The Conservative Party's war on Porn

Back in May last year, I became old enough to vote, and cast my first vote in the 2015 general election. Admittedly, I knew a lot less about politics back then, but I knew enough, even still, I didn't know who I wanted to vote for right up until I was in the booth, all I knew is there was no chance in hell I'd be voting for Labour, and that my family all voted Conservative, so I told them I did too, who I actually voted for is not something I'm up for disclosing. What's funny is that since that election, as I became a bit less thick when it came to politics, I began to get a bit annoyed with the Conservatives, many things started bothering me about them, but, as you probably gathered from the title, the thing I'm going on about here is one of the stupidest things they've been up to. So, after being all doom and gloom about their fucking retarded Orwellian snoopers' charter, I figured I'd have some fun with their apparent crusade against, of all things, online pornography.

So let's wind the clocks back a bit, way back when in 2010, the British parliament proposed a law that would require internet providers to block pornography websites by default, and would require users to contact their provider and request that those sites be unblocked. It is indeed a disturbing universe because you can probably guess what the reasoning behind that was; it was to protect the kids. Now for some personal opinion, porn is a product, just like movies or books or music, it is a media product designed for entertainment; granted a different kind of entertainment, but still entertainment. There's this thing called puberty, and contrary to what fundamentalist religious folk believe, it's real and it has an effect of people, and the effect it has is not only vital to a person's development, but healthy for the person, and everyone's been through it, everyone's had those funny feelings for another person, it's normal. The problem that the busybodies in the government seem to have is that they don't want the poor innocent kids to see this obscene, indecent filth, nether mind that eventually they will want to see it, as a result of all the funky things going on in their brains. This is a very grey area, for obvious reasons, do you protect the poor children or do you let them see this content, not seeing myself as much of a busybody personally, I think this decision is, or should be, up to the parents, parents who, ideally, understand that at some point their baby bird will learn to fly, admittedly not my best metaphor. It's a dilemma I personally don't have a solution for, but I tell you who definitely shouldn't have a solution, that's it, the Government, because in my post about the Investigatory powers bill, I said that they won't take your freedom away entirely, but that they will instead take it away in little bits, it's a slippery slope argument, yes, but it's true; assuming this happened, which it didn't, who in either the government or the service providers would decide what sites to block, obviously Pornhub and Redtube and such sites would be out, but would other video sites with more relaxed content regulation also be blocked, sites like Dailymotion. After that would it be sites like YouTube, because every music video made in the last 10 years has half naked women dancing and being all sexy in it, would that be deemed inappropriate for kids too, would Google be out because you can image search porn, like the [cough cough] pretty [cough cough] image of Faye Reagan I used in this very post. Of course these sites do have content regulation, age restriction and so forth, but if we just want to blanket ban 'porn' sites, the definition of 'porn' being whatever the hell the busybodies want it to be, what is the solution there? And, being frank, the government has no right to govern what people can and can't watch, my stance is hardly controversial on this, if it's over the legal age, and no one's getting hurt in the production, distribution, or consumption processes of this material, where's the problem, because from where I'm sitting, the problem seems to simply be that porn is dirty, which would make you busybodies morons, puritanical morons.

Fast forward a few years and things are no smarter, as when think of the children didn't work, their song changed to think of women and children. At this point the busybodies were trying to ban 'rape porn', and criminalise distribution and position of that material. The word game is a fun one to play, so allow me to play it, rape is a very charged word, for good reason, because it's one of the worst things you can do to a person, but really think about this for a second, it would make sense if this law applied to content that actually depicted a sexual assault or rape, because that shit should be banned, but remember the word game, like my point about who would define porn in the last paragraph, who would define what is and isn't 'rape porn' in this context? This obviously wouldn't apply to just genuine depictions; it would apply to simulated depictions, 2 or more consenting adults role-playing in a safe environment. This, like the ISP porn blocker, is coming from a place of Puritanism, and they're just trying to make it sound sensible; as Cameron himself so retardedly said, "These images normalise sexual violence against women-and are quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them." #triggerwarning here, I can't fucking stand the normalise violence argument, because we live in a society that takes sexual violence very seriously, in fact, thanks to the climate created by modern feminism, the mere accusation is, as we have seen way too many times, enough to ruin someone's life; Rolling stone, Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, and all of the unnamed accuser cases where someone was accused of rape, and despite the accusation turning out to be highly questionable at best and outright fictitious at worst, they became the target of abuse and harassment from the public. People losing their jobs, losing their education, being ostracized by their friends and society in general, people killing themselves, all on the word of one liar, who probably won't face a day of jail time for wasting police time and ruining an innocent person's life. Frankly I find it disgusting that people would then say that sexual violence is 'normal' or 'being normalised'. Mini rant over, but fuck your bullshit Cameron. Curiously, this would have also applied to depictions of Bondage and BDSM, an activity that usually has safe words, you know, so it can be stopped immediately if the person or people involved feel in any way uncomfortable, meaning that when they're getting tied up and spanked and caned and other stuff, they're cool with it, remember my stance from earlier, if no one's getting hurt, where's the problem, and why should the government get to decide that there's a problem.

But those puritans won't be dissuaded so easily. In they swoop with new regulations on what is and isn't allowed in pornography produced in the UK, and like the last attempt to stop the evil porn machine, it seemed to be targeting less typical, more kinky pornography. The list of banned activities is a long list, but here are the highlights; fisting, female ejaculation, penetration by an object associated with violence, and physical and verbal abuse. Let's start with the 2 weirdest, female ejaculation, I'm not going to judge, people can like whatever they want to like, but it seems really odd that female ejaculation was banned and male ejaculation wasn't. Fisting, something the BBFC described as potentially life endangering, to which I have to say, you lot must be some really sick bastards; seriously, what's wrong with you if you think fisting is life endangering, your sex parties must be wilder than any of us can imagine, which would not only signify rampant debauchery, but rampant hypocrisy. Physical and verbal abuse, so, no whipping, slapping, caning, spanking, even if it's consensual, it should probably go without saying that physical restraint is also on this list, so Bondage is 100% out. Verbal abuse, like physical abuse, makes very, very little sense to me, so, no calling people losers, sluts, cucks, whores, the usual porno insults, it's funny how these bans intersect, humiliation is also on this list. But this applies to both of these things, why should it be banned if the people doing it are ok with it, it even specifically says that consent is regardless, so you're banning people from doing something they're ok with because, what? Because reasons? And easily the dumbest, Penetration with any object associated with violence, what the sweet fuck does that even mean, seriously, what does that mean, does that mean no sticking in guns, knives, hand grenades, pieces of Halo cosplay Armour, seriously it means nothing if you're not specific. let's get creative, in a film I once reviewed on this blog, a murderer kills someone by shoving a dildo down her throat and then taping it to her face, so she chokes to death, that's a pretty violent way of using a dildo, so now are dildos banned, because they should be, after all, they're associated with violence. These rules are stupid, very, very stupid, well beyond the point of comical, and what they do is further cement the image that the people making up these laws are just moronic puritanical busybodies, and like the think of the children and think of the women crap they pulled, they must have thought Hyperbole would work, it doesn't, it makes you look unhinged. But again it gets curious, these rules only apply to porn produced in the UK, porn produced elsewhere can still be distributed and viewed here, even if the content breaks these rules, which, when you think about it, makes these rules utterly pointless. In fact, let's have some fun, porn produced over here features tying people up and spanking them and calling them whores, the people making it are cool with it, and in the end they're selling it, making money, and contributing Britain's economy. But now they can't produce that porn here, meaning they either have to move elsewhere to continue making that material, or they're just boned, now that dirty porn money is no longer going into our economy. Being silly is fun, and the government doesn't seem to like fun when it bothers their precious little sensibilities, so maybe they should stop it.

And now, we get to today, and once again, this time under new management, our government is making another push to control and regulate porn. And it seems they really have a hate boner for more fringe sexual tendencies, which is funny because at this point I'm starting to get a bit of a hate boner for them. very much like the attempt to blanket block porn sites, this new proposal would prohibit people from watching 'non-conventional sex acts', just like every other time they've tried this shit, the definition they give is entirely nebulous and completely lacking in any reasoning. But as usual, I can imagine it targets Bondage and BDSM, among other things, I can also imagine this will include gay porn, lesbian porn, interracial porn, porn depicting different sex positions, in fact at this point I can imagine the only porn that's allowed is through a hole in a sheet, purely for the purpose of reproduction, recreational sex is banned from UK porn. That might be a bit too far, but no more than the fucking stupid busybodies who want to control what people do with their personal lives, this is where I really start getting mad, because first they stopped people from making porn that depicted content they didn't like, now they're on their way to passing the Investigatory Powers bill, the most abhorrent surveillance they can get away with short of just putting cameras in everyone's homes. And now they want people to stop watching porn that they don't like, literally, the children argument failed, the women argument failed, the women argument failed again, now they should just give up and be honest, they're a bunch of puritanical pricks who want people to stop doing any kind of hanky panky that they don't personally like. This actually does piss me off, because this is what scares me, how they will chisel away at people's freedom one piece at a time, so as to not draw attention to the fact that they're trying to take away people's freedom. This time they're trying to control what people are allowed to get off to, and taking that control away from the people, where it should be, because they're not fucking children who need mommy state to keep them safe from things that mommy state gets her panties in a bunch about. Honestly, the Investigatory Powers bill is the reason I don't plan on voting Conservative in the future, like the Labour party, it'll just be party I refuse to waste my vote on, because while the Labour party is run by spineless weasels and closeted communists, the Conservative party seems to be run by nosey buggers who want to tell you what you can and can't watch and want to watch what you get up to in your private life.

I would hope that the politics of the world we live in aren't completely fucked, and that there is situation where the people win, but there isn't, America had to choose between a business man with no political experience, and a war monger who only cares about herself and the international and corporate interests that fund her, to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars. UK politics is at this point no better, one of the 2 biggest parties has been in a state of civil war and is almost unelectable, and the other seemed to think that 1984 by George Orwell was a guide on how to govern a society. Let's hope that one of these parties is electable by the next election, that or UKIP has it's shit together and is actually offering something other than independence, which is something the Conservatives should be giving us, but now it just looks like yet another reason for me to not bother voting for them. I think I'm starting to sound like a Libertarian at this point, but I don't think the government should have the power to dictate what people can and can't see, because once again it's a slippery slope, first it's porn, what's next, movies, political propaganda, things that make them look bad, once again, they'll take your freedom away slowly, once they take something, they'll take more, and more, and they cannot be allowed to do that.

Bring on the Meteor

Several months ago, before a considerable period of inactivity, I posted a blog titled Social Justice Jackasses, which was basically me rambling about stupid politics for a few paragraphs, going on about Ghostbusters being sexist [not], Battlefield 1 being sexist [not], and Milo Yiannopoulos' suspension from Twitter being a bad thing for freedom of expression and for Twitter as a company [actually not not]. I actually enjoyed writing that mess, but one thing I didn't like was its very stupid name, a name I slapped on it when I couldn't think of anything better at the time. The new name is, I feel, much more interesting, and good lord has some really stupid shit happened in the downtime, including one of the most hilarious political events to happen in the last few years, and I'm in the mood for another ramble, so let's begin this feast of stupidity.

So, the most racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, whatever other buzzword means you qualify for the basket of deplorables ophobic candidate in the history of America, Donald Hitler Trump, won the 2016 election. Sorry for the mocking, but in all honesty, to see just how utterly worthless those stupid buzzwords have become brings a smile to my face, as does the bitching and crying from the mainstream media and the SJW dimwits who had all their money on Hillary. Like the EU referendum, I went to bed thinking the side I wanted to see win would lose, and just like Brexit, the result I was for won, I'm not ashamed to admit that I am very glad that Trump won the White House, it's a relief that a war mongering corporatist sellout didn't win, and while some of Trump's ideas, both including and excluding the ones he's currently back peddling on, are stupid, his message of 'Make America Great Again' certainly resonated more with me than Hillary's stupid rainbow pandering 'Stronger Together' nonsense, I say that as a Brit, therefore as someone who didn't have a vote in the election. His victory, just like Brexit, represents a rejection of globalism and the political establishment, which is my main reason for liking Trump, it's good to see the culture shifting away from the plague of identity politics, and the pathetic buzzwords they use lose all of their power, and it seems that they really are stupid, because even now, after he won the presidency, these morons are still going with their Trump is Hitler bullshit. And like how the Remain bitches blamed old people here in Britain, the Hillary bitches went after all the white people, not realising that targeting a racial group is textbook racism, but you know, intersectionality and oppression and all that nonsense, isn't that right, Laci.

Now that my general thoughts on the Election are out of the way, I'll get into why I brought it up, a little musical called Hamilton. Donald Trump's VP Mike Pence went to a performance of Hamilton, and after the performance, one of the actors; a Brandon Victor Dixon, addressed Pence and asked him to listen to a message, a message that has started a shit storm on the internet. Having watched the video of the message, I can say it's a message that, in and of itself, isn't inherently bad, protecting and respecting people's rights is, as I will cover later, something I am very much in favour of, and as an individualist, I believe that everyone is entitled to their human rights, regardless of what colour their skin is or what is between their legs. The issue I take with this situation is more the place, and the delivery. it wasn't addressed to the whole theatre, it was addressed specifically to Mike Pence, a man who apparently thinks you can electrocute the gay out of people, I don't know if that's true, but given that he's a republican, I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt. I could be able to give this a pass if Donald Trump didn't vow to protect LGBT people from what is currently their greatest threat, the blatantly Homophobic ideology of Islam, which Merkel and Trudeau and, before she lost, Clinton, seem dead set on importing as much as they can. In addition to that, when questioned about gay marriage, Trump described it as a done deal, which, if that's true, means that electroshock therapy for gays isn't coming to America any time soon. In that regard, the message addressed directly to Pence seems to be coming more from a place of ideology than of objectivity, which isn't good. This is all me now, but I think that the theatre is a place for telling stories, you can have a message if you can tell a story that is engaging and interesting, it's why I still like films by Joss Whedon, and games by Neil Druckmann, even though the pair of them are ardent Feminists, and I hate feminism with a passion.  But when the message is expressed in a way that doesn't add to the story, or takes precedence over the story, or in this case, just literally gets its own bit at the end, I take issue, just as I would take issue if at the end of Uncharted 4 or The Last of Us, Druckmann came out and started telling me about the importance of gender equality in gaming. I personally think that this address was delivered in a place and in a way that it shouldn't have been, as it compromised both the message and the story. I don't think Trump is right that the theatre should be a safe space, but I do agree that it should be a special space, where the mind is challenged not by a direct political message, but by the mix of intrigue and emotion that drives a good story.

Now onto something less intelligent, the terrible racism of Dead Rising 4. So, Dead Rising 4 is fast approaching, and I'll be honest, I have little interest in playing it at launch, I played Dead Rising 3, and it was alright, and I will almost certainly pick up Dead Rising 4 in the future, but for right now, I'm fine with my Titanfall 2 and my Gears of War 4 and my Bioshock Collection. But even with my lack of interest in the game itself, slap a buzzword on something and I'll probably come sniffing. This time the buzzword is racist, because Microsoft sent out an email that, as you can see, reads NNNNGGGHHHAAAA. Now, to a normal person, who knows Dead Rising is a game about zombies, this looks like a classic zombie moan, because it is one, it's just a bit less wordy than BRAINNZZZ. But to some people, it's a deliberate allusion to a certain word that us pasty crackers aren't allowed to say, you know what word. By this point, to be honest, I don't get mad at these people very often anymore, I feel bad for them usually, because to see racism and sexism literally everywhere, even in places where it is very, very clearly not, like how far apart a man's legs are when he sits, or how cold office air conditioning is, or, in this case, seeing a racial slur in a harmless email, your life must truly be miserable if you see nothing but bad everywhere you go, as a somewhat nihilistic fellow myself, I know the feeling, seeing the bad in everything I mean, not seeing racism where it just doesn't exist. There is someone in this situation I am mad at though, Microsoft, the spineless, kowtowing little cunts, who haven't seemed to have got the message yet that when an SJW calls you racist, that doesn't immediately make you a racist, it makes them stupid. Microsoft went and apologised, which now makes Microsoft the stupid ones, you don't apologise when you did nothing wrong, and you didn't, you apologised because you're scared of the slings and arrows that will come your way if you don't, which is something you should never do with SJW's, because once they smell blood, they'll go in for the kill, they pull the buzzword card again, and they go braver and harder, until they have their dicks firmly all the way up your arse. Microsoft should not have apologised, they should have held their ground, and, though they obviously can't say it in such a direct manner, tell people offended by their harmless email to fuck off, sod the backlash you'll get for being racist, the rational people who don't see racism everywhere won't come after you for being pussies, and they're the ones who'll probably buy an Xbox One and play your games, not the SJW's who are too busy being offended by everything to have a bit of fun. I know what I'd do, put 'now with even more NNNNGGGHHHAAAA' on the Xbox One version's box, just to drive it home that you won't kneel to a bunch of hypersensitive moral busybody bullies.

And now for the thing that made me want to do this ramble, I guess you could say I was #triggered by the fact that my country is on its way to being George Orwell's worst nightmare. It seems that government efforts to control the internet just refuse to die, like a racist zombie they just keep rising again and trying to eat you, whether it's SOPA, the great firewall of China, or now the Investigatory Powers bill, which was proposed by none other than our current PM Theresa May, who is really dragging her feet on that whole Article 50 thing, but I digress, and would require UK internet providers to record the internet activity of the people it provides internet to, and compiling that data that can then be accessed by the police. I've had a few Facebook spats with people who argue the supposed merits of compiling data on citizens using the internet, they say it will be used to catch terrorists and child abusers, so I did some mathing. Let's be honest, the demographic that poses the greatest threat when it comes to terrorism in the west is Islam, obviously not all Muslims are terrorists, but it does seem that a few of them do get a sudden urge to strap bombs to themselves. According to the 2011 census, which is the most recent number I could find, 4.5% of the population of the UK are Muslim, that's a couple million people, let's break it down a bit more, of those 4.5%, polls I could dig up suggest that up to 20% of them have sympathy for the 7/7 bombers, that in and of itself should be alarming, but it's still a tiny number of people overall, a few hundred thousand at most, making up less than 1% of the total population, even if that number is wrong, at the absolute worst extreme end of this spectrum, the number of Islamic terrorists is capped by the Islamic population in the UK, which is still only 4.5%. Is 1%-4.5% a big enough percentage to justify spying on 100% of UK internet users? I'd argue no, not even close, in fact I'd go as far as to say that when people say the bill can be used to catch terrorists, they're either ill informed, or liars. Because me, my family, my co workers, my friends, I have a very hard time believing that any of them have dreams of being a terrorist, but yet they all use the internet, so their providers would be archiving their activities, keeping tabs on the sites they visit, the searches they make and the messaging apps they use. Being a bit comical for a second, I wouldn't want my friends and family to know what porn I watch, so why would I want the government to know that, why would I want the government to know everything I'm doing on the internet. One right I think all people are entitled to is the right to privacy, and for very obvious reasons, this isn't very friendly to people's privacy, which makes me less than excited. Another argument that came up in the Facebook spat was that it's only the internet. And that's how they do it, they don't take your freedoms out right, they take little bits, they chisel away at it, telling you lies like we need to catch the terrorists, promising you security in exchange for privacy. I remember once Scotland Yard suggesting that people should put cameras in their homes to catch burglars, which is Orwellian and stupid. But here's the thing, now everyone already has cameras, on them most of the time, and they also use that camera to access social media, google random stuff, and watch Youtube videos, what's next, phone companies are required to compile data from people's phone cameras, and hand that data over to the police with no need for a warrant, this shit has happened before, is it hard to imagine them trying something like it on a large scale, on a country wide scale. And another primary concern I have, as well as privacy, is intimidation and blackmail, what if they start tracking specific web pages, they start archiving everything, and then you say something they don't like, and, going back to porn, they decide that it would be a terrible thing if your friends and family found out you watch Dwarf porn or vegetable fetish porn or whatever weird shit you're into, this doesn't just apply to porn, it can apply to gambling, dating, shopping etc., but you get the point, what's stopping the police who have this data from abusing the power that the data gives them, using it to intimidate people, something the police isn't exactly innocent of doing. Given the utter debacle that reared its head in Rotherham, and how the police were, at best indifferent, and at worst complicit, in the abuse rings, and how people who tried to blow the whistle were smeared as racists and attention seekers and intimidated into silence; it wouldn't be a matter of if they intimidate people, it would be a matter of when.

Principally, I am concerned with the protection of people's individual rights, and I loathe with a passion, people who would like to take those rights away, whether that be the right to freedom of speech in the case of the regressive left, freedom of religion and movement in the case of religious zealots, the right to vote in the case of greedy elitist Bureaucrats, or the right to privacy in the case of the snooping big government. And admittedly, being one person, with a very small reach here on my tiny blog, I can't make that much of a difference, but while I can still enjoy my freedoms, I will, because saying something is better than saying nothing.