At 6:35 AM 8/31/96, Arun Mehta wrote:
There are two sides to this: after all, it is the Singaporeans who finally have to sort out this problem with their government, and denying them the Usenet platform for discussion would only hinder that process.
The point is to make clear to them that the Usenet and similar Web sites are global in nature, not subject to censorship without a very high local cost. If discussions of Lee Kwan Yew's dynasty are considered illegal, then Singaporans will have to choose not to carry the various newsgroups into which *I* post such messages! (This was done by many of us during the Karla Homulka and Teale trial in Canada a couple of years ago: Canada imposed press restrictions on discussion of the trial and the grisly evidence...and then was chagrinned to find that the global Net did not adhere to their notions of what should and could be discussed. They even seized copies of "Wired" at the border, very much akin to Singapore's stone age policies.)
Then again, inappropriate postings are the bane of the Internet: the consensus on which the Net functions relies heavily on people not posting inappropriately.
This works imperfectly, as all long-time surfers of the Usenet will attest! And _never_ has it involved determinations of "inappropriate" by _governments_! Our point in protesting Singapore's actions (and Germany's, France's, America's, India's, etc., in other cases) is to technologically subvert their notions that their politicians can determine what the Net, Web, and Usenet carry. To be blunt, if Singapore wants to stop me from discussing the dictator Yew and his feeble son, they can't. Except by pulling the plugs on forums in which my posts are carried. I consider this a Good Thing (that politicians in Country A generally have no power to tell citizen-units in Country B what they can say and what they can't). The point of being sometimes "impolite" (*) is to "force their hand." (* I find it Orwellian that being "polite" is taken to mean not saying anything controversial. It was impolite for Salman Rushdie to write "The Satanic Verses," is was impolite for people to mention Karla Homulka in talk.politics.canada, it was impolite to point out that the prime minister of India drinks a glass of his own urine every day, it was impolite to refer to Bill Clinton's dalliances with Paula Jones, and so on. In a free society, all things are discussable. That various countries want to make the Net less free is not something we should support, even if it is more "polite" to accede to the wishes of their dictators, secret policemen, demagogues, preachers, and henchmen.) --Tim May -- [This Bible excerpt awaiting review under the U.S. Communications Decency Act of 1996] And then Lot said, "I have some mighty fine young virgin daughters. Why don't you boys just come on in and fuck them right here in my house - I'll just watch!"....Later, up in the mountains, the younger daughter said: "Dad's getting old. I say we should fuck him before he's too old to fuck." So the two daughters got him drunk and screwed him all that night. Sure enough, Dad got them pregnant, and had an incestuous bastard son....Onan really hated the idea of doing his brother's wife and getting her pregnant while his brother got all the credit, so he pulled out before he came....Remember, it's not a good idea to have sex with your sister, your brother, your parents, your pet dog, or the farm animals, unless of course God tells you to. [excerpts from the Old Testament, Modern Vernacular Translation, TCM, 1996]