Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Why age ratings for websites would be a truly fucking terrible idea

From the Ministry of Silly Shit, comes this latest idea to clamp down on teh evilz of the world wide web:

Film-style age ratings could be applied to websites to protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said.

Oh, where to begin, where to begin? Who would decide, and how, and what would be deemed harmful or offensive? What on the internet can cause damage to a child - it's always the children they pretend to give a shit about, isn't it, but never the adults - and what kind of damage can it do? You're already scenting a whiff of censorship through the back door, aren't you? And I don't think I can blame you, my friends:

Mr Burnham told the Daily Telegraph the government was looking at a number of possible new internet safeguards.
He said some content, such as clips of beheadings, was unacceptable and new standards of decency were needed.

I disagree entirely. It may be shocking, horrific and deeply disturbing to see someone having their head sliced off, but that doesn't mean it should be banned from the internet, or from kids having to see it. Those appalling crimes against humanity deserve, if anything, a wider audience. People would then be left in no doubt as to what extremism can do. Similarly, I don't see why it's impossible to show the charred and eviscerated corpses of people blown up by 'our boys' or 'our allies' on the six o'clock news either. We live in a world of double censorship, where things are deemed to be too shocking for anyone to see ever (apart from nice journalists who are obviously immune to all this, and those poor individuals left to clean up the mess) except on the internet, the last communication frontier, where people are treated as adults who can see what they like - although that's changing, of course.

Yes, we might flinch over our mashed potato if we saw a beheading or a suicide bomb aftermath at teatime, but it's something that's happening in the world; real life doesn't come with an off-switch and maybe people should have to see some of these things to understand what really goes on. These are the results of the things that we're told about. It's not a fucking computer game; it is a case of human beings, with dreams and ambitions and hopes and emotions, being torn apart, destroyed and thrown away to further various ideologies. It's as nasty as hell, but it's happening. I honestly don't see what we gain by taking away people's ability to see it. Just as with the Abu Ghraib atrocities, when journalists were blamed for reproducing the pictures - and somehow therefore making something deniable into something that wasn't deniable - it's a case of shoot the messenger. It isn't, and it shouldn't be. Murder, violence, suicide bombings, air strikes - they're all pretty messy things that do some fairly disgusting things to the human body. Does that mean we shouldn't be seeing it? Will we all be heading off down the doctors asking for six months off with PTSD? Surely not. Surely we're designed to be able to stomach these things. Surely we should have the choice to see them.

The patronising cunt Burnham continues:

"Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do," he told the Telegraph. This is not a campaign against free speech... it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake
"This isn't about turning back the clock. The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways, but we haven't yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around it."

See, he's a Big Clever Man and he's allowed to see things. But we are just the unwashed plebs and if we saw things that were naughty or bad, they would damage us and make us go loopy. It's all very simple: we're simply not quite as advanced as human beings compared to the wise and noble leaders who rule over us. We should simply doff our caps and say: "Whatever you decide is acceptable for me to see, Mr Burnham, I'll trust you implicitly, thank you very much sir."

The implication, as ever to try and gain some support for censorship, is that children may be in some way damaged or altered in a bad way if they were exposed to the sort of stuff you can find on the net - you know, not just teh evilz of teh pron but also people being blown up and cut to bits and so on and so forth. And that age ratings might be a way around this - just like with films, what will destroy you internally and make you a gibbering chimp in a leather room at age 17 and 364 days will be perfectly stomachable just 24 hours later, because you will have gained so much more maturity and responsibility in that space of time.

Mr Burnham, a father of three young children, believes internet-service providers should offer child-friendly web access.

They already do, you dickless fucking wonder. There are already parental controls from ISPs. If you actually fucking knew anything about the thing which is supposedly your specialist area of expertise then you would be aware of that, but you've clearly never turned on a fucking computer in your entire life except to send an email to one of your lackeys to type up some gobshitedly awful bollocks about how the modern world is going to suck us into a giant Sarlaac Pit of doom.

"You can still view content on the internet which I would say is unacceptable. You can view a beheading," he said.

I'd say your fuckwitted opinions are pretty damned unacceptable, but I don't want to stop others from reading them, Burnham. For fuck's sake. I hope you got The Internet for Dummies for Christmas; you might actually learn one or two things about the thing you're supposed to actually know about. Not that that would stop you from being a reactionary tosswipe with appallingly scant grasp of the real world, but at least it would be a step in the right direction, you vacuous glob of precum.

On the issue of giving individual websites film-style classifications, Mr Burnham said: "That would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus."

It hasn't escaped my attention, of course, that this particular blog, with its evil bad language and disgraceful disrespect towards the great and good of the world, would undoubtedly be slapped with an 18 certificate, or worse. Ironic when you consider that people are always telling me you have to be under 18 to appreciate the quality of its writing, but there you are. The day that cunt Burnham starts putting certificates on websites is the day we all pack up and give up. Like the ill-fated V-Chip in the US, it's probably a proposal to represent moral concern over something you can't actually do anything about effectively, thereby changing nothing while pretending you're wringing your hands over it, but we'll see.

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