Slashdot Mirror
Australia Ranked Fourth In Internet Freedom
mjwx writes "A report published by Freedom House has placed Australia in fourth in Internet Freedom, below Estonia, the United States and Germany. Freedom House highlights the lack of actual censorship in Australia pointing out that the highly unpopular proposed ISP level censorship has been shelved since the 2010 Australian election. The Freedom House report is available here."
I'm pretty sure Germany has actively filtered their internet before, and possibly still continue to do it. As for America, hello ICE domain seizures? Wtf.
Disagree != mod troll.
It's not even on the list.
Why not whoever is in 83rd place? It seems like "Estonia Ranked First In Internet Freedom" would be the real story.
So only a handful of countries in the world have internet now? Or are we ignoring countries that "don't matter"? If you're going to pretend to do comprehensive reports, at least have a comprehensive list.
Of course they're going to make sure the US gets near the top.
You want to play adult rated video games on it.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Of which only 8 have 'free' internet. There is a lot of European and other countries that may have a more free web. Thus the rankings are pretty worthless. My extrapolating the results it would be likely that across Europe would most likely be 10 above the rest of listed non -European countries.
I would like to think New Zealand's web is more open than Australia's we do have a filter but it has not been forced on ISPs.
What rank is China ? Is there anyone below ?
I would love to RTFA, but I can't access the report myself. They must have some technical difficulties in Beijing these days, because freedomhouse.org seems to be unavailable.
Notice she was very careful not to say her DVDs were confiscated? Because they weren't; Customs "were only interested in illegal pornography".
... or else, you'll be allowed to keep it?
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go."
That is probably because Eugenics itself is solidly based in science. Eugenics is practiced indiscriminately and with great consistent and proven success across the board in animal breeding practices. This is most easily seen in dog breeds because canine genetics are among the most responsive to breeding. Eugenics is often wrongly associated with race. Eugenics really is selective breeding for behavior as opposed to direct physical traits. No more no less.
Nazi eugenics was selection based on made up criteria. For instance, jews were culled based on perceived behaviors without any valid evidence that these negative traits existed in the first place. Western Eugenics was at least based on demonstrated criminal behavior rather than a political blame game that pointed the finger at an entire subset of the population for all a societies problems. Race simply is not a valid distinction for any purpose be it for laws, population statistics, or breeding criteria.
You are right that Eugenics still exists. In reality, that is what the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole amount to. Either prevents further breeding based on demonstrated behavior.
None of that is to say that I agree with the idea of selectively breeding humans even with valid criteria. But if one values the success of the species over the success of the individual a case can be made for Eugenics using valid criteria. There isn't any logically consistent value system that supports selection based on bogus criteria like race.
Annoying, really. Eugenics really had some potential for doing good - just a matter of convincing those with genetic diseases to not breed, and in a few generations they could be almost eliminated. But then the Nazis had to screw things up by taking the idea to extremes and mixing in a lot of unscientific rubbish about racial superiority, and they tarished the idea so much that it hasn't been taken seriously since.
I've not heard of the Stones, but I gather Sanger was interested in contraception more as a tool of social reform than genetic tweeking. She wanted to stop the poor from breeding so heavily, as she viewed their high birth rate as one of the key things that kept them in poverty. Get them down from six children to just one, and they'd be more able to afford to get the one properly raised, educated, employed and no longer poor. Not true eugenics, as she was concerned only with socioeconomic factors rather than genetic.
Nazi Germany is a lesson in how things go badly, not necessarily all those things being bad. Democracy was corrupted in Germany to become fascism and then Nazism and that does not make democracy bad. Eugenics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics certainly went bad when it shifted from promoting sound social reproductive principles to executions of politically undesirables.
A licence to reproduce and be responsible for bringing up children in a world 6.91 billion, really honestly doesn't seem all that unreasonable. It is going to happen or well, things will just get fugly.
As for banning the swastika, that seems hardly fair to those nations where it was a symbol of well being and good luck for many thousands of years, just because with was abused by one political party in Germany for twenty odd years.
When it comes to bad ideas, the best way to fight them is with a flood of good ideas not censorship. The reality is that those bad web pages are out numbered by 'good' web pages by a factor of millions to one. Better that those that produce 'bad' web pages, well, expose themselves and can be investigated to see if they are actually doing bad things.
As for history, well, there never ever was an internet before, a least not for us short hair crested rock throwing monkeys, so we have yet to see how it will turn out. So far after 30 odd years of some pretty disgusting mass media propaganda, lies, distortions, and corporate corruption, the internet seems to being doing a reasonable of job of starting to rebuild the overall human social mind state.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Most genetic diseases are recessive, so just advising people developing those diseases not to breed would not eliminate them at all - they still will be inherited, and only come to light when two people having the disease interbreed. To actually eliminate them you have to test all people for those diseases and then recommend to all the people carrying the right allele not to breed - but because everyone of us carries some defective alleles, no one would allowed to breed at all.
Let's go further.
This report is actively dangerous, in a sort of flamebait FUD way.
Let's just do one example - how about Sweden, (former?) home of the Pirate Bay and the Party thereon, and key pawn in the coercion attempt against, wait for it, Australian Julian Assange from the UK led by the US?
Oh wait!
Those three countries get slots 2, 4, and 5 and Sweden is ... uh... censored?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well.
This is almost certainly one of a long list of social constructionist canards. There are probably a few eugenicists around; however, modern genetic research focuses on the dialogue between genes and environment.
The biological basis of behaviour is well established (See Turkheimer 2000 for a summary), and after 100 yrs of social science, there is no theory that predicts behaviour from social forces. (Things like attachment theory, and the media effects of violence/gender have no empirical backing -- see Pinker's Blank Slate for an overview.)
To preserve their "turf", so to speak, the humanities and social sciences are heavily invested in spreading myths about science and eugenics.
You accuse Harper of being at home with "eugenist-like" ideas. This may be true, but what exactly are you talking about? Because if you mean racism, then you are equivocating. (Racism, btw, almost certainly has a biological basis, as does political preference, as revealed by split twin studies, and adoption studies.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
This is only a problem if you believe that breeding is a fundamental right. I do not.
Free speech? Good idea. Freedom of religion? Good idea. Freedom of movement? Good idea. Free press? Good idea. A few obvious limitations of course, to prevent one person's use of their freedom from infringing upon the freedom of another, but in general good ideas. Freedom to pop out another human even if you are using known flawed genetic material, do not have the money to properly raise it or have a history of violence or mental illness? Not such a good idea.
Look at it more like this: There are laws for adoption. Certain conditions which disqualify someone. Some criminal offences, mental illness, things which have been deemed by those elected to write laws to render a person unfit to be a perent. So we already recognise, in law, and with very little contriversy, that some people just are not fit to raise children. And yet if they can manage to get knocked up themselves - which is not a difficult task - they somehow have a right to go ahead anyway? That just doesn't make sense. If you can't meet some minimum standard of parenting, you shouldn't be entrusted with that type of responsibility.
You cannot be forced to sign a legally-binding document, and a document which you were forced to sign cannot be legally binding.