs.
It is a bit subtle what Heinlein intended with “Starship Troopers”, but once you see it, it becomes pretty clear. The movie, BTW, does an excellent job of making it a lot more obvious.
But I guess there are always some people that are unable to see beyond what seems to be on the surface.
Oh yeah, there was one Heinlein even worse than Starship Troopers.
That one where the ‘Pan-Asians’ overrun the world until a handful of wankers invent an all conquering super-technology that vaporises them all in particularly lurid ways.
Friggin’ racist.
Farnham’s Freehold. Except, as you can imagine, the censors wouldn’t have had a problem with the stuff you have a problem with.
No, that was “Sixth Column”.
As for Starship Troopers: his human society in that one is a little too law-abiding and prudish for my taste, but then, it was written for children (and mostly not changed).
Anyone who calls ST “fascist” is either the kind of mindless leftist who would call America’s founders fascist, or more likely, is someone who’s seen the movie but not read the book. (The book, while not very long at all, explains his moral principles, which you don’t hear one word about in the movie.)
I have never seen the movie.
While I didn’t call it ‘crypto-fascist’ when I read it – I didn’t know such words or political classifications at that age – I sure knew it was a reflection of a sick outlook.
And as a 12 year old I definitely wasn’t leftist. To the degree I had any politics it was right wing and libertarian.
But I grew up.
Read it again. You got it pretty much wrong.
I still haven’t ever read Sixth Column, but I’ve read that it was actually John Campbell’s idea. Supposedly, he had the basic idea for the plot and then asked Heinlein to write it. I don’t know how much of that is true, but I do know Campbell was well-known as a racist.
The impression I get from some of Heinlein’s writing is that he grew up absorbing a lot of the racism around him, came to realise it was all bull, but never got it all expunged at the emotional level. I get the same impression with Mark Twain. But this is all just guesswork on my part.
Sounds credible to me.
Campbell was both a racist and a tyrannical editor.
I’m pretty sure ‘Sixth Column’ was one of Heinlein’s first books so he would have been unlikely to be able to resist Campbell’s influence.
Still, had I been Heinlein I would have withdrawn it from publication upon establishing a firm career.
I never read Farnham’s Freehold but I heard that was pretty racist too.
And Heinlein’s consistent worship of the morally and intellectually impeccable US Army Officer type working within an infallible military was pretty infantile. The sort of thing you see in only the worst Hollywood pro-military propaganda. And Orson Scott Card.
Suggest you try Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion for that.
London wrote it in 1914. It’s set in 1976-87.
I read the story. Thanks for the link.
If you read “Sixth Column” (thanks for the title reminder jdgalt) you will see it is very different indeed to London’s pseudo-history.
London claims fundamental differences in outlook between the Chinese and Western mind until the Japanese provide a ‘bridge’ and he goes on to describe initial overpopulation of China which is dealt with by genocidal germ warfare initiated by the West.
Both sides are dealt with impassionately with no more or less sympathy offered the Western victims of their own germ weapons than that offered to the Chinese.
Heinlein offers very human, indeed heroic white characters which are contrasted with inhuman masses of the Pan-Asians whose evil behaviour is given to be intrinsically race based (as opposed to simple irresistible expansion due to overpopulation in London). The main hero is an army officer named ‘Whitey’.
The whites employ constant racial stereotyping slurs against the Pan-Asians which are vindicated by the behaviour of the Pan-Asians themselves.
The rebellion begins with the simplistic ruse of a new religion that almost all Americans are instantly able to see through as the basis of an uprising but which the Pan-Asians are too uniformly stupid to spot as a threat.
Much of the latter section of the book is given to detailed and explicit description of the effects of a range of race based super-weapons on the Pan-Asians including one that has stuck in my memory for forty years now whereby a ray (that affects only Asians) causes the wall of every cell in their body to break down.
Heinlein allows not a hint of humanity in the Pan-Asians nor a hint of sympathy for their fate. Rather he encourages readers to delight in their gory mass slaughter.
All of this is reconstructed from memory of 40 years ago and I might have forgotten some mitigating details, but I can sure remember being shocked by the racism in the story when I read it. The only comparable story I can remember from my childhood was an explicitly and intentionally anti-Chinese tract written by an Australian author in the mid-19th Century at a time of anti-Chinese riots on Australia’s goldfields. Even Poe’s ‘Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’ was mild by comparison.
Although I understand your point about the comparative tone of London’s fictional future history, I do think it lies well within the “Yellow Peril” form of anti-Asian racial prejudices of its time. That particular bigotry flourished in California in London’s day.
But your final comparison compels me to digress:
Poe’s novel, by coincidence of course, appeared eerily prescient of a peculiar fact in the half-century later “Lifeboat cases” which every law student encounters: the unfortunate cabin boy’s name. That coincidence also influenced, inspired, or suffused some even later scholarly legal articles, Monty Python sketches, and very recent fiction.
For an account of all this, see barrister Paul Cutler’s recent blog article The Coincidence.
I definitely agree that London’s story was right in the mainstream of ‘Yellow Peril’ writing of his day, but would suggest that even back then ‘Sixth Column’ would have been seen as over the top by the likes of London (as well as being poorly written from the perspective of the author of ‘White Fang’ and ‘Call of the Wild’).
Thanks for the link – it was a good read.
I suspect that Yann Martel’s choice of the name ‘Richard Parker’ for his tiger was no coincidence at all. Martel is quite derivative – to the point of having been accused of plagiarism over ‘The Life of Pi’.
I’m more inclined to certainty than suspicion on that. Of all the names, in all the world, he chooses that one by mere coincidence. I don’t think so.
I’ve done a lot of reading about the history of censorship, and it’s made me very cynical about censors. Invariably, any censorship regimen will expand once it is established, until it finally overreaches itself and gets shut down or severely curtailed. Censorious types can’t help themselves, it’s classic compulsive behavior. I suspect that the root of it may be some as yet undiagnosed sexual fetish, because censors are obsessed by porn in a way that normal folks are not. So I expect that if Cameron’s regimen gets put in place, it will be expanded to ridiculous degrees, and abused in all the ways Maggie suspects it will, and that censorious types in other countries will clamor to have it instituted in their homeland. Because that’s the way censorship rolls.
Totally agree. I have long held that the urge to censor is a bona fide mental illness, and though some people disagree it’s only because they haven’t objectively considered the obsessiveness and detachment from reality which are part and parcel of the urge. The need to control others’ thoughts, and the belief that it can actually be accomplished, are far more unhealthy and dangerous than a plethora of harmless or even healthy syndromes which are currently recognized as mental disorders.
Oh it can be accomplished alright – though maybe not with ‘all of the people all of the time’.
It’s just that it’s far easier to accomplish by bombarding people with bullshit than trying to block the ideas you don’t like.
But the really insidious way – for the many people with limited abstract thinking skills – is to do as Orwell suggests and debase the language to the point where they can’t articulate what you don’t want them to think.
If it can’t be accomplished there’s a heck of a lot of money being wasted on marketing, propaganda and most of the education system.
For which language debasement the law itself can become a useful tool. Statutes which invite judicial conflation of “whore’s spouse” with “trafficker” or “pimp” are one such example.
I wonder what would happen if instead of seeking applicants for censorship positions, the censors were drafted from a larger pool?
They also want to criminalize the possession of rapey porn because it leads men to respect women less, which can only lead to a total ban, with the exception of certain homosexual-approved titles. Anyway, the kingdom of England puts people in jail for saying “offensive” words, so it’s a lost cause. It’s sad that it’s seen as some step in the progressive direction, instead of being just as antithetical to the US as North Korea, which recently executed high-profile pornographic performers. The condom mandate, which will shut down the professional studios, the criminalization of “revenge porn”, which will make distributing amateur if not most porn a felony, are big steps once again to suspend rights to protect public safety.
“Progressive” means “progressing toward a controlled, collectivist, machine-like society”. Politically, it has never meant anything else, which is why I’m very glad the folks who used to falsely style themselves “liberals” have now ‘fessed up to their real agenda; all that’s necessary for the picture to be complete is the return of eugenics, which should come in about 25 years.
It never went away, Maggie.
You’re right, but I meant as an openly-acknowledged plank in the “progressive” platform.
I hear what you’re saying and agree it’s not quite explicitly acknowledged yet, but Peter Singer is a Greens candidate in this country and his beliefs include the killing of ‘defective’ babies and encouraging commercial ova and sperm donation because he thinks the markets will ensure the germ cells of more ‘superior’ people will be passed on that way.
The Greens haven’t adopted his views as policy – yet – but they are laying the groundwork by calling for legalised euthanasia on grounds including potential savings to the medical system by not having to take long term care of the disabled. Of course it will be voluntary – at first.
I wish I could believe it was still 25 years away – that probably puts it over a decade outside my life expectancy – but it seems to me things have been ‘progressing’ pretty quickly lately.
Hey, you’re the one who thinks babies aren’t born with a right to live. Don’t flatter yourself that you’re any better.
There’s a difference between not believing people have intrinsic right to life and believing that others have the right (or the responsibility in Singer’s case) to kill them.
You’re the one who says you follow Thelema.
Unless it’s pure affectation you must have pretty much the same moral outlook as me. No ‘natural laws’, no universalist rules, just ‘love and do as you will’.
If you don’t believe a human has a right to live then you’ve taken yourself out of the equation regarding who and how he’s disposed of.
Eugenics is the natural destination of Marxism / Socialism. We talk about the evils of “prohibition” but there is something worse coming because, more and more of us are ceasing to believe in the “higher purpose” of life.
Funny that historically it has been overwhelmingly practiced by non-Marxist – even anti-Marxist – countries, with the US being both the initiator and most consistent practitioner of it (though social-democrat Sweden has a solid tradition of it too).
As far as I know the only country in the world currently espousing and practicing eugenics (as opposed to trying to keep it hidden and blaming ‘bad apples’ when it’s exposed) is Singapore – hardly a commie bastion.
Marxist countries are pretty big on genocide but they don’t use perverted Darwinism to justify it – perhaps because they tend to reject Darwin in favour of Lysenko.
Genocide is eugenics – eugenics by overt means.
Nazis were Socialists bro … It was called NATIONAL SOCIALISM.
American eugenics is some construct of your vivid imagination.
By the way – if you believe the American Empire is so bad what does it say of your own countrymen who continue to align themselves with it?
Or maybe most of your countrymen remember the fact that Japan actually DID officially “annex” both Oz and New Zealand and it was the racist, fascist nation of Americans that saved them from being overrun?
That we are led by a bunch of arse-licking, pro-imperialist stooges who are despised by the bulk of the population but who can’t be replaced short of revolution because our so called ‘democratic’ system is pretty much in the hands of the same multi-national corporations that run yours.
Most of my countrymen are still under the entirely fallacious impression that Japan intended to invade – though I think even they would crack a giggle at the notion we (or NZ) were ever ‘annexed’ in any sense of the word by Japan.
But I think most of them also realise that whatever help we got from the US in WWII was entirely due to the strategic interests of the US and nothing to do with ‘saving’ us. And that we’ve been paying through the nose for that help ever since (which didn’t change much – we had been bending over and taking it from the British Empire for a century and a half before we were sold into the US harem).
Good thing it was in our strategic interest to save your asses!
I can’t understand why you’d hang around in a place you hate. Make a stand brother … The Taliban are desperate for manpower.
I am taking a stand.
My people will continue to take a stand until we get the capitalist and Marxist claws out of the Land we have lived in for 60,000 years.
There’s a word for people who cut and run when in the face of oppressors. It’s a ‘c-word’ that you like to use.
But there is another c-word for people who espouse the values of the very capitalist corporations who keep them and their countrymen under the boot.
Collaborator.
Sorry Maggie but the idea that the prosecution could use this as evidence of propensity for perversion is not true. Also, far more worryingly the police in England can download every piece of information stored on your phone when you’re arrested.
The truth is that most people will turn the filter off, and there will be no consequence in doing so but this was never meant to be pragmatic, it was always a sop to the demented Daily Mail reading blue rinse brigade, who want something done about children accessing pornography. Cameron is passing the buck to parents, by saying if you turn off the filter and your children google “teen cunts” it’s your own fault what they find. Interestingly a lot of the smaller ISP had told him they won’t sign up.
“When the Fuehrer says that we are the Master Race,
We go Heil pffft! Heil pffft! right in the Fuehrers Face!
Not to love the Fuehrer is a big disgrace,
So we Heil pffft! Heil pffft! right in the Fuehrers Face!”
Is this where we are now? I had thought all of the censors had wooden stakes driven through their hearts, their heads cut off and buried on the Strip in Vegas during the Clinton Administration?
These jerks are seriously affecting my mellow, after my friend spent an hour doing Shakti energy work on me Tuesday.
May the spectre (yes I use the English, not the American spelling, it looks more “correct,”) of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas Haunt their dreams forever more.
Frankly, I’d prefer them to be haunted by The Spectre.
Ahh…God’s Spirit of Vengeance. One of my all-time faves, especially for the short period Hal Jordan was the Spectre. Now that was someone who knew about retribution, forgiveness, and vengeance, and trying to juggle the three. But I fear that Justice Douglas is more probable that Jim Corrigan, Hal Jordan, or whoever the new one is that has made no impression on me.
‘Spectre’ IS the American (and British, and every other Anglophone country) spelling. That other one is just an alternative American spelling (and a disgustingly repulsive one at that). I’ve seen lots of US publications using the good spelling.
Tell that to my college freshman writing teacher. Biggest Anglophobe I have ever met.
Word’s spell-check likes to “correct” spectre to specter. Oh hey, and so does Firefox’s.
right-click — Add to Dictionary
There, all better now. I had to teach them how to spell “metre” too.
I have friend who says that they’ll never invent a true artificial intelligence until they invent artificial stupidity. Most spell check systems prove they are working on it.
I can’t disagree.
Australia may have given up its plans for a national porn filter but that’s because it has something better – A ‘National Broadband Network’ that is being installed by the govt. (and owned by them). If the govt. owns all access to the net it can do whatever the fuck it wants and nobody can do anything about it. Sieg heil.
The reason the government is installing the NBN is the same as the reason they build the roads and railways – because the distances and population distribution here means it will never be profitable for private enterprise to do so.
Once it has been installed government will doubtless privatise it, then the infrastructure will not be maintained properly and will begin to fall apart, exactly as has happened with the copper phone network.
Telstra’s failure to even maintain, much less upgrade, Australia’s phone network since it was privatised is the main reason a government funded NBN is now necessary.
So far the only ‘free market’ competition to Telstra’s crap infrastructure is the Optus network that relies on government funded electricity poles to string it’s rubbish overhead wires and it is only rolled out to a few mid-to-high income areas in capital cities.
And the idea that the government is using a multi-billion dollar infrastructure program to ‘control’ the internet is just as paranoid as claims that sourcing some of the components in China will allow Beijing to take over our computers.
There are much cheaper and more effective ways to do that sort of thing.
You guys don’t have high speed Internet in Oz? But I can see you! 🙂
Dude, if you can see me over my paired gain Telstra line with thirteen joints, two bridge taps and four gauge changes between here and the nearest hub then you’re either clairvoyant or downloading data from spy satellites.
I get 28.8kb/s maximum here. No shit. And that’s on a good day.
Streaming video?
Ha, ha, ha!
Even streaming audio is a dream.
I can barely use WordPress and if they slow it down again with another ‘upgrade’ I’ll probably have to abandon my blog.
The joys of privatised infrastructure in a free market.
28.8kb/s? What decade are you living in? Average speed these days for fixed-line internet is 4.7 Mbps with peaks around 26 Mbps.
You must have the same problem my step brother has–you live in the boonies, probably of a southern state, and you feel lucky to have Cinemax.
I am not only in 2013, but less than 5km (via crow) from the centre of the biggest non-capital city in Australia.
I am on dial-up.
I have approached numerous ISPs and the only ones who will sell me a broadband package over this line are BigPond, but they will not guarantee it will actually work. What they do say is that if I take out one of their overpriced and very poorly supported 12 month (or more) packages they will petition Telstra to improve my line. If Telstra refuses I am stuck with the Bigpond contract but still reduced to using the same half speed dial-up I am on now.
And before you ask, yes I have contacted the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and the Federal MP Kate Lundy – who specialises in the cases of the thousands of Australians in the same position as I – and both have told me there is nothing for me to do but either move house or wait for the roll out of the NBN. Unless I can come up with the $7000+ to have my own line installed from the hub to the rental property I can be evicted from with 60 days notice – and given the fact that the hub itself has failed twice in the last 12 months due to lack infrastructure maintenance and overloading it is unclear how much that would help anyway.
Sorry, didn’t know at the time–because I was way behind in my e-mail–you were from the land down under. However, you have my sympathy–part of the reason I use the library is to have fast service without it costing $100US per month.
I get high speed internet. I am a slave to Netflix.
Some people are just living in a bad area for it.
Ha, ha, ha!
I get it.
And the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is Democratic, a Republic and for the People!
Your turn.
Regarding US eugenics, check the link I provided Maggie above.
You know where the Nazi doctors who started Aktion T4 went to learn their eugenics philosophies from?
California!
They even provided all the documentary evidence during their defence at Nuremberg.
Except that the Nazis really were Socialists – own it.
Adolfo Hitler….
The Nazis called for the Nationalization of education, transportation, healthcare, and major industries. They were all about gun control.
Hitler often said his enemies were “bourgeoisie” … That’s a socialist talking.
Had Hitler been successful … He would have been hailed as a HERO by the left. But the evil capitalists, led by the US – pretty much put an end to that. It’s pretty much old saw that leftists disavow their failures.
Your Turn
The NDSAP did have a socialist (and pro-gay) wing up until they were bloodily purged during the Night of the Long Knives.
Later the Nazis rounded up all the socialists and gays they could find and sent them to concentration camps.
Hitler himself was never a socialist – he rails against it in Mein Kampf – but doubtless he found it convenient to say otherwise at various times.
It’s called ‘politics’.
In fact the Nazi’s abandoned all their ‘socialist workers’ pretentions in 1932 when they decided to cosy up to German bankers and industrialists in their bid for power. Gregor Strasser’s socialist wing was completely cut out of policy making with Strasser himself driven out of the party and eventually murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
Strasser, BTW, was a distant relative of mine. Not that I approved of his politics. He was every bit as centralist and authoritarian as the right-wing Nazis.
Obfuscation – there is nothing inherently “pro gay” about Socialism and therefore zero reason for you to even mention it. Hitler never arrested a socialist loyal to him. The fact that the Soviets killed Trotsky in no way declassifies them as Marxists – it’s pretty much a given that leftist governments arrest and persecute members of their own side when they display a lack of “purity” to the cause.
If Hitler arrested any Socialists – this is why.
We do know this though – Hitler killed shitload of CAPITALIST Jews
Along with the communist ones.
He was an equal-opportunity anti-semite.
Nonetheless the socialist wing of the NDSAP supported gay law reform and contained several prominent openly gay members.
Pretty easy.
After 1932 there were no socialists loyal to him.
Name me one politician who does make a practice of arresting those loyal to them no matter what their political persuasion.
How many days ago was it that you were supporting US backing of MEK?
And those guys have exactly as much loyalty as you are willing to pay for.
There can be little doubt that the MEK weapons and training currently being paid for with your tax dollars will soon be being used against US citizens. Again.
And the krulacs of the world will be saying “We are against the MEK. We always were against the MEK. We always will be against the MEK”.
More bullshit … After 1932 ALL of the National Socialists were loyal to Hitler.
MEK? I stated flat out that, as a civilian, I would support only the Iranian Democratic Union. If the US Government is getting worthwhile info from the MEK then it’s fine with me if we use them. Please back up your assertion that the MEK killed Americans AFTER … AFTER they received US support. Link me please.
The left wing groups in Germany were fighting the Nazis right from the start, with the Anarchist White Cross taking a prominent role until it was wiped out in the mid 30s.
The capitalists, OTOH, were nice and chummy with the Nazis up until September 1939 – our pro-capitalist Prime Minister was still praising ‘Herr Hitler’ in July 1939 and selling pig iron to the Japanese until 1940.
The American capitalists were, of course, the exception. They continued to admire and do business with Hitler until December 1941.
Henry Ford in particular was full of praise for the Fuhrer – especially his actions against Jews and the provision of slave labour for Ford’s German factories. Even after Pearl Harbor Ford was lobbying for a separate peace with the Nazis.
So much bullshit in that. The US passed the Lend Lease act prior to the Japanese attack – so you’re wrong there.
It’s people like you who insist that FDR knew about the Japanese attack in advance but did nothing because he wanted a piece of Hitler’s ass. Now here you are claiming the US was practically wedded to Hitler and fascism. This passes as intellectual debate on your side?
I’ve already explained why leftists persecute members of their own side for “impurity” to the cause.
It was the fuckin Marxists in Russia who signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis .. NOT America.
You’re an anarchist defending … Quite enthusiastically … Socialism. Socialism should be as far outside your comfort zone as radical Islam is – yet you defend both.
Curious.
The answer is, of course … That your interests have less to do with ideology than they do simple boredom and what I call the “sad sack” phenomenon in which someone who doesn’t fare well in this society seeks its downfall even though it would result in his own downfall.
You are living in the greatest and most free society this planet has ever seen. Yet to you it deserves destruction because it isn’t perfect.
And by the way – just the other day you were saying that the US and Israel can’t stay on top forever.
Israel is fighting for its survival – they aren’t on top of anything and certainly don’t have any time for imperialist endeavors. I take that “slur” to be anti-Semitic and it appears that you and rest of the left have this in common with Hitler.
Godwin’s Law invoked. Argument over, guys; cool down & play nice, OK?
Respected Maggie.
I hadn’t read your last comment until I’d already hit ‘post’ on mine.
🙂
The US government (under that socialist LBJ) passed Lend Lease and the US capitalists were quite happy about that because they were not only selling war material to both sides, they could now do it to one side with government subsidies.
A bit like Milo Minderbinder getting cost +10% to defend his airbase off the US and cost +10% to attack it off the Germans.
That is the spirit of US capitalism.
And I do not defend socialists (at least none that you would recognise as such). I attack historical revisionism.
Just last week I was defending the reputation of an arsehole called George Patton from someone who claimed he was a lousy strategist.
Patton was a second rate tactician, but in understanding that logistics was the key to winning modern wars and ensuring that his own supply lines were efficient, flexible and well protected he showed that he was one of the better strategists of WWII. When he spun an entire army across the supply lines of several others to respond to the German Second Ardennes Offensive without getting into a hopeless tangle he was demonstrating true mastery of the game.
I agree with your assessment of Patton Cabrogal, although it took years to figure out things because of the huge pro-Patton propaganda machine here in the U.S.. Maj. Gen. John Wood of 4th Armored Div was more responsible than Patton for the slashing Normandy breakout.
It was FDR not LBJ, and the U.S. corporations were more interested in selling U.S. patents–which were easily transportable–through their overseas subsidiaries. Thomas Watson and IBM probably enabled at least one-third of the concentration camp deaths through IBM tabulating machines.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the USSR’s Frunze Military Academy: Armchair generals study strategy and tactics; real generals study logistics.
DAMN, I go out for the morning and miss all the fun.
Which will eventually lead the Jewish people into another Holocaust.
I don’t give a fuck about Israel or any other state on the map – including Australia. I only care about people.
I am appalled by the tiny-minded nationalism of Zionism and what it will inevitably mean for all Jews in the middle east – Zionist or not.
There were Jewish populations all over the middle east – including a substantial one in Palestine – facing far less anti-semitism than they did in Europe or the US until some idiots decided it would be a good idea to create a race based state on land already partially occupied (for many centuries) by non-Jews.
They probably could still have made it work up until the 1980s – if they’d withdrawn from all occupied territories and respected the UN mandated borders of dismembered Palestine, but now I think they’ve gone too far to turn back. Now they’re going to have to keep fighting until they lose and when they do there will be hell to pay. The longer they keep winning the more they will eventually lose by. The nuclear genie is just going to keep seeping out of the bottle no matter how much the US pretends to fight to keep it in.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope the capacity of Israel’s Arab neighbours to forgive is greater than I give them credit for.
Your post here was pretty good, Maggie. And yes, the UK Internet censorship thing is probably a little governmental CYA, and unfortunately even that will require fining or jailing somebody to “show we mean business!” Other than that, though, I don’t expect it to amount to much.
The less I say about the comments the better.
Opt out my arse. I’ve had no blocks to lewd sites/images, no opt out options, none of it. Clearly this idea was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
A, it depends : I’m using a wireless mobile dongle here, with no discernible censorship being applied. My landline ISP required us to opt out (we’ve no kids).
Us Grups can decide for ourselves. Piss off, Dave, and go back to the pod bay.
The issue is twofold :
1) teach your kids about responsibility, and that Pr0n is basically acting rather than a sex education resource.
2) The censorship filter itself. Since the mechanism is in place, there’s nothing to stop the terms being added to on the sly, so that the revolution hasn’t got a chance, and any website the Govt likes can be blocked.
Welcome to China, UK-Style, people. 😒