From Thoughts on Freedom ( where they aren't allowed to tell you which websites you can get fined $11,000/day for linking to, because the list is--no shit--secret ), here's the story of Wikileaks fighting back. Wikileaks published the original list of now- verboten sites , and Wiksters are not about to knuckle under to the jackbooted thugs of censorship. Their strategy? We'll extradite the bastards to Sweden: WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE (for immediate release) Thu Mar 19 23:07:20 EDT 2009 “Wikileaks to Conroy: Go after our source and we will go after you.” The Stockholm based publisher of Wikileaks today issued a warning to the Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Steven Conroy, who is responsible for Australian internet censorship. Senator Conroy issued an official media release yesterday in response to Wikileaks’ release of last year’s confidential Australian internet censorship blacklist. The Senator said that his department, ...

... as in the new internet censorship scheme in Australia? I don't think, after this post from Thoughts on Freedom , that you can legitimately call it filtering any more: The Federal Government’s unspeakable internet filtering plan just got a whole lot scarier: THE Federal Government’s controversial internet censorship scheme may extend to filter more online traffic than was first thought, Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy revealed today. In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial. “Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,” Senator Conroy said. Oh good. Because stateful inspection of every peer to peer connection in Australia is sure to go off without a hitch. When the government first came out with the filtering pla...

... I'm going to run the photo of the old Scorpions album Virgin Killer [h/t From the Barrel of a G un] that got Wikipedia censored by the European Union's Internet Watch Foundation. Here's JD at Disloyal Opposition : If you're British and having a bit of trouble accessing Wikipedia today, you can thank the censors for your research roadblocks. The Internet Watch Foundation, a regulatory organization that calls itself "an independent self-regulatory body, funded by the EU and the wider online industry," added a Wikipedia page to its almost universally used (in the UK) "notice and take-down" service, essentially putting the page on the forbidden list for British Internet users. That's all the more reason to get acquainted with technologies specifically designed to defeat censorship. The forbidden Wikipedia article is devoted to the Virgin Killer album by the German heavy metal band, The Scorpions. The naked prepubescent girl on the cover was cont...

From Classically Liberal : Alan McEwan was charged, tried and convicted of owning child pornography in his native Australia. But, before you jump to conclusions, the alleged porn he owned was a satirical cartoon of the characters from the Simpsons. Now, I must admit it never occurred to me that anyone could consider sexual images of the Simpsons to appeal to anyone's "prurient" interests. It would seem most people would find the cartoons silly while some would find them amusing. But the courts in Australia ruled that these rude cartoons qualify as child porn because some of the characters, such as Bart and Lisa are under the age of consent. Are you getting this? That these characters are entirely imaginary doesn't matter. The judge ruled that under the law "person" includes "fictional or imaginary characters." He also said that just because "the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of human being did not m...

Sometimes there are threads that just take off in tail-chasing directions that nobody (especially not the author of the original post) anticipated. People get caught responding to increasingly tangential arguments and starting making more and more bizarre arguments, kind of like an out-of-control driver repeatedly over-steering until he slams into the retaining wall at 75 mph. I usually chuckle at these feeding frenzies when they occur at Delawareliberal or DelawarePolitics , feeling mildly superiors (except of course when I'm directly involved; then naturally whatever I say is totally justified). But the current triple set of threads at Thoughts on Freedom, the blog of the Australian Libertarian Society proves what a lot of people (Dana comes to mind) have said about Libertarians can't simply be discounted. Sometimes we, too, eat our own young. It all started innocently enough: Indian Libertarian Sukrit Sabhlok posted on the same stats about prisons in America and China ...

This snippet of a (very) brief radio interview [that may not have actually happened--see the comments--it's still worth reading] courtesy my friends at Great Britain's The Libertarian Alliance : THE BEST COMEBACK LINE for 2007 … For those that don’t know him, Major General Peter Cosgrove is an “Australian treasure!” General Cosgrove was interviewed on the radio recently. You’ll love his reply to the lady who interviewed him concerning guns and children. It is a portion of an ABC interview between a female broadcaster and General Cosgrove who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters. FEMALE INTERVIEWER : So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base? GENERAL COSGROVE : We’re going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting. FEMALE INTERVIEWER : Shooting! That’s a bit irresponsible, isn’t it? GENERAL COSGROVE : I don’t see why, they’ll be properly supervised on the rifle rang...

Chris Berg at Thoughts on Freedom has presented an intriguing post on Libertarians and Culture, which begins: A peculiarity of critiques of modern capitalism is that it is, at least in part, an aesthetic critique. McMansions do not just create environmental and socially problems, they are also ugly. Plasma screens and home theatre systems are crass. Advertising on the scale that plasters New York or Hong Kong is obnoxious – European cities are much more refined. (The Melbourne City Council, well known for its trendy environmentalism, also has a thing against billboards.) By contrast, libertarians tend to reject aesthetics as even a valid criteria for political criticism. If someone wants to live in a McMansions or full their house up with expensive and ugly televisions, who are we to judge? And if you don’t like advertising, go have one of those ‘sea-changes’ that the weekend papers keep telling us is the new coolest thing. Spend enough time around other liberals or libertarians and t...

... is that they usually make a lot of sense. Real World Libertarian has two recent posts that are a case in point. Jim first points out that all the arch-conservative anti-McCain hoopla doesn't make much sense from where he sits, even if (or especially if) the subject is immigration: Well I am going to disappoint and upset most of my US friends on the net and support McCain, a difficult decision, but one, which had to be made in the face of the ANCIR and other racist groups attack on him. Sure immigration is a difficult issue to deal with and some hard decisions have to be made, especially in view of the sheer numbers of illegals in the US. However when I see calls for all of them to be booted out immediately, it becomes obvious that many of the proponents come from La La Land or somewhere close to it. The sheer impractability of it is breathtaking in its stupidity. Just how the hell do you take 12 million people out of a country in a period as short as six months as some advoca...

Over at Thoughts on Freedom, the Australian Libertarian Society Blog , there is a current post on school vouchers that starts by rethinking whether or not they should be means tested. I almost did not click the read more button, but then.... But then it took a turn I wasn't expecting; here's the segment where everything changed: I have traditionally argued that everybody should get an equal voucher, and that the voucher should not be means-tested. I now believe that it would be appropriate to means-test vouchers. My primary argument against a means-test was that by reducing the amount of the voucher for high-income earners this would increase the effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) faced by a person as they earn more income, and therefore contributes to the “poverty trap”. I still think this is true, but I now think it is outweighed by another issue. Everybody in Australia is on welfare. There is no such thing as a “self-reliant” Australian and each of us is both taking from a...

Recently I posted on t he Electronic Frontier Foundation's campaign to protect bloggers from Internet censorship . Here's an example of why it's critical. From Australia's Real World Libertarian comes a January 7 report that I just picked up that British authorities are arresting blogger Lionheart: I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986. This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, and all for writing words of truth about the barbarity that is living in the midst of our children, which threatens the very future of our Country. What has become of my homeland, the land my forefathers fought and died for on the battlefields of the world when one of their children is forced into the pos...

From Thoughts on Freedom --the Australian Libertarian blog--comes the report that the BBC has made another of its NewSpeak coverage decisions. Henceforth, all acts of terrorism committed by people who happen to be Muslims shall be specifically categorized as "un-Islamic . I think this means that BBC writers now qualify as crime reporters for the Snooze Journal. But Great Britain's pathetic attempts at censorship pale beside the opinion of Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagenstated, that “Freedom of expression doesn’t mean the right to offend."

Sometimes you get the best perspective from your friends abroad. Thoughts on Freedom, the Australian Libertarian Society Blog has an extensive article bringing Aussie libertarians up to date on the Ron Paul story. Here's their take on the newsletter controversy: About 20 years ago RP allowed his friend Lew Rockwell to publish a newsletter in his name, and he apparently used to write articles for the newsletter relating to foreign policy. In the early 1990s, when RP was out of politics and spending his time travelling & working, the newsletter included a couple of racist comments. The author of these comments isn’t known, but it was probably one of the many writers employed by Lew Rockwell. Ron Paul has strongly repudiated the racist sentiments in the newsletter, but he took responsibility for allowing his name to be linked to such comments and apologised. Over the years he has spoken repeatedly against discrimination against any groups, and he counts Martin Luther King and Gh...