Atheist war hero Turing is finally to be pardoned for a gay ‘offence’

[stickygirl]

So in common parlance ( and it is getting late ) a pardon is worth jack-shit. I take your point and thank you. I'll stick to science...

 

[oggbashan]

So in common parlance ( and it is getting late ) a pardon is worth jack-shit. I take your point and thank you. I'll stick to science...

Yes. It was too late for me as well.

All I was trying to say was that agitating for a pardon for anyone who is dead is a waste of effort. It is worthwhile if the person is alive and a pardon would release them from jail. But a pardon means that the person was justly and fairly convicted. (It also means from the UK Government's point of view that the pardoned person cannot sue for wrongful imprisonment.)

If, as a result of an appeal, they are found to have been wrongly convicted, then they are declared innocent. An appeal cannot be lodged for someone who is dead.

 

[Safe_Bet]

Yes. It was too late for me as well.

All I was trying to say was that agitating for a pardon for anyone who is dead is a waste of effort. It is worthwhile if the person is alive and a pardon would release them from jail. But a pardon means that the person was justly and fairly convicted. (It also means from the UK Government's point of view that the pardoned person cannot sue for wrongful imprisonment.)

If, as a result of an appeal, they are found to have been wrongly convicted, then they are declared innocent. An appeal cannot be lodged for someone who is dead.

No, Nuhuh, Nope!!! It most CERTAINLY is not a waste of time.

It might not do that particular individual much good, but it does wonders for his family and people like him who aren't dead.

There is NO doubt that what the UK government did was unjust and wrong. Just because appeal is an impossibility, that doesn't mean that the wrong should not be righted.

 

[oggbashan]

No, Nuhuh, Nope!!! It most CERTAINLY is not a waste of time.

It might not do that particular individual much good, but it does wonders for his family and people like him who aren't dead.

There is NO doubt that what the UK government did was unjust and wrong. Just because appeal is an impossibility, that doesn't mean that the wrong should not be righted.

Pardoning those shell-shock victims who were executed for cowardice during the First World War was worthwhile, especially as many communities added their names to the War Memorials.

But why ONLY Alan Turing? If he is to be pardoned postumously, what about all the other gay men (it wasn't a crime to be lesbian in the UK) who were convicted?

 

[Safe_Bet]

Pardoning those shell-shock victims who were executed for cowardice during the First World War was worthwhile, especially as many communities added their names to the War Memorials.

But why ONLY Alan Turing? If he is to be pardoned postumously, what about all the other gay men (it wasn't a crime to be lesbian in the UK) who were convicted?

No, I absolutely agree with THAT!

It should be Turing AND the 49,000 others.

 

[njlauren]

While I understand the sentiment behind it, a pardon implies he did something wrong. What the government should do is issue an apology for their actions, governments hate to admit they were wrong and for them to admit an action was wrong is a big deal. A pardon says "gee, we are so magnanimous, we out of the goodness of our heart decided to pardon Turing who committed a criminal act"...instead of saying they were wrong. It should be issued about Turing, and it should be issued to all those prosecuted under that horrid law.

The reason they won't do that is because the assholes in the Anglican and Catholic Churches would go crazy, if the government admits it is was wrong it would also be the government tacitly telling them their teachings are crap, and they won't stand for that.

There is nothing to pardon him for, rather they should apologize and admit they were wrong,that they destroyed one of the brilliant minds of the 20th century (his work at Bletchely Park paled in comparison to his work in math and computer science) over what was written by 2000 year old sheep herders and propogated as law by church and state.

 

[Wolfman1982]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/p...-years-after-he-poisoned-himself-9023116.html

Alan Turing gets royal pardon for 'gross indecency' – 61 years after he poisoned himself

He was the father of modern computing whose work on the Enigma code at Bletchley Park is said to have shortened the Second World War.

But he was also gay and in those less enlightened times was chemically castrated by an ungrateful nation after being convicted of "gross indecency" with a man in 1952.

Now, nearly 60 years after his suicide from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41, Alan Turing has been officially pardoned by the Queen under the little-known Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

The pardon comes after a change of heart by ministers who had previously insisted that Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence.

A pardon is usually granted only when the person is innocent of the offence and where a request has been made by someone with a vested interest, such as a family member. But Turing's pardon has been issued without either requirement being met.

It follows a sustained campaign by scientists, including Stephen Hawking, and a petition to Government signed by more 37,000.

Announcing the change of heart, the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said Turing deserved to be "remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort" and not for his later criminal conviction.

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," he said. "A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."

The pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy will come into effect today.

Since 1945, only three high-profile pardons have been granted in England and Wales under the Royal Prerogative: to Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Michael Shields.

 

[stickygirl]

A pardon that only the Queen is fit to issue considering the succession of asshat politicians who've hidden behind the skirts of the law for fear of losing votes. About bloody time (your Majesty) *curtsey*

 

[Bramblethorn]

Now, nearly 60 years after his suicide from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41, Alan Turing has been officially pardoned by the Queen under the little-known Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

I'm with Andrew Hodges on this:

Alan Turing suffered appalling treatment 60 years ago and there has been a very well intended and deeply felt campaign to remedy it in some way. Unfortunately, I cannot feel that such a 'pardon' embodies any good legal principle. If anything, it suggests that a sufficiently valuable individual should be above the law which applies to everyone else

Tens of thousands of others suffered under the same law. Some are still alive. Lord Sharkey is campaigning for a mass pardon, but now that Turing's has gone through, I suspect it'll be harder to muster enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, the very same UK government has just succeeded in bringing in net filtering which blocks kids in the UK from accessing LGBT support websites. Among the filtering criteria are "LGBT lifestyle"...

 

[stickygirl]

Agreed that this will take the air of that balloon and so lets the government off the hook for rescinding sentences on many, many others convicted of homosexuality, but all the same, symbolically the message is loud and clear: that the law was unfair, that as a society we have moved forward.

As for the web-filtering - I'm fully behind it. Too many kids have accidental access to pornography and violence: I've been to house where there are three young children and each has access to the internet. I watched the Mum trying to monitor what they are watching and it was like trying to herd cats. We're talking about the internet where nothing is truly hidden and LGBT kids can still have access to appropriate sites, as of course they should. LGBT kids need to find out that their sexuality and identity is not intrinsically linked to the porn industry.

...and Happy Christmas Time for this commentator to get out of PJs and embrace the relatives

 

[Bramblethorn]

As for the web-filtering - I'm fully behind it. Too many kids have accidental access to pornography and violence: I've been to house where there are three young children and each has access to the internet. I watched the Mum trying to monitor what they are watching and it was like trying to herd cats. We're talking about the internet where nothing is truly hidden and LGBT kids can still have access to appropriate sites, as of course they should. LGBT kids need to find out that their sexuality and identity is not intrinsically linked to the porn industry.

Problem is that many ADULTS haven't absorbed that distinction... including the ones who write web filters.

When I started at my new work a few years back, we had a training session that included some test questions about permitted use of IT resources. (We have a reasonably common-sense policy on personal use, e.g. checking the footy results is fine as long as it's not interfering with your work, but porn is out.) One of the questions was "Looking at a gay/lesbian website: clearly acceptable, clearly unacceptable, or maybe?"

There were about a dozen of us answering that question; everybody except me answered "clearly unacceptable". They simply assumed that "gay/lesbian website" meant porn, because what else could a gay/lesbian website possibly be about? And this is in a workplace where most people are highly educated, politically aware, and left-leaning, where we occasionally need to be informed on LGBT issues as part of our job!

LGBT content is always going to be hit harder by filtering, because heteronormativity/cisnormativity means LGBT is going to be interpreted as "sexual" even where equivalent cishet material wouldn't be. I expect that has a lot to do with why sites like London Friend and the LibDems' official LGBT website got blocked as "pornographic".

Here's how BT worded their "sex education" blocking category in parental controls: "[blocks sites] where the main purpose is to provide information on subjects such as respect for a partner, abortion, gay and lesbian lifestyle, contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy."

Not that LGBT content is the only stuff inappropriately blocked. Here are some of the others, including NSPCC, Childline, Samaritans, gov.uk, parliament.uk, the British Library, and - hilariously - the website of Claire Perry who campaigned for those filters in the first place.

I don't mean to play down the problems of raising a kid when access to internet porn is so easy. Been there, done that, wasn't happy to find the 15-year-old looking at porn. But even if blocking support websites and all sorts of LGBT-themed stuff was acceptable collateral damage, filters aren't actually that good at blocking porn. TalkTalk only blocked 93% of 68 actual porn sites tested. That still leaves far more porn sites than my no-longer-a-teenager could get through in a lifetime, so it's not much help with the original problem.

 

[stickygirl]

Work places will buy in a software solution to block access to sites and teaching staff already have an intranet block, which as present they can sidestep by finding a 3G signal.

I'm not too bothered about 15 yr olds finding porn but what about 10 yr olds and younger? If a child that age wants to find legitimate LGBT sites are the two sources you mention going to be appropriate anyway? As things stand, they would have to wade through a sea of pornographic images to get there. The first port of call for a 10yr old is its parents - and I know that is a big problem for a lot of kids, but it is the best route to start with. I know that restriction to information is not ideal, but LGBT kids have problems now despite free access to the web and I don't see how blocking access is going to affect their lives one way or another: there are plenty other sources of information around besides the web.

I say give the filtering a chance: let legitimate sites apply to have restrictions lifted until the system works better. Better that than throw in the towel before even trying. This puts the control in the hands of the parents - they can opt out of porn filtering if they wish.

The UK has made plenty of mistakes in the past and will do in the future but is doing far more for LGBT rights than many countries, including your own.

 

[njlauren]

I'm with Andrew Hodges on this:



Tens of thousands of others suffered under the same law. Some are still alive. Lord Sharkey is campaigning for a mass pardon, but now that Turing's has gone through, I suspect it'll be harder to muster enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, the very same UK government has just succeeded in bringing in net filtering which blocks kids in the UK from accessing LGBT support websites. Among the filtering criteria are "LGBT lifestyle"...

The idea shouldn't be that Turing was above the law, rather it is in recognizing that the law itself stank to high heaven and is something that never should have happened. More importantly, if the government was serious they would issue an apology for ever having the law on the books and condemning both the Anglican and Catholic churches for their role in this bigotry..but isn't going to happen.

 

[njlauren]

Agreed that this will take the air of that balloon and so lets the government off the hook for rescinding sentences on many, many others convicted of homosexuality, but all the same, symbolically the message is loud and clear: that the law was unfair, that as a society we have moved forward.

As for the web-filtering - I'm fully behind it. Too many kids have accidental access to pornography and violence: I've been to house where there are three young children and each has access to the internet. I watched the Mum trying to monitor what they are watching and it was like trying to herd cats. We're talking about the internet where nothing is truly hidden and LGBT kids can still have access to appropriate sites, as of course they should. LGBT kids need to find out that their sexuality and identity is not intrinsically linked to the porn industry.

...and Happy Christmas Time for this commentator to get out of PJs and embrace the relatives

Stickygirl-

The problem with censorship like that is who decides what is filtered?The US tried that back in the late 90's when Slick Willy was president (kind of ironic, huh, same douchebag who supported DOMA and signed it), they came up with the child protection act, that was designed to filter the internet, that would require ISP's to filter out content "deemed harmful to children".....the problem, as interestingly Antonin Scalia of all people wrote in the majority ruling, was that it was so broad that it infringed the right of freedom of speech and press. For example, the religious reich, then still listened to by far too many people, made clear that they expected any site that 'promoted the homosexual lifestyle' should be banned, and religious fundamentalists wanted sites that promoted 'underming the faith of children' be restricted......sites with information routinely taught in sex ed classes, on contraception and so forth, likewise could be banned. It was probably the last decision Scalia was on the right side of.

I am a parent, and I understand about the net, but reducing things to the level of children is not the answer, not on a broad basis like that. There are programs out there like Barracuda and others that for example workplaces use, that can do the kind of filtering they will be doing broad based like that and give people the choice. ISP's likewise could offer filtering, much as cable companies offer the ability to lock out channels and so forth, that a parent can ask be put on their account, what is wrong is the government mandating that filtering be in place unless you opt out, it sets as a default a position of censorship that affects everyone, rather than being self censorship. And yeah, you can tell the ISP to turn it off, but that is also restrictive, since it is telling them I want to look at adult material....

 

[stickygirl]

Problem is that many ADULTS haven't absorbed that distinction... including the ones who write web filters.

.....

Stickygirl-

The problem with censorship like that is who decides what is filtered?....

Ok well, I'm hearing you both. Somehow I don't think this is going to be as dramatic or censoring as you're both suggesting. I'll be sure and keep you posted

 

[njlauren]

Stickygirl-

The devil is in the details, and usually when mass programs like this happen, they go for lowest common denominator, which for an ISP would be have filters that are very, very broad indeed, which they assume would stop some old trout from complaining about websites saying GLBT are human beings and deserve human rights (put it this way, the Anglican church in England makes classical music audiences look young, and those people are some of the most regressive people in the Anglican communion...the AC is about 80 years behind the Episcopal Church)....they figure the more liberal people will grumble but won't do much, so will cut broad based to make the stupidly religious and the old people happy.....(note, not all religious people are stupid, my appelation is towards those that are). Even well meaning censorship gets bolluxed up, and remember that this gives power to bureaucrats you may not want them to have. A hilarious take was in the movie "Pirate Radio" (Kenneth Branaugh must have paid them to do that movie, he is a hoot as the repressed upper class type trying to fight the pirate radio stations in the UK, because BBC refused to broadcast pop /rock music).......but it is a real threat.

 

[stickygirl]

But an over zealous censorship will have the reverse effect: regular folks will get pissed off and opt-out. In fact, with the exception of Anglicans and parents of ten year olds, most people will opt out. I just don't see this as a Stasi blanket ban, not will it ever be. It might even prompt people to discuss censorship more openly.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not too bothered about 15 yr olds finding porn but what about 10 yr olds and younger?

I would certainly have been unhappy about my ten-year-old finding porn. But filters aren't an adequate solution to that problem, and they risk making things worse by giving parents a false sense of security.

It's like saying "hey, we know parenting is difficult and talking to your kids about sex is awkward and you don't want them getting pregnant or catching STIs, so we're going to help you by teaching them all about the rhythm method. Now you don't have to think about the issue any more. You're welcome!"

If a child that age wants to find legitimate LGBT sites are the two sources you mention going to be appropriate anyway? As things stand, they would have to wade through a sea of pornographic images to get there.

But would they?

I just googled "lgbt", with the SafeSearch option switched off. On the first page of results I have Wikipedia's articles on "LGBT" & "LGBT rights in Australia", a couple of news articles about LGBT equality issues, National LGBT Health Alliance Australia, and various LGBT community sites. Some of those would be useful starting points for a kid trying to find out about RL LGBT stuff; the rest would at least be helpful reassuring the kid that they're not alone.

The only thing that remotely resembled porn was one tiny thumbnail accompanying one of the news stories; it's hard to make out but looks to be a (clothed) female pole dancer.

I tried again with "gay", "lesbian", "bisexual', "transgender" and "transsexual" - all with similar results minus the pole dancer. A couple of dating sites in there, but nothing obviously explicit. Plenty of support and straightforward info sites on the first pages of hits, every time.

All in all, nothing that I'd consider likely to be harmful to a ten-year-old, and quite a bit that would be actively helpful to somebody struggling with orientation/identity issues.

The first port of call for a 10yr old is its parents - and I know that is a big problem for a lot of kids, but it is the best route to start with. I know that restriction to information is not ideal, but LGBT kids have problems now despite free access to the web and I don't see how blocking access is going to affect their lives one way or another: there are plenty other sources of information around besides the web.

You'd know the situation in the UK a lot better than I do: if a fifteen-year-old kid is trying to figure out gender identity and they don't have trans-friendly parents & classmates (or aren't prepared to test that by outing themselves), how would they find those sources of information? Is this something covered in school sex-ed classes?

I say give the filtering a chance: let legitimate sites apply to have restrictions lifted until the system works better.

How would that work?

By my understanding, each UK ISP has its own block list. So if somebody's operating something like a LGBT info/support site, they have to go check all those ISPs individually to see whether they're blocked (not necessarily easy to do) and apply individually to get that lifted. And then, since these lists get updated over time, they have to keep checking all those ISPs to see whether they've been added to the list since last time.

Maybe a large UK-based organisation would be willing to go to that sort of trouble. But a lot of the smaller ones aren't going to have the time for that sort of monitoring. As for the ones which aren't run from the UK, their owners may not even be aware that their site is subject to filtering.

Better that than throw in the towel before even trying.

Filtering has been tried before, over and over. It always runs into the same problems. Before the UK filters came in, several of my UK friends predicted exactly how it was going to go wrong, and they were right on the money.

But an over zealous censorship will have the reverse effect: regular folks will get pissed off and opt-out. In fact, with the exception of Anglicans and parents of ten year olds, most people will opt out.

I'm not so optimistic.

First off, to get pissed off about censorship you have to know that it's happening, and one of the first steps in any censorship program is to limit information about the extent of the program. Filtering blacklists are often kept confidential, and many censorship programs don't actually tell you "page access blocked b/c censorship"; it just looks as if the site's offline or couldn't connect. See e.g. Cleanfeed, which is big in the UK.

Even if you do figure out that sites are being censored, and it's not a crisis site that you might need in a hurry... well, there are reasons why people might be uncomfortable with putting their name on a list of People Who Look At Porn. None of our governments have a great reputation for protecting privacy just at the moment.

 

[stickygirl]

Then why any censorship? Why not throw away all moral code? Why have X-rated horror films, why not push Miley Cyrus a step further and have her fucking on stage to sell a few more CDs? Why pursue journalists who hack into the mobile phone of a dead girl?

I agree, the internet is an amazing resource: it has broken down barriers and whilst it let Egyptians communicate what was happening during the crisis in Tahrir square it also fed them the impression that every woman with blond hair was a nymphomaniac whether they were American or British or Dutch journalists.

I just know that if I had children, I wouldn't want them to see images that are all about exploitation and nothing to do with education. I've been shocked by posts I've seen here on Lit and they are certainly not for children's eyes and hearts, so should Lit be included in that censorship? Of course. Lit's policy bans under 18s - isn't that censorship too?

Ok, so I'll stop playing advocate now and say, yes, I agree with much of what you are saying. I think that parents, educated ones, can afford and understand how to screen some of the content their children are viewing.

People object to top down government on principle and I'm glad you're one of those. I'll keep worrying about morals! I'm impressed that you've actually been on a committee advising on censorship. They better not invite me had they?

 

[Bramblethorn]

For those who missed it:

David Cameron's advisor Patrick Rock, one of the architects of the UK anti-porn scheme, has been arrested. Guess what for.

Colour me unsurprised.

 

[DukeSupernature]

I admit straight I didn't read this conversation from the very beginning. I'll try to keep to generalities to address the concepts I've seen raised here - and genuinely make me uncomfortable inside.

Why should any government be filtering our internet any more than they should already be doing. Saying that "children will be more protected" because there's a list somewhere of websites they can't look at it seems kind of redundant.

i) (Considering sites with vile content such as the violation of rights): To be able to block a website they must be aware of it and at least basic details. I understand that legal recourse would take a period of time to shut it down. However the ability is there to monitor traffic and the intention of becoming that traffic and hence prosecute people of guilty of consumning that product and producing said product where possible.

ii) Where are the limits drawn as to what's on the list? As somebody already mentioned - you usually cannot peruse the 'blacklist' - and I can't really think of a government in the world who has proved themselves worthy of arbitrating that impartially on their own. Where's the line of 'too many' or 'too prudish' ? All the examples above seem relevant - LGBT sites? Political history and contempary? Planking galleries?

iii) It seems all these features can be provided to a concerned parent to implement within the limitations of their home? Why should this be implemented as a cover-all, opt-out scheme - where you're obliged to register yourself as what essentially is a pale goverment dissidence.

iv) The successfulness of an internet filter is fairly hit and miss. But that argument falls both sides of the fence. What is not - is that kids will find a way around it. Guaranteed. Because they want to see the porn. Because they want to gamble. Because they can.

I find the idea of any true 'censorship' abhorrent. Remarks were made regarding 'Why any censorship at all?' And I would ask the same question but with a much different inflection. I don't think it is 'censoring' something when you make efforts to stop people watching an abuse of rights. I do think the actions taken are extremely important. 'Censorship' does not equal 'reasonable morale code' and historically, fails to even really keep up with the zeitgeist. When something is deemed so abhorrent, it is made a crime, by law, which allows flexibility and recourse but most importantly - informed public scrutiny. Which is -essential- to any democracy. (And democracy is kind of my favourite )

When you let the 'fear' trump - haven't you already lost?

(Apologies if I'm irrelevant or seem 'preachy' ... but I feel strongly about this.)

 

[Bramblethorn]

Apologies for the tardy reply, I was taking a bit of a break and then forgot to get back to this one:

Then why any censorship? Why not throw away all moral code?

I like to think I have a fairly strong moral code, and I wish others would follow the same code.

But even if I had the political clout to do so, even if we didn't have a zillion different competing notions of what is and isn't "moral", trying to make a legal code enforce 100% of that moral code would be a recipe for disaster. Law-making is complex: laws interact, and they get applied in situations which the drafters could never have foreseen.

Would the Founding Fathers have felt differently about the First and Second Amendments if they'd known about the Internet and assault rifles? Getting very briefly back to Turing, would the UK's child-porn laws be different if the drafters had foreseen that GCHQ would be holding one of the world's largest collections of porn?

And legal systems can easily become tools for the powerful to preserve and improve their position, especially when they're enforced by people with the same prejudices and blind spots as the rest of society. Allowing people to defend themselves seems like a simple principle, but in parts of the USA laws enacted for that purpose have turned into a de facto license for hunting black teenagers.

(Meanwhile, Marissa Alexander is looking at 60 years for firing warning shots, and CeCe McDonald served 19 months, all in a men's prison, for killing a man while defending herself against a transphobic attack.)

So I'm really cautious about trying to enforce morality through legal channels; often it does more harm than good. When it comes to an area of morality on which society is badly divided and already has a lot of fucked-up double standards, it seems like a recipe for disaster, even before getting into the technological side of why this particular law is a bad idea.

Why have X-rated horror films,

Short answer: because we live in a society that's so fucked up about sex that the "X-rated" aspect bothers them more than the "horror" part. As long as that continues to be the case, society is demonstrably not competent to make sensible laws on this subject.

I can switch on CSI or a dozen other cop shows and see a bullet or a knife penetrate a human body on prime-time TV. If that's not enough, I can go to the cinema and see something like Wolf Creek 2, which is being advertised all over the place just now: kidnapping, rape, torture, murder of backpackers, all based on a real-life case.

But a penis or a dildo or a finger or a tongue penetrating a human body consensually? Somebody spraying their own semen instead of somebody else's blood? That's FILTH and it has no place on our screens. Not that sex is entirely banned - Mick Taylor's allowed to rape his victims, and if you pick a socially-acceptable form of rape you can even market it as a romantic comedy where the victim ends up falling in love with his rapist, marrying her, and living happily ever after. But don't show the physical bits involved, even to an adult who already has similar bits of their own, because that might pervert them!

So, yeah, I don't trust our institutions to make sensible decisions about what sort of porn should and shouldn't be banned. I especially don't trust them to keep their own *phobia out of that mix. Encouraging them to filter the net for our protection is like inviting a vampire in to fix the plumbing.

My understanding of the UK laws is that, as in Australia, there's a lot of emphasis on banning stuff which "looks like" rape - BDSM, CNC etc. IMHO that's one of the most dangerous and counterproductive elements, because an awful lot of rape cases get ignored or trivialised when they don't fit people's preconceptions about what rape looks like.

why not push Miley Cyrus a step further and have her fucking on stage to sell a few more CDs?

If she's comfortable with doing that, it's not my business. I may think it's an unwise decision - I think an awful lot of the things celebs do are unwise and possibly self-destructive - but I don't see a lot of benefit to anybody in me trying to enforce my ideas of what's good for them.

If she's being "pushed" to do that, then the problem is with the "pushing". I want to see society getting the message that it's not sex that makes the difference between good and bad, it's consent that should be our focus. (And there are all sorts of things wrong with celebrity culture; if we want to tackle that through legislation, there are other places that I'd start.)

Why pursue journalists who hack into the mobile phone of a dead girl?

Again, consent.

I agree, the internet is an amazing resource: it has broken down barriers and whilst it let Egyptians communicate what was happening during the crisis in Tahrir square it also fed them the impression that every woman with blond hair was a nymphomaniac whether they were American or British or Dutch journalists.

I'm not sure they needed the Internet for that. We've been sexualising women and especially "exotic" women for longer than anybody on this board has been alive; go back a hundred years and it was filthy postcards of foreign ladies, go back two hundred years and it was paintings of slave markets.

I just know that if I had children, I wouldn't want them to see images that are all about exploitation and nothing to do with education.

Me also. Some years back I walked in on my partner's son looking at mainstream internet porn - I think he was about fifteen at the time - and told him that we weren't happy with him looking at that stuff when he didn't yet have any small-r relationships with RL women (parents' generation doesn't count).

I don't know if he obeyed that; teens being teens, I wouldn't be surprised if he kept on looking at porn and learned to cover his tracks better, but at least I hope we planted the idea that porn ain't RL. And while I can't say he grew up perfect, I've never seen a problem with his behaviour towards women.

Had it been legal to do so, I would have handed him a copy of Nina Hartley's "Making Love To Women". It's an X-rated video that starts out with an intelligent discussion about how to be respectful to a female partner, and explains how women get stigmatised for sex and why not to do that. Then it talks about RL female sexuality and how it differs from what's usually seen in porn, accompanied by demonstrations. Finally, it shows a scenario where Ms. Hartley has an open and assertive talk to her date about sex and then has fun & consensual sex. All in all, a lot more healthy, educational, and relevant than anything covered in my high-school sex-ed classes.

But it shows penises and vaginas, so... tough luck, kid. Better stick to rom-coms that present stalking as sexy, or crime shows where it's OK for a woman to have sex as long as it was rape and she's dead and you only see enough to titillate. There's already a ton of harmful material out there.

I've been shocked by posts I've seen here on Lit and they are certainly not for children's eyes and hearts, so should Lit be included in that censorship? Of course. Lit's policy bans under 18s - isn't that censorship too?

There's certainly stuff on Lit that I wouldn't want children seeing. For that matter there's stuff here that I think is harmful to adults, like the LW content that encourages vengefulness and misogyny.

But let's put that in perspective: a ten-year-old can walk down to the bookshop or the library and quite legally get hold of "A Game of Thrones", and read about 14-year-old Danaerys being married off to Khal Drogo, and 14-year-old Sansa getting stripped and beaten with the flat of a sword in front of an audience, until her entire body is covered with bruises.

Why do children need to be protected from Literotica, and not from that? Why don't people need to go on a government-run register of grown-ups who like explicit content and promise to keep it away from their kids before they're allowed to buy books with adult content? I'm cynical enough to think the answer has more to do with money and political influence than with child protection.

I'm impressed that you've actually been on a committee advising on censorship.

I haven't, and I'm not sure where I gave that impression, I certainly didn't intend to! But it is a subject that I've followed for a while.

If you mean my comment about "one of the first steps in any censorship program is to limit information about the extent of the program", that's a historical observation: people are much more accepting of censorship when they don't know too much about the ugly details. In the case of internet filtering it's also a technical imperative - if you publish a list of banned sites, you're effectively advertising them to anybody who can get past the technical controls (i.e. lots of people).

i) (Considering sites with vile content such as the violation of rights): To be able to block a website they must be aware of it and at least basic details. I understand that legal recourse would take a period of time to shut it down. However the ability is there to monitor traffic and the intention of becoming that traffic and hence prosecute people of guilty of consumning that product and producing said product where possible.

This isn't necessarily easy - there are various tools that help people remain anonymous online, and it can be hard to shut a site down if it's running somewhere with uncooperative law enforcement.

But then a lot of the really bad stuff - child porn etc - isn't even on websites anyway. It's circulated via P2P networks and other private channels, against which web filtering is completely ineffective - something that moral panic politicians find convenient to ignore.

iii) It seems all these features can be provided to a concerned parent to implement within the limitations of their home? Why should this be implemented as a cover-all, opt-out scheme - where you're obliged to register yourself as what essentially is a pale goverment dissidence.

Not to mention that the UK government has a very poor record on privacy of confidential data.

 

[Cumference]

..... And it is considered "good" for small children to read the bible!
And a more fucked up collection of treason, genocide, incest, human sacrifice, slavery and bronze age moral is hard to find!

Whenever someone else starts being concerned about your "moral" and ability to decide for yourself, you should start to be very worried.

 

[Cumference]

Also, I am personally not aware of the truth when it comes to the almost 100 grams in Denmark. Cause in my ears personally it sounds reasonable crazy. But I have personally heard that comment.

It is simple, you just look it up:

http://dinforsvarer.dk/nyheder/straf-i-narkotikasager/
Link in Danish, but we are talking Danish rules.

Less than 100g and you get fined, more and you go to jail.
.... As long as it is for your own use.
If you are selling, you are punished harder.
In the end, it all depends on the circumstances.