From: Secret Squirrel <nobody@secret.squirrel.owl.de>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 10:47:56 +0800
To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: Re: NYTimes oped: Federal laws better than censorware
Message-ID: <2fe8bf3abfb3d4e32098b45842d2a5ca@squirrel>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>I think the answer to your question is that most of us find the very idea
>of filterware distasteful (let alone the generally poor quality of the
>implementations.  However, that's much the same as I find american cars
>distasteful.  If somebody else wants to blow their money on one of those
>pieces of crap, by all means let them.  (I admit, they're slowly getting
>better)  This leads us to poke fun at the current systems and argue against
>people actually using them, much the same way a christian friend of mine
>keeps trying to get me to accept jesus into my heart and love him so that I
>won't go to hell.  On the other hand, we get really pissed off when
>somebody tries to force us and our kids to use this crap.  It doesn't
>matter if it is AOL or the FBI, outside coercion is outside coercion.

Or public school districts, which are arms of the government regardless of
the fact that many of them have the word "independant" in their name and
have a quasi-independant regulatory joke known as a "school board."
Strangely enough I'm taxed to provide Internet feeds in the schools, then
taxed to censor those feeds, then bitched at for not "thinking about the
children" when I post to USENET, then threatened with government regulation
for the same. All while the public school system is turning out people who
can't read or do basic mathematics.

And we still come back to the old question: Who determines what is "suitable
for children?" Since I, for instance, consider absolutely no material to be
"inappropriate for children" on basis of their age and I absolutely deplore
censorship in all its forms I would rate everything as "suitable for
children," even if that means that I have to rate a porn page as having "no
nudity," or a copy of a hack and slash novel with blood and gore all over
the place as "no violence." It's blatently obvious to a human that they're
walking into a porn page or a copy of The Terrorist's Handbook before they
actually transfer it. Since the sole purpose of automated filtering and
rating systems is to censor material which some censor decides is
"inappropriate" for a particular audience without any input from that
audience at all, and in many cases I'm the one paying for the network feed
to begin with, screw them. And I'll put whatever I want on my pages, even if
that is a ratings tag, thank you.

If Little Johnny is of such fragile mentality that he will be damaged for
life because he sees a penis or a breast, then he was screwed already. Think
of it as evolution in action.

Rate falsely and watch them load.