Sunday, January 25, 2009

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

are you saying that stifling political dissent through the guise of protecting us from ourselves is pragmatic?

Sure, if you like, but in this particular case I was saying that my quoting of an article which you chose to claim was a breach of © was an example of pragmatism on my part.

IE, I really couldn't care if you thought it a breach of © or not, but even if it was, my view is that the ends justifies the means ... for after all, I'm just an (what was it ?) "annoying snot", eh ?

But seriously, don't expect me to get all fanatical about either protecting the internut in its current form OR seeing it turned into what it should be. It just isn't important enough to me to care all that much, especially when at the end of the day, it is FANATICISM which is the true enemy.

Such as the kind being birthed in various ILCF opponents in this very forum.

AFAIC, not only is "free speech" a BFW (cheers TISM) that certainly is not under the slightest bit of unjustified threat, but also the internut is far from being the be all and end all of such an over-rated and so misused animal.

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

main requirements for a deductible gift recipient is that it must be based in Australia (with some limited exceptions).

Such as those which also have Oz based offices and/or approval by Oz ATO. My receipts indicate such approval.

I can help put you in touch with such charities if you are interested in helping our ally Israel out in such a way.

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

Hypocrisy aside, calls by authoritarian regimes to curb vulgarity are often a smoke screen for the stifling of political dissent.

from derspatz' very own, copyright infringing post...

Isn't pragmatism wonderful ?

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

I put my money towards benefiting Israel over Oz anyway, and by doing so am helping benefit all of humanity in the long run.

cmon ppl .. he's no more than trolling for a laugh for his own amusment

I can assure you (blat) that every year I give many thousands of dollars to worthy Israel Based charities including for care packages for their army. I've been doing this on a monthly basis for years, and the Oz ATO even gives me a tax deducation for doing so.

It is no laughing matter, and the more of us who similarly start helping Israel in such financial ways, the sooner this whole mess ala the world the way it currently is, will be over and done with and we can then get on with the Real Life.

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

( @ ) Lillary ( @ ) writes...
derspatz writes...I put my money towards benefiting Israel over Oz anyway, and by doing so am helping benefit all of humanity in the long run.

And that, folks, says it all doesn't it?

Etc. Awww, someone just needed a scapegoat to kick after all.

Hey, I'll be the joker to your batman ... you complete me, Lillary.

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

From: http://www.newsweek.com/id/181312
24/01/09

SOQ
China kicked off the New Year with another crackdown on the Internet. A government-supported entity—the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, tasked with finding and fighting online content that violates the law—began by informing 19 popular Web sites, including Google and Baidu, China's two leading search engines, that they contain "vulgar content that violates social morality and damages the physical and mental health of youths." Only a few days later, they expanded their blacklist to 91 sites, including MSN and MySpace, demanding that they all take action to remove the offensive content. By last week more than 1,250 Web sites had been closed down and 41 people arrested. The crackdown singled out galleries of scantily clad women on tiexue.com and videos on vodone.com, as well as Google searches with links to anything that could be deemed racy. On the same day, People's Daily, an official outlet, posted paparazzi photos of the Chinese celebrity Zhang Ziyi in a bikini at the beach. The Web site of Xinhua News Agency has also run a slide show called "China's Hottest Babes."

Hypocrisy aside, calls by authoritarian regimes to curb vulgarity are often a smoke screen for the stifling of political dissent. Iran recently included several sites critical of the government on a blacklist of more than 100,000 pornographic sites, and a study by the OpenNet Initiative, a university consortium that tracks Internet filtering around the globe, found that Vietnam censors politically sensitive content along with obscenity. China's current crackdown is no exception. Bullog.cn, an edgy Chinese bloglike platform that often irked the Chinese authorities by reporting on controversial events like protests against new chemical plants, is one openly political victim of the current purges. Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on the Chinese Internet at the University of Hong Kong, writes that "historically in China … the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content," and this appears to be the case again now. The thaw in anticipation of the Olympics, in which politically damaging sites like those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were allowed to publish unhindered, may now be nearing its end.

Beijing is expanding controls ahead of several inconvenient anniversaries. It's been 50 years since the Tibetan uprising, 20 years since the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square and 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China. An immediate cause of the crackdown might be the launch of Chapter 08, an appeal for democratic freedom by numerous Chinese intellectuals a few weeks ago, which engendered widespread and, so far, uncontrollable online discussions.

Indeed, Beijing's sudden toughness comes just as the Internet is becoming an effective tool for exposing possible government corruption. Squads of Internet vigilantes called "human-flesh search engines" use the Web to identify and terrorize leaders whom they believe have overstepped their authority or good judgment. When Zhou Jiugeng, a real-estate official from Nanjing, appeared in an official photograph wearing a Vacheron Constantin watch, which retails for $15,000, bloggers did some digging. They reportedly found that Zhou also drove a Cadillac to work and smoked Nanjing 95 Imperial cigarettes, which cost $20 a pack. This online attention and widespread calls for his resignation triggered an official investigation into Zhou's affairs in late December.

Earlier that month, Lin Jiaxiang, the Communist Party secretary of Shenzhen's Marine Affairs Bureau, was fired after being accused of assaulting a young girl at a restaurant. The Chinese Netizens tracked his identity, circulated a video of him and the girl and demanded an investigation. In another episode, two Chinese officials left receipts from a costly tour of North America on a subway in Shanghai, which wound up being published online, to general outrage. The officials were promptly fired.

The government's methods of identifying dissent have gotten more sophisticated in the past year. Rather than having to rely on search queries, censors have begun to employ private firms ("censorship entrepreneurs") to perform data-mining operations to identify dissent. The firms are then free to demand that Web sites remove the offensive content. TRS Information Technology, for instance, claims to be a leader in the fields of "information retrieval, content management and text mining." What this means in practice is that TRS provides various Chinese government agencies (mostly police authorities) with technology to monitor online discussions that may pose a threat to the regime. In a recent interview in the Financial Times, TRS's marketing director took special pride in having installed such systems at eight police stations in Shanghai, noting that now the work formerly done by 10 Internet police offers could be done by one. TRS, which was founded in 1993, now employs more than 200 people.
EOQ


Oh, and Lillary, you go 'girl' ... tis all "win-win" to me however you choose to deal with ILCF. I put my money towards benefiting Israel over Oz anyway, and by doing so am helping benefit all of humanity in the long run.

regarDS

Posted @ whirlpool - ILCF pt24

P.J.C...Belgium wants in on European web blocklist

The world has gone stark raving mad!.


No, it is just a case of the usually silent moral majority being wakened from their relative slumber and at last getting the pendulum to swing the other way.

For too long too many of us have sat back and allowed the immoral and evil doers who share our oxygen to get away with abusing freedom of choice by choosing to do what is bad and negative for/to our communities, culture, societies and civilisation.

For too long we've allowed wickedness to increase unchecked so that instead of being able to allow our children to play unfettered and free from sun-up to sun-down, we are now too scared to let them out of our sight for more than 30 seconds.

For too long we've had to make concessions that at any moment can expose any of us by pure accident to that which we would rather have lived an entire lifetime without witnessing.

For too long we've given chances and second chances and tried and hoped to reason the best way forward to bring about the best world possible, yet for too long we've been forced to accept virtually without complaint or recourse things that are basically intolerable as well as historically part of the ruin of any culture or civilisation.

Well folks, your greed and lack of control has done it to yourselves yet again for at last the tide is turning, the pendulum is reversing its swing and there is a ground swell movement to roll back the philosphies and practices of the depraved world you want to inflict upon us all to our inevitable judgement and destruction.

And not before time.

Yup, I'm busy putting my time and my money towards a bringing to an end of the kind of world you want, and guess what, according to the promises and prophecies (if you prefer) that continue to prove themselves accurate with every passing day, not only is my time and money being well spent, but also that new and better world is eventually going to be achieved ... and not only that, but the likes of ILCF will not be needed in that world because no one will even dream of creating or promoting the kinds of things that would justify it.

The world has not gone mad. It has just finally got angry enough about the way the world has gone for so long to at last start trying to do the right thing about it.

ILCF is obviously not the perfect solution ... but it is a start in the right direction until certain people start choosing to make righteousness and doing the right thing by their neighbour a priority again rather than the base selfishness that currently is their norm.

regarDS