Deliver My Mail and Get Out of My Laptop.

“I am fairly sure that if they took porn off the internet, there would only be one website left and it would be called bring back the porn” Dr Cox, Scrubs

I shout, a fair bit. Lots of things piss me off. A few days ago in the car, listening to Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics, on Radio National, I shouted so hard that nearby pedestrians threw themselves into the path of the oncoming 96 tram, rather than suffer the skull-shattering volume and priest-melting violence of my vituperations.

The government’s proposed mandatory internet filter is one of those things that makes me very shouty indeed, and its supporters, like Clive Hamilton, better pray to whatever brown-cardigan and sensible shoe-wearing deity they worship that they never find themselves alone in a lift with me.

Big deal, you say, they want to filter out child porn, that’s gotta be a good thing right? Well yes it is, but rock spiders know how to use dodgy URLs, virtual ISPs, and how to move their filth around from site to site and country to country anyway. And besides, anyone who’s used a computer long enough to work out that the mouse isn’t actually a foot-pedal knows how to get around filters.

Police agencies around the world recognise the enormity of the child porn industry, and there is a concerted international effort to track down the producers and the consumers. When a big network is identified and located, warrants are executed all over the world by national and state police within minutes of each other, and the lowlifes who’ve been downloading it and storing it on their computers are arrested and charged.

(You may not particularly like police, but think about the poor bastards who then have to trawl through thousands of images and films of kiddie porn in order to put a prosecution together).

Putting a filter on won’t stop the production or consumption of child porn, it will merely slow down our already lamentable broadband speeds, and lead to debacles like the one in the UK last week, where NOBODY in the UK could access Wikipedia due to one image (of a record cover that you can buy on Amazon and that regularly shows up on Worst Album Cover emails).

There are two things about it that get me shouty. One is the ever-present curse this planet throws up at me on a regular basis: stupid people. The other is censorship and control and interference in my day to day affairs by cat’s-arse faced wowsers and religious bigots, dressed up as “Oh God, won’t someone think of the children?”.

Firstly, stupid people. The people who allow their kids, from a very young age, to have computers in their bedrooms and don’t exercise any kind of control over what the young ‘uns are up to, what they’re watching or reading or doing. Then, when nine year old J’aime develops an eating disorder and starts hanging out with year ten boys, or eleven year old Cadyn starts riding burning shopping trolleys down the street and talking about bukakke at the dinner table, throw their hands up and blame someone else.

It’s simple, you lazy fucks. It’s not that hard to take some responsibility as a parent; the only help I want from the government is to train decent teachers and childcare workers and have a health system that works. In our home our kids share a desktop computer, which faces out into the kitchen; they use it for homework, and watching stupid Japanese cartoons, and playing games, and downloading bloody Miley Cyrus songs. Sometimes they sit together just googling or youtubing stupid stuff, and the eldest is in charge, and he makes sure the girls don’t see any of the fruity stuff. It’s a condition of use that we keep a history of MSN Messenger conversations, and they know we’ll check it for their own good. We’ve talked to them about the stuff that’s on the internet, they know it exists, they know it will mess with their little heads if they see it and we’ve taught them how to avoid it. We did all that without any assistance from the bible or the government. It’s called being a parent.

Secondly, the wowsers and religious nuts who have such a morbid fascination with, and need for control over, intimate details of my life, and why I was shouting so hard at Clive bloody Hamilton.

He was on Radio National (Australia Talks, November 18), desperately trying to justify the filter by constantly referring to child porn and extreme fetish or violent porn, and running and hiding whenever hit with a decent argument. His point is simply that he doesn’t like porn, and he made a lot of assertions that porn has a bad effect on young people. When asked about offensive material like Holocaust denial sites, or hate sites in general, and whether they should be added to the list of banned sites, he said no of course not, that would be a restriction on free speech, no matter how offensive. He also said several times that it was wrong to ban euthanasia information, or anorexia-glorification sites.

But his whole argument was based on the Harm That Porn Does, and when confronted with a caller who said “Well I’m Jewish, and Holocaust deniers and other hate sites cause a lot of harm to me and my children”, he ended up admitting that he knew best and it was up to him and people like him to look after society, and it became clear that this is not about protecting children, it’s about protecting all of us.

What should and should not be banned is a hugely subjective decision, and the problem I have with that is that I don’t want Clive Hamilton, or Kevin Rudd, or that fuckwit from Family First deciding for me. And I don’t want someone that I may happen to agree with deciding for everybody else.

Of course, all of the above is moot now, because the whole thing looks like collapsing. Telstra and Internode have refused to take part in the trials, iiNet is only taking part to show that it won’t work, and Optus are hooking in for a mere 1% of the banned list, and there are no live customers to be included in the trials.

The Communications Minister is backing away faster than Peter Garret can say “Academy of Music backdown”, and it pleases me.

No more shouting for now, back to redtube, I mean youtube…

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