That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘pedophiles’

The IWF, our self appointed online guardians, publish a list of ‘potentially illegal’ web pages which many of the UK ISPs use in order to determine what content we should be allowed to see. In the past this has caused controversy because images that they deem ‘potentially illegal’ are silently censored by our service providers, the most notable being the Virgin Killer artwork which was blocked on a wikipedia page.

Something that is important to remember, though, is that the blocking is entirely voluntary and you can always change to a different ISP which does not use the block list. An ISP that subscribes to the list must block its entirety rather than picking and choosing which pages to allow but subscription to the list is not currently compulsory, or at least not at the moment.

The NSPCC has decided that it is really bad news that a measly 5% of broadband connections are with service providers which don’t use the list because ”allowing this loophole helps feed the appalling trade in images featuring real children being seriously sexually assaulted”.

Apparently ”Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites”. This has prompted the NSPCC and the Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety (CCCIS) to call for more government intervention as ”self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing – and in a seriously damaging way for children”.

I checked the maths and if you work on the 2001 census data of 24,479,439 households and OFCOM’s number of 57% broadband penetration then it follows that around 700,000 households are in that 5% who have got unfiltered internet access. Is a bit of ‘nanny state’ intervention going to make a difference to whether people can access child porn? Of course not.

Depending on the ISP, the implimentations differ but broadly speaking the IWF list works like this:

1. People with too much time on their hands find sites with kiddie smut and report them to the IWF.
2. The IWF takes a gander and works out if the content will give a paedo wood. If they think it will then they put the URL on a list.
3. Twice a day the ISPs download that list and their clever technology enables them to return a 404 page not found error instead of the page.

The effectiveness of this plan makes a number of assumptions, the first is that paedos are really really fucking stupid and just turn on their computer and type “kiddies with their bits out” into Google. In reality the ones that don’t want to get caught will employ a number of different and easy to use technologies to circumvent the blocking technology. Kiddie smut on the web is pretty rare because it’s a specialist thing and illegal in a whole lot of places so slightly more underground methods of distribution are most likely used. Usenet, the legacy of the pre WWW internet, will not be blocked by the IWF list. Peer to peer software can enable the distribution of illegal material and even something as simple as an anonymous web proxy can bypass the crude interventions of the IWF.

So what’s the fucking point? It won’t block the hardened paedo from getting his rocks off and it won’t stop people from abusing kids and taking pics to share by email, P2P, usenet etc. It’s a good way of being seen to be doing something and it might stop the odd idiot from accidentally happening upon a page that contains kid smut while searching for some other form of depravity but I suspect that most people would just hit the back button and go off looking for their dwarf/foot fetish/squirting/big cock porn elsewhere instead.

Of course the cynics will say that this is a back door way of getting the censorship infrastructure in place so the government can then use it to silently quieten dissent; people who say stuff like that are ignorant cunts though, it’s not a conspiracy it’s just lazy politics and a waste of money.

A fortune cookie once said:

Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the blind allegiance of fools.

The message behind the proverb is that rules are there to show people what generally is and is not acceptable but they are fallable so should not be seen as inflexible boundries. Unfortunately, where rules and laws fall down is when dealing with people who follow rules too closely and use them for their own means.

Most civilised societies have laws which prohibit murder but most countries also have a pretty narrow definition of murder and an often less serious crime of manslaughter. Murder is defined as the taking of life with malice aforethought, or with the intention of doing it. If I cause an accident which kills someone then that would be manslaughter but if I set out to kill someone then that would be murder. Proving the intent is the hard part and often means that prosecutors settle for manslaughter charges rather than murder because they are easier to prove. Unfortunately this puts us in a situation where occasionally accidental deaths are convicted as murder because the guilty party cannot prove it was accidental and also means that a clever murderer will be able to make the death seem either accidental or claim that it was accidental in order to get a reduced sentence.

Pedophiles can get their kicks just by being in the audience at a school swimming gala while parents are unable to take photos of their own kids, terrorists find new and interesting ways of causing mayhem while regular travellers get their duty free booze confiscated because it breaks the 100ml rule and copyright or patent laws are used by big corporations to attack the small creative groups that the laws were designed to protect.

The legal system has always had loop holes but the judiciary were selected for their strong moral judgement and ability to make decisions based on the evidence provided. Some of these decisions were subjective and occasionally errors of judgement happened. In an effort to prevent this from happening we, as a society, have built greater and greater layers of complexity to the legal system and filled the statute books with more and more laws which are designed to stipulate exactly what can and can’t be done in any given situation. The problem with closing loop holes is that for every one you close, many more open up. The idea of ‘rights’ is great however they must be evenly applied and are most often used by the malicious in order to escape or evade punishment.

A few years ago there was a story going around that a homeowner was sued by a burglar who had slipped while breaking in. It caused much outrage and was seen as a poster boy example for the ‘political correctness gone mad’ that the Daily Mail is keen to womble on about. In an ideal world this case (if it indeed existed) would have been thrown out by the courts for contravening the basic ideals of common sense and personal responsibility…

But what if it had? If a homeowner is allowed not liable for injury if the other party is trespassing then it might be wise to make sure that you have written invitations from the unscrupulous householders you may visit; they may exploit the loophole if you injure yourself at theirs by claiming you were trespassing. If a burglar injured himself while stealing from you he might think it wise to claim that you deliberately injured him, thus putting you in a riskier position.

Legislating for every eventuality is a process which leads inevitably towards totalitarianism and cannot be achieved without it, we are already happily skipping down that path and it would take a significant reverse in public policy to take us back to the point where judges were trusted to make decisions and policemen could use their discretion, the golden era that the “BBC Have your say” gang wistfully recall.

Media responsibility is pretty important if we want to steer away from a totalitiarian Britain. Newspapers and TV channels competing for attention are prone to blowing unusual events out of proportion. News coverage brings the unusual to the public attention. A few million people going to work is unremarkable yet a few million people trapped at home because of snow is unusual and worthy of news. All too often the remarkable events that capture the public imagination fuel massive changes in policy and legislation which are disproportionate to the original and improbably events.

In short, don’t worry about the little things that the papers report. It’s the stuff they don’t report that is happening every day in every city all around the country. Legislating for the little stuff just takes our eyes off the big stuff or gives the perpetrators new loopholes to use to their advantage.

In another article we raised the concept of childhood obesity being a form of child abuse and that seemed to get some of our readers a little confused so here’s the whole thing in a little more detail.

In the UK we have a concept called ‘parental responsibility’. The name of the concept causes quite a bit of confusion in itself because many groups seem to see parental responsibility as ‘parental rights’ because many of the visitation rights that a father may have are tied to or determined by the level of parental responsibility. Regardless of how it is perceived, being a parent is a responsibility and probably the greatest that many of us will every experience, it is our role to protect the child, to educate it and to ensure it is brought up to meet the fullness of its potential.

Many forms of child abuse have hit the headlines from the tragic example of Baby P, one of many who have slipped through the system and been physically abused to the myriads of children who are sexually abused. Children who are emotionally abused are often given less air time because it is harder to sensationalise the act of destroying a child’s self esteem or dashing their hopes. Recently the government, schools and many other factors have been blamed for a perceived rise in obesity but let’s look first at the numbers behind that rise.

The graph above has the proportion of kids who are overweight between 1995 and 2002. The period is too short to get a definite trend but the proportions have risen by 3-4% over seven years and that is considerable.

The rise in the proportion of kids who are medically obese follows a similar pattern and this seems to indicate a rise in obesity which follows the increase in the proportion of overweight kids.

It’s worth noting at this point that these stats are all percentages rather than absolute numbers. It would be normal to expect the absolute numbers of overweight kids to increase over time as it would also be normal for the number of underweight or average weight kids to increase as the total number of kids increases but changes in the percentages show a different make up for that increasing population, essentially the population of fat kids is growing faster than the population of average or underweight kids.

So what about the health problems? Childhood obesity is not just a problem for the kids, it’s a problem when they become adults and likely also a problem for their own kids (if they live long enough to breed). Heart disease is already the number one killer in the UK and the effect that an aging obese population will have on the already stretched NHS is unthinkable.

The blame currently rests in a number of places: TV, sugary soft drinks, school dinners, lack of sports in schools and genes have all been blamed for the obesity problem. The chief executive of McDonalds UK, Steve Easterbrook, has blamed video games while a recent survey of parents suggested that 10% of them believed that fast food companies were to blame. Really, though, the blame can only rest at the feet of one group of people: the parents.

Raising a kid is hard. They don’t want to eat their greens and they want to eat what all the other kids are eating. They don’t want to play outside or get exercise because they would rather be playing on the xbox, that’s why we don’t let young kids go out into the world to live on their own because they are just kids and need their parents to make some choices for them. Sometimes as a parent it’s necessary to say no to a child when they want more chips or insist that they eat their greens before they get desert. Denying a child something they want is not abuse if it is in their long term best interest and encouraging them to take part in some form of active sport is possible no matter what the ability of the child.

Of course it’s all to tempting when you have had a hard day to just give them a pizza or not ensure that they have had some fruit or vegetables. It’s easier to shell out a few quid for school dinners because if you make a pack lunch you aren’t there to make sure they eat it. Food from the frozen aisle in the supermarket is often cheaper and quicker to microwave than vegetables which have to be peeled and prepared.

But who said being a good parent is easy? Parenting is hard work and doing it right is even harder, that’s something that’s not taught in schools or by parents and that’s probably one of the reasons why we have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. If you can’t deny a child sweets and get it to enjoy (or at least tollerate) vegetables then you need to think about if you should be a parent at all. If you haven’t got the dedication to go out in the rain and play footie after a 12 hour shift then it could be that parenting is not for you. If you can’t get your kids to eat their 5 a day then maybe you should use a condom, take a pill or just keep your pants on because you are only destined to kill the child you bring into the world.

Today has been a rather disappointing day in which the universe did not end as the LHC began slowly spinning up. Nobody apart from the Daily Mail readers and the minority in the US who actually voted for the Republicans would have believed that the world would end today and it’s been well publicised that the particle smashing does not start for a little while but I did hold some hope in my heart that today would be the end of the Universe and we would not have to wait longer.

Today does appear to be the end of the Universe for park goers in Telford though. The council have made a spectacular leap of causality by assuming that as kids play in parks and pedophiles like kids (but often don’t have kids) then anyone who does not have kids and is in the park must be a pedophile. This is a bit like saying that the nazis had smart uniforms and the people at Telford council have smart uniforms so they must in fact be nazis. OK, that’s a bad example of flawed logic. Maybe it means all bus drivers are nazis? The police? OK, this logic actually seems to work, forget I said anything about uniforms.

The “I’m doing it for the kiddies” excuse for stupidity is not an old one, it’s the same reason why I can’t video my own kids at their school play and why I can’t take a picture of them on the winners podium at the swimming gala. Normally the data protection act is waved around as the legal basis for these rules however even the office of the information commissioner has tried to clarify the jobsworthian stupidity of these claims.

The solution is of course is for a whole bunch of single men without children to go and sit in parks across the land and read their books and munch their sandwiches and when challenged recite the legal premise of public ‘common’ lands and their rights to be there.