The Conservative Reader

Art Smith June 29th, 2008

Wow!  I totally missed the Lieberman confrontation with YouTube (owned by Google) until it was mentioned in an email exchange I had today.

From CNN:

In a Monday [May 19, 2008] letter to Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, Lieberman asked that YouTube “implement its own policy against this offensive material,” by removing the videos. Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, also wants YouTube staffers to have a system that will prevent the video from reappearing.

I am a bit amazed, as I did not think he would advocate this kind of censorship.  If I understand his position, I think he’s wrong.  I like Lieberman mostly because of his willingness to stand up to his party and be his own man.  I suspect he is trying to get on conservatives’ good side with this approach, but I think he will find he’s barking up the wrong tree.  I’m glad that YouTube reacted the way they did.

Again from CNN:

YouTube said Monday on its blog that it had removed a “number of videos” from its site after examining several videos that Lieberman’s staff said “violated YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”

The videos that were removed “depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech,” YouTube said.

However, “Most of the videos, which did not contain violent or hate speech content, were not removed because they do not violate our Community Guidelines.”

It deeply saddens me to see such horrific violence or gratuitous sexual content so readily available to children and adults in our world.  I do believe that the easy availability of this kind of content will have a deteriorating impact on our society.  However, I don’t think the answer is to use the government to control it.  As a society, we can choose to manage it in ways that are not destructive, convince adults of the undesirable personal and societal impacts of the content,  and train our children to be discerning about what they consume.

This is not the government’s responsibility.  Quite the opposite.  The minute we allow the government to decide what is appropriate content to view, we slide down the path of political censorship and government media management.

Probably the one distinct exception is Child Pornography.  Only because in order to produce it, you need to be exposing a child to abuse.

That said, we at The Conservative Reader reserve the right (as others do as well) to censor our web site to ensure it is suitable for visitors of all ages.  That means we watch for the use of offensive words, we don’t intentionally link to a site with pornography or gratuitous violence or the kind of language we restrict on our site.   This is not censorship… it is our own right under the First Amendment to exert this type of control over the content we provide here.

And YouTube has the same right.  Take that away and you might as well chuck the whole Bill of Rights.

My thanks to Richard Perlman for pointing this story out to me.

Tags: Bill of Rights, Censorship, First Amendment, Google, Government, Gratuitous, Joe Lieberman, Pornography, Terrorism, Violence, Youtube

• Bill of Rights , Child Pornography , First Amendment , Joe Lieberman , Liberty , Terrorism , US Congress
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Art Smith June 8th, 2008

As reported by the BBC, New South Wales police recently ended their investigation of Bill Henson, a Sydney photographer whose exhibition was shut down before it opened because some of the photographs apparently amounted to child pornography.  If you consider nude photos of a 13-year-old girls to be child pornography, that is.  Which I do, and most reasonably civilized people do as well (according to a scientific poll conducted in my car yesterday).

The investigation was halted because, I kid you not, prosecutors don’t think they have a case.  There’s no lack of evidence, no lack of admission, but a cloudy political climate between the artsy-fartsy Aussies and the rest of the people there (the ones with brains). 

This is considered a big victory by the art crowd, on both sides of the Pacific, who want to promote sensuality in any form, and who have absolutely no clue about how objectifying and truly disgusting this is, and how this behavior and promotion will become a key building block to the their cultural house of cards.  Worse yet, they get support for this out of the US.  According to the BBC:

Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett and other leading arts figures had said the investigation risked damaging Australia’s cultural reputation.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a great appreciation for Australians and their contributions to international culture, justice and especially their milltary support over the years.  This story is not endemic so much of Australian society as it is the general state of the world society.  What this really demonstrates is the flaw in pure democratic philosophy, that is, the belief that most people in a society are going to be of sufficiently moral character that the concept of majority rule will lead to a righteous society and behavior.  This is sophism, and the fallacy was clear to our founders, which is why we don’t have a pure democracy, nor should we ever have one. 

What’s worse, is the spinelessness of the autorities to deal with this behavior makes those that perpetrate it think they are markedly in the right.:

The Australian photographer said: “It is reassuring to see existing laws, having been rigorously tested, still provide a framework in which debate and expression of ideas can occur.”

Wimping out of prosecution is hardly a rigorous test.  Regardless, that’s the message that gets sent.

Perhaps for Australia, there is still hope:

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - who had condemned the exhibit as “revolting” - said on Friday he stood by his views.

“I said what my views are as a parent, I don’t budge from that,” he told Nine Network television.

Well, it’d be nice if he took a strong line than this, but it’s a start.

• Child Pornography , Spinelessness
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