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The Forum > Article Comments > Clive Hamilton the Net Nanny > Comments

Clive Hamilton the Net Nanny : Comments

By Kerry Miller, published 24/11/2008

Christian Right follows Clive Hamilton's lessons in their push for Internet censorship.

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Bronwyn: "the vast bulk of pornography depicts women in the mode of 'passive dominated object'"

You are now going on the same flights of fancy as chandralekha and dickie. For most porn pictures I see, it is almost impossible to tell who initiated what.

In video you can tell, and unsurprisingly porn reflects real life. The males initiate, the females have the final say. Unlike real life, the females usually say "yes" to all sorts of odd requests, but it is porn after all. I imagine it is that aspect you really have issue with. However, your claim that in "vast bulk of pornography depicts women in the mode of 'passive dominated object'" is, to put it charitably, badly ill-informed. To put it not so charitably - I don't believe for a second you are so ill-informed.

Bronwyn: "pornography which is exploitative of either animals, children or women (which wouldn't leave much!)"

I wasn't going to comment on this, but since I am here ... I'd say it leaves rather a lot. Despite the hysteria displayed here there ain't that much child porn out there. That leaves women and animals. I have not actually seen any porn involving female animals, and given the length of time I have been on the internet that is saying something. (Actually dickie's flights of fantasy are the first I have read about it in some time. Reading about it again reminded me why I don't seek it.) I can't imagine a mammalian male feeling in the slightest bit exploited at being fellated, and being one myself I'd say I have some expertise in the matter - unlike you. As for the women, if they aren't there because they want to be then it is illegal. You say they are exploited. They say they aren't, and often sound peeved at people like you putting words into their mouth. Who am I going to believe?

You are sounding like a bunch of teenage girls taking fright at your own fantasies. If you started behaving like women it would be easier to take you seriously.
Posted by rstuart, Friday, 5 December 2008 2:06:36 PM
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Those who support the proposed government censorship of the Internet are yet to respond to a succinct and excellent comment by billkerr in this thread. He said: "The core issue is this: Do we dare to be free? Being free does mean being exposed to unsavoury things. Do we as adults want some other adults to protect us from those unsavoury things, without even full knowledge of what they are. If another adult is going to protect me from unsavoury things then I want to know why that adult feels that he or she is superior to me? Why does that adult feel that he/she can handle freedom but I can't?"
Well, can one of the pro-censorship people respond to this?
Posted by byork, Friday, 5 December 2008 2:52:27 PM
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Australians I have found have a very infantile understanding of freedom and what it constitutes. I expect this comes from not having a bill of rights. In not having one, many authoritarians who would easily belong in various dictatorships around the world, such as Bronwyn, feel it's only natural to deprive others of freedom for the sake of some abstract concept that is currently politically correct and fashionable to clamour for (in this case, the idea that society must bend to it's knees in the name of it's chilren)
Posted by Steel, Friday, 5 December 2008 3:46:16 PM
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Bronwyn: << How someone of your sensibility and intellect can defend the right of this garbage to a life is absolutely beyond me, CJ. >>

Hi Bronwyn - thanks for the compliment. Believe it or not, I'm not a great fan of pornography. If all the hard core stuff disappeared from the face of the Earth and the Internet I probably wouldn't notice. However, I do appreciate various forms of erotica which I wouldn't necessarily define as "pornographic" but which I suspect you might - and therein lies one of my major objections to this push for censorship.

Just because material is deemed by some to be "exploitative" or tasteless doesn't mean it should be banned, if the people who produce and consume are consenting adults. Hell, you can't impose taste or equity on people in a free society. Further, some prudes label all kinds of stuff as pornographic that isn't - the recent brouhaha over Bill Henson's photographic art comes to mind, in which the PM referred to the art as "repulsive". Is this the kind of thing that the government will decide is "unwanted", although legal?

However, my main objection to this 'Net Nanny' stuff remains my commitment to freedom of speech and expression. While some people may be sufficiently alarmed by what they see as the threats to our society posed by images and texts that are available on the Internet to acquiesce to the State censoring what the rest of us can read and look at, I think that the act of censorship itself carries far more risks than does the problem it purports to solve.

Which it won't anyway, according to just about everybody who is more expert on the technical aspects than I am. The whole exercise seems that it will be expensive, authoritarian, inefficient and ineffective - and to achieve what end?
Posted by CJ Morgan, Saturday, 6 December 2008 8:37:59 AM
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three cheers for david f.

dickie, no animal abuse is trivial to the animal, and not to me. but it is trivial for the purposes of your cheap moralising.

and your moralising just got cheaper. we discuss morality and you simply quote a bunch of laws at me? you really want to equate legality and morality? if not, what's your point?

and, your stance of "democracy" as unquestionable lord is equally silly. if you think democratically elected governments are incapable of making stupid and immoral decisions, then you haven't been paying much attention to the bush era.
Posted by bushbasher, Saturday, 6 December 2008 8:46:13 AM
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1) pornography is evil and should be censored
2) pornography is evil but censorship is a greater evil
3) anti-pornography campaigns are themselves morally evil

I vote for (3)
Posted by billkerr, Saturday, 6 December 2008 9:13:15 AM
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