Posted on 02/14/2013 6:08:31 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
The unprecedented censorship is justified by fears about damaging effects of the internet on children and women.
Ogmundur Jonasson, Iceland's interior minister, is drafting legislation to stop the access of online pornographic images and videos by young people through computers, games consoles and smartphones.
"We have to be able to discuss a ban on violent pornography, which we all agree has a very harmful effects on young people and can have a clear link to incidences of violent crime," he said.
Methods under consideration include blocking access to pornographic website addresses and making it illegal to use Icelandic credit cards to access pay-per-view pornography.
A law forbidding the printing and distribution of pornography is already in force in Iceland but it has yet to be updated to cover the internet.
The proposals are expected to become law this year despite a general election in April.
"There is a strong consensus building in Iceland. We have so many experts from educationalists to the police and those who work with children behind this, that this has become much broader than party politics," Halla Gunnarsdottir, a political adviser to Mr Jonasson told the Daily Mail.
The proposed control over online access...is justified as a defence of vulnerable women and children.
"Iceland is taking a very progressive approach that no other democratic country has tried," said Professor Gail Dines, an expert on pornography and at a recent conference at Reykjavik University. "It is looking a pornography from a new position - from the perspective of the harm it does to the women who appear in it and as a violation of their civil rights."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Government only has those powers specifically enumerated. What enumerated power does government have that would give it the legitimate authority to ban porn?
Absolutely not.
I don’t go to porn sites, and nobody I know does but I don’t want the government or any government controlling anything about the internet. If you can’t keep your kids off the bad things on the internet or just can’t help peeking yourself then get rid of it.
Who in said governments decides what is porn? You know that the answer is that they (the governments) will decide if FreeRepublic is porn or not or any religious or political site is porn. The definition will be left to select power groups who will use it to control the flow of information rather than just porn.
Never, ever give governments or bureaucrats or even religious leaders the power to control what you might see or not see on any media or what information is “good” for you.
Durus: “What enumerated power does government have that would give it the legitimate authority to ban porn?”
I think you’re talking about the federal government. What about state or local governments? If you think no government has the right to impose restrictions on images, can kiddie porn be banned? Wouldn’t that also be protected speech?
I asked questions because I’m interested in what other’s think. I already know what I think is right.
My parents did a very good job of protecting me from all the different kinds of trouble I could have become involved in.What's wrong with *today's* parents?
What the article didn’t mention was that pornography, to a great extent, has only been *legal* since the late 1950s, and even then, it was very tame by today’s standards.
But, at the same time, when it was illegal, there was a substantial black market for it. For example, the infamous “plain brown wrapper” packages from Cuba, a major exporter of porn. Stag films were de rigueur at bachelor parties, and there are now museums dedicated to “pornography as art” from about the 16th Century onward.
Even in ancient history, pornography was ubiquitous. The Romans loved it, and the ancient Hebrews were known for their dirty poetry.
Porn with children can not be made without raping a child. That is why it is banned and obviously laws protecting children from sexual exploitation is constitutional. Child pornography can not be conflated with typical pornography made with consentual adult actors. The child pornography issue is raised only to muddle an otherwise crystal clear 1st amendment issue. This isn't to say that I think pornography has any redeeming merits, or even that it doesn't present some very clear dangers, but my opinions don't change the clear meaning and principles of the constitution.
Libertarians are all in favor of it (kiddie porn).
Porn overrides all petty concerns. Good porn, I feel will touch your heart, uplift your soul, and encourage you to GET UP when you’ve been knocked down. Porn heals. Porn is the culmination of mankinds experience. Porn makes a summer day a little warmer. Porn delights the spirit and makes love to the soul. Porn is festive. It’s like a parade with free buffet and jumping cheerleaders with pompoms and a band playing and a big silvery moon, with fireworks and party hats and streamers and cotton candy on a summer night by a glass-smooth lake as you hold the one you love in front of a roaring fire on a bearskin rug, while you overlook the mountains of Aspen from the deck of your expensive yacht.
But then you get to the question of "what is porn?" and who has the right to say what it is and isn't? To some, the Super Bowl Halftime Show was porn. Does that mean ISPs have a duty to block the Super Bowl?
I'm disgusted by a lot of what is on the internet but I'd rather have it and choose not to partake in it that have some Obama-chosen bureaucrat decide that Free Republic should be banned. And if you don't believe they wouldn't try it, just wait.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
You had me at Good Porn!
It’s an interesting question. In 30 or 40 years the generation that was raised in an era of very easily accessed porn will be the ones in charge. If it is as bad as many say for society, it will probably be too late at that point to do anything about it.
On the other hand, I can’t see the state sticking soley with ‘porn philter’ limits once they get the power. On the other-other hand, they already probably limit access to certain things.
The libs that seem to be for this have become so liberal that they went in a complete circle and came out the other side.
If it is implemented I suppose we can always compare Iceland to free access porn places in 50 years or so. Of course Iceland is the place where the state has to approve the name you call your kid, if I recall.
Freegards
Yes, but I suspect this is a situation of closing the barn after the horse has run out.
Admittedly, I do not know much about Iceland and its culture, but I think that I am correct in saying that religious observation there has decreased markedly. Internet porn, I suspect, is just blooming in a weedy field where there has been woefully insufficient seeding of moral truth and standards of decency.
There is some affliction or dread condition that needs a poster child out there. I am making that a project. Stand by.
The First Amendment relates primarily to political and intellectual liberty: it is the expression of meaning. It is a cognitive process: the conveying of ideas by speech and by the publishing (in today's world, the media.)
But porn, by definition, doesn't work because it "means something" (on the cognitive level); it works because it "does something." I don't think it's any exaggeration to say it's operant behavior conditioning, based on chemicals, brain hormones.
To put it simply (especially for you, my well-loved Laz), sexual arousal and release works like a drug because it triggers feel-good brain chemicals: it suppresses cortisol, sends in a rush of serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin.
If you could get this stuff via a needle in the vein by pressing the S-E-X keys on the compute keyboard, you'd be reacting not to the cognitive meaing of word "sex," but by the entry of blood-borne drugs into the brain.
I think that's what makes porn different from "speech" and "the press." It has more similarities with drugs and addiction. In other words, it's not, precisely speaking, communication (an intellectual process). It's more like a chemical hit.
True, you could bring this on by plain-old masturbating with a tintype of Queen Victoria (if that's your taste.) But internet porn, especially, has a degree of instantaneous access, sensory overload, and perversion so extreme, that it compares to making IV heroin available to every 12-year-old with an internet connection.
It also sets up adult men to be interested in those 12-year-olds, because it significantly weakens their natural sense of good-touch and body-boundary, and their normal, self-protective aversion toward anything that is dangerous or perverted.
And that is a legitimate human rights and public safety concern.
(And citizen usa, it's obviously different from medical journals, art, and the like. Anatomy charts and Michelangelo's David don't reach right in from your eyes to your crotch to effect chemical-based operant conditioning on your brain.)
Interesting in that Iceland is one of the most sexually loose nations on the planet....and the first to legalize abortion (1930’s)
They must be having major problems with child porn.
However, just as there may be legitimate criteria to distinguish between "active terrorist conspiracy" and political speech, and there may also be legitimate criteria to distinguish between "toxic BDSM pornography" and intellectual/artistic expression.
I myself, have had the experience of both being frustrated by a self-installed filter on my computer when researching a sexual issue, AND to have been assaulted by a sadistic image of sexual brutality which popped up when I was looking for an illustration for Louisa May ALcott's "Little Women."
It's not safe for me that men are being repetitively conditioned toward the torture of women as a form of entertainment. Or women so abusing men, or other women. Or children.
Keywords "Little women". No joke.
In a democratic republic, it has been possible to make such distinctions in the past, and may be possible to make them again.
My momma always said that if I looked at porn I would turn to stone. I did!
I wish I still did!
So then, they should be ok with gay porn. No women involved there.
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