This essay first appeared in Cliterati on December 7th; I have modified it slightly for time references and to fit the format of this blog.
British readers, enjoy this website while you can.
In the year 2015, less than half a human generation past the end of a century which saw advances in sexual freedom (both practical and legal) unprecedented in human history, we are now well into an attempt by the powerful to roll it all back to the Victorian Era. But while the Victorians were largely concerned about appearances and tolerated considerable debauchery in the back-streets, neo-Victorians pretend that “sin” should be eradicated everywhere for everyone, and modern surveillance methods (not to mention the erosion of the presumption of innocence) have made it easy for police and prosecutors to destroy anyone’s life with an accusation of sexcrime, even if they have to manufacture it. For years, we’ve seen the recrudescence of the absurd but dangerous Victorian dogmas of the “innocence” of “children” and the fragile asexuality of women; these have been used to justify scorched-earth policies on adolescent sexuality and the re-establishment of the misogynistic doctrine that rape is a “fate worse than death”. More recently, however, the UK government has dramatically ramped up its censorship efforts, and this time even adult men will be included (though still mostly in the name of “protecting women and children”). In 2013, internet “filters” (i.e. censorship programs) were mandated, first to block adult content and later to stop anything else the government decides it doesn’t want the peasantry to see. Then last autumn, we discovered that the government is willing to cage people for years for looking at drawings of taboo subjects, and now it comes to this:
…from now on, VoD porn – online porn you still pay for, essentially – must fall in line with what’s available on DVD. That means that British pornography producers will no longer be able to offer content online that couldn’t be bought in a sex shop. Acts that are no longer acceptable include: spanking, caning and whipping beyond a gentle level; penetration by any object “associated with violence”; activities that can be classed as “life-endangering”, such as strangulation and facesitting; fisting, if all knuckles are inserted; physical or verbal abuse, even if consensual; the portrayal of non-consensual sex; urination in various sexual contexts; and female ejaculation. It’s quite a list, but one mostly made up of stuff that seems to have been picked out pretty arbitrarily (women orgasming, exactly which items can or can’t be inserted into a consenting adult’s body)…
The list also includes bondage, humiliation and “role-playing as non-adults”. As in the above-referenced manga case, even pretended depictions of taboo acts are taboo, despite the fact that pretended depictions of far more serious acts (like murder or mayhem) are allowed on ordinary television. For now, the Vice article assures us, “the new law only covers content produced in the UK, meaning that viewers…can still…view as much [international] fisting, strangulation and urination as they like…” However, given the expansion of the internet “filtering” parameters, do you honestly believe it will stay that way for long? Erotic Review certainly doesn’t:
…British authorities are gearing up for an all-out war with online porn. Sources tell me plans are afoot to start blocking British access to foreign so-called tube sites, which host porn videos, regardless of where they are based or whether the scenes they show are legal. The attack on TV-like services is just the latest stage in a war which could severely restrict people’s access to porn…
One detail of the new censorship regime which is being treated almost as a joke provides another clue to where this is actually headed: “the publicly funded regulator, the Authority for Television on Demand (ATVOD), will have to pay someone to watch porn and enforce the new regulations…at a cost of £36,000 [per year]…” You know who else pays censors to watch porn so the people can’t? China. The Great Firewall of Britain is well on the way, and once it’s discovered that merely blocking adult content fails to achieve the desired effect, the next level of tyranny is criminal charges accompanied by “sex offender” registration (a combination already used for the most-vilified forms of porn). As I pointed out in “Welcome To the Future”, the dystopia is already here; all that remains to be seen is how heavy a yoke the subjects will accept before they finally attempt to throw it off.
I’m not entirely certain its an actual war on pornography but rather laws that can be used as catch all’s so the police can persecute just about anyone who might display any sexual curiosity.
And as someone who went to UK boarding school where canning was a regular form of punishment, you can imagine my surprise when some years later it turns out to be a pornographic act.
This has not even been debated in Parliament – it’s just a list of things drawn up by a privately-owned (though publicly-funded) company, using the excuse of rationalisation. And the beauty of it, as with the ISP filtering, is that the Govt can claim that this is not Govt censorship.
Labour would be no better – but at least their Dangerous Porn law was a proper law, passed through Parliament. The Conservatives have the same censorship instincts but are just too cowardly to admit it.
It’s embarrassing to live here sometimes, it really is.
Well the Digital economy bill was rushed through wash-up in late night session.
So sadly I don’t seem putting through parliament as significantly better, the advantage of doing this approach is that when the bill is put to parliament is that it can be said that the bill is doing nothing more than legislating something that is already in force.
Only a matter of time before this hits the U.S.
It’s the camel’s nose under the tent. It’s about complete government control. Like the gun laws – it started out with bans on automatic weapons. Pretty sensible, huh? “It’s just machine guns”. Then it moves to certain types of handguns … then on to “assault guns” (and, by the definition of the gun grabbers those are just anything that looks “scary”) … then on to magazines then on to …. “Fuck why do we have guns at all?”
If the government can actually make an argument for banning internet porn – and then seize enough control to actually block it … other things will follow. Those same “filters” and “firewalls” that were put in place by appealing to the “sensibilities” of the public will be tweaked to block any information the government doesn’t want you to view or know about.
And it’s both Conservatives and Liberals who have an interest in doing it. If you’re the party sitting on the horse when complete internet control is realized – you’re the winner of the cake walk and you get to sit there for eternity – because you have control of ALL information. You can vanquish your political enemies … AT WILL.
Okay, I’m going to admit this right up front, the following is going to sound very stupid:
What are the Conservatiberals are waiting for? If they could magically reorder the world in their image, what would it look like and realistically, how close are they? They have (or can confiscate) all the money. They have the best weapons (most powerful military the world has ever seen, remember?). If they don’t have the technology, they surely know where to find it and can confiscate that as well.
I ask a similar question about Ferguson. What held back those police, armed and ready for action, from just mowing down those protesters? The burning of private businesses and one officer saying “I feared for my life” is all it would have taken. Seriously, who would have stopped them if they had done that? Obama sending in the Army? Don’t make me laugh.
As for the internet and these proposals that would ‘destroy the internet as we know it’, I’ve been pondering this for most of the day and I ask, maybe it needs to be destroyed and rebuilt on a model that didn’t spring from a government project. Maybe it would give industries that actually produce things of value a chance to be rebuilt, and it would not act as a safety valve for people to rage about places they will never go to about things they will never come close to changing. Maybe we’d have had the revolution everyone here is pining for by now if people weren’t able to vent, as I have just done.
I feel better now.
Establishing a totalitarian regime takes time these days, as the fast ways to do it are still widely known and remembered. Hence doing it the fast way (Hitler, Stalin, etc.) has a real risk of failure with the (well deserved) negative consequences for those that tried to do it. But the slow way apparently works well: Keep people in fear of various made-up threats, slowly erode freedoms, all in the name of security, bring law enforcement firmly under control by fostering an “us-against-them” mentality and get them military-grade weapons, establish blanket surveillance, etc.
Sure, eventually even a totalitarian regime established in this way will fail, but it could take a long, long time. And the scary thing is that it is happening all over the supposedly “free” world this time.
You speak of conservative liberal as if either one or both were one huge monolithic entity. Let me tell you from experience: trying to get liberals to do anything these days is like herding cats.
I am a liberal, an unabashed, William Douglas/FDR liberal. This means I get mistaken for a Libertarian in matters such as free speech, free press, search and seizure, self-incrimination, XIV Amendment, etc..At other times I have been called a Communist, because most people have never read Marx beyond the Communist Manifesto, which explains what Marx was talking about like Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity completely describes all of modern physics.
British law is different from our own, relying far more an precedence and custom than it does a “written” constitution. The UK has one fifth our population, and less than 1/40th of our area. Right now, they are suffering from what we are suffering from in this country: a society subordinated to corporate interests. New Labor is not liberal, it is at best moderate.
The Democratic Party isn’t liberal, hasn’t been since it decided it needed to trim its sails to beat Reagan. I can count on my two hands the full-fledged, unabashed liberals in the House and Senate.
It was liberals on the Supreme court like Douglas, Black, and Brennan, who got Potter Stewart, Earl Warren, and the other moderates and conservatives on the Court to say that we had a right against self-incrimination in a state court, the right to an attorney in a state court, the right to use contraception and have an abortion, the right to burn the American flag as an act of free speech, and a lot of other rights we take for granted today.
We may not like all of the ramifications of their decisions, but they are the primary difference between us being a full-fledged fascist state, and one that is gradually becoming one.
The Great Firewall of China is as porous as a sieve. Also this crap comes from Cameron–a true moron. His latest announcement was that all encryption on the web must go. Which of course would end all e-commerce and more or less shut the web down. The economic fall-out of which would prob bring down numerous governments world-wide. He is a vapid PR stooge with no real knowledge or understanding of anything other than how to lie and fake sincerity. All UK polits are that way since the “success” of Tony Bliar.
As all across the West the scum of authority are doing the ground work for establishing police states. Several reasons why suggest themselves:
1- The long march of statist/socialist poison across the West is reaching its zenith. Look at Universities–hotbeds of demented PC piffle. The institutions of the West are now full of power-seeking ideologues who know best how peoples lives should be lived–under the direction of their “betters”. Power-seeking opportunists have always been there but when the ordinary greed and malice and “I know best” of the individual egotist is enhanced by evil ideology then things tend to get really bad–as the 20th century shows.
2-Alongside this it maybe that the state realises that its economic bungling and mismanagement is about to bring economic disaster down on the World and that millions of people will soon want to see the colour of the political/bureaucratic hacks insides (yes bankers have also played their part–but in the role of Igor to the states Baron Frankenstein). Increasing authoritarianism is the polits play to try and ride the storm.
3–Those who want to lord it over their fellow human beings can see the prospect of humanity completely free of them soon and they don’t like it at all. Techno-progress including ever-greater prosperity and opportunities for all, Life Extension, and such possibilities as Intelligence Increase and personal emotional control offer a world no longer full of the easily lied-to or the easily led. The political types realise that they must make a grab for ultimate power soon–and pervert technology to serve tyranny–or lose their “power” for ever.
Governments are slow and expensive, they require committees and budgets before projects can even be begun.
Writing code for a project by individuals just requires a computer and some commitment, governments will always suffer from technological lag.
Which is why governments frequently resort to control through fear, we can’t compete technologically or intellectually so we’ll just destroy anyone we catch and leave that as a warning for others.
“encryption on the web must go”
Yeah that was ridiculously stupid, TCP/IP are encrypted data packets that the web runs on. binary is a code by which all machines operate and signals are sent and Johnny foreigner refuses to speak English.
So trying to have an Internet that works without no Encryption (just plain English), is the stuff of fantasy, or rather its called talking to someone, the limitations are that they have to be in earshot.
Sorry, but you are confused about what “encryption” is. TCP/IP is payload-agnostic, no relation to encryption. It can transfer “plain English” just as well as encrypted data. “Binary code” is encoding, not encryption. The difference is that encoding can be reversed by anyone without any secret information, while encryption cannot.
Some applicable examples for encryption on the Internet are:
1) SSL and HTTPS: Encrypted web traffic for surfing
2) Encrypted email via PGP/GnuPG
3) Secure VPN tunnels (“trusted” VPN tunnels are not encrypted)
4) Transport encryption in anonymity networks like TOR and I2P.
5) Storage encryption on mobile phones and on computers
Hate to disagree, but getting rid of encryption is extremely simple – just block any packet that looks statistically random. It’s not a technical challenge. The problem is that things like the control blocks for routers themselves are encrypted, and for excellent reason.
Actually, I am just blowing smoke. Within a couple of weeks people will be using steganography to bypass the encryption detectors. And in any case, blocking packets that look random will make it impossible to transfer compressed material. All this to block dirty pictures on the internet, yet they’ll let “50 shades of grey” to be sold right in the bookstores.
Actually, it is a very hard challenge (I did some research in that area) as soon as the protocol is not known anymore. Well-compressed data is not easy to distinguish from encrypted data if you do not have a lot of it and do not have time (both conditions are met in Internet routers).
Today most web-traffic is compressed, by sheer necessity. An extreme example I recently encountered was a page that is 3MB of mostly JavaScript Framework Cruft, and compressed down to 60kB. That reduction can be the difference between total network congestion and things running smooth and fast.
You are right on you second point though. If some blow-up of the data volume is acceptable, hiding encrypted data in network traffic is easy to do.
There’s also the “what is porn” question.
Another factor is that yes, guys get desensitised to porn, but it works the other way, too. With less exposure to porn, a dude needs very mild stimuli to get the job done. Up until a few years back in Japan, a woman’s neck was a locus of erotic fantasy. Dress the women head-to-toe in drapery, and a tilt of the head becomes porn. Cupid (or Priapus, at least) always finds a way.
In light of yesterday’s column regarding immigration, while I’m surprised no one was foolhardy enough to try and defend immigration regulations, it seems like the message to potential immigrants to the West should be thus:
Why would you want to join a decaying imperial construct whose government is incapable of doing anything to actually help the individual; where people will sneer at you because of your funny name, your dark skin or your funny accent (when they aren’t turning you into a side show because they are desperate to curry your favor and approval); and where the police will just as soon kill you as look at you (and often will kill you without looking at you)? You’d be far better off staying in your home country and fighting to succeed where the Americans, British and Western Europeans have failed. And since we’re apparently on the brink of catastrophe, why would you want to be around when the hammer really falls?
“Why would you want to join a decaying imperial construct”
Why? Well, there’s a lot to be said for clean water, basic medical care, and not having bombs raining down killing your children.
I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole, and I was thinking of immigrants vice refugees from war-torn areas. However, read enough of this stuff and the idea of ‘well, at least we still have clean water’ goes out the window if one believes we’re about to have a catastrophic collapse.
But you’re right, we don’t have bombs falling. Yet…
It’s a good question. I can’t go two weeks without hearing or reading about how America is this dismal dystopia with less freedom than ever before (*). I sure can’t go six weeks without discovering that the UK and Europe are either following or leading America into this apparently inevitable pit of despair. Why the hell does anyone come here?
(*) Worse than the Sixties, when some states gave you a life sentence for a third marijuana conviction, when the government could send you to kill and die for them? Worse than the Fifties, with its HUAC? Than the Forties with its internment camps?
Sadly, as America’s history during the Hayes Code era has shown, the public will suffer a great deal of very intrusive censorship for a very long time before it will rebel. I suspect the same is true in Britain, where they do not even have a First Amendment to be violated.
I’m not sure the Hayes Code, as ridiculous and pointless as it was, is the best analogy here. People still managed to go out and change things despite not being able to see married couples sleeping in the same bed.
Further, we didn’t need to burn the country down in order to get rid of the Hayes Code, as it was not Government-mandated (although I do realize the Code was implemented to head off Government censorship)
Reblogged this on caprizchka and commented:
We are all just children who need big government to look out for us.
“God Save the Queen,
and her Fascist Regime.”
–The Sex Pistols
I’m sorry to say it, but talk of “throwing off the yoke” is somewhat premature.
If you had suggested a few years ago that banning smoking in all pubs by law (rather than by landlord choice) would be completely successful, I would have laughed
saying it would never work and be widely ignored, requiring the prosecution of half the population, guarded by the other half.
Yet it HAS worked spectacularly well, with hardly a squeak of protest. (I don’t smoke, by the way)
This shews that the great British Public are nothing like ready for a fight,even to look after their own interests. Although together we are more powerfull than the police, the law and the army combined, principally requiring a quiet easy life, we just can’t be bothered.
And THEY know it. Which is why they treat us like site – because they can.
In this< I'll agree with one of my heroes: William O. Douglas; who, asked why he refused to view the pornographic movies and other material that was brought before the Supreme Court, said, "i don't have to see it; It is Free speech, protected under the First Amendment. Period."
I think it’s also a matter of deception – the delusion that such images are exploiting women, when the truth is that it depends on the nature of how such images were made.
Certainly makes no sense as regards to amateur material. So if anyone points out that the ‘end page 3’ campaign is nonsense on stilts, that person is guaranteed to be lambasted as a ‘misogynist’ or ‘rape apologist’ or any other such outrageous nonsense just so the moral guardians can protect their own power. While concealing some of their own prejudices, and showing what they can get away with.
(One certain actress declared herself ‘not a feminist’ and was called a bellend by the morons in the sisterhood – so much for respect for women!)