James Riley has written a sycophantic piece of rubbish on ITWire, praising the merits of the Rudd Government’s mandatory internet censorship plan. Riley reckons that by mere merit of the existence of official censorship in Australia, which gives the government the power to send in the police to enforce suppression of film and literature that the government of the day finds distasteful, censorship is good, mkay, and we should have lots more of it, particularly on that big bad ol’ internet. I can think of no other reason for a bit this wrong other than Riley’s bucking for a job in Conroy’s DBDCE.
Riley demonstrates his Alice Springs mud-puddle depth throughout the piece, starting with his ad-hominem attack on filter opponents in the very title of the bit, dismissing them as ‘ferals,’ supporting his position with no more than the authority fallacy that he ‘works in the information business.’ Riley attacks straw-man after straw-man but never manages to get past ‘censorship’s not so bad.’
Yet, he ‘gets it.‘
It’s plain and obvious that Riley has never lived a moment in any society which does not have an official censor. Riley appears to think that without the firm hand of a benevolent dictator guiding the thoughts of the common man, he is likely to think bad things. I wonder how Riley reckons a nation like the United States, the constitution of which includes very specific limits on government power as regards its ability to limit freedom of expression, has survived without imploding.
Riley goes so far in this ill-considered drooling rant as to invent his very own censorship scheme, which he names ‘Filter Lite.’ Nowhere does he address the main fallacies of the Rudd government’s proposed censorship scam, those primarily being that it will stop children from accessing porn and paedophiles from trading kiddie porn- of which it will do neither.
Not only does Riley not ‘get it,’ he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be getting.
-weez
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Well, James Riley must be a complete MORON! There I said it (without any worry of censorship). And who the hell does he think HE is (and Rudd or Conroy for that matter) to dictate to the Australian public what we should watch and hear! This type of dictatorship hasn’t been seen since the Nazis. Their views on censorship have definite and frightening parallels. Wake up Australia! Voice your protest before we lose all our freedoms by stealth.
Comment by Kathy 02.17.10 @ 7:41 pmLeave a comment
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