Urm... "pinko"?!? What is this, 1953?
(Btw, you misspelled "butt", a word which, so far as I know, nobody has
yet proposed ought to be made a federal offense to mention.)
[Btw2, people offended by "profanity" are, by definition, irrational
boneheads, and I certainly hope you're not seriously siding with them, but
rather engaging in a more benign form of red-baiting. It's simply inane to
be offended by the _mention_ of certain words, independently of their
_use_ (and often in direct opposition to the obvious uses intended by
their authors) -- and I use the terms "inane", "bonehead" and "irrational"
here because they're appropriate to the practice of choosing to be
"offended" by something regardless of its meaning -- by definition, that
makes it something which would cease to be in itself "offensive" at the
moment that people stopped choosing to be "offended" by it. Compare these
two cases: (i) "Fuck you!" is reasonably offensive, since it's obviously
intended as an insult; (ii) "There's no fucking way I'm driving into that
storm!" is patently inoffensive, since it's obviously intented as
something synonymous with: "There's no <i>way</i> I'm driving into that
storm!" I can't take people seriously whose entire moral argument
consists of: "I am offended...that I am offended." This is called
"circularity". Politeness (ie., conforming with arbitrary conventions of
decorous behaviour) is, of course, generally a good thing, and I'm not
saying that it isn't, but I would be quite upset to see Congress passing
laws making burping at the table a jailable offense. End rant.]
> These cries betray a deep ignorance of the economics of the Net,
No, these proposed _laws_ betray a deep ignorance of the economics of the
Net. This does not appear to be affecting the passage of such laws. Or
do you have reason to believe otherwise?
> and an
> ignorance of the leadership of Congress, in both parties.
Enlighten us, please, as to why the leadership of Congress ought to be
considered as doing anything other than pandering grotesquely to narrow
moralistic interests because they happen to be the successful lobby-group du
jour (and possibly the successful lobby-group for all time, since it
appears to be inherently more difficult to get people fired up and
frothing at the mouth in favour of rationality, reasonable grounds for
laws, and moderation, in comparison to getting them fired up about
extremist moral principles).
> The telecommunications bill is a huge give-away, but you the actitivists
> don't give a damn about learning the issues and opposing the bill.
Again, you may wish to enlighten us about how the telecommunications bill
is a huge give-away (although I'm willing to assume that a priori, since
every bill passed by a North American government in the last 15 years has
essentially been a huge give-away to corporate interests, but that's just
a quick and dirty opinion on my part). At any rate, I do believe that
there are _consumer_ activists opposing whatever anti-consumer giveaways
may be in the tellecommunications bill, since that's what those people
do. What free-speech activists do, in contrast, is organize action in
favour of free speech. This is known as a "different issue".
It's _your_ goofy Congress that insists on conducting its business through
this duplicitous practice of bundling all sorts of absurd unrelated things
together and giving them misleading and unopposable titles, like "The Not
Smashing Kittens With A Hammer Act". (Next year's advertising: "When you
vote, remember that Rep. Stevens, when it came time to be counted, was NOT
OPPOSED to SMASHING KITTENS WITH A HAMMER!" <grim music: bongggggg!> "Vote
Williams: Because Hammers and Kittens Just Don't Mix.">)
> Instead, they whine about being able to shit, piss, and fuck.
Um, establishing legal parity of protected speech for online media with
200-year old protections for offline media is "whining"? What was the
Equal Rights Amendement, "bitching"?
> It might be a good thing to get kids of the net.
Well, I believe the complaints and paranoia only started when kids got
_on_ the net. The rest of us were getting along just fine before the
credulous suburbs signed on.
That last sentence is not a statement of elitism, it's a recognition that
there is a flat-out cultural war taking place here (and everywhere else,
for that matter). It's our culture versus theirs. And since theirs
(read: the culture and discourse familiar from any suburban shopping mall)
is roughly the most obnoxious culture presently in existence except those
which involve active killing, it needs to be opposed at every turn. (Oh,
and there is a little wee issue at hand here about how grownups ought to
be allowed to talk to each other. I think that's in somebody's
constitution someplace, though I could be wrong.)
But this issue still feels kind of unreal to me -- I really can't see this
proposed law meeting any kind of legal challenge, and I'm tempted to
believe that they've crossed so far over the line that they've shot
themselves in the foot, since it'll be hard to avoid producing some kind
of Roe-v-Wade precedent-setting decision against any and all laws of this
type. If the Right had just picked away at the margins in their usual
fashion (ie., go after the child pornographers today, the grownup
pornographers tomorrow, aim for the homsexuals and the sex-educators in
the long term), they might have been able to force a lot of their core
moral agenda onto the Net without really angering a lot of people at the
same time. But the current provisions of the House and Senate bills seem
geared to at least mildly annoy 2/3 of the people online, and infuriate a
lot of people (ie., publishers) who are perfectly capable of financing
legal battles. I can't see it working.
Heck, you could never pass laws like this even in Canada; we do limit
speech in all sorts of ways, but at the very least this always requires a
theory about how that speech could actually harm somebody (or harm the
language of French in the abstract :). Dopey moral or religious arguments
about people's delicate sensibilities being fatally damaged by the sight
of the word "fuck" would never cut it. (Wired is now required to retract
their stupid anti-Canadian smugness, btw.)
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu