Occasional Tales

The new version. After several days of reasonable good service, the forces of ignorance seem to have been trying their hardest to strangle my Internet assistant. However, this afternoon, I managed to get the latest version, and things seem to be fairly steady at the moment. Once again, I’m able to see the real Internet as I ought to be able to see it. If the Chinese want to stick their heads in the sand and their government want them to stick their heads in the sand, they’re welcome to wallow in their ignorance. In fact, there’s something disturbingly wrong with countries whose governments are so obsessed with keeping their citizens so ignorant. In China it’s because the government is obsessed with keeping power at all costs; though because the population is so zombie-like already, they could unblock most of the Internet, and it wouldn’t, I believe, make any real difference. The number of people who hate blocks on Facebook, YouTube and other non-porn sites is, I suspect, tiny. I...

And only another couple of kilometres to go. It’s been a slow business escaping from the choking tendrils of unwarranted censorship today. After working so well, my little helper has been choking badly today, and if I can post this entry, I’ll be very lucky. The connection to reality keeps coming and going, which makes me wonder whether the hysterical reactionaries are fighting back in their ongoing campaign to keep the benighted populace of the inGlorious Motherland in witless ignorance. I finished marking the PAL tests at the weekend and have started on AS, which is always painful. The PAL classes did quite well for the level at which they were being assessed, but that tells me that they’re good at this level and would, on average, get a C, which is the maximum mark they can attain in the Core exam. As I noted on my WordPress blog, their writing was boringly identical, and the range of marks was typically 7 to 9 with a few 10s. But it’s also worth noting that if their writing...

A lunchtime update. I’m using lunch as an excuse to add some further information about the current state of Live Journal, but I should really be ploughing through lunch and getting on with marking some tests while at the same time enjoying a horrible little headache. There’s a story about Live Journal on Global Voices which offers some hints about the current cranky state of the service. I don’t know whether everyone is banging their head against a brick wall trying to access their blogs or anyone else’s. The Information Policy site has this post from early August about the mis­treatment of Live Journal. It looks like the Russian authorities (though which authorities is another matter) are probably to blame for the current state of affairs and that Live Journal is about to become Dead Journal. 17.10.11. The latest update is that I was able to update an LJ post and access most of the site, but I was unable to post anything new. 18.10.11. Still unable to post new entries o...

I’m just not sure about the lyrics. The last of our censorship dilemmas is about offensive lyrics in pop music, which have probably been around long before Thomas Shadwell wrote Nymphs and Shepherds and Dryden wrote Alexander’s Feast . They probably offended someone, but no one remembers who. The question once again, is how bad something has to be to be banned. Where’s the line between tasteless but acceptable, and tasteless and unacceptable? And what of other circumstances? What might be unacceptable in one country might be greeted indifferently in another, just as attitudes vary from one age to another. The discussion at the back of the book notes that censorship is a slippery creature because while it may be the right thing to do in very clear cases, there are others where it isn’t. There are also problems with implications vs. declarations, where the message isn’t overtly stated, but everyone knows what it actually is. This kind of tactic is used in more censorious societies to tr...

Nymphs and satyrs. Today’s dilemma is the hoary old chestnut where art ends and porn begins. I suppose I’d say that it depends on the purpose or intention. If titillation, then porn; if not, then art or instruction (e.g. The Lover’s Guide series). But I can imagine that I might be confused by, say, style, because if someone put the effort in, you could do porn in the style of art. For example, it might be sepia pictures with a nice studio background, but the participants neither engaged with each other nor the audience. It just has to appear sophisticated in the right way and the content becomes acceptable because you can start talking about the composition and symbolism. It also works the other way. If an artist made pictures of people having sex out of vegetables or glitter or ground-up crayons, we’d judge that to be art. It’s curious (perhaps) that the less realistic the depiction, the more acceptable it is. To use two real live humans in photographs would be least acceptable of all...

The best possible taste. Dilemma 37 is all about taste and decency and quotes the transcript of an investigation by the American government into comic books. The publisher seems to think that one cover depicting a man carrying a woman’s severed head and another showing a man strangling a woman with a crowbar are perfectly all right. Maurice has to bear arms once again against this sea of troubles. It’d seem that the public ought to be protected from this sort of material on the grounds of taste. Taste is like morality, both depending on what a particular society finds acceptable. (Or, rather, what the government thinks the hypocritical tabloids find acceptable.) Once again, we have no context for the pictures, although it seems unlikely that the misogyny depicted in them shows some evil woman getting her just desserts. This material is just another example of the material that I discussed yesterday, with comics replacing penny dreadfuls as the source of establishment hysteria. Obviousl...

Think of the spotty Herberts. Today’s censorship dilemma is about tales of actual villains. Politicians, being hysterical reactionaries who believe that the picture of crime in the media causes crime in reality, want Maurice the Censor to become Maurice the Censorious. They even have a little 19th century evidence which backs this up and the opinion of the Chief Constable of Birkenhead in 1936, who thought that depictions of criminal activities shouldn’t be allowed because of the deleterious effects it might have on young people. Surely censorship is good for everyone, especially the young. I got onto the matter of censorship and youth in yesterday’s entry. My inclination is to suspect that claims about censorship being necessary to save young people from their own stupidity is often based on a comparatively small number of incidents where a link between books or film or television and crime can be demonstrated, which results in the generalisation that because some were affected, all s...

That’s the last [ censored ] warning you’ll get. I’m not sure I have a consistent view of censorship. For the most part, I prefer to think that I should determine what I watch or read, but I recognise that different people find different things acceptable so that an official censor may be a necessary evil in order to impose some consistency. Some aspects of censorship may annoy me such as the rather prurient attitude towards porn in the UK, which needs to be relaxed. It’s the [ censored ] 21st century for [ censored ]’s sake. Time the nation grew up and started to behave like the rest of Europe. Censorship, it seems, is a matter of morality rather than ethics. As I said, the UK’s attitude to porn is rather puerile and immature compared with other European nations. On the other hand, the more liberal attitude in the US seems odd for a theocratic nation, but ends up being a constitutional quirk. The inGlorious Motherland is also a little odd, but for another reason. Although porn is und...

Unless they're from Google. This country is pathetic. Really pathetic. I thought it was about time I changed the theme on my iGoogle page and started looking through what was available. At first I could see all the themes, and then I could only see the ones from Google. Everything else was getting blocked. I can't believe that every non-Google site from which the themes were coming was somehow offensive to Nanny. I tried one of the offending themes in case they were available in spite of their innate subversiveness, but it completely screwed up my home page and I had to choose one of Google's own themes. I'm largely not bothered about Internet censorship. As I said somewhere long ago, most of the things that really get Nanny having a tantrum aren't things I'm remotely interested in and thus blocks on such sites don't matter. I'm bothered when the block affects some site which is innocuous, and irrelevant to Nanny's petty paranoia. What reason can the...

geocities is on; Sicilian is off. For the past few years I've assumed that geocities sites have been blocked without exception and without the on-again-off-again nonsense that has affected blogspot. But I discovered a couple of days ago, quite by chance, that geocities sites are accessible again. I don't know when they became agreeable to the mad old bat or why. On the other hand, I thought I'd drop by Ninu Russu's Sicilian language site . Could I? I've been able to in the past otherwise I couldn't have bookmarked it. But no, it's now blocked. I thought I'd double check via anonymouse in case the site had gone. No, it's still there, and definitely blocked. It seems the site was moved to a new host in October. And there's my answer. It's now hosted by Lycos. This is another instance where the wholesale blocking of a host results in websites which are of no concern to Nanny being unavailable for no good reason. If the deranged old cretin wants...