Posted on 09/02/2005 6:59:41 AM PDT by LifeSite News
“The days are now numbered for surfing an uncensored, open-access Internet, using your favorite search engine to search a bottomless cyber-sea of information in the grandest democratic forum ever conceived by humankind. Instead you can look forward to Googling about on a walled-off, carefully selected corpus of government propaganda and sanitized information "safe" for public consumption. Indoctrinated and sealed off from the outer world, you will inhabit a matrix where every ounce of creative, independent thinking that challenges government policies and values will be squelched.” - Eliot D. Cohen Ph.D.
The Great Firewall of China
In May of this year Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, published an article in the Toronto Star. Entitled “Face to Face with the Great Firewall of China,” it related Geist’s troubling experiences while surfing the internet during a recent trip to communist China.
(Excerpt) Read more at lifesite.net ...
AOL has been censoring Pro-Constitution / pro-America web sites for years now!
Remember the outcry after the Super Bowl and the people calling for all Viacom's licenses to broadcast to be taken away because of Janet Jackson?
bookmark
You did mean 2008?
It would be pretty hard to do that. Even in china, there are still large numbers of people getting around the censors.
Far as I'm concerned, porn is destructive to families and especially to children. It took liberal, activist judges to change it into "free speech." But what are we to think? The same people who want to inundate us in porn under the banner of "free speech" also would happily censor political speech which they dislike. The Founding Fathers could have told us exactly what is going on here.
"Yes, we'll give the yahoos the freedom to broadcast demeaning images with one hand, while taking away their ability to criticize us with the other. Sure, it's a bum trade for them, but they'll be too (temporarily) ecstatic to notice. Once they get tired of the porn, it will be too late for them to renegotiate."
See the government should not get to decide when people get to exercise free speech - you oppose limiting speech that criticizes the government (and hopefully all of us do) but there is more to a free society than just the right to criticize- Free speech is more correctly defined broadly.
BTW, there should be consequences when a corporation agrees to not show pornography and does it anyway. But the reaction to the Superbowl went beyond any reason and went into the area of trying to so massively punish as to have a chilling effect on free speech in general. For example networks are now afraid to show "Saving Private Ryan."
And if you read my post, you will see that my concern is the same as yours, just the flip side of it.
The question that faces the elitists is, how to get us prying yokels off their back? Up to now, the answer was, we'll let them have porno "prolefeed", and they won't notice that they can't say anything politically substantive anymore. Your concern is that, now that the proles are off the reservation, they will take the tack of, "OK, we'll restrict porn now", and use that as a cover for restricting what they REALLY hate.
I'm fed up with the elitists' shell games, though, and mean to say just what I did say. Porn is a separate issue from political speech, and I will not let the free speech suppressors turn it into a smokescreen. One hundred years ago, everybody understood the difference. What is so different now? Only that nowadays, we willingly accept hypocrisy at its face value (because it plays well on the MSM).
But not here. They ain't gettin' away with it anymore.
You seem to be relatively unconcerned with any potential consequences for posting that comment. Reason? The real reaction to the Superbowl was from individuals. It obviously didn't chill YOUR "free speech" just now. And what was the "massive", disproportionate response, from the gummint? A fine.
That was it. No hordes of black-suited, jackbooted thugs, no censors. Just a bill.
The driving force behind political speech, especially that which the elites would happily suppress, is not something that counts the cost. Since it is not mercenary, it can't be bought off. OTOH, porn, being mercenary in nature, runs from a fine like Teddy Kennedy from a sinkin' Lincoln. So I'm not willing to extend it equal consideration.
Bottom line for me is, I consider porn destructive. There was a time when you couldn't get it in this country, but it wasn't because the government was forbidding it. It was because there was no market for it.
You seem to be relatively unconcerned with any potential consequences for posting that comment. Reason? The real reaction to the Superbowl was from individuals. It obviously didn't chill YOUR "free speech" just now. And what was the "massive", disproportionate response, from the gummint? A fine.You are right - blogs and message boards will be some of the hardest to censor. But corporations are already feeling the effect. I don't understand how somebody could dislike pictures of nude women enough to want free speech limited - but that is what is happening on a small scale.
Will it get worse? I think probably not because I think the feeling is that the pendulum needs to swing back.
And you may think that threatening to put a $54 billion dollar business out of business for showing one nipple is not extreme but it is extreme whether you see it or not.
Let's see...you have this:
$54B bye-bye -- VS -- one (sorta concealed)nipple
That picture reflects a certain bias, of which you may not be aware. Try this one:
$fine -- VS -- denigration of woman (and man) in the eyes of SB watchers (many of them children in formative years)
Certain people prefer the first characterization for obvious reasons, but the second is not allowed a minute's consideration, especially on the selfsame networks which claim to fear to show certain movies because of the SB incident.
Of course the first pairing above IS grossly disproportionate, but I would suggest that it is not the real situation, merely a smokescreen. The whole $54B business was not really in danger, and there was more to what happened on that stage than a nipple. After all, if it had been a real accident, wouldn't JJ have immediately reacted the way a woman usually does when that happens? And everybody would have laughed (and sympathized), and life would go on.
No, those kids were deliberately sending a message, and some non-kids were hoping to make a buck off it.
That's good, because your position boils down to: "Do it to Julia!"
Puh-leeze. It's already been pretty well established that this was a classic "astroturf" (i.e. fake "grassroots") scam by a small pressure group.
Bottom line for me is, I consider porn destructive. There was a time when you couldn't get it in this country, but it wasn't because the government was forbidding it. It was because there was no market for it.
Man, I thought I'd seen some serious disconnection from reality on DU, but you outdo them all.
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