Slashdot Mirror
India Blocks Over 800 Adult Websites
William Robinson writes: The government of India has blocked over 800 adult websites through a secret order. “Free and open access to porn websites has been brought under check,” N.N. Kaul, a spokesman at the department of telecommunications said. “We don’t want them to become a social nuisance.” The ban has provoked debates in the country about extreme and unwarranted moral policing by the government. The action came after the Supreme Court of India had refused to ban porn sites in India.
more socially conservative societies that restrict outlets for harmless sexual release do indeed have higher rates of rape and sexual violence in general. there is much truth to the concept of catharsis as a way to reduce rape and sexual violence. it doesn't prevent everything, just some of it
but bringing up child porn in this context is a red herring because the creation of child porn victimizes actual children, and this is why it is genuinely immoral illegal and verboten
sexual content between consenting adults is completely unrelated to child porn. to believe it is marks you as woefully inadequate to comment intelligently on the topic, or a failed troll
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The slippery slope here is not that people will stop thinking, observing, or even protesting. Rather, it's that with the laws and infrastructure in place, it becomes very easy to block more pages. So rather than a uncontrolled "slippery slope", maybe it should just be called a "first step" or sure tell-tale sign.
That idea is not based on some illogical extrapolation into the future, but on a number of examples from the past: Many European countries have already followed this pattern, some of which you'd think be among the most liberal: Holland, Denmark, France, Germany, UK. Take UK as a prime example: First they put in place the infrastructure because of child porn. Then it's used against "hate speech" or "terrorism". Next violent porn, BDSM. After that, file sharing sites, The Pirate Bay. Next, political party sites like The Pirate Party, and the Chaos Computer Club. The latter two have already been "mistakenly" blocked in multiple countries.
Now, many people believe the state should not be in the business of policing the Internet. So in the UK, they've made the brilliant move of making it "voluntarily". All the major ISPs now have personal filters controlled by their customers. Of course, it'd be a bit naive to think that those settings could not be used against you: If you ever find yourself in a sexual abuse case, Child Protection Services case, background check / government security clearance, you'd better have those settings in the right position.
> with a pervasive rape problem
I know that the series of articles in media seem to make it appear so. But there really aren't any stats to support the claim that India has a "rape problem". The case being built is highly anecdotal, which is easy when you have a country of 1.2 BILLION to pick cases from. There are about 25K rapes reported in India annually. For the second most populous country that amounts to 2 per 100K. That is pretty low.
Granted, only a minority of rapes get reported in relatively conservative societies. But under-reporting occurs everywhere at different levels. 1 in 5 or 6 women report rape in surveys in US. Only a fraction of those get reported. Even if you reasonably adjust for the fact that rape is much more under-reported than say US, it is a very difficult case to make, that India has much more per capita rape than US. For a country, one fourth the size of India, CDC counted 1.3 *million* *reported* rapes in US in 2010. With a more strict definition, FBI counted 86K.
It is "possible" that India has a lot of rape. But the case has not yet been made in data. It also needs to be shown that rape in India is somehow specially higher than other countries in the region with similar development indices. For police recorded offenses, the stats are:
India: 0.4
US: 27.3
Pakistan 28.8 (where I assume much more conservative in reporting than India)
Nepal: 0.8 (which can be assumed to be about the same as India)
Sri Lanka: 7.3
I feel that the real story was how people came to the streets angry about the crime. Which other country had its capital shutdown by the public in response to a rape case? The people do care.
The justice for harassment is sometimes weird :-).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I agree about the outlet argument of course. But in Inda, bans come and go. It isn't China. The state does not really control people. People don't take these seriously. *All* of Indian press condemned the bans as attempts at a nanny state. I doubt that it will last, when subjected to scrutiny. At the end of the day, India is still a noisy democracy.
Here are Indian comedians at the previous attempt at the same ban
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...