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Posted on 04/22/2009 12:37:28 AM PDT by CounterCounterCulture
A year and a half of debate over filtering pornography out of San Jose public library computers came to a head late Tuesday when the City Council rejected spending money on the technology.
After a lively debate that lasted hours, the council voted 7-3 to approve a proposal by the vice mayor and two councilmen that would remind computer users of existing policies to be courteous to others. Mayor Chuck Reed and council members Pete Constant, who led the push for the filters, and Pierluigi Oliverio were opposed, favoring filters in children's areas.
"There are a lot of different ways to protect our children," said Councilman Sam Liccardo who sponsored the approved proposal along with Vice Mayor Judy Chirco and Councilman Ash Kalra. The proposal argued the city should first find more money to expand library hours, school crossing guards and sex-crime detectives. Liccardo compared filtering to "fighting a global naval strategy by deploying all our ships to Lake Tahoe."
At Tuesday's meeting, dozens of residents lined up to speak, with advocates arguing filters will protect kids from easy access to porn in the libraries. Debbie Mendez said that on a visit to her local branch library last summer, a man seated next to her and her son and daughter was viewing pornography, and the librarian said there was not much she could do about it.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
The proposal failed seven to three, but the council did say they will require a screen that comes up making sure users agree they will not participate in any illegal activities on the Internet.
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ABC7's 2006 I-Team investigation captured several library patrons performing lewd acts while visiting porn sites.
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Wonder if the Council would consider a pedophiles' guide to "Where the Children Are", or maybe an online directory to kids' unique URL's, chat rooms, and so on?
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Sex crime detectives eh.
So is it a sex crime to wank in a public area at the library while watching porn?
If we agree, there should be a sex crime detective at each library.
Public lewdness, yes.
Send the dick (no pun intended) around the library circuit in plainclothes.
In today’s post-literate America, public libraries are primarily free internet porn portals for stinky, drug-addled, mentally-ill, unemployable men. The paid members of the library staff usually see job security in their patrons’ hours and aren’t willing to restrict even the most objectionable uses of their facilities.
This is a complete distortion of Freedom of Speech. Libraries didn’t use to buy hard core porn books, yet they now think they need to let pornograph be the main attraction on the library’s computers. With the wives look’in over the guys shoulders at home, the public library is becoming the hottest place in town. Your tax dollars at work. Poor Marion the Librarian.
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I’d rather have free, completely accessible computers arranged in a ring, with everyone’s screens facing inwards (so that no one has long-range privacy), than have filters that could mistake medical images for porn, and block them, and that too, in a library.
Put up some plywood walls and charge a quarter every 5 minutes and turn the library into the peep show it apparently has turned in to. Why not sell a few sex toys at the desk and get some good looking librarians.
as I understand the issue, it kind of goes like this:
if you put filters on, you’re sayign “You can’t access anything BAD”, which also means “what you CAN access is therefore GOOD”.
Since no filter gets everything out, then you’re saying that “THIS porn site is GOOD because you can access it through the filters”.
why suddenly the public has a free right to the internet is beyond me.
The local porn shops should file suit on the grounds that this is an unfair subsidy that competes with their business.
Better to have *no filters* than to have some filters — especially when one finds out (later on) that they’ll “add” things to filters that they don’t want in there (like so-called “right-wing extremist” literature)... LOL...
Its just another example of California becoming an increasingly unglued and dysfunctional state.
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Plus, the liberal librarians can set the filter to block 'right-wing hate sites' like Free Republic.