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Julian Sanchez | August 13, 2003

The administration hasn't given up on the "constitutionally infirm" Child Online Protection Act: They're headed back to the courts to defend legislation that would hold website operators (rather than, you know, parents) responsible for ensuring that our nation's pwecious wittle darlings aren't exposed to anything more lewd than Tinky Winky the Teletubbie.

Comments

Mrs. Lovejoy|8.13.03 @ 7:43AM|#

Oh, won't anyone PLEASE think of the children?!!!

|8.13.03 @ 7:59AM|#

But you better not have your hand in your pants while your doing it!

Kevin Carson|8.13.03 @ 8:15AM|#

According to Bill Maher, he saw Tinky Winky bending over and going "wee, wee, wee" while another 'tubby scratched his butt. That's pretty damn lewd.

Mickey|8.13.03 @ 8:39AM|#

And both Garfield and Pluto are naked ... NAKED, I tell ya!

|8.13.03 @ 8:43AM|#

Talking about "wee, wee," my 4-year-old daughter lifted Barbie's dress and was puzzled about how she would go.

("Mommy, she doesn't look anything like us!")

Kevin Carson|8.13.03 @ 11:08AM|#

This seems to be part of a common pattern with the No Child's Behind Left Untouched Act, another hobby horse of Mr. Compassionate Conservative. To Bush, as to most of the GOP, the Tenth Amendment is a form of verbal Muzak, for creating an appropriate atmosphere, but apparently has no objective content whatsoever. Bob Dole used to quote the glorious Tenth in every speech when he was running for president, but was for food stamps and ethanol subsidies.

Mickey,

How come you wear pants with no shirt, but Porky Pig wears a shirt with no pants?

Camille,

A little girl goes to see a mall Santa. When asked what she wants for Christmas, she says a Barbie and a G.I. Joe. "What do you want G.I. Joe for?" Santa asks. "Barbie comes with Ken." "No, Barbie comes with G.I. Joe," says the little girl. "She just fakes it with Ken."

|8.14.03 @ 2:28AM|#

Let's see. . . um, pyramid schemes? Check. Ravings from some wacko in Montana? Check. How to make a fertilizer bomb? Meth? Double- check.
At least they can't get porn.

|8.14.03 @ 3:02AM|#

I fully agree Kevin.

Here is the saddest story I've yet read about drugging children who are said to have ADHD:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2003/08-25-2003/vo19no17_drugging.htm

From the article:
In an appeal filed Aug. 11, Solicitor General Theodore Olson said the filter technology alone is not enough. Children are "unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web,"

Well pray tell what exactly are the harmful effects of this pornography on children? I've seen many people use such assertions as this to defend censorship of all types, but I don't think I have ever in my 27 years, seen any actual evidence that pornography is harmful to children.

Such concepts as "emotional scars" are metaphors at best, and as no one has seen an "emotional scar" the existence of anything like one is a pure guess. The actual origins of the concept are in the Victorian psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who though respected as the father of psychoanalysis, is reguarded by most as unduly obsessed with sexuality.

Indeed, it seems much more reasonable to expect that as throughout the history of the human race most people have been naked or half-naked most of the time, and they often observed sexual relations between members of their tribe from a very young age, there is unlikely to be anything dangerous to the minds of children in merely seeing the unclothed human body, or happening to see people engaged in sex.

At the same time, a credit card, or other identifier that can be used to verify that they are an adult and, therefore presumably past the point where emotional scars matter to anyone, can also be used to keep a record of exactly which individuals are looking at which websites. A law sold on it's potential to protect children could just as easily have the effect of enabling authorities to track individual adults and compile dossiers on them.

bothers me is when people talk about restricting things defined as hate speech, or the ravings of some whacko in Montana, as things that kids ought to be protected from. Frankly, some of what I really believe, Ideas I want to, and think ought to be taken seriously, might be defined by some as "hate speech" and might be mandantorily filtered.

I mean, do Christian Scientists, Scientologists, Feminists, or religious people of any other stripe really want their kids hearing MY opinions?

we used to think that the children of the future would be taken away from their parents very young, to undergo forced indoctrination in fairly comfortable but firmly secure conditions, under the scientific care of psychiatrist-controllers who were mostly concerned with how their group of charges fit the statistical goals set for them by the authorities. This is different from today how?

And wouldn't it be sweet for them if my ideas, which I believe are true, and mostly arrived at rationally are defined as some sort of involuntary symptom, or heresy, or thoughtcrime, and they could just be blotted out as though they didn't exist, without having to meet them with reason.

It would be almost as sweet for them as it would be for their opponents if their own views were judged byond the pale.

And today's conservatives ought to think very hard about that, because by slow steps that is what it seems is being done.

david f|8.14.03 @ 3:24AM|#

nice, Graystoke!
and don't forget the zealots who say that sex confuses kids, while the kids have some sort of filter that enables them to discern "cartoon" or "TV" violence from real violents....

but that filter doesn't cover boobs, i guess.

and, Plutarck, getting in touch with your inner child can get you arrested now...

oh, is this why the dutch are running around as sex freaks??? and drug freaks... oh wait. nevermind.

drf

|8.14.03 @ 5:20AM|#

Watch out, Schwarzenegger! Kevin Carson will NOT be voting for you, that's for sure.

"the educracy is also obsessed with schemes like extended school days/years, educrat-managed after school programs"

(I'm in total agreement with eveything you said, Kevin.)

|8.14.03 @ 9:14AM|#

Russ, in the above comment, you seem to be equating (and attributing) your freedom-loving inclinations to educational institutions external to you.

"Public school made me what I am."
"Catholic school did it to me."

Did it ever occur to you that what you are, how you think, and what your values might be -- are generated from within? Surely, as a lower-case libertarian, you don't really believe that your values come from "out there" somewhere, do you?

Kevin Carson|8.14.03 @ 9:35AM|#

I'm a product of the government schools myself, Russ, as are most of the people I know with "bad attitudes." So apparently they have about the same success rate in churning out "human resources" as they do in teaching literacy.

sarah|8.14.03 @ 9:47AM|#

Heaven forbid parents actually monitor their children's computer use. That would smack of, you know, PARENTING.

Most modern parents don't care if their kids see porn anyway; the kids are only there as fashion accessories.

|8.14.03 @ 11:01AM|#

See, if you make it so children don't have any rights, they won't complain about not having rights when they're adults.

Kevin Carson|8.14.03 @ 11:54AM|#

You sure got that right, anon 1101.

Until the mid-20th century, most kids lived and interacted in neighborhoods with kids of all ages--a miniature society. They were forced to learn how to get along, organize activities, and settle differences with their equals, without every damned move they made being organized and supervised by an Authority Figure. In the days before "peer group socialization," a much larger proportion of kids were also inner-directed and obtained most of their internalized values from their families. And outside of the Deweyite axis, in the rest of flyover country, the schools weren't actively at war with this organic model of society.

But under peer group socialization, the ideal is for as much of a kid's waking life as possible to be spent with twenty or thirty of his age-mates, under the direct supervision of an adult. This is also known as a BARRACKS SOCIETY.

Within this barracks society, kids are taught to immediately run to an authority figure every time an anomalous situation arises, or if a "peer" says something that's not quite right according to the principles of Ingsoc. I recently heard a teacher on NPR lamenting the images of violence kids picked up from the media. Since some kids still retained the horribly atavistic idea that you don't snitch (another thing she was sobbing over), she tape recorded their conversations and then wept over how their poor little minds had been contaminated by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES.

All kinds of programs, from DARE to WAVE, are designed to weed out kids who have picked up the wrong political ideas from their parents, or to turn kids into informers against parents who ingest the wrong substances or own too many guns ("Trotskyite Saboteurs Turned In by Child Hero"). And don't forget Ritalin, when authoritarian intimidation and mind-numbing routine alone aren't enough to fit a square peg into the round hole.

Since from the perspective of the publick skool establishment, any time spent outside this barracks society is a threat to proper statist socialization, the educracy is also obsessed with schemes like extended school days/years, educrat-managed after school programs, mandatory kindergarten and preschool. Add to this massively increased homework tailored to the standardized tests, so there won't be any chance of intellectual curiosity leading to any independent learning outside the supervision of the social engineers.

And so, anon 1101, is it any surprise that twelve or sixteen years later the corporation receives an almost perfectly processed "human resource" that views rocking the boat or asking the wrong questions as "antisocial"?

|8.15.03 @ 9:58AM|#

Interestingly, I went to a Christian School until I dropped out and home/non-schooled until later taking the GED and starting college.

Thus the statistical error of the sample so small it had a nearly infinate margin of error - ie, generalizing from such a limited experience (sample, number of observations) relative to the total population.

My opposition to public school is primarily it's restriction on limited private sector alternatives to extremes, such as religious motivation - and at least part of the origin for my position of the inferiority of the school system as a whole was how much I loved learning from things like television (Beakman's World!) and reading, and yet did not take to the classroom experience much at all, save the occassional conversation with the teacher about some interesting subject...which would leave me to discover that I knew more of the subject than they did, as the conversation quickly went beyond the bounds of the standard course material (interestingly, one of the first times I noticed this was a Bible Study class on Revelation - a book I'd read at least 4 times, front to back, by then, and was further 'informed' by Jack van Impe shows on TV).

College has revealed that at least the teachers are professionals in their given field, with a far wider range of knowledge...but now the students are the ones who seem completely uninterested, and for good reason as class is more a treadmill and excercise in short-term memory and regurgitation than anything resembling genuine learning, elucidation, illumination, enlightenment, understanding, and appreciation. Call it an unreasonable expectation, but anything less is a travesty.

Scarbrough Elizabeth|9.10.04 @ 12:27AM|#

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Powers Devon|9.10.04 @ 12:27AM|#

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