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Internet Censorship in Australia?
Enaku writes "Right wing Australian Christian political party Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users in Australia to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level. (Read Family First's Policy Statement on Internet Pornography and Children (pdf) ) Great firewall of Australia, here we come!"
Down-Under your rights take away the fundamentalists!!
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Australia is south of the Equator.
It's the opposite, just like the seasons and the water in the drain thing.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
-- My Weblog.
we do insist that our schools cover a concept called 'evolution' in biology lessons, sometimes even hypothesis of galaxy and solar system formation in physics lessons, and generally encourage a form of thinking called 'the scientific process', in which only observable and repeatable experiments/data are to be treated with any regard.
One could argue therefore that we do persecute certain people who choose not to believe in the scientific process and its implications.
What we dont ever do is knock on people's doors to bring "the truth" to them. Which is something to think about it. Should we become door to door atheists? I can imagine it now:
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about god"
them#1: "go away, there is no god"
us: "thank you, that was what we wanted to verify"
or
us: "hello, we are here to talk to you about the fishes and the ocean"
them: yes?
us: "you see, the fishes, they walked up on their little fins, out of the ocean"
them: "did they?"
us: "yes, they walked out of the ocean onto dry land. And they did it for us".
them: "yes, I see it now, let us go spread the word!"
And together we could bring the happy truth about the fishes that walked to the world.
Who cares whether the church supports it or not. It doesn't work. The only nation in Africa to see a reduction in its AIDS epidemic is the one that taught abstinence as a means to avoid contraction of HIV (which, for the two people who may not know, is the virus that causes AIDS).
Now let's be scientific about this. A large portion of lung cancer patients get lung cancer from smoking. Would you subscribe to passing out filtered cigarettes as a solution? They are obviously ineffective, because they don't change the behavior, and indeed, give a false sense of security.
AIDS is being spread primarily through sexual encounters. Logically, the best way to avoid contracting it is to avoid all together the situation most likely to cause infection. Is it fair to have to abstain from sex? Well, is it worth it to risk dying for it?
Now I'm not proposing that AIDS is some kind of divine retribution, just that the fact of the matter is everyone has choices, and we have to deal with the consequences of each choice we make. When faced with an action that has a very high risk of long term detrimental impact, one can most always freely choose to not take the action.
What I can't understand is why people find so offensive the idea of educating people in Africa about how HIV is primarily being spread. I'm not saying stop passing out condoms. I'm just saying, tell people the truth of the matter, and then let them make an educated decision about how they want to handle the situation. If they want to go for it, give 'em a rubber and let them deal with the consequences. But don't deprive them of information. We take for granted over here the ease of access to information that people in other parts of the world don't have. Or maybe people in decision making positions think people in Africa are too stupid to understand or control themselves. Either way, it's wrong and oppressive, because someone somewhere is deciding for others what they need to know, and stopping people from making fully informed decisions. Information age indeed.
Despite conventional wisdom, I've discovered you can blame a guy for trying. It's called "attempted murder".