ISPs in AU and NZ start censoring the internet without legal precedent

>psycho-societal immune response

I like this term, I think it conceptualizes some of my looser thoughts about how we ought to respond to influences in life.

The thought process I see acted out by our institutions often looks like this: Declaring Foo is a bad influence that causes Bar, therefore we should engage in social engineering and propaganda against foo and/or bar.

Forget that the causal relationship between foo and bar can be tenuous, or that bar's badness is often motivated reasoning. The entire process just leaves people worse off to navigate the influences in their life.

Sorta related anecdote: When I was a child we had an anti-drug program at school. They taught us some of the ways "bad guys" would pressure us into doing drugs or drinking. I wasn't the only one to notice it was the exact same way parents, teachers and the media tell us to do the "good" things. ..... That put a resentful streak in my life that still exists to this day.

> the most disturbing Orwellian thing I’ve ever seen

Even compared with the patriot act and the war against Iraq?

Good question. Child porn is illegal regardless if the content is made by force or with actors. Someone making a cp video with actors and passing it off as real would be immaterial.

Having lived and worked in a collective culture, no it's not a cop-out. They literally value harmony over truth. It's very hard for a western mind to understand (as I have discovered).

> No system is perfect but fuck me, you’re taking it to the extreme when you’re essentially defending child porn...

It depends on what you consider extreme I guess. I am a parent. In the past 10 years, 1470 Queensland parents saw their children prosecuted as paedophiles [0]. The kids were sexting each other of course.

To me that's beyond extreme, it borders on insanity. That may be because I come from a time when sharing a picture with your mates of your naked mud covered daughter being hosed off by her mother was considered perfectly fine. Now that same picture gets people looking at you suspiciously. The current moral panic about pedo's and pictures makes me wonder if one of the most iconic pictures of my time [1] could be published today.

Then there is the case of the fellow gets a criminal record for possessing Simpson cartoons [2]. OK, I get they weren't tasteful cartons - but a criminal record prevents you from doing all sorts of things, such as taking overseas holiday or working as a public servant. I know there weren't tasteful because I've had people email those cartoons (they are jokes which some found funny). The idea of me being banned from travelling to most overseas countries because they were in my Inbox was no laughing matter.

I have not heard anybody say anything in support of child porn, which would be my definition of defending it. I'm not sure what your definition is, which again makes me nervous - in fact I would be very nervous if I still had kids at the sexting age. What I have head a lot of people say is "hang on, you are criminalising the possession of images here, and that seems like a dangerous road do go down". And with the benefit of hindsight, they were right.

I get some delight in watching people twist themselves into knots to justify their positions, and as it happens my favourite example was child porn. There was a time when a prime minister ask his communications minister to implement a internet censorship filter to protect us Australians from the bad stuff out there. They characterised it as only preventing the worst of the worst. They were both practising Christians, and their undoing was "the worst of the worst" included things like the _Peace Pill Handbook_ (which deals with assisted suicide), so they had grey armies preparing for the filter by inviting hackers to their old people homes to instruct them on how to by-pass the filter. But that didn't come out until later. At first the example of the worst of the worst always trotted out by the Minster was child porn - something nobody could disagree should be blocked. But at the very end the Federal Police let slip child porn would not in fact be blocked by the filter, at least not a first. It was far too useful in tracking the people abusing the kids. So the Federal Police managed to convince a pair of Christian politicians on a censorship mission that letting little child porn float around the internet was actually a good idea. The irony was absolutely delicious.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/8511174 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc#/media/File:... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/233562