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Victory in Holland
I think it was my friend Lizard on the fight-censorship mailing list who said: "You can't compromise with book-burners. When someone asks you to burn 1,000 books, you cannot agree to burn only 500." He's exactly right. Any middle ground is a step backwards, and hard to recover.
It's important to keep in mind how tough the battle was. Holland was chosen to be a testbed by national groups like the American Family Association and Family Research Council, and they spent a lot of money. Why? Because the AFA and FRC stood to make a lot of money by using Holland as an example for nationwide campaigning. They have been hyping up this ballot as the first big step in a nationwide campaign.
And they figured Holland would be a slam-dunk. It's one of the most conservative communities in American. And the measure was well-timed: the ballot was on the same night as the Republican primary. (Michigan is not a closed primary, though, and many Democrats did vote.)
Some Slashdot posters have commented that I've seemed pessimistic in my reports on the campaign. They've been right. I couldn't read the city's mood very well, not being a native, and based on the coverage and talks I'd seen, I didn't think the chances were very good.
While the AFA and FRC together contributed over $40,000, the anti-filter side raised - locally - $2,000.
The AFA sponsored a "pushpoll," in which a Florida firm made phone calls to hundreds of likely voters, asking them "questions" designed to leave the impression that the library is inviting to pedophiles. Local anti-filter volunteers went door-to-door.
The pro-filter organizations ran radio, newspaper, and cable TV advertisements, they sent out at least three direct mailings, and they spent thousands on slick presentations to local groups.
And when it came down to the vote, they lost.
This isn't the end, though. It's just the beginning. The heads of the various pro-filtering groups are all hinting that the battle is not over. Presumably that means it will become another ballot issue, perhaps later this year, perhaps next year. And it will certainly be happening elsewhere in America at the same time. (Write me when it gets to your community.)
In some cases, the unaccountable censorship of secretive blocking software will be turned down at the voting booth. I'm guessing that, in the next five years, we'll see a definitive statement on the relevance of the First Amendment, one way or the other, in the courts.
But for now ... well, I'll close by congratulating everyone in Holland who worked to defeat this measure, and by quoting from one of the direct mailings funded by the AFA. You'll have to imagine this text as it appears, in 30-point headlines, with yellow highlights:
"America's watching, Holland. The debate over Internet filters on library computers is a national issue. Now, the focus is on Holland, Michigan.
"Tuesday, February 22nd, Holland citizens will decide the first ballot vote on filtering in the nation. How we vote will affect this issue nationwide.
"On February 22, send a clear message to America. Tell America we must protect our children from Internet pornography and drugs."
"Voting, hah! What a waste of time! The fix is in, and nothing we can do will change it."
Voting is a waste of time! Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pleased with the turn out here, happy to see a defeat for the AFA, but don't let yourself be fooled into thinking your vote actually makes a difference.
voting is a way to delude you into believing that you actually have a mechanism by which you can enact change, i.e. that you posess a modicum of political power, as small as it may be.
vote all you want. band together in citizen's groups to "fight" (interesting terminology) for what you think is "right." maybe you'll win a few symbolic victories. nothing will change.
while you're out and about making a fuss over petty, symbolic issues, the people who really "control" things are doing all the deals that matter behind your back. voting, politics, elections, most of government itself is just a flashy light show to distract you from the real happenings. pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
the weakness in a representative democracy is of course the representative layer. so long as politicians (who in a representative democracy are supposed to act as vehicles of the popular will) can act in self interest, the only votes that count are green and have George Washington (or preferably Benjamin Franklin) on them. government doesn't need to be analyzed any further than that.
money makes the world go round. votes don't accomplish shit.
.
> Presumably you would be in favour of mandatory
:-) It doesn't seem likely to me, but it's the most common argument put forward by pro-mandatory voting folks I've talked to here.
:ta em liam
> voting with enforceable penalties?
You mean, like we have here in Australia? No, I'm not kidding, we really do have a law here that says that everyone HAS to vote, including morons and disinterested (read: uninformed!) parties, and you get fined if you don't vote, and you go to jail if you don't pay the fine.
Someone from the States, tell me: do you often see special interest groups "hijacking" your elections by making sure all their members vote, taking advantage of low voter turnouts? "SIGs" might include library filterware advocates, for instance.
Cheers,
fatscumbag (AC because too lazy to look up passwd)
(skcus maps) ten.gnilhtrae@hwc
This is because there was no interest in a women's program
Hehe.. That's pretty funny. I would assume that there would be some way arround it though.. like promoting intermural women's wrestling and promissing to make it more serious if they ever got the partisipation.
Same thing with Ultimate, I think.
I really doubt this! I know more women that play Ultimate then men.. and the teams can requently be co-ed. Maybe we are not thinking about the same level of competition.
um.. you have not answered the question of what capitalism has to do with anything.
Captialism and democracy are seperate concepts. As the post you replied to pointed out. Did you read it?
Every time I saw that headline I kept thinking something was happening in the Netherlands. Nice to know that it was just some crazy Americans, and common sense won over the voters.
say, is "The Manchurian Candidate" out on DVD?
I dunno, but I sure wish Frank Sinatra were here to save us from John McCain today...
OK. You haven't seen Austin Powers, have you? It was a frickin' joke, ok?
*TROLL* ????
Gimme a fvckinn break!
Meta Moderation is working so-so. Slashdot needs a mechanism to bitch-slap moderators who don't have a clue.
When you meta-moderate, you can't send a *reason* back to the moderator. Some people just want to use up their points.
"What kind of a deal is that?" Presumably you would be in favour of mandatory voting with enforcable penalties?
I dont want to sound mean or anything, but,.. what is the point of these recent posts? I dont live in Michigan, and if I did, probably not Holland. Some of you don't even live in the US... Why should we care about what happens in Michigan? Ok, the geek compound is based there,so what?, discuss this via e-mail not a thread on /.
That's like me trying to post stories about how I ate tuna for lunch in my lovely town/state. No one else cares but me, or crazy tuna lovers.
(posted a/c because this may be moderated down... if its moderated up... DAMNIT! i want my karma!)
And an awesome fucking movie it is, too. :-)
YOU TEACH THEM. you teach your kids right from wrong, let them explore explain to them how the real world functions and how to be a part of it, you dont stigmaitze sex and most importantly you dont WIG OUT if they come across a porn site.
"-he would say to us now 'Well done, good and faithful servants,'" Schepers said..." dosent that seem like the epitome of childishness and mindless subservience? ugh. we should'nt be surprised at all that people like that are for censorship, they're so afraid of having to think for themselves.
I'm in favour of free speach and dissent and against guns and violence, and I'll shoot anyone who disagrees with me.
He didn't say that the twisted logic was his. If he endorsed this kind of logic, he wouldn't call it "twisted", would he? He was describing the AFA's twisted logic.
I think it would be better to encourage my children to learn from multiple sources of media (me, books, TV, computers, friends), not just me. I've seen too many people end up warped because they weren't exposed to points of view outside those held by their immediate family.
What's capitalism got to do with this issue? This is politics, not economics. Get your terminology straight.
Congratulations Jamie. It was a battle well fought, and won.
The war may go on. But it is important to stop and celebrate the victories!
Wow. :) Thanks for writing such a scathing piece of social commentary that shows just what kind of odious hypocrites these sanctimonious "people" (and I use the term very loosely) are. Now take a few deep breaths and go have yaself a beer. :)
Actually the younger brother of a good friend just recently died from an overdose of medical grade Nitrous Oxide that he ordered from the internet. He had heard (on the 'net) that it was a good way to get high with little consequence. The second day he tried it is also the last time he tried it.
The police took all of his computers to see if they could track back to who sold him the stuff but I don't know how far they have gotten yet.
So, it is possible to get mixed up in drugs through the internet. It is just as stupid as doing it on the street but just as easy.
Eric
Geez are you stupid. Can you read?
Feel free to set your threshold to -5; I'll stick to the convenience of filtering it out. We both still have options.
Posting without contributing is a sign of a small dick.
And jiggy jiggy jiggy jiggy smalls is da smallest.
"If I said that the ghost of Jim Morrison wanted me to campaign for the legalization of marijuana, you'd think I was nutty, wouldn't you?" No way, dude, I'd be right alongside you! Power to the people!
Yeah, how dare they actually stand up for what they believe in... Those fanatics...
How dare they inflict their religious beliefs on people by making them vote. Where do they get off thinking they have that right?
And gosh darnit, if that measure had passed, due to people placing their vote, then it STILL would've been religious fanatacism's fault, not the voting public. Those darn religious people.
It's always worse when the impetus behind a law being passed is a religious organization. Those zealots. Everyone else should be free to get any laws passed that they want, but darned if religious organizations should be able to do the same thing, that's just not right. How dare religious organizations use the political process in their favor... Like everyone else.
this is completely false. there are several good solutions to the problem listed in the responses above. yea, they all require you to actually DO SOME WORK as a parent(gasp). and yes they are difficult, as the matter of raising children USUALLY IS DIFFICULT. what you want is not a solution. you want a 'QUICK FIX'! sure the FRC gave one to you, and it involved restricting the rights of other citizens as well as some other minor problems of not working at all(like most quick fixes). what did you expect? THERE ARE ALMOST ALWAYS NO QUICK FIXES FOR COMPLEX PROBLEMS! DONT WASTE YOUR TIME LOOKING FOR THEM.
From anti-ALA propoganda on the web: :)
Gary Glenn 517-835-7978
This is his AFA-associated phone number (I found what
looked like his home number on the web, and this
was different), so it would be (IMO) appropriate
to discuss AFA-related topics with him on this
line. (Indeed, the phone number being placed on public
propoganda is an implicit invitation to call him
up and discuss A[LF]A-related issues.)
I couldn't find an email address.
s that 41% of the registered voters? Who would register and not vote? Odd!
or is it 41% of the eligible voters?
that means approx. 21% of the voters voted it down?
21% decides for everybody? what kind of deal is that?
Majority rules.
41% voter turn out means 41% of registered votes found their way to the poles that day. In an area where local elections draw 13%, I'd say that's a pretty good showing.
don't get me wrong, I don't vote
but 41%, wow what a turnout
say, is "The Manchurian Candidate" out on DVD?
clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap
But sometimes your opponents ARE demons. Repressive, book burning, afraid of their own genitalia weasel-demons who would twist anything, the legal system, the Constitution, the facts, to impose their will upon your way. Shit, the whole west half of this state is teeming with them. Nobody needs to demonize them.
Now if Slashdot would live by their ideals and not moderate posts down to -5, they could have some credibility.
Until then, you are just a bunch of blowhards.
When were the poor helped? Puhleeze. "Good people who knew" blah blah. The poor have been getting the shaft since day one. I don't happen to be one, but you've got to be blind to think that our "democracy" has ever been even benevolent. You think "the people" have "might" in this country? Who runs politics? Rich people. --Doing the crack-dance for democracy...
I hate the itching, but I don't mind the swelling
Hmm, off-topic rates a -1, eh?
;)
It's in a response to people being dicks about technology, perhaps you're a person who's anti-2nd Amendment?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Now this one I'd argue about.
Are we not discussing ways in which activists can impact fundies, and the whole hoopla (ie: voter-picking (only during republican primaries), and assorted other legal tricks, media manipulation, meme manipulation, etc). Maybe you didn't like my previous post, and just trying to smother me?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
(Illogic: The Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are all the same person, see? But When jailed for spreading the word of God, Jesus exclaims "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?" Obviously, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, JESUS IS TALKING TO HIMSELF!!! Now, why would Jesus forsake himself???)
(Obscenity: In the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot saves an Angel from Homosexual Rape. Lot later loses his wife and proceeds to get drunk and gets both his daughters pregnant! Now mind you, Lot is the HERO in the story, whom God spares from destruction because of his godliness. So here we see the bible advocating incest???)
Yeah, how dare they actually stand up for what they believe in...
It has nothing to do with them standing up for what they believe in. The scary thing is the fact that they believe that an ancient, tribal Hebrew wind demon is "on their side", and that it wants them to push for Internet filtering for all. Some of the most atrocious things in history have been done by people who believe that some sort of magical sky pixie is on their side. If I said that the ghost of Jim Morrison wanted me to campaign for the legalization of marijuana, you'd think I was nutty, wouldn't you?
From the sky comes a scream, as Homer is crashing right into the Capitol. A few footsteps later, he comes running down the stairs.
Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
[murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]
The next day, Kodos announces the result: "All hail, President Kang."
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Politicians are supposed to protect the rights of all citizens and when civil rights are up for a vote, the minorities are the loosers.
Ballot issues are more used more often than not to inflict the tyranny of the masses on the minority.
It is my understanding, that VA does not allow their workers to view with company equipment. And becase Rob and Hemos are such freeloaders, they do not own a computer themselves. Rob and Hemos then realized that in order to keep their porn scavenging ways a live they were go to have to use the good old public library.
Using /. as a launching pad, they protested knowing that their porn viewing days were being seriously threatened. It is rumored that Hemos looked into buying a cheap iMac if his library pipeline was to be filtered but Rob assured Hemos that his pornographic cartoons were gettig a lot better and were almost life-like.
If you do not believe me, then e-mail them at malda@slashdot.org.
is that 41% of the registered voters? Who would register and not vote? Odd!
or is it 41% of the eligible voters?
that means approx. 21% of the voters voted it down?
21% decides for everybody? what kind of deal is that?
Where I grew up, in Milwaukee, there was a "religion" section, but it was purely informational and had no sermons at all. It was little more than a classified ad section for churches, where they would list times & places of gatherings. There was usually one or two articles about what churches were doing or what people in churches were doing, but no actuall preachy sermons. There might be an article about a new church being built, or a new archbishop being selected, but that was it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The point of this wasn't that the issue came to a vote-- the point was that two very-well-funded organizations *not based in Holland* came in, threw some cash and rhetoric around, and tried to push their morality on others.
If a group of local citizens campaigned with their own money, on their own time, to get filtering software installed, I don't think there would be such an outcry. Then it is simply a local issue.
But when outside concerns *start* the fight, and have lots of money to spread around, it becomes *every*one's conern.
Personally, I'm offended that money is the fuel of politics, instead of public interest, or even public opinion. Most laws are passed to protect business, and not to protect the individual. Even the MS case was brought about because Sun and Netscape cried foul. Why didn't they step in when the *public* complained? (Consumer groups had already started complaining about the MS abusing monopoly power.)
Sorry. Rant mode off.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I grew up in the Boston area and I'm just not used to seeing a "Religion" section in the local papers -- religion is certainly a fine institution but seeing a section of Christain sermons printed in the local newspaper is a bit fo culture shock to me. I know a lot of people in my area who would throw a fit if the Boston Globe printed daily sermons. I grew up in Newburyport, Mass: same population as Holland, lots of churches, plenty of Republicans, but no daily sermons printed in the local paper. Just an indication of some places being more conservative than others, that's all.
I'm sure Jamie's work helped a bunch. Nice to know that people don't always get the wool pulled over their eyes.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
>>how do we prevent the innocent from stubmling across pr0n *mistakenly*?
.gov, never in .com, other stuff ends in .com, .org, .net; And other countries end in .au, .ge, etc..". Make them visit the Whitehouse's site and other government agencies to ingrain the idea in thier heads. Then make sure they're supervised and can ask for help if they don't know how to find a site.
When was the last time YOU accidentally stumbled accross porn? I can't think of a single incedent. Now there ARE dangers: www.whitehouse.com is a porn site, whilee www.whitehouse.gov is what you'd expect. How do you avoid this? Educate your children: "Government stuff ends in
http://www.ariannaonline.com/c olumns/files/040698.html
I am currently sitting behind a proxy with SurfWatch active (for "sex" only). I had a feeling that the above domain name would be a trigger.
Well what a surprise...*BLAM!*... Blocked by SurfWatch®
I then checked out Arianna Online through my home machine and it appears that she is just a political writer. An anti-censorship one at that.
Where is the "sex" in that? Of course I had to use Lynx, so there could be pictures showing a sexy political writer.
I just can't figure these filterware companies out.
Kurt Gray said,
To have a proposal like this shot down in a town where the local newspaper has a "Religion" section, during a contested Republican presidential race, what are the odds?
I think he was trying to say that Holland is politically conservative.
I don't know what he's trying to say about religion. That religion == censorship? That religion == fascism? That religion is itself a social evil, or that all people who profess a religion are any huckster who comes down the pike?
There is nothing wrong with a newspaper having a Religion section. In fact, there is a good deal right with it. If newspapers have a Politics section, they should have a Religion section too. Religion isn't just a hobby. It influences the believer's entire life, and is a social force to be reckoned with even by the non-religious. For many people, their religion is the most important thing in the universe, because it truth, it is the best explanation of reality.
So your statement has no real punch. Some papers have religion reporters. A lot of newspapers consign infrequent religious reports to "lifestyle" feature stories. Though a newspaper merely having a regular section devoted to religion is a Good Thing IMHO, it does not, in and of itself, say anything about the political leanings of the area residents.
It could just as well have been,
To have a proposal like this shot down in a town where the high school has a football team, and during a heated gubernatorial race, what are the odds?
Before the Web, children could go to a library and look at things their parents considered unsuitable. "Huckleberry Finn", "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret", "The Nat Turner Diaries", "Mein Kampf", Madonna's "Sex". All these books have been and will continue to be under fire for not having the right presentation of ideas.
But public libraries are just that: public. Just as parents have to accept the fact that their kids might hear "motherfucker" on Main Street, they have to accept the fact that those kids might see a Mapplethorpe whip-in-ass photo in the library. If you try to keep it off the monitors, they'll just look in the books.
Hmmm. Maybe filtering software isn't such a bad idea...
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
But the AFA will be back. Count on it. They take losing very badly, and when they come back the second time they'll bring big guns.
And the remainder of us shouldn't rest on our laurels. There's the DVD CCA/MPAA and UCITA still out there. Our fight is nowhere near over.
Donate to the EFF!
55/45 is usually considered a pretty substantial victory for a local election. It will probably be enough to discourage the proponents from just putting it on the ballot again next year.
It's especially big news when you consider it's Feb. ballot ('slient majority' less likely to vote), a conservative town, and the Republican primary (huge turnout mobilized by christian right, although apparently there was quite a bit of Democratic monkeywrenching too.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Look, I appreciate free speech rights. I'm not a "book burner" who opposes ideas and free expression. I think that the free exchange of ideas is critical for our survival as a nation. However, since when is SEX a political statement? I'm sick of people who claim to be for "free speech" by default feeling obligated to defend any speech at all - even if it's not speech but rather people having illicit sex - or enticing you to do so.
I can hear you saying, "Oh dear, another wacko who is trying to limit me." Or, "look at him trying to impose his values on me." say that if you will, but I feel strongly about what follows:
Pornography is not an issue of people simply being unclothed. It's far more insidious than that. The people who produce pornography are quite happy to do the necessary research to figure out what will motivate you to want to keep looking at it. You are being manipulated, and so are the women who pose for the pictures. This ultimately hurts our society.
This is not the same thing as saying "don't contradict the government, or leaders." It's not. Pornography is a not-so-subtle attack on you, on women, and our culture.
Filtering is not (supposed to be) about limiting access to ideas. I know that filtering software has problems. I know that nothing is perfect. This is not a simple issue. Don't expect a simple answer. The truth is that much filtering of other media occurs today. Librarians decide what to spend public money on. Publishers decide what is worthy of publishing. Bookstores decide what materials they will carry. Newspapers decide which books will be reviewed. In the print medium, restrictions exist. They should exist in some form in the electronic world, too.
Filtering is supposed to be about blocking matterial that is not appropriate, or that is destructive. Don't fall prey to the idea that all information is good information. Children are not simply little adults. Some information is harmful to all of us. Information that might not be destructive for you as an adult might be very destructive to a child.
I support the first amendment, but this is NOTa free speech issue.
Thank you for your time.
Regards,
anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I agree with what you're saying. In this debate, however, the equality has been brought up a few times ("she pressed Enter and immediately a picture of a nude female appeared before her...")
:-) There's no reason why a five- or eight-year old couldn't have as resilient a facility, given proper nurture.
However, I think the best solution is to allow children to gain a greater maturity regarding such matters earlier in life. When you saw that hard-core stuff, it disgusted you, but it didn't mess you up. You kept on living your life just as well. (I hope
I once saw a video about young schoolboys in China. They play games, they do their studies just like any other kids their age, but what really impressed me was their lunch hour. Their school cafeteria is entirely run by them-- not a single person over ten years old. And that includes the people behind the food racks, serving up the dishes. And everything moves along with perfect order. And they leave the cafeteria perfectly spotless when they finish.
Compare this to an American classroom, where most of the teacher's time is spent simply keeping her students under control.
The lesson being, children will be as responsible (or irresponsible) as you make them to be. Not to say this can be carried to an extreme degree, of course-- but that, as a whole, our society has greatly underestimated its youth.
iSKUNK!
You confuse and mix up differend things like sex, pornography and rape. People DO get hurt through rape and indeed there are extremely rare stories of rape to make porn but no-one gets hurt by looking at pornography or sex as such, not even (small) children when they have been brought up with an open mind to the human sexuality.
A prime example of wrong upbringing is this Irv Bos who so couragiously told about his (childhood) trauma after his dad's barn burned down. The source of his grief is not caused by his hiding of a porn book in the barn but by the superstition that false preaching had brought into his mind!
The sort of people that preach this dangerous belief are often (decendants of Dutch) immigrants of years gone by. These people came from remote rural areas and for them time has stopped when they left Europe. They try to cling to a world that no longer exists, not in the US and even less in The Netherlands. Thank God over here the topic of "Porn Is Dangerous" is largely a non-issue.
What remains is a dangerous liking by some to restrict access to information, based on obscure ideas that come forth out of the same sick minds as that caused mr. Bos his grief. In the old Jerusalem they were called Pharisees, in the US they are know by names like reverent Bakker to give just one example..... Good luck in the struggle
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Er, are you talking about those introducing it, or those voting for it?
:-/
I am talking about those who push it: those who spend money and/or effort in order to make mandatory library filtering a reality. Most of the voting public are just innocent bystanders
you'll lose PR points saying it so bluntly
I don't think I am running in any popularity contests right now, so...
"This post is for limited release to Slashdot readers only. Under no circumstances it is to be made available to general population. What would they think of us?!?! Keep PR in mind at all times!!"
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I am serious.
Send him a letter or better yet, write a public letter to newspaper where people can read it. So that you can help stop using rape victims as political sound bite. Not that you will actually stop him but at least you can make other politicians think more before they say thing.
I'm very happy that enough citizens in Holland had the intelligence and common sense to defeat this measure. However I feel that it will be short lived given the political, cultural climate of the community.
It was, in fact, a very encouraging vote. And, as someone who lives here in Holland, I actually wasn't that surprised it failed. Yes, it's a hard, hard core conservative area, but that doesn't mean we're all yokels here. While folks hereabouts are genuinely concerned about all manner of moral and ethical issues, at the same time, we've got a decent bit of common sense, and we especially don't like other people dictating what we should or shouldn't do. At least, that's the case for enough of us that this issue's settled.
55% is pretty danged decisive; when you take a look at the totals for overall Ottawa county, where the staunch Republicans overwhelmingly (2:1) voted for Bush, there is no question but a significant number of 'em must've voted down the library filters--there's no way it would've lost otherwise.
All told, not a bad moment for our li'l ol' bastion of conservatism here in SW Michigan ;)
Props to the original poster for including the line about Communists -- it's frequently omitted, probably because people find it embarrassing.
Maybe they meant free beer.
There is not an appreciable difference between ballot initiatives and bills brought up before a legislative body. If one person can say, "That should not be on the ballot, because my friends and I think it's unconstitutional," and have it stick, then anyone can. Unfortunately, you're not always going to agree with the person saying it, which is why it's the responsibility of the judicial branch to determine a measure's constitutionality. All of which is to say, this belonged on the ballot, because enough people believed it belonged on the ballot. Arguments of tyranny by the majority have no legal standing at this point. You can (even should) try to convince people not to sign the petition, but once enough people want to vote on it, it should be voted on. Anything else would leave a hole big enough for a Pinochet or a Pol Pot to get through.
Jeff
I am 100% for what happened in Holland, Michigan. I am, like seemingly most /.ers, very against censorship.
But, this isn't a 100% win-win situation. Because to me, censorship isn't the answer for protecting our children from mistakenly browing to pr0n or extreamly hateful material... so what do we do about the young children browsing?
Now, keep in mind, I'm not talking about the kids who *intentionally* seek out pr0n and stuff on racist organazations, kids will be kids, that's a topic I don't want to hit on here, because that subject can be a whole 'nother thread...
The issue I do want to address, though, is how do we prevent the innocent from stubmling across pr0n *mistakenly*? I don't want a 5 year old in my library, doing legitimate reading or, hell, reading about Pokèmon characters, I don't care, then hitting the wrong link... And don't come back trying to tell me that kind of thing doesn't happen. =)
Parents will understand that there is a time and a place for children to be educated about the "reality" of things in this world, and sometimes age 5 isn't always the best time to explain all the hate-groups in our world and the high existance of pornographic material.
So, if not censorship (which, as I said, I am against as well), what do we do?
-Saxton
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
From The Dutch to Holland :
CONGRATZ!!!!
And eh... Jamie, please keep writing the most excellent SlashDot articles! I love em.
Greetz SlashDread, from the old Holland.
Although I tend to be Libertarian by inclination, I find it difficult to get excited about laws restricting the spending of public funds. Censorship is the muzzling of people by government; not the imposition of limitations on what can be said in government facilities. Is it equivalent to book-burning to prevent people from posting political posters in libraries? How about a law preventing evil right-wing zealots from passing out religious literature in a library?
All I can say is... WTF does full internet access have to do with a girl getting raped in the same building? How the hell is an internet filter supposed to stop that?
Dude, don't you know that, like, the Web causes your brains to do bad things? Like rape girls, and read news that the AFA doesn't like, and think for yourself? Don't you know ANYTHING?
THIS POST HAS BEEN RATED 'S' FOR SARCASTIC BY THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PEOPLE THAT USE THEIR HEADS FOR MORE THAN A HATRACK.
Brazil has decided you're cute.
"It's been an incredibly interesting journey that we've been on," said LoriJo Schepers, co-chair of Citizens Voting YES! to Protect Our Children, a committee that campaigned in favor of the ordinance.
"God has called us to this, and no matter what happens from this point forward, I think he would say to us now 'Well done, good and faithful servants,'" Schepers said. "This is a journey. This is not the end."
I don't have a problem with people having religious beliefs - as long as they don't try to inflict them on me. Religious fanatics (from any political bent) are the worst kind of fanatics since their status for eternity rests with doing the biding of an almighty power.
Of course, with AFA and the other groups involved, this was to be expected.
What about also exploring avenues that would allow public forums, i.e. libraries to avoid the filter issue. Why not created a domain where the pornographic sites are. Perhaps a .sex or a .xxx or whatever. Then they could at least have a better chance of blocking some traffic. The movie industry already does this. The music industry has started.
Down side with this idea? It would take global committment and regulation. Do we want that? I don't think so... to hard to enforce.
This is nothing new and has been thrown around. If America does it, it will force the porn industry to move their servers to another country. Being that federal, state and local laws mandate the Internet, it will be very hard to accomplish this unless there turns out to be a universal panel that will govern the Internet.
If you think the religious zealots whine alot now, wait until you mention a "one world government" and you will have every conservative republican grabbing a gun looking for the "four surfers of the apocalypse".
I do agree, though. A suffix for a domain of .xxx does make alot of sense, but then we still have the issue of speech that the zealots will whine about and want censored. Hate speech (although selective, they do a fair amount themselves) Witchcraft, Harry Potter websites, they will find something to ban. Chances are they will want .gay domains as well.
So what other ideas/methods could there be?
The only thing that comes to mind...
- Detritus
"I never really liked computers, but then the server went down on me"
I find that very hard to believe - if we're talking about the American population. That was what I meant. Because, obviously, people from other countries are less likely to fly around the world to a protest in Seattle, especially if they are poor. So the proportion of American Hispanics/Blacks/whatever would be the key statistics here.
Female Prison Rape in NY
For Gary Glenn, president of the family association's state chapter, the issue is simple. "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
The library's director, in a letter to the editor of Holland's newspaper, denied any connection, saying her "staff is positive that the accused rapist did not use the Internet here."
But Glenn believes libraries with unfiltered access create an environment that draws in sex predators. The association wants to protect children not only from porn on the Net, he says, but also "from having to share a library with adults who are accessing the Internet."
I think this extract just speaks for itself.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
Mind you, there have been political cases where that kind of thing happens, but some people extrapolate from those cases to assume that everything is fore ordained. It is also easier on their consciences when they don't feel like going to the poll or write a letter to say, "Well, it wouldn't have any effect anyway."
If the fix had been in in Holland, the libary would have lost, and been forced to install AFA approved filters. It is precisely because the outcome was not pre-ordained that this is not how the vote turned out.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
In this government, unless you're willing (and able) to start a civil war, you don't matter unless you exercise your Constitutional right to VOTE. This is good or bad, depending on how you view it, but most of all it is fact.
When you don't vote:
You not only don't affect the process, you also don't get listened/pandered to. Your concerns don't get registered, such that you might come in contact with other people who agree with you, or even find that a majority of people sharing your belief haven't been listened to, either, and that had you spoken up, you may have been able to effect your world in your way.
People diametrically opposite to your values, issues and way of life come out of the woodwork to pass as many laws and elect as many people as possible to shut you out of the process. They figure you're either not caring, or not noticing.
I refer you to the Term Limits, Anti-Campaign Finance Reform, Anti-Alternate Voting Methods, and Tax Reform (two-thirds majority clauses, all increases subject to a public vote that you already don't care about) movements as examples of how some people who understand their civic duty are actively trying to exclude you from participating in your government by either limiting your choices, marketing you to death so that you won't give a shit, or otherwise making it tough on you to remain interested in shaping your circumstances.
The thing is, 1) it's your fault they're able to do that to you, and 2) if you already delude yourself into thinking that you can't even write in a candidate you'd like, or otherwise make a lame-ass excuse, they've already won.
People who would normally listen to you and agree with your value system have to move away from your concerns. You can't help them back, because you didn't stand up for your convictions. You don't give them the benefit of your support, so there's nothing in it for them to help you.
Believe me, I've heard personally from more than one Senator, Congressman, or other elected official that our generation (18-35 yrs. old) doesn't get its concerns on the table because we turn out for elections at anywhere from 9% to 16%. That's as in percent of us who can vote.
And if we don't get our shit together, we in that age group can expect to be shut out of any meaningful role in our government our entire lives. We're not suddenly gonna get religion with regard to voting when we get old. The people who are old now (and turning out at something like 62% - minimum) have been active their entire voting careers. They voted during the Kennedy/LBJ Vietnam era, some even before that, and they haven't stopped.
Again, the people who took the time to vote in Holland's election are the ones who matter, and who deserve to tell Holland's public library how their iboxes will be configured or not with regard to content filters. Whether 41% turnout deciding a vote is bullshit or not isn't their problem, and it certainly isn't their fault.
Vote or Die, folks.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
concerns of those who don't cotton to the idea of their tax money being used to fund someone's porn habit at the local library
Taxes pay for a lot of things we should be outraged about. This argument sounds desperate to me.
Good to see people voting, though! (Who says Gen Xers are all cynical and jaded? Oh, that was me...)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
From the MSNBC article:
For Glenn the issue is simple. "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
All I can say is... WTF does full internet access have to do with a girl getting raped in the same building? How the hell is an internet filter supposed to stop that?
Lib.BENCH the only site you'll ever need!
Anyone in Holland Township want to sign a petition to cut the library's funding from the Township unless they remove all materials of the AFA and FRC?
I'M ONLY KIDDING OF COURSE. I'm just still a little miffed that the issue came up in such an underhanded way that excluded 3/4 of the librarys supporters/patrons from voting on the issue.
Good luck to the next community where they try to pull this nonsense. And it is likely they will. Remember, next time they are going to be better organized so you better get ready!
Here's a few links to help you get ready.
http://www.freedomforum.org/
http://www.firstamendment.com/resources.html
Also, let's make it a clean fight. Don't stoop as low as they will.
What's scary here is that I probably know you. I graduated Wilton in 94. Go Beavers!
I assert ownership of all trademarks and copyrights on this page.
I got this quote from an article at news.com and I quote "LoriJo Schepers, a spokeswoman for Holland Area Citizens Voting YES! To Protect Our Children, said last night that the defeat won't end her up's fight to get filters installed on the library computers."
First of all what makes these people think that they have a right to impose their ignorant ideas on the rest of us when clearly they have been defeated by a reasonably democratic process. Give it up. The people have spoken and it looks like they're against it. But no, we have to protect the children. Why is it that everytime they try to limit our rights it's in the name of protecting the children. I'm all for "protecting the children" but stop using them as some sort of a rallying cause. After all what politician would say "against" when asked if he is for or against protecting the children. These people preach morality when they have absolutely none and they are yhe only thing we should protect our children from.
I'm guessing that ole fashion newsprint paper editors must be all for blocking software because the news that is blocked out competes with their own newspapers. Editors in general have always seemed prudish and preachy to me.
... with the thaw, I doubt there's any white stuff on the ground in Holland today. (Slush, maybe. ;-)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If we adopt the tactics of the Religious Reich, we will become like they are. Let's not.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Dang. Here I was hoping you meant Moscow, Michigan.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Obviously you should get some St. John's Warts.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I also thought that this measure would be a slam dunk in the Tulip City.
It is good to see that people can see past the hype and know when they are being played.
Stay vigilant, these special interests will be looking for another demographic to attack, this battle isn't over.
Hooyah.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Don't forget to advocate low cost solutions. Putting web terminals in high traffic areas is a far more effective way of making sure community standards are enforced and doesn't require any technology at all.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
But I think that the whole point was that No one should be allowed to take advantage of an unknowing and/or apathetic voting audience to put an item that is in violation of the first amendment on the ballot.
I'm pleased with the community's response in this case and I hope that their action is indicative of what will occur in other areas.
This is a great victory. Congratulations to everyone involved!
To begin with, most of the stuff on pr0n sites doesn't seem to be just pictures of naked people. I am not a regular consumer of pr0n, but the few times I have accidently found my way to some of those sites (ok, I admit it, I was following 'warez links at the time) the stuff there rather turned my stomach. Why? Because it depicted much more than just naked people. Some of it was violent, some of it just plain disgusting (e.g. the bestiality-fetish crowd).
I agree that the best solution is for parents to supervise their children's use of the computer (especially young children), but I would like to point out that the concern people have isn't just some Puritanical anal-retentivity. There's no way any child should see hard-core pr0n. If I want to educate my children (I don't have any, BTW, but perhaps someday. . .) about the naked human form, I will try to find some art gallery or book on human anatomy or something that has much more taste-ful depictions of the human form, thank you.
What about something like:
1 Being that the foundation of a free society is based on the free flow of information, and being that various elements have attempted to restrict the free flow of constitutionally protected information, it is prohibited for any state funded organisation to restrict the use of computing devices to view constitutionally protected speech through the application of filtering software.
1.1 In order for filtering software to be used at a public computer terminal, it must not prevent the end user from viewing any speech which is constitutionally protected.
1.2 Should an organisation receive a complaint that filtering software in use on the terminal has blocked constitutionally protected speech, the provider of said software must reveal to an investigatory committee the criteria with which it blocks content so that the committee may determine whether the software does, in fact, use criteria that may block constitutionally protected speech.
1.2.1 The analysis of this criteria shall be performed by a committee containing no less than two individuals serving for the state, two individuals from the private sector drawn from local technological companies, and two individuals of any background from the private sector.
1.3 Should the software block consitutionally protected speech, the committee shall notify the organisation controlling the terminal of its violation. At this time, the organisation shall be required to upgrade the software so that it comes into compliance with this law, or remove the software from all public computer terminals.
1.4 Should the organisiation still be in violation more than two weeks after notification, state funding will be withdrawn.
Thus, the library can put censorware in place, but if it blocks out any 'protected speech', the software needs to be removed. It would look like it was granting the right to use censorware explicitly, however since I don't know of any censorware that actually does what it promises, none of it would be valid.
Then again, I don't know the politics of Michigan.
I just had a thought, and call me crazy, but can't we fight fire with fire? Why not get some Michigan /.'ers together and write a law banning the use of internet filters statewide in Michigan?
Obviously, the major proponents of censorware are attempting to bring the requirement of censorware in public libraries to the state level, and at some point probably to the federal level. If we were to put together legislation to ban the use of filtering software in publicly funded libraries, it would either:
The only real failure here is if it fails so dramatically that censorware proponents can immediately use support they've garnered to pass their own legislation, and I give this a rather slim likelyhood.
So, anyone want to write some legislation?
And it is important for those of us opposed to these types of censorship to learn from your experiences. Because these same people are coming to all of our neighborhoods if they aren't already there.
The groups that wanted these filters are not stopping. I am sure they are not even done with Holland, MI (what they can't get done with voters, they then usually try to get with legislators, and vice-versa).
Enjoy your victory, but don't forget the price of freedom really is eternal vigilence (and overcoming apathy).
Actually, no. Republic.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
> The government shouldn't be spending the
> people's money on anything that doesn't
> have very strong upside potential. "That
> government governs best, which governs least"
> and all that.
Which Thoreau extended, quite correctly, to the
obvious end "That government governs best that
governs not at all". (I often wish that I had
the courage to do what Thoreau did...to refuse to
pay taxes and willingly go to jail for that
belief - tis so hard to be an idealist)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Making it easy to bypass the filters is one possibility
My employer uses SmartFilter. It seems to get a remarkable number of false positives. (Everything has SOMETHING to do with sex, it seems. I'm not sure I want to meet the guy who thinks Crusoe block diagrams are a turn-on.)
But Anonymizer is NOT BLOCKED. Since the site itself suggests that it is normally blocked by everyone, I presume that my employer added it as a specific exception. Since I can get anywhere via anonymizer, I'm not too upset at the use of a high-false-positive blocker.
Does the opposition have a website?
http://censorware.org/
Ha, the measure required spending money. In Holland, Michigan, the cheapest town in America, that is usually a dead-bang loser. Seriously though, employers love Holland because it has a large body of people with good high school educations. People who can be good workers, and good members of a community. Not everyone gets college degrees and graduate degrees. I think the people there just understood the issues, including the futility of trying to set the Internet in stone. After all, these people did elect Phil Tanis mayor at one point, right? How knee-jerk conservative can they be, electing a 22-23 year old as mayor? I just think the out-of-town proponents just screwed up their market research. There has to be a community in America where that initiative is a winner, just not Holland.
Of course, I'm a pessimist. Then when everything works out, I'm pleasantly surprised. (Slightly maligned from original source)
Anyway, it's good to see that most people there supported making up their own minds than letting some software do it for them.
As a kid (read, early teens), I went to the library looking for all kinds of information (and entertainment). One time, out of sexual curiosity, I found and took out the 'Kama Sutra', 'The Joy of Sex', and a couple of other _extremely_ explicit books. I found information I couldn't find in most other places. Yes, it encouraged me to try some of the things I read (I learned, through that, that most of these books are bull____, and they're definitely wrong about what women will like (usually written by men, big surprise)). But you know, I'd probably have tried some of those things anyway, and I'd be less happy if I hadn't been able to learn. Sexual repression sucks. Having those books publicly accessible is actually a good thing, to my mind.
Thankfully my mother, while not great in some other things, was easy to ask about just about anything. She always answered with logic, and explanations. Even if she simply believed something to be wrong, she explained why and let us make up our own minds. She didn't approve of sex as teenagers, but she knew it would happen anyway, so she made sure we had Planned Parenthood classes and an anonymous drawer in the bathroom, supplied with condoms from the local chapter of PP and the AIDS info groups, which we could use or hand out to friends however we wanted. No questions asked, and it was always full.
If books like these can be in our libraries, why can't the web? And as for filtering, what's wrong with children seeing sex? If you _explain_ your views to them, they will likely follow in your footsteps (at least in some ways). Are we to filter the books then, too? Because, let me tell you, there are some very explicit books in libraries (I found 'The Story of O' in a library once, not to mention others). What's next? Can't talk dirty, even among consenting adults? No flirting at all? Where is the line? Where does it end?
It ends in revolution - the totalitarian control over our minds and bodies would become too much, and people would revolt. People don't like to be chained. Some part of me thinks that the RR knows this, and that would be why they push it slowly and in places we might not think of. If we don't see it coming, maybe we won't revolt against it. Thinking like that gives me the creeps.
-Elthia
If you think religion=conservative, you don't know much about the religious spectrum in the US.
Lee Kai Wen
Funny how it's only "legislating morality" when you don't agree with it.
If I want to outlaw pornography, I'm trying to legislate my morality. If I want to outlaw child pornography, I'm a right-thinking person.
Since most laws have a moral base the political process is largely concerned with "legislating morality". Deal with it.
Lee Kai Wen
Hear, hear. While I was recently part of a successful ballot campaing in my state (on public funding for candidates, funny how sitting reps are never into that sort of thing.) and see their value, I'm also frightened by the tendency to put human rights for a minority up for majority vote. We live in a constitutional democracy, not a full one. (US that is)
here in MA, you cannot put anything on the ballot that relates to religion. Same concept, but only protects one kind of minority. (though by happy happenstance, the gay civil rights law here was passed with a religious exception that inadvertently ballot-proofed it. :> Same thing will probably prevent an anti-marriage initiative.)
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
*grin* well, this is a public forum. And don't forget that the "open letter" to a pro-filtering group got held up as an example of our evil because the "department" heading had a boobies joke. :)
Anyway, "unmitigated bigots" really isn't very descriptive. If we're going to be insulting, lets at least be informative. Are they intellectual bigots? Sexual expression bigots? I deal with a wide variety of bigots in my political life, I just need more data!
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Congratulations, you just explained why filter proponents will most likely win. A person says "i am concerned about X" The Religious Right gives them a solution, but one they are uncomfortable with. You give them no solutions and insult them for being concerned. Guess who they are more likely to see as on their side?
This community has the ability to give concerned parents a non-censorship solution to the problem they percieve. Everyone wins except the RR. If we instead choose to insult their perceptions, we give the RR a constant platform to gain support, the parents solutions that dont work and censorship for ourselves. Everyone loses except the RR.
Your choice, guys.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Ottowa County: Bush: 55% McCain: 36% Keyes: 9%
Overall, 68% of Republicans voted for Bush, and about the same percentage of Independents and Dems voted for McCain. There's no telling if those numbers were similar in Ottowa county, but they probably weren't too far off. It's a pretty safe bet that Keyes was getting very little non-republican support.
As for what it means, I'd say it points out that the Religious Right has been counting on republicans falling into line a bit too much. Obviously even a wave of propoganda couldn't win this fight in a district had (very approximately) 60% republican voters. (OK, I realize there's a wide margin of error in that guess, but It's pretty safe to say republicans were in the majority.)
Borogrove
I'm sure that was their theory, but take a look at the demographics of yesterday's vote: 49% Republicans, 51% Democrats/Independants. While they came primarily to vote for McCain, I have no doubts that it helped defeat the censorship proposal.
A big question, though, is what happens next time, if they try for another Republican dominated election and there isn't a McCain to throw their expectations out the window. It's also a pretty safe bet they'll try to avoid the geek compound's backyard next time.
Borogrove
"All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe." -- Lewis Caroll
Congratulations to the city of Holland. It's nice to see there are occasionally communities who choose accountability and involvement in their children's lives, over a cop out. Filtering software is simply the latest wayin which people can feel they're no longer responsible for their own actions, and don't need to pay attention to what their own children are doing. Kudos to the people of Holland for rejecting a trend that has become all too familiar in our society.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
I refuse, on principle, to have a
Yeah, captialism. (or should I put democracy?)
kwsNI
> I think that you deserve some of the credit for this victory.
Actually, I think you deserve quite a bit of the credit. Thanks for helping to keep the internet open to everyone.
> It just goes to show that geeks can make a difference when we take the time to get involved and to make our pitch in a way that can be understood by the average Joe.
In the words of Austin Powers: "Yeah, capitalism".
kwsNI
people can be trusted to look at an issue and do the Right Thing.
The trouble is that this isn't THE right thing. Children can still go to a library and look at things that their parents consider unsuitable for them. This could be considered wrong. The decision was whether this is this more or less wrong than blanket censorship.
Most children, I think, will satisfy their initial curiosity and move on. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist,
I think you're right. Difficult to convince a lot of parents of this though.
Well, I've never seen Mein Kampf on a bookshelf, but my History teacher assured me that it was available if you ask for it. This is essentially the same thing as the library censors (they would have been removed if requested). Although I do agree that it shouldn't be up to the library to restrict people in an attempt to enforce what parents don't want their children to see.
The point is that if censorship happens in Michigan, it culd happen elsewhere.
If it happens in your town, they'll say "Well, they've censored the Library in Holland, Michigan, and nobody complained"
Try these: http://www.ala.org/alaorg/oif/filt_res.html http://www.ciec.org/SC_appeal/decision.shtml (this one is a little pokey) Oh, and yay for open minded people who like to make their own decisions... -pjf
Oh, yeah... I mean Moscow, Iowa ;-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Slashdotter's
Its seems to me that the problem with internet filters is thier blanket approcach searching for words in pages, URLs and of course the ole blacklist. Its the same as WWII blanket bombing. Drop 500 bombs at one target and chances are you'll get it (along with alot of things that weren't targets). Has anyone considered starting a little project to create a simple very easily modified open source internet filtering program? Allowing library officals to decide what tactics would fit thier needs such as a blacklist of the the obvious prono sites. I really wouldn't mind a filtreing system IN public libraries if it could be scutinized BY the public and then changed.
Now another hot topic has come up in that past was making a new domain classification such as dot XXX or something like that. Of course the obvious objection to that is "Who decides what gets placed into .XXX". I personally think it would work great as a strictly volunatry thing. The same way the the X movie rating is purely volunatry. In fact most adult movie producers have taken a serious marketing liking to it even making the imaginary XXX rating to sell thier movies. I can just see the ads now (even though the change was volunatry) "Goto www.hardcoreprono.xxx! So hardcore we got kicked off .com".
How does the /. feel about these iniatives?
I'm actually hoping Jamie responds to this one. Listening to the local news on my public radio station, I caught a story about state legislation mandating filtering in libraries. Does anyone else privvy to Michigan politics have a more info on that? I dunno if the statewide measure was about state libraries, or if it covers everything. I do remember the provision to mandate filters for university and college libaries got stripped from the bill. Anyway, you have to keep watching for these people becase they're relentless and if they fail at one level of government, they'll try at another.
On the positive side: Good going! That victory provides some enthusiasm on my part.
ATTACK OF THE PORN IMAGES
it could happen to YOU
Yeah. SURE they did lady. And that Playboy just happened to POP UP in my mailbox.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
You're right... I misinterpreted his post. My bad.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
There are people naive enough to think that the tide of filth on the internet can be turned back. They're wrong, but it's important that votes like this rub their nose in it (let's be honest and call this whole discussion a sack dance, okay). That way we ensure they will begin to question their willingness to fund the library's internet access, or, better yet, the library itself.
When their grievances go unaddressed (except by taunts of "bluenose") we can practically guarantee that they will opt out of the system. Every place we can polarize society is an opportunity to create more self-governors. Okay, some of them will be murderous Timothy McVeighs, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, no?
Who said fundamentalists cared about whether any of there proposals were legal or not? They would just as soon restrict everyones rights and make them attend church.
There's one thing you fundamentalists don't understand. Not every issue can be settled by voting on it. We have in this country what is called a constitutional democracy. All new laws have to be in accordance with the constitution. If the founding fathers hadn't established a constitutional form of government we would have all kinds of rights violating laws.
The true motivation of these anti-freedom freaks is revealed by the following: -------------------------------------------------- The ballot initiative here was led by Irvin Bos, a 59-year-old builder and manager of apartment buildings who said he had dedicated himself to fighting pornography because of an incident that occurred when he was 12 years old. He found a sexually explicit book by the roadside then and read it over and over again in the family's barn, Mr. Bos said in an interview today. When lightning struck the barn six months later, burning it down and killing the family's prize bull and best cow, Mr. Bos felt responsible. "I just knew I had caused that barn to burn down," Mr. Bos said. ------------------------------------------ Sorry Mr. Bos... guess there's gonna be a lot of fires in Holland now!
the money they spent on trying to get this through all went down the drain.
Better than that, it informed a lot of people about blocking software, and some of those (who decided to find the other viewpoint) are now more educated about Internet privacy/censorship. People are now ad dumb as we sometimes think. Merely misinformed.
This just makes me mad... "Has the rapist ever been to a post office? It's obviously the USPS' fault that he rapes." How absurd can these peoples' claims be?
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I read somewhere, I think slashdot actually, that the "lack of minorities on the web" is based on old statistics, and no longer true as of the last year or so. Today, in fact, Hispanics are actually overrepresented on the net.
And I think there is another possible reason for the lack of minorities in the Seattle protests that ought to be visited. "Progressives" tend to be a more affluent than average. We all know that income isn't evenly distributed ethnically.
It's a twisted kind of logic. If your library has full internet access, then it attracts the guys who will surf porn. Those guys are the same guys that will rape young girls. Therefore, the guy was hanging around the library, just about to, or just finishing up, surfing porn, and in the mood to rape a young girl, and he found one. Logically, if you don't have full internet access, the guy wouldn't have been there since he couldn't get to the porn, therefore he wouldn't have raped the young girl there.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
To have a proposal like this shot down in a town where the local newspaper has a "Religion" section, during a contested Republican presidential race, what are the odds? I think Jamie deserves due for credit for showing the people some common sense like just how flawed the logic in Internet filters are. It bothers me that all the press coverage is not mentioning the various flaws in Internet filters, but instead most press stories are making it sound as if Holland voted in favor of pr0n for everybody because the ACLU told them pr0n is protected by the first amendment -- that's not what this issue is about, it's simply that Internet filters don't work as intended as Jamie demonstrated. I'm suprised there were still 45% percent of voters who didn't get that through into their thick skulls.
The real problem is sites you find when you aren't looking for them. These are mostly spammers -- email, usenet, search engines. Looking up "monkey" shouldn't give you porn sites -- but I've seen kids do just that and get 50% of the results as porn. If kids are getting pornographic email, parents aren't going to let them have email at all -- and I want children to be able to communicate. These are the problems.
Parents can't be expected to monitor their children's activity completely -- this simply isn't practical. Nor is it practical for schools.
However, I think filtering could be okay if it only targetted misleading sites, email, and posts. This might include pyramid-schemes (though education is much more important and effective here) but wouldn't include all porn, risque geocity sites, hate sites, or nearly anything based solely on content. Fraud is illegal, and filtering out fraudulent content doesn't harm anyone's first ammendment rights.
OTOH, these fraudulent sites are exactly the ones that are hardest to filter. Heuristic-based filtering is bound to make mistakes, and that's exactly the problem. Making it easy to bypass the filters is one possibility to counter this. It isn't really a problem for a child or adult to be able to bypass a filter if it requires extra action. Mostly children do the right thing, and adults should be allowed to bypass whatever they want.
I really think children should be able to do the wrong thing -- that's part of learning. But they shouldn't be able to do the wrong thing without trying. That's the valid argument for filtering, and denying that the problem exists isn't the right answer.
I've never seen a society where everyone is so keen to be the underdog.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Both sides would be wrong.
Just goes to prove that you can't oversimplify issues by claiming that anything is fixed. Too often, we create general principles where none is warranted.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Here is a paragraph out of the article on this incident as reported in the Digital Library Journal:
"However, the rapist -- who has not been caught -- was not seen on the library's main floor, where Internet stations are located, according to library director Martha Ferriby. The rape occurred in the women's restroom on the ground floor, where the girl had gone after coming to the library with her father; different news organizations reported that the rapist followed the girl into the restroom or was already present there. "We know nothing about this man, if he's ever been in the library before," Ferriby said. She said she was "99 percent sure" he hadn't used the Internet, since workstations are monitored closely."
The other paragraph basically states Gary Glenn's comment about how the internet is at fault, which is contradicted here. It wasn't as if this guy looked at porn and then grabbed a random library patron and rapped her on the library floor. If the library had had no internet access, the chance that this event would still have occured are incredibly high. Even if he was looking at porn on a library machine (highly unlikely, as the machines are monitored as mentioned), it did not force him to go rape that girl (remember, the internet doesn't rape people; people rape people).
Brynn, who is really pissed off when people blame machines for people problems
"Any sufficiently advanced form of Magic is indistinguishable from Technology." - Gnomish Technomancer
So far, all I've seen here is comments and restatements but no proof to back up these statements, so I made one. Although it is geared toward the illegality of censorware in schools, it also applies to public libraries as well (esp. the last paragraph).
During some recent research, I came across an intriguing idea: Schools cannot use censorware on their Internet connections. After further research, I have found this to be supported by current United States Supreme Court (USSC) decisions. The following, using said decisions, will show that censorware on Internet connections used in public schools is illegal.
First, according the 1997 USSC decision, Reno v. ACLU, the Internet is covered in full by the First Ammendment. However, many people believe that the 1988 USSC decision, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, gives the schools the right to censor the Intenet as the see fit because that decision stated that schools can censor publications with the schools name on it. This is completely untrue. Here's why:
The Internet contains many sites which promote one religion over another. If schools associate themselves with the Internet, they inherently associate themselves with all of the Internet's content and, therefore, the affore-mentioned religious sites. This is illegal due to the 1971 USSC decision, Lemon v. Kurtzman, which requires that all government and, therefore, school, actions not end up promoting one religion over another. By associating one's self with a religious site, you are inherently promoting that religion. Therefore, the government and all of it's entities must disassociate themselves from the Internet. Also, because the schools will be supplying information from many independant sources, and because said sources retian the right to disallow the schools association, the schools are required to disassociate themselves from the Internet. Without association with a given medium, schools loose the Hazelwood right to censor it.
The ability to censor, therefore, falls to the 1969 USSC decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, which grants the ability only in cases of obscenity or where material and substantial detriment to the learning process would result. Blocking even one page that is not obscene and does not materially and substantially interfere with the learning process is, therefore, illegal. Censorware blocks many pages which do not fall into the category of legally censorable.
Furthermore, being considered printed material by Reno v. ALCU, the internet collectively counts as one gigantic library. By having connections to the internet, you inherently have the entire internet's book collection (that is, every page as one book) in your library (every computer, in this case). The 1943 USSC decision, West Virginia State Board Of Education v. Barnette, says that once admitted into a library run by the state or entities thereof it cannot be removed. Since the internet constitutes a library of books, no one book may be removed, with sole exception of pornography and other materials which are detrimental to the school environment. Censorware will always block some material which does not fall into the latter category. This is a trait which cannot be removed with any ease nor reasonable amount of time and, since even one instance of illegal censoring is illegal, censorware cannot legally be used by any entity of the state including schools.
BTW, IANAL.
part of the problem is that when a politician talks about "protecting the children" from the latest bugaboo (like Internet porn), too many of us, who would be laughing at his expense, restrain this natural urge to faux civility.
9 8.html
Take Arianna's advice:
http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/0406
Lower your guffaw threshold. Better yet go to political rallies and lower your guffaw threshold.
Why should we care about what happens in Michigan?
/. would pay anywhere near as much attention as they are to this "local" dispute?
/., you should care. For every government-censored public terminal, there're schools full of kids who will be selectively barred from information (about gay rights groups, breast cancer studies, etc.) that would highly enrich their lives.
Let's see...
a) because the Right has decided to try and sneak censorship into Holland libraries, the intention being to develop the illusion of a "consensus" ("Moral Majority," anyone?) on this issue so as to argue it on a national scale.
b) If this were to happen in some other random community, do you think
c) Even if the Right didn't have such an agenda, even if Slashdot wasn't the home of
This is why I care. And this is why I think jamie's doing an awesome service to the community (and to the nation in general) by fighting against the legalization of censorship.
Aren't you dead?
Definition1: A pessimist is a well infromed optimist.
Definition2: An optimist is a well instructred pessimist.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
And remember, don't take hypercards from large Aleutians with tattoos on their foreheads.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I can't help but wonder how much of the vote was a negative reaction to outsiders coming in and throwing relatively large amounts of money on one side of a (notionally) local issue? We in "Middle America" tend to have a conservative streak -- even the hippie-looking folk like me -- but we also tend to bow up at the idea of outsiders throwing lots of money behind one side in a local election.
Perhaps all that money did more harm than good?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
presentation up on the Web somewhere permanently?
We will definitely do this, and store them on censorware.org for future reference. It's a great idea, one that we thought about in the past but never got up the gumption to actually do.
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Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot?
I Grew up in Atlanta in the '60s and saw the cival rights movement first hand. I'm pretty sure it qualified as a "devisive social issue". I can assure you if this appeared on the ballot in any local or state election in the south, 40 years ago
"Should Negros have the same rights as Whites?"
It would have been defeated by a landslide! The racists in the south didn't have the "Right" to deny African-Americans thier cival rights. Fundamentalists don't have the "right" to deny others thier first admenment rights.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Um, excuse me, this was not a petty issue. Although it was very symbolic, and sends out a message that even one of the most conservative of constituencies isn't willing to tolerate this kind of control on access to information.
Here's just one reason why it's important, even if you are very pessimistic about representative democracy (as I am): One of the notable things about the demonstrations in Seattle was that ethnic minorities were under-represented among the demonstrators. It's not entirely clear why that was, but some reasons that have been suggested are:
- Many ethnic minority people (as well as white people) didn't understand what the WTO protests were going to be about, or how it would affect them - or they saw more pressing issues to organize around.
- Some "progressive" groups display either implicit or explicit psychological barriers to the entry of ethnic minorities (sometimes this can be as simple as the fact that there are few non-white faces in the group, discouraging non-white people from joining.)
- The internet - particularly low-tech stuff like email lists - was a big help in organising the Seattle protests, even without there being any kind of overall controlling organization. (In fact, this latter factor probably swelled the numbers, as no-one group felt unable to stand behind a "co-ordinating" group). But many ethnic minority people and groups simply don't have very much, or any, access to the Internet. So again, they didn't get to know how dangerous and relevant the WTO really is.
Given the large disparities in average wealth, and Internet penetration, between white America and other ethnic groups, this is not entirely surprising. Internet access through libraries is a small, though significant, part of access to alternative points of view from the stultifying mainstream media, and hence to real political activity - and of course, battles fought over libraries will affect the current and future debates on school, college and indeed corporate and home-based censorware.The Internet, particularly with sites like ZNet and Free Speech Internet Television, is a brilliant place to enlighten yourself. I don't call restricting access to the Internet, especially when these restrictions are blatantly designed to censor alternative political views, in any way a "side issue".
And yes, it is a "fight", in a very real sense - not curious terminology at all - it is a psychological battle. As the elites of this world have known for centuries, winning the psychological battles are usually even more important than the physical ones. (Cruise missiles, for instance, are very useful at psychological distancing - not even the soldiers deploying them, let alone the public, have to see the bloodied bodies of their victims any more - a major PR aid.) Behind the rhetoric, if you look at the business pages, the elite and their spokespeople can be very candid sometimes amongst themselves about the very real Class War being waged by the rich elite against working people around the world (though they don't use those words, of course). They know it's war - we should recognise that too.
Female Prison Rape in NY
I hear they have books there that ACTUALLY TALK about sexual health! Burn them! burn them all!
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-=DaveHowe=-
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot?
The general population tend to not know anyhting about the true state of minority rights, so social issues the ballot will tend to be targeted at removing a minority's rights.. and will play on the ignorance of the genreal population.
A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote.
Yes, this can be a serious problem and it should be prohibited too. Orginisations like the ACLU have done a realitivly effective job of prohibiting government officials from forcing their beliefs on their citizens.
Example: There was this preacher in some random fringe christian sect last year who wanted to get a drivers lissence, but believed that it was a sin to have his photograph taken. The DMV (unellected beurocrats) was quite happy to tell him to go fuck himself (and no christian orginisations came to help him because he was not in a main stream sect), but the ACLU sued the DMV on his behaf and won.
Example: During desert storm the Saudi's did not want American soldiers bringing bibles with them and out unelected millitary leaders were happy to comply. No christian orginisations mounted an effective defence (I guess they did not wantt o seem unpatriotic), butthe ACLU sued the millitary and won, so the millitary sent chaplans and stuff over too.
Example: The religious reich tries to get laws passed which "protect the religious freedom of teachers" to do things like post the 10 commandsments, but they ignore the fact that a teacher is a member of an unellected elite who is in a possition of athority and has the power to unethically influence her/his charges religous leanings via such activity. Clearly, this violates the rights of Moslems, Hindu's, Atheists, etc. and if it is allowed to expand it would result in attacks on some christian sects like Mormons and Catholics. The only solution is that patents have the right to teach their children whatever religion they want, but the school has no rights to teach the children anything related to religion period.
Now, you need to make an exception for scientific things which some religions object to (i.e. evolution) which influence the child's future job opertunities (it's hard to get a biology degree without understanding evolution), but parents still have the ability to object and keep their child home on those days. The reality of the situation here is that the children who's parents do not objet have a right to learn about evolution AND the school is obligated to educate them in this matter since it is a scientific idea which parents are not qualified to teach.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
This deserves to be moderated up.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Internet drugs? Would that be.. snow crash?
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The shareholder is always right.
Which is as it should be. The government shouldn't be spending the people's money on anything that doesn't have very strong upside potential. "That government governs best, which governs least" and all that. If only we could get
the good people of Holland to export this attitude to the rest of the country...
Oops that shouldn't have been said. Take a look at what people have done throughout history with various shall we say "unpopular" things. I guess freeing of the slaves and helping the poor were bad things too. However the slaves were still freed and the poor were helped all in the century from 1800-1899. Sometimes unpopular things are sometimes necessary because some people can't see past the ends of their noses.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
My favorite example of the flawed logic on the side of pro-filtering is this one:
For Gary Glenn, president of the family association's state chapter, the issue is simple. "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
While it's sad and unfortuneate that a girl was raped at a library, the logic in the argument is flawed. It could equally read that the girl was raped at a library that carried Winnie the Pooh. The Muskegan Library points out that the man who committed the act didn't even access the internet; there is absolutely no evidence to support the theory that the library having unfilterred internet access contributed in any way. Yet in the minds of the pro-filterring groups, this was a direct cause.
Remember, if this vote comes to your town, these are the types of flawed logic and half-truths that you'll need to fight.
On a side note to Jamie: Does the opposition have a website? Is there a location that has a collection of the counter-arguments used to fight the misinformation?
Organizations like the ACLU have also done a relatively effective job of crippling men's sports programs in college. LEXIS-NEXIS is down right now, so I can't get the citation, but the ACLU managed to turn Title IX into a prohibition on expanding traditionally male sports. E.G. at Dartmouth, there is no varsity wrestling. This is because there was no interest in a women's program, and so the college couldn't just create a men's wrestling program. Same thing with Ultimate, I think.
The ACLU is not the source of all good things. They screw a lot of good people over, too.
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yeah, that would probably be the Right Thing to do. Unfortunately, the ACLU don't care.
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Well, maybe a better solution would be to approach the problem you discribe from a different technological angle.
I think (though I'm no expert in any of this) that the best way to correct the problem might be to change the way we browse the net. Most of the "horror stories" that censorship advocates love to tell, involve children finding porn or other "inappropriate" content, by accident. This is either because of a bad result turned up by a search engine, or from following a link from another "appropriate" page.
If there were better ways for us to accurately tell what web pages really contained, and organize that information so that we could use it to navigate more easily, then it would be easier for everyone to find what they want. Little kids wouldn't accidentaly end up on a porn page that pops up half a dozen other porn pages when it is closed. Adults who are looking for porn would be able to find it. Adults looking for some porn, but who don't like other porn, could find that too. Anyone looking for anything else would be better able to find it.
The question is, how to make this work. I don't know all that much about search engine algorithms, or anything else that might be useful for something like this, but I'm sure some readers on Slashdot do. Can better search engines accomplish this? Perhaps it will will need a radical (or evolutionary at least) new way of navigating between pages.
There's not going to be any revolution that will bring censorware to computers everywhere (not that some groups won't try). The internet will continue to chage and adapt to it's users needs and gradually the porn sites will fade into the background a bit more.
Anyway, congradulations to everyone who helped defeat the effort in Holland.
Steve
Any other approach runs into the quid custodes problem, which ultimately leads to a repeat of the Inquisition.
I think you just made his point: dredging up moral demons hardly helps your position. Knee-jerk comparisons to witch-burnings, inquisitions (no matter how historically questionable) or nazism might fire up the troops, but it also tends to isolate those in the middle -- parents, such as myself, who don't generally support censorship, but who do sympathize with the concerns of those on the other side of the issue.
I, for one, felt slightly offended to be broad-brushed by implication as an inquisitorial, witch-hunting nazi simply because I think the pro-filtering crowd has concerns that need to be addressed, not mocked.
I have no sympathy for parents who indulge in electronic babysitting of any form. ... [That's] ultimately responsible for things like Columbine. But I digress.
Yes, you do. And please stop. It's been my experience that most of your "opponents" on this issue are not weekend parents, but rather the opposite; take the time to know your enemy, and I'd venture you'd find that most of them are very involved in their children's lives. It's why they're concerned about such issues in the first place. Not because they're looking for substitutes for involved parenting, but because they are involved parents. Trying to pin tragedies such as Columbine on them is hardly conducive to convincing them to listen to your arguments. At least, it wouldn't work with me.
Frankly, I think a real good solution is simply to remove the 'Net access altogether from the kids' section and replace it with a copy of Britannica... the uncensored Net is no place for unsupervised younglings. If Mother wants to sign for her kids' adult-grade library card, including a release of liability, that's her problem.
I proposed a similar solution in a /. forum a few months ago. I was unmercifully attacked as a witch-hunting censor out to destroy the First Amendment (quite amusing, actually, since I don't even live in the United States).
Apparently, quite a large contingent of /.ers considers any attempt by parents to control (nay, even monitor) the information their children have access to as morally outrageous as burning books. I was accused of many unspeakable attrocities - including what to /.ers appears to be the ultimate sin - impeding my children's First Amendment rights. (The fact that, since my children are not American, they don't have any First Amendment rights didn't seem to deter them in the least.)
But when we consider adults in the adult section of a public library, paid for by you and me the taxpayers, censorship in any form has no place.
This, as far as it goes, is fine. However, I suggest you need to take the next step and address (not dismiss) the concerns of those who don't cotton to the idea of their tax money being used to fund someone's porn habit at the local library.
It very simply constitutes prior restraint on free speech
But the issue, from what I can tell, is not so "very simple". If it were, it wouldn't even come up.
And even then, it only addresses the concerns of Americans. You should consider that an increasingly large segment of the Internet community is not constrained by American laws or philosophies. And unless you're considering imposing your American jurisprudence on the rest of us, you'll need to find arguments which will play well outside of Peoria (or, in this case, the United States). While America may think of itself as the center of the universe, you need to keep in mind that fully 95% of the world's population is not subject to its laws or constitutions.
Some folks learned the hard way about sixty years ago about defending their rights, and that so-called "middle ground," and six million of them paid with their lives.
Again, rewriting history does nothing to help your case. Six million Jews were not killed for defending their rights, or whatever "middle ground" you're talking about. They were killed because they were Jews. Period. It may be tempting to attempt to enlist them to your cause. It also strikes me as rather revisionist.
Lee Kai Wen
Er, are you talking about those introducing it, or those voting for it? If the former, whatever, but you'll lose PR points saying it so bluntly. If the latter, I think you may want to think it through a little more. I really doubt that 45% of Holland MI's voting population are "unmitigated bigots" and if they are, you might as well give up now. I rather suspect that those who voted for it were people who saw a problem and had an easy solution handed to them.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
Oh please. The only thing I hate more than holocaust revisionists is those people who demean it by trying to equivalate every tiny crimp in their style. You know why? Because the revisionists are at least implicitly acknowleging the significance of the event.
If you think finding a way to keep people from (irrationally) worrying about their kids happening upon porn at the library without censoring deliberate searches is the first step to gas chambers you need to grow up and get some priorities.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I think that you deserve some of the credit for this victory. It just goes to show that geeks can make a difference when we take the time to get involved and to make our pitch in a way that can be understood by the average Joe.
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
"God has called us to this, and no matter what happens from this point forward, I think he would say to us now 'Well done, good and faithful servants,'" Schepers said. Leave God out of this! This is not what God called people to do. Of course, I am just as presumptuous as Schepers by saying so, but see if she will admit that. *sigh*...It's days like these that I'm reminded that God is in dire need of a publicist to make comments to correct the idiotic things people say that God made them do or God chose them to do. "No, I did not send them to do that, they did that all by themselves and frankly, I'm disgusted." Or, "No, I didn't tell him to kill the abortion clinic doctor; I told him `Thou Shalt Not Kill' and `Love Thy Enemy.'" Or even, "No, those people are not defending Me when they attack homosexual marriages." *shudder*
With all due respect, Rosa Parks wasn't just an old lady sick of riding at the back of the bus when there were open seats available up front.
Mahatma (Mohandas K.) Gandhi wasn't just a former grad of a UK law school who was making salt by the sea.
And a 15 year old Norwegian kid who writes software that lets him play DVD on his Linux box isn't just a kid arrested in a faraway land thanks to the backroom efforts of the MPAA.
Holland was going to be the springboard to encourage censorship of the Net to people without the financial resources to go online otherwise in a country with the strongest legal protection of free speach on the planet (I'm from Canada, but the American protection of free speach lead to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with a similar protection limited as may be "reasonably and demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society").
In other words, we just barely kept the barbarians from the gates once more in what will always be a war between freedom and order. That's the point, and that's why others besides yourself care. Hope that makes your tuna digest more easily.
One of my (infinite) job reponsibilities is filtering the web for our coprorate Internet access and for an Elementary & High School on our WAN.
I "think" I'm unusual in this position in that most people (that I've found so far) that are in charge of filtering develop a "Supreme Being" complex, a "you can go where I decide you can" attitude. I thought we moved beyond that when we moved away from the mainframe mindset. I try to filter as little as possible and it's a huge struggle. We use CyberPatrol as our filter software. No one agrees on how to filter. I get an equal number of complaints about blocked sites as I do sites that should be blocked.
At home I have to listen to my 16 year old daughter complain about Bess which they use at the High School. She feels it's wrong (and I agree with her) to block sites or at least she disagrees with the method for determining what sites to block. I don't have any filters or blocking turned on at home nor have I told my kids that I can see where they've been. From periodically checking logs I can see that they have no interest in the seedier side of the web.
I started my 16-yr old's interest in Anime (must mean I'm a rotten parent, right?). She knows what hentai is and can't understand why anyone would want to "ruin" the artform.
The youngest (11 years old) was at our local library and when she went to use one of the Internet PC's she saw a porn site in the screen.
She got the librarian, showed her the PC and showed her how to save the history file, clean out the cache and shutdown and restart the PC.
Why does this whole Holland, MI (I live in an even smaller town) thing remind me of Tipper Gore and her crusade against Rock music? How much of the Internet did she invent with her husband and if she gets in to the White House will she be allowed to dictate what I can see on the web.
Here's hoping that jamie and friends can win this round and all of the next!
I'm thinking maybe these people need something real to do in their lives other than controlling other people's lives. There really is no job market for dictators but SO many people seem to be applying.
ZDNet has already picked up the story. I just wonder how much your activism contributed to the victory.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Yes, pointing out other solutions is useful. Matter of fact, that's probably the best way. But I have no sympathy for parents who indulge in electronic babysitting of any form. This whole raising kids by proxy thing is not only producing parents who have forgotten what civil rights (and their corresponding responsibilities) are, but are ultimately responsible for things like Columbine. But I digress.
There are some folks who will listen. Address them. (Frankly, I think a real good solution is simply to remove the 'Net access altogether from the kids' section and replace it with a copy of Britannica... in all honesty, thinking as a parent, the uncensored Net is no place for unsupervised younglings. If Mother wants to sign for her kids' adult-grade library card, including a release of liability, that's her problem.) But when we consider adults in the adult section of a public library, paid for by you and me the taxpayers, censorship in any form has no place. It very simply constitutes prior restraint on free speech, and any such restraint, no matter how small, must be opposed, lest we gradually and by degrees lose all our rights. Some folks learned the hard way about sixty years ago about defending their rights, and that so-called "middle ground," and six million of them paid with their lives. Sorry, I don't intend to go quietly.
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Never Again the Burning
Congratulations to all of the volunteers out in Holland, MI. I am sincerly relieved that the measure got defeated.
I don't share the reports optimism though - 55% to 45%, while it is generally a "landslide" in a Presidential race, is not all that encouraging - 45% of the people can't see the big picture. Although it does speak volumes that clear headed reasoning can prevail even in the face of a marketting machine.
However, could we prevail upon the volunteers for just a bit longer? Can we get a copy of the presentation up on the Web somewhere permanently? Maybe one of the OSS free project repositories? While there would be no code involved, I'm sure that presentations, demonstration descriptions, leaflet samples, etc. would be allowed to be stored there.
A known resource for fighting future battles would be a godsend. The folks at Holland paved the way and we need to learn everything they did right and wrong, and have all the materials they created at hand.
The DeCSS events have shown that the battles will pop up when you least expect it, and generally (no pun intended) on very short notice. It would be great if we knew where to go to just grab leaflets and educational presentations, print them out, and respond *the same day*. It would make quite an impact, and at the least show how important people think the issue is. Just that will slow down the process - if officials know their constituency genuinely cares about an issue they will not rush it.
Perhaps the Minute Men will be needed once again (the Revolutionary War soldiers were called Minute Men - to be ready to grab their rifles and fight on a minutes notice. We need to do the same.).
It's popped up at MSNBC and The Register so far that I know of. But we still have to remember the old quote: "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." They didn't mean just from OUTSIDE, people...
Brazil has decided you're cute.
I suppose this shows a good way to fight filters:
- Hype up the costs. Money, money, money.
- Point out who the money goes to. If you can show that the filter maker is financing the filter campaign, you've tarred them as one of the worst things they could be: a bunch of astroturfing lobbyists.
- Point out that plenty of pr0n goes through the filters regardless, so it's like paying for the QE II and getting a leaky scow. No value for the money; taxpayers hate that.
If filters ever come to a vote where I live, I'm going to busy myself along these lines. And thanks for keeping us all informed.--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Elaine Cioffi, 62, saw it differently.
"I just think that children really don't know what's for their own good," she said. "It may not be a really big problem at the library right now or in the future, but why take a chance?"
I'm totally against censorship & all that, but how long will it be until (not if but when) this viewpoint succeeds somewhere? /.ers will never support filters, but we can't expect to reach and convince all the Grandma Cioffi's out there when fighting against the entire "cult of the child" (the "they don't know what's best for them" sentiment).
"On February 22, send a clear message to America. Tell America we must protect our children from Internet pornography and drugs."Sure... http://www.crackaddictsonline.com/, where your first hit is free!
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Well, I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last, but this is a great victory!
Being a Michigan native, I know how small conservitive communities work. I am really glad that the "Decency police" have suffered a hard blow to thier "My ideals should be imposed on you" campaign. Wow.
And the bad news is that they will not stop. I heard on an interview Tuesday and if defeated, they will keep moving from community to community in Michigan until the Governor and his congress recognize that this should become a state requirement! Now IMNAL, but I know that non-complying libraries would then lose all State endorsement and funding.
As with all great victories, celebrate for a minute, but then get back to work because the fight is not over yet!
Better to be too pessimistic, and put in too much work to defeat something like this than to be too optimistic and see it pass because you slacked off.
So, congradulations!
This vote is proof positive that, once in a rare while, in spite of ourselves, people can be trusted to look at an issue and do the Right Thing.
The problem here has boiled down to a question of who to trust with the decisions about what you and/or your children see when using the Internet. Obviously, the best solution would to be to have real, enforcable ratings for web content, but given the distributed and ever-changing nature of the web, that's impossible. So in lieu of ratings, will you trust some anonymous company with a possible agenda of their own to make decisions through their filter as to what you can and can not see on the Internet? Not even factoring in that filters just don't work very well and are child's play to defeat, the answer seems obvious to me. Since filters don't work very well, and ratings are impractical, then your ability to view content should remain free. Whenever we err, we should always err on the side of freedom, choice, and individual responsibility. We owe ourselves that much.
On a related note, at my company I am often asked by my co-workers if they should put filtering software on their computers to protect their kids. My response to them has been this: "You can go ahead and buy filtering software, and there are quite a few options to choose from that are well-supported commercially. But keep in mind that your kids probably know more about the inner workings of your PC than you do, and it's likelier that you'll be blocked than your children will. Your kids probably already know how to beat all the filters out there - you need to address the issue by talking to your kids, tell them what you don't want them doing, and check things like the browser history (I'll show them how to use these if they ask), cookie files, and cache to keep a watch over them and their habits. If they don't do the right thing as you see it, take away their access."
Most children, I think, will satisfy their initial curiosity and move on. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but there's so many useful things to do on the Net and on a PC that I think that most kids will find better uses of their time.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
When you demonify your opponents, you lose the middle ground and you cheat yourself.
Sometimes there is no middle ground. I am not saying this is one of those issue, but there are certainly struggles where there is NO middle (or, rather, the middle is a very slippery and very steep slope towards one side).
Besides, if you are always searching for a compromise, in a negotiated deal you will always end up worse than the hard-core people because you will start from the middle, and they'll start from their end.
Some proponants of filtering software may be in the same league as "book burners." Most aren't going to be. They will be concerned parents, people who have had a misleading porn site draw them in...
I disagree. I think that a small minority of pro-filter people really worry about dropping their kid at the library finding him an hour later totally corrupted. The majority of pro-filter people just want to legislate their morality. What gets their panties in a bunch is a simple fact that somebody somewhere could be sitting in a public library and enjoying porn. Clearly, this is evil and should be prohibited. I would bet that most of these people would gladly prohibit all and any porn anywhere, it's just that there are some problems on this road (Supreme Court being a nuisance, and all that).
As far as I am concerned, the pro-filter people are exactly those who were pushing CDA a couple of years ago and are pushing CDA II now. I don't think they are concerned parents. I think they are unmitigated bigots.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
"On February 22, send a clear message to America. Tell America we must protect our children from Internet pornography and drugs."
Many drugs become more hazardous when they are distributed on digital media. We should at least consider removing the floppy drives from these machines to prevent children from downloading Internet drugs.
numb
Rule No. 1 : Don't assume anything. Odds on, they've reached the site by mistake, and you know for a fact that these pages spawn sub-windows like there's no tomorrow. (I was a newbie searching for warez once :-) They will probably either be oblivious to what they've seen, as nudity is rarely a problem for most small children, or, especially if they are slightly older, they may be frightened out of their wits. To them it can seem like the computer has completely taken over. Talk to them gently. Ask them what happened. They'll probably tell the truth first time, as they are still likely to be shocked.
Rule No. 2 : Tell it like it is. Explain that there are people who put this kind of thing up there (Call them 'bad' people if you want). Tell them that because of these people, they should be careful about using the computer, and that they can always come to you if it happens again. This is important, because if you go into fundamentalist mode, they won't learn anything from the experience, only that, to you, what they've done is shameful and wrong, which is almost as bad a thing to tell a child as the Religious Right spout. Growing up with a guilt complex doesn't help. Also explain that this is a thing that they will understand better later in life.
Rule No. 3 : DON'T LOSE IT! If you start screaming bloody murder at your child, you stand a better chance of frightening them much more than they already are. You may not be an advocate of porn, in fact you may harbour strong feelings about it, but don't express it in front of them. It's that kind of guilt-complex method of raising children, espoused by the Religious Right, that has been defeated here. Equally, violent reactions (Ripping cables out of the wall etc.) are a bad move for your kid to see (to say nothing of the state of your equipment). Just gently power down the monitor, or close the windows (shut the browser task down). The calmer you appear, the easier a child will listen to what you have to say.
I'm not saying that this is the best way of dealing with it, but I can't see that getting het up in front of your child will solve anything. Respect from your child is a good thing, but it must be respect attained without fear. The second a child is intimidated, you go down the same route as those just defeated.
Again, sorry if I sound preachy, it's just the way I feel.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
Yesterday or the day before, I read bitter words to the effect that, "Fundamentalists can get anything on the ballot."
Well, fundamentalists (of which I am one) got the internet filter on the ballot. and thankfully, the measure was defeated. (i oppose internet filters, too.)
What the heck's wrong with getting divisive social issues put on the ballot? A worse problem is when unelected elites impose their morality upon others *without* the opportunity of putting the measure before the people for a vote.
smiles and cheers,
steve
This weekend I went to my local library (small town NH) and signed up for Internet access (as a convenience thing when I'm in the library and want to look something up). One of the steps I had to do was reading the "policies and guidelines". "Uh-oh," I thought, "Holland all over again."
Not so. Turns out they had VERY liberal policies. Essentially, you can do anything you want, although if you view porn, etc and other patrons complain they will ask you to stop.
The most interesting thing (and I wish I had kept a copy of the sheet for the URLs it gave) was the references to Supreme Court (of US? of NH? dunno) decisions that filtering in a library amounted to censorship and had been outlawed in 1996.
If no one here can post with any more information, I'll go get another copy of the sheet and copy the URLs for jamie (or someone) to post later.
--
Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Make no mistake, this was a loss for the AFA. They don't have an infinite supply of money and the money they spent on trying to get this through all went down the drain. That doesn't mean they'll give up though, not as long as their coffers are full, but it does mean that their threat to keep pushing this should not obscure the fact that this is a real victory for freedom of speech.
Good for Holland, the town proved that people who use dishonest and underhanded tactics to push their agenda don't always win and can be defeated by ordinary citizens standing up for their rights.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I'm very happy that enough citizens in Holland had the intelligence and common sense to defeat this measure. However I feel that it will be short lived given the political, cultural climate of the community. Eventually there are going to be filters unless the community can work even harder/stronger to EDUCATE the communities of the world that filter technology is not the answer.
I used to live in Michigan (all of my life) until about five months ago when I took a position at a software company in ChicagoLand. In Michigan I worked as a trainer traveling from library to library teaching librarians and other staff members how to use databases and internet resources. My backgroung is in Library and Information Science. During that position I traveled to well over 100 libraries, and also spoke at several state-wide conferences for libraries or media-centers.
Sad to say, it seemed to me that the library community is split on the issue. Academic libraries don't wan't filters. Public libraries are about 50/50 on the issue. And school media centers, well they just want to protect themselves from the litigation by are society (same for probably the 50% of libraries that are leaning towards filters)
So, what next? How to proceed?
As a community we have been doing very well at fighting this. But for all of our good intentions of fighting against filters, we are going to fail and then it could very well be a domino effect.
What about also exploring avenues that would allow public forums, i.e. libraries to avoid the filter issue. Why not created a domain where the pornographic sites are. Perhaps a .sex or a .xxx or whatever. Then they could at least have a better chance of blocking some traffic. The movie industry already does this. The music industry has started.
Down side with this idea? It would take global committment and regulation. Do we want that? I don't think so... to hard to enforce.
So what other ideas/methods could there be?
Note: Please keep in mind that I am not pro-filter/censoring. I am just looking for discussion of possible alternatives.
Never make an argument for your cause which is both falible and unneccassary. If and when it fails, some people will percieve your entire position as invalidated with it. I'm seeing it happen on an issue I work on right now, and I started worrying when I read about your little bet. Think about that in the future.
Then there's this...
I think it was my friend Lizard on the fight-censorship mailing list who said: "You can't compromise with book-burners. When someone asks you to burn 1,000 books, you cannot agree to burn only 500." He's exactly right. Any middle ground is a step backwards, and hard to recover.
When you demonify your opponents, you lose the middle ground and you cheat yourself. Some proponants of filtering software may be in the same league as "book burners." Most aren't going to be. They will be concerned parents, people who have had a misleading porn site draw them in (a friend found a site posing as a pet supply retailer that dumped her into hard core porn then kept popping up windows on her. It might be unusual, but it only has to happen once to change your opinion on the internet) people who want to feel that dropping their kids off for an afternoon at the library is better than leaving them home with the TV, and people who take care of their kids, but are worried about other peoples. You deal with these people by educating them, not with insults.
And the "no compromise" attitude sucks too. When someone complained of finding another user's porn, you didn't say "deal with it, no compromising with book burners", you pointed out a solution which is not censorship. If you actually listen to what the average voter is concerned about, you can help them solve their problems without them feeling they have to resort to censorship. If you tar everyone with the same brush, you won't know how to change the moderate minds.
Sorry to be negitive, and I mean the congradulations, but the only problem with victories is that they rarely inspire you to learn from your mistakes, and in a closer contest those mistakes will cost you. Good luck in the future.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...