{"id":1179,"date":"2009-03-18T16:39:08","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T06:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.msnaughty.com\/blog\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2009-03-18T16:39:08","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T06:39:08","slug":"besieged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/18\/besieged\/","title":{"rendered":"Besieged"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may have noticed that the blog has been scarce with posts recently. That&#8217;s because I took another week off, relaxing and trying to recover from a bad RSI attack. The house I stayed in only had dialup, which decreased my computer use substantially &#8211; and a lovely thing it was too.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m home again and over the last couple of days have been sucked into the usual round of news-reading, Twitter feeds and trying not to procrastinate. And, fuck, if it isn&#8217;t depressing.<\/p>\n<p>I came back feeling motivated and creative, but in the last few days I&#8217;ve felt overwhelmed and pessimistic. A lot of this is thanks to the ongoing bullshit that is the Australian plans for a mandatory internet filter. In the last few days it&#8217;s emerged that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.computerworld.com.au\/article\/295977\/australia_internet_filter_ruled_by_single_bureaucrat?fp=2&#038;fpid=1\" target=\"blank\">the &#8220;watchdog&#8221; is happy to blackban political sites<\/a> on the say-so of a single person. The people who want the filter are still telling the same lies and it seems that everyday punters continue to believe the nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>And then I find that Britain, Germany and a bunch of other countries are all planning their own filters citing Australia as some kind of magical filter paradise.<\/p>\n<p>Friends, the seige of the free internet has begun. The politicians have realised that the internet has given us POWER. We&#8217;re able to make decisions, to muster support and to make our voices heard without the mainstream media getting in our way. We&#8217;re mobilising. We&#8217;re active. And we&#8217;re fucking powerful. They&#8217;re going to do their best to try and stop us, and they&#8217;re going to use porn and &#8220;the children&#8221; as their excuse.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the other depressing thing. I keep seeing so many news items about porn lately and it&#8217;s always reported in a negative fashion. Porn is the great, amorphous enemy, despoiling lives hither and yon. Never mind that religion does far more damage in the world, it&#8217;s our clits and cocks that are the problem!<\/p>\n<p>These are big issues and I want to wave the flag and encourage the fight&#8230; but, damn, if it isn&#8217;t draining and very, very difficult to be involved. And it makes it hard to do my everyday work, because I&#8217;m always spending brainpower thinking about how to argue against the filter and its supporters. At the same time, I feel the future looming like a black thundercloud. We&#8217;ve had a wonderful twenty years but now the fight for online freedom is about to begin in earnest.<\/p>\n<p>I do hope the other free countries of the world are watching what goes down here in Oz with regards to the filter, because if it goes ahead it will be like a big green light to other repressive governments.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may have noticed that the blog has been scarce with posts recently. That&#8217;s because I took another week off, relaxing and trying to recover from a bad RSI attack. The house I stayed in only had dialup, which decreased my computer use substantially &#8211; and a lovely thing it was too. Now I&#8217;m home again and over the last couple of days have been sucked into the usual round <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/18\/besieged\/\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[87,332,333,427],"class_list":["post-1179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","tag-australia","tag-filter","tag-filtering","tag-internet"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}