hey weez,

http://www.machinegunkeyboard.com works
http://machinegunkeyboard.com doesn’t

?

dunno what’s going on, @ndy, they both work from here.

yep… working for me now too!

[…] however are being forcibly removed by nervous hosts. Brian Stokes aka Weez @ MachineGunKeyboard had his blog account suspended for “displaying child pornography” after posting one of Henson’s images. [Read his longer response to the action at […]

Many kudos to The Age for actually printing one of the recent Henson pics, uncensored.

Hi there weez,

very ironical that you were then shut down for commenting on censorship, even if for a brief period of time.

I think it is absolute hyperbole to level an accusation at you of “normalising child pornography” on your blog, when Western society and culture is obsessed about youth and looking younger, which is actually the problem not the image itself.

Thanks Ed. Good points.

David Jones and the makers of Bratz dolls have a lot more to answer for than Bill Henson, no doubt.

The Age has taken down the image they’d used to illustrate the story in the above link. This was the image on the postcard announcing the Henson exhibition at Oxley9 Gallery. The Age story once looked like this.

“The Age has taken down the image they’d used to illustrate the story in the above link. This was the image on the postcard announcing the Henson exhibition at Oxley9 Gallery. The Age story once looked like this.”

Publishing photos of potential victims in sex abuse investigations was a low point, publishing naked photos of alleged sex abuse victims was a one-off in global terms, no newspaper had ever done that before. It is an indication of how low standards are in Australia.

The Henson material was banned as child pornography in London. Which is exactly what it is in England (SOA 2003).

So one can be arrested in England for having the photo the Age published, and people do get arrested for having that kind of material.

And Bill is banned from that kind of thing at galleries ver here.

Gregory, I’ve reviewed the Sexual Offences Act 2003 per your note. Nothing in it precludes photography of a person under the age of 16 in the nude. Nudity alone DOES NOT equal ‘indecency’ either in the UK or Australia. The standards are about the same as ours; there must be sexualisation in the image or context. The Australian S91G requires intent to create a pornographic image, as does SOA 2003. None occur in Henson works. You need better legal advice.

If you think I’m wrong, go argue the point with the V&A Museum in South Kensington, which has several Henson photos on exhibit.

I’ll let you do the legwork to find all the other images of nude adolescents or children contained in UK museums and galleries (Anne Geddes, Jock Sturges, David Hamilton, etc etc). You’re being a very narrow wowser, my friend.

All rather moot as this matter did not take place in the UK.

So one can be arrested in England for having the photo the Age published, and people do get arrested for having that kind of material.

While you’re in Ireland and not England, I suggest you call the cops on yourself immediately, regardless. By reading my story, you now have an uncensored Bill Henson image in your browser’s cache. Quelle horreur!

oh, and- you get one bite off the apple here at mgk, Mr Carlin. You will not be allowed to berate me and my readers the way you did on Theatre Notes, which forced the closure of two comments threads.

If you’ve missed my other comments on this issue, take some time and catch up. I understand you are an anti-human-trafficking (and anti-trousers on schoolgirls, oddly enough) campaigner. Go back to that. You’re well and truly out of your depth on this one. Remember that crying ‘wolf’ isn’t good for your mission.

Hunter S. Thompson once warned that “you should never kill more than you can eat.” Hetty Johnston- and you, it would appear, have decided to chew on not just the ‘arts world’ as it were, but civil libertarians as well. Artists may make for an easy feed- civil libertarians don’t. Kinda gristly, that mob.

oh, and- you get one bite off the apple here at mgk, Mr Carlin. You will not be allowed to berate me and my readers the way you did on Theatre Notes, which forced the closure of two comments threads.

Gregory, I said it and I MEANT it. You got your bite. Goodbye.

Carlin, you can stop trying to post comments. You won’t be published on mgk again.

I am most amused that you are complaining about being ‘censored.’ You clearly don’t know what that means. I can’t censor anything. Censorship is something governments do. I apply editorial judgments on mgk, but so do the Eds at Fairfax and Noise Ltd. If this were somehow impermissible, delivery of the op-ed section alone of the daily paper would require a forklift.

As long as you are exercising your rights to free expression in the sole pursuit of depriving someone else of theirs, I don’t think you have any sort of a valid beef at all when your spewy screeds go in the bit bucket. It’s hugely funny that Mr Censorship complains about being ‘censored.’ You love censorship- as long as you’re the censor. Not being the one in control reallllly unnerves you. Good. At least our terms of reference regarding your motivations are clear.

At the end of the day, I don’t really give a hairless rat’s ass what’s legal in Ireland. I chose to live in Australia 12 years ago and lemme tell ya, my decision wasn’t driven by a desire to hang out in a bog with small minded power freaks who have an insane need to run others’ lives. You’re not doing too well running your own life- work that out before you try taking on mine, K?