loon pond: Jim Wallace, and why a Savonarola paywall preventing membership of Club Sensible might solve the problem with the Internet filter thingie ...

(Above: is it only me that finds this image truly weird? You can find more weirdness at the ACL website here).

Sometimes it gets too much to bear, the thought of sneaking into Club Sensible - actually a deep cover franchise code word for loon pond - to catch up on the views of Christopher Pearson, and not even a glass of port to hand, while subsiding into the leather chair, and popping out with a pompous 'egad sir, I say, wot wot, it's all the fault of this red headed woman chappie fella, the state of the country and the world, wot wot' will help.

Sure that Pearson chappie sounds like a refugee from a movie about George III - we have our eye upon him - but if you want to read the opinions of a person who denies climate change is happening - yet feels free to expound on the best solutions to the non-existent problem - why then Pearson's your chappie fella, and Cabinet leaks show depth of Gillard's problems is your cup of cake.

We were too fatigued - the relentless bias machine known as The Australian can do that to you.

Even the so called token lefties are in a rage there - well there's only one, that hapless gherkin Phillip Adams, who upped and resigned from Labor party before heading to New Orleans for a taxpayer funded junket, leaving us to contemplate this kind of bot mot:

... Kev is happiest discussing theology. I asked him what he was reading on the campaign trail. “Biographies of Martin Luther and Savonarola.” Why was I not surprised? Mention Savonarola at an ALP sausage sizzle and they’d think of a frankfurter in a bun. (Not the Kevin I know).

Indeed. Here's how the wiki on Savanarola begins:

He was known for his book burning, destruction of what he considered immoral art, and hostility to the Renaissance.

Indeed. What an exemplary study for former Chairman Rudd. Savonarola did have his redeeming features - anyone who calls the Roman Curia a 'false, proud archaic wench' isn't all bad - but it did remind me of a storm in a teacup earlier in the week, mounted by Jim Wallace as he snuffled through Internet filter puts the common good first.

Jim copped 181 comments, including a copious amount of abuse, for all that he tried to elevate himself and his noble cause by an opening gambit quoting Oscar Arias Sánchez, 1987 Nobel peace prize-winner.

Two can play at that game of course, and so I felt the need for a little Orwell, and a few words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm, which you can find here:

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian régime is a mainly evil thing, and I claim the right to say so, in spite of the fact that we are allies with the USSR in a war which I want to see won. If I had to choose a text to justify myself, I should choose the line from Milton:

By the known rules of ancient liberty.

Jim of course has no time for that kind of high falutin' tosh.

Perhaps the most bizarre objection though was from the US ambassador, who described the need for the net to "be free the way we have said skies have to be free, outer space has to be free, the polar caps have to be free, the oceans have to be free". How could anyone disagree?

Well naturally Jim finds a way to disagree.

But every one of those mediums is subject to restrictions as to what can and can't be done there; it is the only way to ensure they are maintained, as the ambassador rightly said they should be, ''as a shared resource of all the people in the world''.

Um actually Jim, right at this moment, there are rules that govern the full to overflowing intertubes. Get caught publishing defamatory remarks, and you might get done over in a court of law; get caught with child pornography and you might find yourself doing jail time; get caught downloading naughty intellectual property and once upon a time the music industry would lavish a fortune in lawyers' fees to hang you from the yardarm.

The notion that the Intertubes is a giant, ungovernable out of control jungle of course suits the likes of Jim and his tribe of the fearful and the fearing and the afraid, but what is remarkable is how much self-regulation there is, and how the best kind of regulation involves applying the laws of the land, rather than a giant all purpose filter that won't work.

But we've been down this path before, and all the arguments are well rehearsed, and the only piquant note was Jim's plaintive closer:

Are we disappointed with the delay? Yes, but we are also realistic enough to realise that ISP filtering was not going to get through Parliament before the federal election anyway, given the lack of time and the need to ensure it was implemented in the most transparent way possible.

Despite the delay, we welcome the federal government's continued commitment to a policy that puts the welfare of children and the common good above the "free for all" desires of the few. It is time for the Coalition and the Greens to match its commitment.

Not if they want my vote, they won't.

Abbott of course won't go near the topic, at least until after the election, and then if he wins, he'll most likely carry on like Conroy in drag. But since he's a luddite, and already committed to scrapping the NBN, and throwing Australia back to the twentieth century in terms of being a wired society, even he might find it a little too hard. And if the Greens get in, and hold the balance of power, why look out Jim, we might be suffering anxiety for years to come ...

Sheesh, where's our Savonarola when we need him ...

Of course not all censorship is bad. Self-censorship is to be encouraged, and it's pleasing to report that Chairman Rupert's exercise in self-censorship with The Times is proceeding splendidly. Thanks to Beehivecity, we understand these are the recent figures:

Number of people registering for The Times and Sunday Times websites during the free trial period: 150,000
Update 19/07 noon: I’m now hearing from official sources that this number is in fact somewhat higher. But I’m hearing no challege to the more important numbers below
Number of people actually agreeing to pay money: 15,000
This figure, apparently, is considered disappointing. And if it’s right it’s certainly a slow start (right now Beehive City considers itself bigger than Times Online, and we ain’t lying either). .
But there is more obviously positive news too.
Number of people paying for The Times’s separate iPad application: 12,500

Dan Sabbagh then did a breakdown of that data, but since it's a little detailed, why not give him a hit at Times paywall: more analysis of the data.

Jolly hockey sticks good stuff. Is it cheating to quote one word of his? Defeat ...

Oh sweet galumphing galloping gushing galoshes of joy, or as Harold Hare used to say in Jack and Jill, goody goody gumdrops. Ain't alliteration fun ...

Meanwhile, wasn't there talk at one time of The Australian going behind a paywall in the second half of the year? And I see by the clock that tomorrow is the first day of August, and how time flies when we're all having fun.

Bring it on, and the sooner the better, so that I no longer have the chance to visit Club Sensible, let alone pay for the pleasure of membership ... not to mention the pleasure of not chancing on the odd Phillip Adams' Club Bleat scribble urging Savonarola on us ...

Meanwhile, to wrap it all up, a bit more Orwell, but instead of his concern below for the Daily Worker and Oswald Mosley - now there's an odd couple - why not give it an antipodean flavour by substituting the name David Hicks?

These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen’s college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves! Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the ‘anti-Fascism’ of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?

So it goes Jim ...

(Below: and is it only me that thinks the image is truly weird? Are they telling the strangely glassed kid to talk to the hand?)