I thought that the whole English uptight, repressed thing was just an antiquated stereotype. You’re the country with Page 3 girls, for god’s sake! Has anything been leading up to this, or did this drop out of the air out of nowhere? Does the PM’s plans have wide backing in the UK?
*[To be clear, this post of bafflement has to do solely with the garden variety porn, not the child porn ban, which I was surprised wasn’t already in force. ] *
I’d never heard of it before, but I haven’t been reading much news lately. I think it reflects the opinions of some of the “Won’t somebody please think of the children” types, but I’m honestly surprised to hear of this in the UK.
In terms of how uptight the UK is on such matters, I’d say probably less than the US or Australia, more than much of the rest of western Europe.
I think what you have is an alliance attack on porn by the traditional family-values type conservatives and social progressives with a feminist agenda (and the Prime Minister, as someone who claims to be socially progressive, but leads a party of largely traditional conservatives is in an ideal position to capitalize on support from both). In the lack of likelihood of there being vocal opposition and the good possibility of cross-party support, it’s the kind of issue that a politician can only get mileage from.
Child porn of course is very illegal in the UK and has been for a long time. Child abuse is a hot button issue in the UK though.
Maybe some of these measures will achieve their stated aims, but at the same time there’s a clearly a lot of political posturing going on in the sure knowledge that there’s only political gains to be made on the issue.
It is a distraction. Cameron is under pressure to “do something” to stop the kiddies accessing porn on their mobile phones.
Most experts don’t believe that it will have much effect. There was much talk of getting Google to block the worst pornographic images - I thought they already did.
Never heard of this until reading it upon this board; but I don’t read or listen to news media. However although it seems odd, British governments this century have been steadily becoming more and more puritanical and moralising. The present bunch could have stepped out from any of the governments of the English Republic.
Yet socialist scandals are generally financial, whereas tory scandals are sexual, so they may not bring back hanging for adultery just yet.
Pure political posturing. The media has been full of experts pointing out how the proposals are unworkable.
What is he proposing? It is difficult as it changes by the day.
He wants all ISPs to disallow any 18 plus content unless the administrator requests otherwise. My 11 year old son worked out how to boot me out as administrator of his computer (by googling methods to over-ride password locks.) If he can do it, most older lads will soon know how. We are not talking desktops here- on current count including smart phones, kindles and such, we must have twenty plus ‘computers’ capable of accessing the web in the house- who is going to admin all of that?
He wants to disallow certain words in Google searches and install filters against such words. Such changes have unintended effects, and most child porn users use the dark web, not Google.
What he is not proposing is additional funding for the anti-child porn organisation that recently had its budget cut!
I was called in by a friend, recently connected to the net, who mysteriously could not get most pages to load, even her ISP page came up blocked. After much mucking about i discovered that, frightened by newspaper articles about the “rivers of filth” on the net she had put all ISP filters to max, which blocked everything including the ISP page, where the filters could be changed…the ISP was “Virgin”… Eventually i had to phone then and prove my age to change it! People like that have a vote, just the same as more aware and intelligent people, and they are easier to influence.
The great thing about David Cameron wheezes is that you just have to do nothing for a month or so and he will move on to something else. Anyone remember the “Big Society”?
I really wonder how this will actually be implemented (and thats not counting the legal issues that will arise and the inevitable challenges in Courts) by the ISP? These days if you do not block porn, it will be accessible in 5 seconds. If you do block, it will be accessible in 10 seconds. And anyone who does not know how to evade can find out vide one simple Google search.
I do seriously start to wonder if a lot of Tory policy is motivated by spite - trying to get their own back for being out of power while Labour out-toried them. The new primary school curriculum is a case in point - its based on the whim of one man (Gove dismissed, then ignored the consultants he initially set on it), it has almost zero support from education professionals - and is based primarily on the notion that children need to learn lists of facts by rote. Utterly moronic and destructive.
Yes, this is being supported by a lot of feminists who don’t actually watch porn and have grossly mistaken ideas of what “most” of it involves.
It’s also being supported by rape crisis centres, which is sadly ironic because their own sites are quite likely to be blocked if this is implemented (that’s what happened after filters were installed at my last workplace).
Now Irish campaigners are calling for our government to follow suit :eek: Where will the madness end?
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