Clive Hamilton - Nanny Statist

The headline alone is like a red rag to a bull, and should drive most reasonable people to outrage. Go click on his scare-mongering nonsense if you dare. I've taken out one extract below:

Web doesn't belong to net libertarians

Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt University | February 16, 2009


Some participants in the internet filtering debate do not believe that access to porn on the internet is a problem. One referred to the sorts of images I have described as "naughty pictures". Others take an extreme libertarian view that people (including children) should be able to view whatever they like.

Ahh, the attempt to win the debate through demonising and marginalising your most well known opponents. The old strawman.

All of us internet users and fans are suddenly a fringe group - extreme libertarians. But our statist opponents who want to censor and regulate the internet represent parents, children and just about everybody who cares about "the children".

Hamilton then continues:

Reflecting the influence of moral relativism, there is a common belief in the internet community that any restriction means the imposition of one set of moral values on others who don’t hold them. Any sexual practice, no matter how bizarre, is just a matter of personal choice.

Firstly.. censoring content, by the state, is nothing less than imposing one set of moral values on the entire society.

And internet usage has nothing to do with actual sexual practice. The internet is nothing more than communication, completely peaceful and non-violent.

Basically, Hamilton tries to characterise all freedom of speech concerns to sex, deviant behaviour and predatory paedophiles.

Fortunately, we do not live in the type of society favoured by organisations like Electronic Frontiers Australia. We live in a democracy where citizens ask their governments to impose restrictions on certain types of content that are regarded as harmful to individuals or to the community more broadly.

Clive Hamilton's opinions are harmful and offensive to me, yet I don't go lobbying Canberra to censor him.

But perhaps the most revealing words in the Get Up statement are "our internet". The internet does not belong to the net libertarians, who seem to believe they inhabit a cyber-nation that is beyond normal forms of social regulation. The net belongs to all of us and, like other forms of communication, is subject to our collective decisions.

Yes and should be run according to the whims of Clive Hamilton ! This thug-o-crat has no room for individual disagreements in his utopian view of collective societies living in harmony. I suppose some kind of counselling or re-education is in order for those who disagree with him .. err.. I mean "society".