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2 responses to “Mayhem and death with just one click – World Politics – World – The Independent #missingthepoint”

1. 2012/09/17

   Dave Walker

   A further problem is that this is going to be used as an argument in favour of Internet censorship – and preserving life, law and order makes for a compelling argument, it must be said.

   The question then becomes one of where the censorship takes place, in terms of at what point in the chain of connectivity – and therefore, what percentage of the Internet is affected. For example, I note from “The World Tonight” that Pakistan has just added a filter to block YouTube, as Google refused to take the videos down when asked.

   (There’s the matter of how effective the filters are, too – but that’s a topic covered in detail in other postings.)

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2. 2012/09/17

   Dave Walker

   Perception strikes, again.

   I found myself scratching my head, on hearing about attacks against British and German embassies. An attack against Germany makes no sense whatsoever, and neither does an attack against us – although as we (sort of) speak the same language as the Americans, it might be an honest mistake – although there’s the nontrivial matter of differences in flags flying from relevant poles.

   After all, geopolitical ignorance is relative; we all know where “the Middle East” is, but I suspect your average “man on the Clapham omnibus” probably couldn’t draw a rough set of national borders on an otherwise-blank coastal outline map of the area, and may not even be able to list all the countries there. The average “man in the souk” will probably have a similar level of geographical knowledge of “the West”.

   The biggest perceptive disconnect, though, is around freedom of speech. We assume we have it and the protesters don’t, (it’s debatable,) yet apparently there’s a view “over there” that the video has been screened on “US state-sponsored TV” (where the concept is an oxymoron, except for the Emergency Broadcast System).

   If the concept can be got over that YouTube is carefully neutral and bidirectional, and that aggrieved muslims are entirely free to compile and upload videos denouncing Christianity, US foreign policy etc, who knows, things might calm down a bit…

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