David Cameron's Magic Porn Filters!

You know, whenever I hear relatives from The Motherland talk about what a useless wanker Prime Minister Cameron is and how much they can't stand the Conservative Party, I usually smile to myself and think 'man, they don't know how good they have it.'  After all, the fringe elements of the Republican Party have serious questions about things like evolution and what constitutes legitimate rape.   Chill out, I think to myself.  The Tories are pretty vanilla compared to the real right wing nutters we have over here.

Well, I'm not thinking that anymore.  Prime Minister Cameron has, in his wisdom and somehow managed to wrangle the major ISP's in the United Kingdom into forcing everyone onto a porn-blocking filter which would be automatically added to everybody's service unelss they specifically request to opt out of it.   Why?  It's for the kids, he says.   It's censorship, say a lot of other people.  (One of his own Ministers has also sounded a disapproving note and ISPs were quick to point out that the filter would block far, far more than pornography.)

Look, this is censorship, plain and simple. Child porn is already illegal (at least I'm assuming so in the United Kingdom.  I know it is over here) and if you want to tack on some of the weirder, more violent porn onto that, well then fine.  But constructing what might as well be the Great Firewall of China to do so?   Yeah, that's not fine and hopefully there's enough of an outcry (and hopefully Nick Clegg or Ed Miliband will have enough sense in their heads to object to this as well) that this idea gets stopped before it's started.  Because once it's started, it's only going to get bigger and bigger as the government decides that it needs to censor other things on the internet- for the children, of course.

I can understand feminist arguments for and against pornography- that's a debate that you could write whole volumes of books on* but ultimately this gives the British government way too much power that is way to open to abuses.

Plus, it's bound to give some Republican somewhere over here ideas.  And they have enough bad ideas as it is.

*In general, I'm fairly neutral about pornography.   You can only stare at flapping testicles and heaving breasts so much before it gets weird and a little boring.  Nothing can really substitute a real life emotional connection with another human being when it comes to intimacy.