Disclaimer: I know I am breaking my own rule of not getting vocal about politics, but hey, I couldn’t help myself. It is also about politics in the UK. I promise I won’t feel bad if everyone ignores my little rant below…

Since yesterday I’ve been having a hard time keeping quiet. In between all the excitement about a baby being born which in no way affects any of us really, David Cameron made a confusing announcement which was covered by my radio station of choice in just one sentence: “David Cameron plans to block internet porn by means of an ‘opt-in’ system” or thereabouts. On my drive to and from work, I only half listen to the news bulletin usually, but this made me wake up; hang on, he’s doing what, now? This deserves further research…

In short, as far as I could gather, David Cameron is trying to save our children from being corrupted by the great evils of internet pornography. Oh and to make him look like a total hero, let’s toss around the terms rapists, paedophiles and child porn a few times so everyone will automatically agree with his plans. In fact this proposed measure is not (just) about blocking access to child porn or videos of abuse. He wants the entire internet to by default be the happy, fluffy, child-safe zone it has never been. But only with regards to sex. Violence and hate mongering is still fine even for children to see, apparently. He is conveniently failing to mention the occasional decapitation video which is probably quite a bit more traumatising to children than your average cumshot.

While I guess most people might agree that children should not accidentally be able to stumble across (child) porn, his plans of making ISPs implement a filter which is meant to block access to anything and everything adult in nature is ridiculous. Not only has he gone around calling his wonderful idea an “opt-in” system which if you don’t pay attention sounds great. Only if you listen carefully do you realise that you don’t “opt in” for the filter, you get the filter by default. You need to “opt in” to porn. Great. So you will need to contact your ISP, tell them you’re a pervert who likes to look at adult material, and ask for the filter to be turned off.

Dave, you cunt, that’s called opting OUT, not in!

Also, I like to think I’ve seen my fair share of the internet, starting from when I was young, impressionable and still in school. I can’t recall often finding myself in the situation where I’m looking for say a recipe or a book review, and accidentally encountering a video of someone getting it up the ass. If I want to see that sort of thing, I have to specifically search for it.

The first thing that crossed my mind was: wonderful, so every ISP will have a neat little record of all the deviants who asked for the filter to be turned off. How handy, since more than likely any potential rapists or child molesters are likely to be amongst those who would like their porn back, so those can perhaps more easily be monitored. The second thing I thought was, but filters don’t work, do they? As clever as technology has become, even Google can’t figure out how to eliminate false positives and adult content with seemingly innocent descriptions being misclassified by child safe filters. What hope do the mere humans at the ISPs have? (On a side note, would you like to see a wonderful example of filtering gone wrong in action? Open up Tumblr on your mobile and try searching for “gay” or “bisexual”. Yep. No results. Just why they would assume that all gay and bisexual content is unacceptable/pornographic in nature is beyond me.) Also, does anyone think it would take the average horny teenager more than 5 seconds to bypass the filter? I think not.

Of course mentioning the phrase “child porn” is getting especially Daily Mail readers very excitable. Why and how can anyone oppose such a thing when child porn is so very obviously evil? Listen up, dickheads, child porn is already illegal to watch, possess and distribute.

We do NOT need any more laws to ban it!

And remember when we hear those stories, of those shitty totalitarian regimes we’re so pleased we don’t have to live in, banning random things they don’t like online? How the internet in China for example only gives you the squeaky clean version of how Tibet isn’t actually Tibet but has always been part of China and the locals just love it that way? Remember how we feel relieved that we in fact have a free, uncensored internet which doesn’t just represent the assholes who happen to be in charge of the country?

Yeah. Not for long. The slippery slope argument gets dragged out for a lot of things nowadays, but is it really so far fetched to think that what our wonderful government stands for today might change a few elections from now? What if they’d like to filter out a little bit more then?

This whole situation is a big clusterfuck, and I’m not even going into the fact that while Cameron has been out congratulating himself for being our moral protector, his government is responsible for cuts to organisations which support victims of abuse.

Fucking Tories. Screw this, I’m going home.