Offence seeking déjà vu

Do you remember the end of 2010? I do. My very last blog post of the year was titled "Last effort for the Offence Seeking Twat of the Year Award" and was about the Top Gear Christmas special outraging literally some people, most of whom were white, middle class Graun readers. Oh, and Andy Choudary.

Needless to say I haven't actually seen Top Gear's "Three Wise Men", and being a Christmas special I expect it'll air here between Easter and late June, but it has already made some news here. And it's all thanks to James May, a rock, a few square yards of black cloth, and bloody Anjem "Is-It-'Coz-I-Is-Slamic" Choudary. It seems that James May brained himself with a rock somehow and that when he came out of hospital, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, this was what he was faced with.

Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond disguised themselves as women by wearing Islamic face veils which only revealed their eyes in a Christmas show filmed in Syria.

Don't fancy yours much.

Andy, with almost gravitic inevitability, was upset because he saw this as an attack on a symbol of his religion, which as far as I could tell the burqa isn't, having been predictably silent over the years about Muslim attacks on the symbols and traditions of other religions.

Still, all to be expected, and so is the nature and level of outrage directed Top Gear's way over this year's Christmas special.

Jeremy Clarkson has been accused of offensive behaviour once again after mocking Indian culture in a Top Gear Christmas special.

Okay, can I interrupt to make a brief point. There's no 'accused of offensive behaviour' about it - if someone was offended then ipso facto his behaviour was offensive. The question is whether that's a reason for doing anything, and since nobody's ever done so much as two fifths of fuck all about most of the things that offend me, and since that doesn't keep me awake at night, I'd say the answer is no, no reason to do anything at all. Being offended is painless and causes no loss unless someone chooses to allow it, which says more about them than what they're complaining about. By all means take offence and say so if you like, but don't tell me it harmed you and the other person must be silenced.

Viewers have complained to the BBC after the outspoken presenter made a series of controversial remarks about the country's clothing, trains, food and history. At one point, Clarkson appeared to make light of the lack of sanitation for poor residents by driving around slums in a Jaguar fitted with a toilet.

And? It's not the wittiest way of making the point but unless it's actually wrong and Indian slums typically have indoor plumbing, piped water supplies and sewers now I don't see the problem. These people are dreadfully poor and literally don't have a pot to piss in. I'm not saying that Clarkson was subtly highlighting the issue of Indian poverty but it's not as if he was saying something that isn't true. Even if he was the appropriate response is rebuttal, not howls of righteous outrage and the usual demand to have him sacked and flogged with broken glass.

And then we have the actual volume of complaints.

A spokesman for the BBC said they had received 23 complaints about the programme, which was broadcast on Wednesday evening.

And how many watched? According to the Graun, who I imagine would like nothing better than the anger of the terminally thin skinned over Clarkson's shoot public sector strikers remark to kill TG's viewing figures, five million people watched and it was the most popular show in its time slot. Assuming every one of those 23 who complained actually watched the show that's 0.00046% of viewers who were offended, and given that about a million people in the UK are of Indian ethnicity it says even more that only 23 complained. Not that all those 23 were necessarily Indian - some are probably white, middle class Graun readers getting offended on behalf of Indians, who presumably don't know when they're being offended. Certainly some of the people taking to message boards and Twatter seem to be.

Owen Hathway tweeted: “Whats wrong with the BBC that they think casual racist stereotyping is acceptable on top gear?”

No idea, Owen, but why don't we leave it up to the million British Indians and the billion Indian Indians to decide whether to be upset. Many of them might think it's some middle aged white guy making a tit of himself and find it amusing. But no, they're clearly mistaken and should be as outraged as the Owens are on their behalf, because it's raaaaaaaacist, see? Raaaaaaaacist!

Which reminds me, where do I write in to complain about this sketch by Goodness Gracious Me from a few years back? I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but now thanks to 23 anonymous complainants and an assortment of condescending pricks I now realise that it was mocking English culture and... what was it again? Oh, yes, I remember: casual racist stereotyping.

I mean, what is wrong with the BBC that they thought it was acceptable?

 

What's good for the goose is for the gander, offence seekers, and you can't have it both ways. Either both are bad and offensive and shouldn't be allowed, or both are fair play regardless of whether someone somewhere is (or just decides they ought to be) offended by it. I'd say the latter because, as I've said before, there is no right to go through life and never be offended, and since one person can be offended by something that is said while another can be offended by it not being said there never can be a right to not be offended.

As someone who's offended by opening the paper and has moved somewhere that has its own special name for the English my advice would be to get offended all you like as often as you like by absolutely whatever you, er, dislike. Just don't sit there fuming and expecting it means you have a right to insist that anyone else has to accommodate your feelings, because a free society can never work that way and all an unfree society can do is to pick sides.

Sloppy filter

I haven't blogged on the proposed webnanny/internet filter/Great Firewall of Australia plans down here for a while because things have gone a bit quiet. There have been enough colours nailed to masts, reputations staked and interests vested that I'm not all that hopeful that sense has been seen, particularly when it needs to be seen by a Communications Minister whose paternalist streak might be coming from both religious beliefs and leftie-ness, but it may be that it's been realised that a filter that promised much and failed to deliver would be worse than none at all. And I'm quite confident it would fail. Much of the illegal stuff is being shared by P2P anyway, and the filters proponents were forced to admit almost from the start that it couldn't do a thing about that. And then there's TORs and VPNs - basically it'll affect people who don't google for a way around the filter before the thing goes up, which is more or less everybody that doesn't need a filter because they won't be searching the web for baboon porn or whatever in the first place.

More interesting if you're a baboon, I imagine

But it's not just that because ISP level filters will be under attack from the other side too, as TalkTalk in the UK and some of its customers have found out.

Britain’s third-largest broadband provider has been promoting its new “HomeSafe” security product to its 4.1 million subscribers as a way of blocking pornography, viruses and other potentially harmful content.
Unlike the child safety products offered by other providers, it operates at the network level so parents do not need to install or maintain any software. The approach has attracted praise from MPs and campaigners seeking to restrict the availability of pornography on the web.
But for more than a week the system has failed to restrict access to Pornhub, which offers thousands of free explicit videos and is ranked as the third largest pornography provider on the web.
The failure was discovered by Cherith Hately, an IT expert and mother of three teenagers in south London, who tested the service last week. She found that on the Pornhub website the HomeSafe blocking page had been relegated to a small box normally reserved for advertising, leaving its adult content fully accessible.
“The ‘you have been blocked’ page has been diverted to an advertising slot within the Pornhub homepage thus opening access to it,” she said.
“The HomeSafe barrier has been knocked down, technically and literally. TalkTalk should inform all their HomeSafe customers that their children are still able to see pornography so that parents can supervise more.”

Far be it from me to tell me how to bring up your children, Cherith, and I'm sure you've already had the awkward conversation with your teens about which one had visited that site, but I'd say that parents should take this as an indication that the best filter system is the parents themselves.

A spokesman for TalkTalk acknowledged the failure and said technicians were working on a fix. He was unable to say whether the HomeSafe system had been deliberately circumvented by pornographers.

Perhaps not, but it occurs to me that if it had been to circumvent another filter that worked the same way it could affect TalkTalk too. In the Aussie context since what the nannies want is effectively ISP level filtering under government supervision all ISPs would have the same filter, and when a website manages something similar to what Pornhub's done to TalkTalk's HomeSafe this single point of failure would mean it won't affect just Telstra or iiNet or Optus customers - it'll be everyone. Hardly the end of the world because we'll be about where we are right now, but it does make the whole exercise seem a bit pointless.

“As the only network-level filter, TalkTalk’s HomeSafe is the most effective way of protecting children from content parents consider harmful,” the spokesman said.

No, I repeat: parents are the most effective way of protecting children from harmful content. The filter can't unplug the computer, withhold their pocket money or threaten to stop paying the broadband bill so there's no service whatsoever. But it can create a false sense of security.

“While no technical solution alone is able to solve the issue of child internet safety or be a substitute for parental supervision, we firmly believe that HomeSafe is a step in the right direction.”

Providing that false sense of security doesn't take over leading parents to assume that the filter is doing its job and little or no supervision is necessary, because when you concede that there's no substitute for parental supervision that would be a step in the wrong direction. Not that Britain's nannies are any more clued up about that than Australia's.

Under government pressure the rest of the big four internet providers – BT, Virgin Media and Sky – recently agreed to offer all new customers software to restrict which websites children are able to access, but stopped short of implementing network-level filters.
TalkTalk’s approach is meanwhile supported by the campaigners, and MPs including Claire Perry, a Conservative backbencher who is leading a parliamentary inquiry into online child protection. As well as network-level filters she wants broadband providers to switch them on by default.
“When I started campaigning to make access to internet pornography an 'opt-in', many industry experts said it was technologically impossible to provide a network-level filter,” Mrs Perry said.

You idiot. Of course it's impossible, we've just bloody seen that. This looks like it was circumvented at the other end without any effort on the part of the person sitting at home, and it's not like the person sitting at home doesn't have ways and means anyway. Look, I can't put it any better than an Australian blogger, Stilgherrian, put it nearly four years ago (my bold):

Real-world experience in everything from spam filters to the record industry’s futile attempts to stop copyright violations always shows that filters only block casual users. Professionals, the desperate or the persistent will always get through.

However if a politician demands a filter, pretty soon a shiny-suited salesman will appear, ready to sell him a box with “filter” written on the front. It’ll work — well enough for the demo, anyway.

“Look, Minister! Nice Minister. Watch the screen. See? Filter off, bad website is visible. Filter on, bad website gone. Filter off. Child in danger. Filter on. Child happy and safe. Filter off. Voter afraid and angry. Filter on. Voter relaxed and comfortable. Cheque now please.”

When elected nannies like Stephen Conroy here and Claire Perry in the UK wrap their heads around this and stop spunking taxpayers' money at things which at best will work until someone defeats them and at worst will never work at all they might start giving out useful advice. Advice along the lines of: the government can't stop your kids from seeing tits and arses and rooting baboons online...

... but if you get off your arse and look at what they're doing you can.

In which I credit the Tories with something positive for a change

Not hugely positive, and I still loathe the Cobbleition almost as much as the last lot, but this is still good to hear.

Governments must not interfere with the internet, the British government said Tuesday - weeks after suggesting police should curb online access during riots.
Foreign Secretary William Hague said the fact that criminals and terrorists can exploit digital networks is not "justification for states to censor their citizens."
And Prime Minister David Cameron said governments "must not use cybersecurity as an excuse for censorship or to deny their people the opportunities that the Internet represents."

As the article points out this is a bit of an about turn from the post riot noises about Twitter clampdowns and turning off mobile phone networks from some in the government, and the cynic in me wonders if this is less a Damascene conversion to the cause of liberty than a dawning realisation that they just can't stop people talking to each other, but whatever the reason it's welcome. Not so sure about this next bit though.

Britain supports the less proscriptive idea of internationally agreed online "norms of behavior." That approach was backed by US Vice President Joe Biden, who warned against imposing a "repressive global code" for the Internet.

And who's doing the agreeing? I suspect we know the answer already and that it'll be governments agreeing for their citizens without giving them any say in the matter, which rather sours the happy mood. Still, backing away from overt censorship isn't a bad thing at all. Statists and authoritarians run so much that any concession they make, any little victory at all, is worth mentioning.

Aaaah, look, they're getting all grown up

For a blog that's supposed to be the semi-coherent rantings of an English expat upset at the goings on in the land of his birth I feel it's been a bit overly focused on Aussie affairs lately, and was determined to give it a rest for a bit. The trouble is that while the phone-not-hacking business seems to be dominating news in the UK, and is also being so well blogged elsewhere I haven't got much to add, there appears to be a wider variety of things going on here that have got sufficiently far up my nose to blog about. Money being wasted, carbon tax, some more money being wasted, different money being wasted elsewhere, politicians saying one thing and doing another, politicians talking complete bollocks, politicians talking bollocks whilst wasting money, politicians destroying the cattle industry - Christ, I've just realised I haven't even done that one, but fortunately the Real World Libertarian has covered that as well. Well, best intentions of mice and bloggers blahblahblah, because I'm going to do another one. No apologies though, because this is important - Australia's nannies have decided it's growing up enough to be allowed scary videogames.

SEXUALLY explicit and violent video and computer games banned in Australia could soon be sold here after all state and federal governments except New South Wales agreed to an R18+ rating for video games.

Now as I've mentioned before, the reason we don't already have one was that one state, South Australia, would not agree and that unanimity was required for change on this, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that nothing much has actually changed. NSW abstained rather than objected as SA had done in the past, although the new Attorney-General from NSW, Greg Smith, is reportedly a conservative (yeah, that Liberal kind of 'liberal' again) and argued against introducing an R18+ classification.

Mr Smith said he abstained from the vote because it needed to go to state cabinet first as the government was new - it was elected in March - and so he could consult the community.

Same same but different, you'd think, because that's really not far off the old situation - one strongly conservative view, quite possibly religiously influenced, held by a paternalist know-it-all in a position that lets him decide for the whole country rather than just his state (or better yet, his family) has apparently been exchanged for another. However, the federal government are not letting one state lay down the law for the whole country anymore. Kind of begs the question why they've been content to do so up to this point, but nevermind.

Brendan O'Connor says the Federal Government would over-ride NSW and implement the R18+ rating regardless of its decision.

And then there's that community Greg Smith mentioned, and that can be divided into three groups: the gamers, who overwhelmingly want to be able to buy adult oriented games since so many of them are adults; the non-gamers who mostly don't care or support the gamers; and the small but phenomenally noisy and, for their numbers, highly influential Christian lobby, who up 'til now have mostly opposed games that would be rated R18+ because of the violence and the risk of a T&A being included. Presumably the feeling is this sort of thing inevitably leads to hot women playing World of Warcraft in the nip and naked gaming parties, which in turn can only lead to sticky sheets, Kleenex shortages and babies, and this game-induced lust-fuelled sexmageddon will meet the game-induced bloodlust-fuelled murderpocalypse head on.

No, I don't know how they get there either, and that many of the kind of games they worry about are not only not banned but are sold to 15 year olds here in Australia because of rather than despite the lack of an RA18+ rating seems to have escaped them until now. On that point there seems to have been a waking up and smelling of coffee...

THE Australian Christian Lobby has overturned its opposition to a new R18+ category for adult computer games, saying a new in-principle deal would keep extreme games out of Australia.

... though it's not exactly a Damascene conversion.

“The draft R18+ guidelines as originally proposed would have matched the R18+ guidelines for films,” spokesman Rob Ward said.
“This was clearly never in the interests of the community, with the boundaries of the R18+ film guidelines slowly eroded to allow extreme violence, actual sex and simulated pedophilia in films.
“Although ACL awaits the final detail from the meeting, it appears that the existing ceiling for games has been maintained with a commitment to move the more extreme MA15+ games into a newly-created R18+ rating.”

So while the Christian lobby, or at least one of its most vocal parts, has worked out that the current situation is counter-productive they haven't gone quite as far as conceding that they don't speak for 'the community', just themselves, or that adults in Australia should be able to buy the same games that are available elsewhere without the game developer having to specially ruin it for the local market.

Still, the main thing is that the opposition to an R18+ category has pretty much dried up and I'd say it's almost certain that it'll be in place in time for Christmas orders. And I'd be prepared to bet that although the wording on the game classification guidelines may be slightly different to those for other media I'd be prepared to bet that the official censors - the people who've been employed to nanny us but have often allowed games aimed at adults to slip through as MA15+ - will allow into Oz unaltered games that they can't at the moment.

I'd prefer to see an end to the gaming nanny completely, and realistically with online sales growing - my last two games purchases were made via Steam and with the prices of games in the shops I'm likely to carry on buying that way - I don't see how they expect to stop someone downloading games that aren't for sale here anyway. Even if the internet filter plan hadn't stalled I'm sure serious gamers would be working out ways around it so they could download ZombieSplatterKill4 from the US or elsewhere.

So I have mixed feelings about it, but overall there are more positives than negatives. It didn't go as far as I'd hoped and certainly not as far as I'd like, but baby steps I suppose. Progress has been made and Nanny is going to let us play the scary and slightly naughty games now, which for a country with the biggest and most blatantly sited sex shops I've ever seen is probably about time.

View Larger Map -- Sexyland, just off the Tullamarine freeway about ten minutes from Melbourne international airport

For those who are interested there's a good potted history of the road to an adult games rating on The Age's Screen Play blog.

YouTube's sense of humour failure

The Go The Fuck To Sleep book is probably pretty well known by now what with the press it got when it came out and especially with the Samuel L Jackson reading. So it's slightly surprising that when Noni Hazlehurst, who I'd never heard of but apparently was on the Aussie Play School for twenty years or so, put up a clip of herself reading the book Play School style, and which amused me enough to blog and embed it here, YouTube pulled it.

Noni, to her credit, has promptly put it back up again, and bloody right too since other versions of it were never taken down.

Former Playschool presenter Noni Hazlehurst says the decision to remove a recording of her reading mock children’s book Go The F--- to Sleep from YouTube was ‘‘laughable’’ and ‘‘absolutely ridiculous’’.
The video was pulled late last night only to be posted again about 5am today.
[...]Her video was removed, but others including those read by German arthouse film director Werner Herzog and American actor Samuel L. Jackson stayed online.
‘‘It’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, and to leave all the others up there is even more ridiculous,’’ Hazlehurst said.
‘‘The hypocrisy just makes me laugh.’’
[...]
‘‘Anyone with a tenth of a brain would realise this is not meant for kids,’’ she said.

The trouble is, Noni, that some people who look at YouTube probably have less than a tenth of a brain.

A YouTube spokesman said no comment would be made about individual videos, but they could be removed because a user had flagged them as offensive or because the person who had posed (sic) the video was underage.

Since Noni Hazlehurst is in her fifties it sounds like the latter. I'm speculating here, but I reckon some softcock, and sadly it's probably an Aussie who saw her name and thought 'Oh, this will be sweet and harmless', got offended by it and complained to YouTube rather than take the more practical option of turning it (the fuck) off. Samuel L. Jackson's version? Well, he's an actor who says bad words in lots of his films so our mystery whinger(s) may never have come across his version. Werner Herzog? Arthouse film director? Hmmm, ditto I expect. But sweet Noni Hazlehurst who used to - she's not presented the show for a decade - sing songs down the TV at toddlers and make stories with teddy bears and dolls, that Noni Hazlehurst going all potty mouthed? Oh no, the childhood of some 30-somethings is irrevocably shattered. It can't be borne, so it must be banned.

And of course SupineTube caved in.

Fellas, it's aimed at adults. It's humour for adults who can laugh at the frustrations an adult may feel when trying to get a noisy baby to shut the fuck up and give them a little peace. And maybe, according to Noni Hazlehurst herself, a bit of a warning.

The book and her reading are a bit of fun, she says, ''but there's a serious underlying issue. People need to understand when they're talking about how nice it would be to have a baby that it's a huge undertaking.''
[...]
''Many of the kids I entertained are parents themselves now, and I think it's pointless saying, 'Make sure your child has a lovely environment to sleep in'. I think we have to speak in a language people understand.''

This subtle distinction is apparently lost on YouTube, who'd rather pull something not meant for a general audience because someone's had a whine about it, even though other versions remain on their site. It's a little tempting to go trawling through the place looking for any overtly religious damnation-to-sinners type videos and flag as offensive as many as I can just to see whether or not they pull any of those, but that'd be unfair to anyone who actually did get their video removed. Instead I think I might make and put up a video myself and then log in as someone else with some bullshit complaint about how it offends me, and then we'll see what they do.

In the meantime, here's Noni Hazlehurst hosted by EyeTube...



Complaints may be addressed to gothefuckaway@tellsomeonewhogivesashit.com

The Shut-the-Möhne-and-Eder-dams-down-without-hurting-anyone-ers

As ably blogged by Longrider and Max Farquar I see that the remake of The Dambusters, which I've been looking forward to, has caved under politically correct pressure over the real life name of Wing Commander Guy Gibson's dog, which, in case either of my readers (hello Mum) weren't already aware, was a black labrador called Nigger. Actually I think my mum would have seen the original before they began changing the name for PC reasons. As far as I can remember I have only ever seen the sanitised version in which no dog's name is also a derogatory term for a person of any particular ethnicity, but in which I'm sure Germans were still referred to as 'Jerries', 'Krauts' and possibly even 'filthy Huns' (with an option on 'Boche') and well over a thousand of them were eventually killed by the good guys in an operation that would now be prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Clearly bad-mouthing a whole nation before killing off large numbers of its civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure is a mild character flaw compared to the swivel-eyed racist psychosis that must be necessary to call your dog 'Nigger', but I digress.

The remake is being produced by David Frost and Peter Jackson and scripted by Stephen Fry, so it's safe to conclude that the people behind the film are bright and well aware of the historical facts, but of course they are also aware that the word offends a lot of people and they've known for some time that this was going to be a bone of contention.

[Peter Jackson] said, when announcing his plans in 2006: "It is not our intention to offend people. But really you are in a no-win, damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't scenario.
"If you change it, everyone's going to whinge and whine about political correctness. And if you don't change it, obviously you are offending a lot of people inadvertently."

To be pedantic, Pete, people are taking offence where you are offering none, but we all get what you were saying. To be honest I'm not strongly in either camp and if you're adapting an historical account for the purposes of entertainment it's not too big a deal if changes are made, right? It's not like you're rewriting history books or making a documentary and deliberately including a 'fact' that you know to be incorrect, eh?

Except...

Except that for a lot of people these days mainstream entertainment is nearly all the exposure to history they get, and while artistic licence is to be expected from the world of fiction, movies and TV - especially the latter two - when you then slap 'based on a true story' all over the posters you will inevitably get people leaving the theatres and turning off the TV assuming that what they saw on the screen was what actually happened. Hells bells, there are a small number of people out there who can't distinguish between a fictional character and the actor or actress who plays the role on TV, it's hardly surprising that, thanks to the magic of Hollywood, there are people who think that an Enigma machine was first captured by the US Navy in 1942 rather than the Royal Navy the previous year (and months before the US had even entered the war) or, to stick with just one nationality, that Apollo 13 was saved largely by the guy out of CSI: New York while the astronauts on board nearly came to blows (all of which was politely corrected by astronaut Jim Lovell on the DVD commentary). I can understand why it's done - the makers of U571 wanted bums 'asses' on seats in American cinemas and sticking to history in those bits of Apollo 13 would have meant having to increase an already large cast and losing some good dramatic tension - and clearly we can't expect a little red warning sign to flash up saying 'this bit didn't actually happen this way'. However, the problem is that people do go away having been told that the film is based on reality but crucially without knowing which bits were not. Peter Jackson worries about inadvertently offending people but arguably Hollywood has a track record of inadvertently offending people who value history by, again inadvertently, dropping certain historical facts down various memory holes.

As I said I've been looking forward to the Dambusters remake since I first heard about it, mainly because I like special effects to be convincing enough for me not to notice that there was a special effect and what was available in the 50s stood out like a dog's balls.* And while I'm not a history pedant I was also hoping that Peter Jackson, having already stood up to the legions of the professionally thin-skinned and offended by refusing to rename The Two Towers on the grounds that not many would confuse fantasy Middle Earth thousands of years ago with New York on September 11th 2001, would show the same stuff again and not change the dog's name. And that wasn't the only reason (my bold):

Stephen Fry, the actor who is writing the new script, was asked to come up with alternative names for Nigger.
But Sir David Frost, the executive producer, is reported to have rejected all the options Fry offered.
Sir David has been quoted as saying: "Guy sometimes used to call his dog Nigsy, so I think that's what we will call it.
"Stephen has been coming up with other names but this is the one I want."

But that was then and this is now and it seems that in the remake the dog, and incidentally 'dog' is Australian slang for a despicable person who's a bit of a scumbag, is now to be called 'Digger', which by the way is a nickname for Australian and New Zealand soldiers that dates back to World War One. Presumably this is no worse than a thousand or more German civilians being casually referred to as Krauts, Jerries and filthy Huns before being drowned in the dark following the destruction of the local dam.

Of course the film makers can spend their money how they please and make whatever changes they feel they need to in order to sell as many cinema tickets as possible and maximise their return. If they want to call the dog 'White Trash' knowing that a lot of people will call them on it then they're free to do so, and of course that would get just as much discussion as, well, as simply calling it anything other than 'Nigger'. And of course that's had the unintended consequence of making nearly everyone who'll see it well aware of what the dog was really called because the word is being used in articles about the new movie nearly as frequently as it was used in The Wire by black characters to refer to each other, which, presumably because it was being grittily realistic, was also not offensive though I'm not sure why the same would not apply to an equally realistic portrayal of something that happened two generations ago. It can't be just that a white guy is saying it because allowing people of one ethnicity to do something that people of another ethnicity may not would obviously be racist.

Musical interlude, apropos of nothing

Personally I feel they've missed a trick here. Stephen Fry, whose knowledge may be vast but whose intelligence I've doubted in the past due to his inability to grasp why politicians fiddling their expenses is wrong, could have written a script which sent a subtle message that this was how people thought in the 1940s and that doing so today would be frowned upon in the same way that, say for the sake of argument, bombing to destruction a dam causing mass civilian casualties would be. Sort of 'we did that then but we do not do it these days', or at least not on purpose if we can possibly avoid it.** But instead of that or even just an honest admission of historical fact we are again treading the path of political correctness.

Well, fair enough. No reason to avoid offending people if you don't have to, especially when you want them to be your paying audience. With that in mind when I go to see the movie I expect it to be completely inoffensive by being completely Kraut, Jerry and Hun free and by implying that Barns Wallace's genius was to design a bomb that would safely disable the dams' generators and drain the reservoirs without harming a soul, and perhaps even a brief apology to the Australian Defence Force at the end for using the word 'Digger' to name a dog. Perhaps many Diggers wouldn't care much and many Germans will be over it all by now, but if you're so desperate to be even handed about anything and everything that might cause someone somewhere a degree of offence then there isn't much option but to sanitise it completely. To do otherwise would be putting the interests of one group ahead of others and, er, just a wee bit prejudicial.


* Probably a dog called "Whitey" or something. Just to be on the safe side.
** Yes, I know it could be argued that sometimes we could have avoided it by not getting involved in a pointless and unnecessary war but I'm sure you get my point.

Teh interwebs are so confusing

More evidence that some people in positions of authority have absolutely no idea how the internet works. On this occasion it's Supreme Court here in Oz.

NEWSPAPERS, including the Herald, have been ordered to remove old articles from their websites after a court ruled they might interfere with a fair trial.
The decision, one of the first of its kind, came after lawyers for three accused men argued jurors might develop prejudice by reading any of 10 selected articles.
The Supreme Court yesterday ordered the removal of these reports from the online sites of various newspapers for the duration of the trial over the death of the former drug dealer Terry Falconer, due to start next week.

Which of course will completely sanitise the whole internet, yes? Oh, except for Google Cache, obviously. And anything else outside Australia. And probably quite a bit inside Australia that's too much trouble to track down. But apart from that there won't be a mention.

But the decision has no impact on thousands of other internet hits for the names of one or more of the accused - Anthony John Michael Perish, Mathew Robert Lawton, and Andrew Michael Perish. The court heard a Google search last month found 6930 references to the name of one of the men on Australian sites alone.

Probably more than that now that there will be a heap of articles on the suppression of previously published articles. And you can be sure that people will look them up out of curiosity for what it is that's being suppressed. Streisand effect, anybody?

The order was imposed even though jurors will be told not to look up the case on the internet or discuss it with anyone.

Okay, it's right that jurors should be told this and doing so deals with them like adults. Censorship is sending a message that just to be on the safe side the court wants to make sure nobody eats cookies by putting the jar on the top shelf, and if everyone is really good there will be cookies later. Except of course there are cookies literally everywhere and moving the contents of one jar has a pretty negligible effect on availability and possibly a negative one on the willingness to cooperate. So why even do it?

Carolyn Davenport, SC, the barrister for one of the accused, had argued that a juror might inadvertently speak to someone who had read one of the articles online, and the court needed to protect them from ''events that put their integrity to the test''.

Hello? Ever hear of the Streisand Effect?* Yes, a juror might have happened to speak to someone who'd read one of the articles, and now they're probably even more likely to speak to someone who's read a copy or précis or comment or blog because you're drawing attention to it by getting the original 10 articles censored. And protecting the jury members from having their integrity tested? You idiot. For one thing it doesn't offer any such protection when all you've achieved is to censor ten articles and draw attention to the fact there are thousands more out there, and for another you may have just given the jury the impression that you and/or your client thinks they can't be trusted. I wouldn't presume to tell you your job but if you were representing me I'd be hoping you'd say and do things to win the jury over, not tell them that we don't trust them. I'd be wondering how many jurors might be thinking to themselves, "I wasn't going to look but fuck it, now I'll have a peek just to work out what it is they don't want me to see."

Justice Derek Price agreed and said the court had the obligation to do whatever it could to protect the integrity of the process. ''The confidence in the integrity of the jurors does not mean the court should not protect them from incidents that put their integrity to the test,'' he said.

Of course the court must make sure trials are fair but ask yourselves if the censorship of ten out of thousands of web pages actually achieves that, particularly when the only people who are being ordered to remove pages are in a position to make the whole censorship order itself very, very public.

Last week, the chief executive of News Ltd, John Hartigan, called for an end to ''the nonsense'' of take-down orders. ''They are unnecessary and ineffective … the modern equivalent of burning books,'' he argued.

I'd have said just one or two books while leaving the same content available on whole shelves.

The barrister Dauid Sibtain had argued the orders were unnecessary and the media organisations should not be in a position ''less favourable'' than others who had posted material.
The orders ''lacked practical utility'' because other copies of the article may remain online, but Justice Price rejected this.

For why?

Justice Price said the inability to remove all offending material did not mean the removal of the articles outlined would be futile.

What? How the hell do you work that out? Look, it's been explained to you:

n IT expert, Nicholas Klein, had told the court material could be republished on other websites. The only way to make the stories unavailable for people searching for them, he said, would be ''to remove every single one from the internet''.
...
[Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties] said orders against internet publication appeared to discriminate against the internet because courts never ordered ''the removal of a microfiche from every library in the state''.

With that in mind surely at best this achieves nothing due to the sheer amount of material that remains. And it might do more harm than good due to the possibility that the censorship will put the question in peoples' minds: what are we not supposed to know, prompting them to try and find out.

How can it not be futile unless you believe can trust the jury not to go looking through all the other pages that can't be taken down or to pay attention to anyone else who has and mentions what they saw? But if you do trust them then you could also have trusted them with the ten removed pages still there in the first place.


* Actually that'd make a good movie title.

Why so (serious)?

The Joke

For Trooper Thompson, who the other day noted:

... Richard Murphy is a curious cove. He has a blog, but he hasn't quite entered into the spirit of the medium with regard to interacting with his audience. Unless would-be interlocutors are prepared to do the necessary obeisance, they will either never pass the moderation stage or be smothered in a wet blanket of sneering patronisation....

Such inadvertent humour has brought the guy a kind of cult anti-following, and a recent spike in interest occurred when Ritchie seemed to throw down the gauntlet of debate over his 'Economic Plan B' - which one commenter identified as being lifted wholesale from Mitterrand's disastrous first two years in power...

"Now would anyone (serious) like to debate it?"

Why so (serious) Richard? Does it get you down when commenters don't agree? Awwwwwwww, c'mon!

Let's put a smile on that face.

Punching fog.

If the people currently frothing in outrage of the whole Wikileaks things thought they had problems before they need to think again, because now similar sites are starting to appear.

A former co-worker of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to launch a rival website on Monday called Openleaks that will help anonymous sources deliver sensitive material to public attention.

In a documentary by Swedish broadcaster SVT, due to be aired tomorrow and obtained in advance by AP, former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg said the new website will work as an outlet for anonymous sources.

"Openleaks is a technology project that is aiming to be a service provider for third parties that want to be able to accept material from anonymous sources," Domscheit-Berg said in a rare interview conducted in Berlin.

Ever since WikiLeaks burst on the international news agenda in the northern spring there's been speculation about possible copycat sites.

Ironically it seems Domscheit-Berg quit Wikileaks after disagreeing with Assange over transparency in Wikileaks itself, arguing that there wasn't enough of it, but that's by the by. What's relevant is that there is an alternative now, and regardless of which one is more attractive to any individual whistle blower things just got harder for secrecy obsessed governments. Silencing one is hard enough and now they'd have to silence two, and possibly more. If there's room for more than one social networking site there should be room for more than one anonymous leaking service, especially as you'd expect something like that to be less faddish than the MyBookSpaceReunitedTwitFace stuff.

Of course there is a simple, easy solution for governments that avoids much of the nightmare that multiple leak sites would bring: don't give access to really important information to a Pfc and at the same time don't fuck about and waste time classifying gossip.

Assange did break Australian law... unless he didn't.

Oh, for fuck's sake. In the same paper, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, and at the same bloody time we have this:

THE federal government has elaborated on its position on WikiLeaks, saying both the initial leaking of classified documents and their subsequent distribution by the controversial website is likely to be illegal.

"The unauthorised obtaining of the information may well be an offence," Attorney-General Robert McClelland said yesterday.

And also this:

FEDERAL authorities have failed to find any criminal laws that Julian Assange may have broken by publishing what has become a daily diplomatic scandal sheet for the Gillard Government.

The Australian Federal Police and the Attorney-General's Department admitted they had so far been unable to determine if there was any law under which he could be charged.

So that's cleared that up.

Justice - not just blind but occasionally completely shitfaced.

Telly Tubby Bye Bye!!

I'm not a serious gamer, particularly not when it come's to shoot-'em-ups, but I'm tempted to buy Left4Dead just so I can do this to it.



I've always felt that Tellytubbies deserve everything they get, and with Australia's track record of censoring games and infantilising adult gamers (particularly those interested in the Left4Dead series), it might be the right approach for game developers to take with zombie shooters destined for the Australian market.

Say eh-oh and eat lead, motherfuckers!

YouTube porn.

Some people, say maybe people who've had their videos censored because of some orchestrated whining about the content, might feel that this is poetic justice.

Senseless censor.

From Wikipedia:

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

It's often been the case that attempts to ban something give it a greater attraction than if it had been ignored. "Don't climb on to the worktop and take biscuits from the tin," we're told as children, but until the fact that there was a tin of biscuits was brought to our attention we'd have been happy to go play in the garden or watch TV. Later on we find new restrictions and prohibitions, and naturally many attempt to beat them by drinking, smoking and screwing before they're of legal age and then trying to find some pot. This is only natural since the reasons given for the prohibition can be unconvincing and so the only way people can understand the need for the rule is to break it and see what all the fuss is about. Therefore if you want teenagers to smoke or drink and to develop a little black market in fake ID just tell them they can't 'til they're 18, if you want more people to become interested in drugs just tell them that drugs are completely forbidden, and if you want to ensure maximum publicity for some otherwise fairly uninteresting publication you should emulate Barbara Streisand and do your absolute level best to censor it.

Now Babs may have inadvertently put her name to this in 2003, but it's much older. I've never read Lady Chatterley's Lover but I'm told by someone who has that it's not exactly a page-turner, so I can't help but wonder if a few sex scenes and a smattering of Anglo-Saxon (including at least one word already published centuries before by Chaucer) was enough to create such widespread interest. Or was it that anything that had been banned for three decades had to be something really juicy? During my childhood there was Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which might well have been good enough to be a hit anyway but was absolutely guaranteed success when the BBC refused to air first the video and then the song, and then Spycatcher, which was easily the most boring book I have ever attempted to read (I gave up about a quarter of the way in, and that was the second try). I know many people who've tried and some who actually made it all the way through but very few who actually enjoyed it, yet it sold by the pallet load thanks to the vast amount of free publicity it got courtesy of the government's desire to prevent it being sold at all. Streisand Effect? It could as easily have been called the Spycatcher Effect or the Frankie Effect.

So with all that in mind you might think that censors would be wary of using their power to ban and prohibit for fear of generating wider interest in something that would largely pass unnoticed. Well, you probably wouldn't think that because Babs Streisand and her lawyers hadn't learned, the fucktroons that banned Spycatcher hadn't learned, the BBC censors that banned Relax hadn't learned, and so on and so on. Censors never learn, especially the Australian censors, so actually it should be no surprise at all that they're at it again. Having temporarily run out of computer games to ruin they've turned their attention to the movies and banned a film called LA Zombie.

And its director is absolutely delighted.

"My first thought was 'Eureka!'" director Bruce LaBruce said, speaking from his home in Toronto.

"I’ll never understand how censors don’t see that the more they try to suppress a film, the more people will want to see it. It gives me a profile I didn’t have yesterday."

Oh, has it ever. This movie is a low budget zombie gay porn flick - to call it 'niche' is probably an understatement. Almost certainly it would have lacked sufficiently broad appeal to have got more than a passing mention in most larger newspapers, yet the idiot censors have ensured that it's newsworthy enough to be given centre attention in The Age and second item on the entertainment section of Google News (click both to enlarge).

Without the helpful hand of censorship LA Zombie would never have got that sort of attention, and not being a fan of zombie movies or gay porn I for one would almost certainly have never heard of it, which would have been no loss as it sounds shit.

Made for "less than $US100,000" in Los Angeles last year, LA Zombie was devised as "a reaction against torture porn" says La Bruce. "People come back to life [in my film], it’s a metaphor for healing."

Really? The synopsis on Wikipedia says that the central character is a nutter who thinks he's an alien zombie and who attempts to reanimate the dead by shagging them up the shit chute. And that's a metaphor for healing, is it? Yeah, okay, right.

Pfffftt.

LaBruce admitted that his film did have explicit scenes of sex and violence, but said the version that was banned from the festival was a "soft core" version, where "it’s obviously a fake prosthetic. It’s a bizarre-looking thing with a scorpion’s stinger, it’s clearly not a human penis."

That's big of you.

No, wrong word. Not big. Er... generous. Shit, no. Still sounds a bit like we're talking about dicks. Must keep the censors happy. Oh, damn... censors! That sounds like we're talking about dicks as well, which we sort of are.

Seriously, this film didn't need to be banned. I'm a pretty normal person and I'm no more likely to be corrupted by it than I was to learn the innermost secrets of the British Secret Service by wading through something as coma-inducing as fucking Spycatcher. Have the courage to treat people as adults and allow them to choose for themselves what they want to see, and you may be pleasantly surprised how many won't bother to seek out what you were tempted to ban. Or carry on using taxpayers' money to generate vast amounts of free publicity for crap that would have sunk without trace had it been left alone. Your choice, though if you carry on the way you have been you should expect people to be provocative on purpose just so they don't have to bother with an advertising budget. Don't believe me, oh censortive souls? Then consider this:

The director denied he’d deliberately sought censorship when making LA Zombie... "I wasn’t expecting it with this one," he said. "My film Otto screened in Melbourne and that also had a zombie penetrating another zombie."

Even if you accept LaBruce's denial that he wanted this to happen, and the fact that he's used the opportunity to plug another one of his movies means we should probably take it with a large pinch of salt, it seems possible that he's thought about it before. "I wasn't expecting it with this one." If it's occurred to one then it will certainly have occurred to many more, so it's now down to the censors to decide whether or not the best method of censorship in the future is in fact not to censor at all. But if I was a betting man I'd put money on them ignoring the evidence and carrying on banning and restricting and cutting and prohibiting just as they and their kind always have. It's not just that at heart they're paternalists who really do believe they know what's best for many millions of individual people, and know it far better than those individuals know it themselves. It's also that a censor who censors things by not censoring them isn't likely to be kept on the payroll for very long.

Prohibito ergo sum, but probably also prohibito ergo sum pensus.*

Twats.

* Latin classes were twenty odd years ago and I dropped it as soon as I could. If I've mangled that I can only say that it's because I don't care enough to have researched it properly.

Facebook grows a set.

'Facebook is a place where people can express their views and discuss things in an open way as they can and do in many other places, and as such we sometimes find people discussing topics others may find distasteful, however that is not a reason in itself to stop a debate from happening.''

Good for them but it's funny, isn't it? Sometimes companies like Facebook find it easy enough to get all worked up about free speech and tell governments to stuff off, and I'm right alongside them when they do. But the same companies will freak out and cave in when confronted by a small number of complaints from misogynists, prudes and tittyphobes who object to photos of slightly too anatomically correct dolls or new mothers breastfeeding their babies. This might make sense if most of the whiners were paying to book their faces, but it's a free service so what are they losing if the tittyphobes all sod off somewhere else?

Personally I carry no brief for Raoul Moat or anyone else who goes around shooting unarmed people in revenge for perceived wrongs, and I'm generally inclined to support the police when they're not harassing innocent photographers and chasing victimless crimes that help the clear up rates but are in reality, as the Guide says, mostly harmless. But I accept that not everyone will be of the same opinion and they have as much right to express their thoughts as I do mine. Equally I feel that photographs of breastfeeding mothers can occupy a spectrum from yawn inducing cack that only their family members will be interested in all the way to moving and beautiful (and in keeping with the H2G2 theme I really don't give a pair of foetid dingo kidneys about nipples on dolls). Why can't the tittyphobes and prudes take the same attitude and either stop whining about images that offend them (and almost nobody else) or stop fucking looking at them? For that matter, why can't the Elder Twin start living up to some of these ideals about freedom he espouses from time to time?

Freedom, as I've said before, tends to be pretty black and white, and freedom of speech is no exception. You are free to say what you think or you are not - it's that fucking simple. You are certainly free to say that something someone else has said offends you but that doesn't give you the right to shut them up. It's at the top of the page: there is no right not to be offended. If you can't deal with that without demanding other people's freedom is restricted to suit you and your tastes I'd suggest you go live in a cave somewhere where you can't see or hear the rest of the world not agreeing with you. That goes double if you're a tittyphobe and treble if you're a politician sucking up to tabloid readers.

Melbourne - a visitor's guide.

Video removed

St Kilda, eh? Yeah, you know what? Wouldn't surprise me either. NB if you've come across this after late February 2011 I can only say that the previous sentence would have made sense if you'd seen the video clip.

Own goal - UPDATED

Either you are free to speak as you think and feel, or you are not. Any restriction on what can be said by definition means you do not have freedom of speech. It's one of life's absolutes. Mrs Exile should be free to call me a pom with an unhealthy obsession with the weather and the correct form of queueing. I'm should be free to call her a typical fucking colonial with a cultural inferiority complex. We should be free to refer to the Scots as a nation of orange haired, drunken porridge wogs* who deep fry anything edible, perhaps anything at all in the hope of making it edible. And the Scots most certainly should be free to say they'd rather support anyone but England in the World Cup.

Arguably the performance of Rooney & Co is enough to make English fans consider supporting anybody but the Italian led bunch of overpaid, talent-free, embarrassing, salad dodgers on whom England's hopes rest(ed) anyway, but given that the Scots, as usual, don't have a dog in the fight, why shouldn't they support who they want for whatever reason they want?

Because it's racist, apparently.

High street retailer HMV has withdrawn "Anyone But England" World Cup posters and T-shirts from its Scottish stores following complaints they were racist.

/facepalm

Racist? Oh, behave. I wouldn't call that racist if I heard it from an Aussie, much less a Scot. I might accept that "Anyone But England' has possible racist overtones, though not that it's explicitly racist, if it came from someone black or asian etc, but really it's more nationalist than racist. And even if you do accept as racist, it's about a bloody soccer tournament for Christ's sake. How bloody thin-skinned do you need to be to get upset by this? Harden the fuck up!

And who's behind the complaint?

The Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP) contacted police about the "insensitive and provocative" items which, their website claimed were "criminally irresponsible".

/double facepalm and oh shit. I'd been meaning to link to the CEP since I thought these guys stood for a return to common sense, fairness and liberty for all. I may still but this move seems awfully like a touch of "if you can't beat 'em, join in". The CEP seems to want freedom of speech for England, and of course that's great. I'm all for freedom of speech so I'm absolutely with the CEP on that, but why stop at England? Personally I'd like to see the day when any North Korean can say that Kim Jong Il is a cunt, so England (or Australia, depending on who/where I'm ranting against) is no more than a first step. But if so then restricting the same freedom elsewhere seems like a step backwards, especially if it's within your own country. Would we get more freedom here in Victoria by persuading Canberra to put limits on Queenslanders, or would it be more likely for them to apply the same restriction in all states?

You're not gaining more freedom for yourselves by demanding limits on the freedom of your neighbours, and I think the CEP have scored a massive own goal here. I'd hope that the idea was to try to ridicule the tendency to cry 'racist' whenever anyone says something that someone else (not necessarily themselves) finds something vaguely objectionable, but I think they've succeeded only in legitimising it even for something as trivial as fucking football. In turn this opens the door for the Scots to cry 'racist' if an Englishman says he'd rather eat anything but a clootie dumpling.

As far as I know I haven't so much as a molecule of Scottish glomahaeblin in my blood but I'm on their side. Screw the English who killed Mel Gibson and won't let them support whatever football team they like - HMV should have told them to fuck off. Anyone but England indeed, though in the interests of free speech I'll say I think Scotland's twelfth most talented footballer is Wee Jimmy Krankie.


UPDATE - I left a brief comment to this effect on a post about the Scottish HMV at The CEP blog at 9:58am on 20/6/10. It's still awaiting moderation, though ten comments made afterwards seems to be up. [Shrugs] Wonder why.


* In the Aussie sense a wog is a Mediterranean European providing they're not French and therefore already covered by the term 'Frog'. The people covered by 'wog' have been extended by the use of modifiers. Some, like 'porridge wog' for the Scots, I've heard fairly often. Others. like 'potato wog' for the Irish and 'clog wog' for the Dutch, seem more rare. The fact that Australians have given us English the unique and unmodified term 'Pom' all to ourselves I take to be an indication of the special place we occupy in the cultural hearts of this linguistically gifted people. Either that or the sand-grubbing bastards loathe us so much that we deserved our own insult.

I don't lose any sleep over it either way.

Met Office memory hole - UPDATED

I wish I could say I'm shocked by this but it'd be a lie. I'm sure they're not the only type of holes in the building.

On July 23, 2009 the UK Met Office issued their infamous winter forecast, ahead of the coldest winter in 50 years. It read:

“…Early indications are that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder *(and wetter) than last year “.

...

I remember reading the article on the Met Office web site at the time. But something funny happened on December 30, 2009. The Met Office over wrote that link with a new article titled “Forecast for the rest of Winter 2009/10″ which has no mention of the original prediction. It now reads:

…for the rest of winter, over northern Europe including the UK, the chance of colder conditions is now 45%; there is a 30% chance of average and a 25% chance of milder conditions.

Their original warm winter forecast seems to have been scrubbed from the web site, and there are no longer any press releases dated July 23.

Of course after Climategate this probably isn't a surprise to anyone, but it's still quite disturbing. Naturally a couple of Watts Up With That commenters have mentioned the obvious Orwellian link, the memory hole, which was the first thing that I thought of when I saw the post. I'm sure a lot of people have heard of the memory hole concept in 1984 but when you think of how things on the internet can simply be changed from saying one thing to saying another the passage in the book that describes Winston Smith at work is worth re-reading.

Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon -- not actually Newspeak, but consisting largely of Newspeak words -- which was used in the Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:

times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify

times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialled 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from The Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. Or again, The Times of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today's issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston's job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a 'categorical pledge' were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

1984 was, as has been said about a bazillion times, supposed to be a warning, not a fucking instruction manual. It's ironic that the reason these bastards are getting caught doing this sort of thing is because they don't control the internet, the medium they're trying to give the memory hole treatment, and it just takes one nosy blogger to notice and post this sort of thing for other bloggers to read and spread. How on earth did they think this would go unnoticed? Must be more than one type of hole in the building.


UPDATE - Actually it's a bazillion and one times thanks to cracked.com. I know this is getting away from memory holes but it's still a fair point.

Aaron Evans is another cautionary tale against bragging. Evidently fearing that someone might take false credit for his illegal deeds, Evans had his full name and birth date tattooed on the back of his neck. This was a particularly poor decision considering he was a car thief from the UK--the place which treats Orwell's 1984 as a set of instructions concerning video surveillance.

And that was pretty moronic idea for a tattoo.

Net nannying and censorship - the same fucking thing actually.

As I mentioned yesterday Senator Conroy appeared on The 7pm Project this evening to justify the Great Firewall of Australia, his pet ISP level internet filtering project. Now obviously in the short term this is only going to affect people living in Australia, and if you reading this from somewhere else and are confidant that your politicians respect liberty on or offline then you can skip the rest of this - it doesn't apply to you, you lucky soul. If you're not so sure about the liberty thing - and if you're in Britain then news like this and this suggests that you bloody well shouldn't be - then bear in mind that you may be next, and watch out for a politician giving an interview not unlike this.



So how did Conroy do? How did The 7pm Project do? Did they give Conroy an easy time of it? And most importantly of all am I sold on the filter? Not bloody likely. Please bear with me while I fisk this fuckwit, which unfortunately won't be brief since the very first question Conroy was asked - the very first - he ducked.

Censor news, and for a change it's good.

Despite my occasional pessimism that everyone in Australia is going to be treated as a retard incapable of having any contact with a computer or the internet without government nannying things are looking up. First, good news for Australian gamers - Michael Atkinson, the principle barrier to getting an R18+ classification for games, has resigned. I've blogged before on Australia's nannyish attitude to computer games and how even games aimed at adults have had to be altered to suit the squeamish attitudes of the Puritan fuckwits here (see here and here). Finally those gamers who are perhaps more than 20 years older than the current maximum age classification have a realistic chance of being able to buy an unedited, not specially ruined for Australia, copy of Demon Zombie Smash Hack Blam 3 or whatever.

R18+ video games are a step closer to being allowed in Australia following the resignation of South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson.

Mr Atkinson's decision to leave the front bench means he will no longer be in a position to vote on changes to the country's classification system, including the introduction of an R18+ rating for games.

As a quick refresher to save anyone picking through my other posts on this, the relevance of one resignation at the state level is that to create a new R18+ classification for games all states must agree, and this decision is up to the Attorneys-General. Fuck knows why but the practical upshot was that Michael Atkinson was opposed to it and that meant that in theory everyone in the whole country could have personally written to Kevin Rudd demanding it and he'd have been able to do precisely fuck all, his hands being legally tied by one politician in a state government. Now in some ways this need for unanimity is not a bad thing - if used to prevent loss of liberty I'd be heaving a sigh of relief. In this instance it's been the other way around. of course, South Australia may replace Atkinson with someone else who feels the same way but hopefully they've sussed the mood. Part of it is that the Australian Labor Party (please donate any spare lower case 'u's here) got a bit of a shoeing in the state elections in South Australia and Tasmania.

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