Archive for March, 2010

March 12, 2010 was marked by Reporters Sans Frontières as World Day Against Cyber Censorship.

A few months ago, at the height of Typhoon Ketsana, Rep. Juan Miguel “Mikey” Arroyo proposed regulating the Internet in the Philippines – Facebook and blogs among others – as they are susceptible to abuses.  We laugh and scoff at that idea because we think it’s impossible: either the Government lacks the technical skills necessary to control the medium, or that the Internet “cannot be controlled.”  Yet if Ella Ganda and the Pangandaman-Dela Paz issues prove anything, it’s that the enemies of free expresssion do not need to respond to online dissent with online methods: that offline repression works perfectly as an apparatus to control the Internet, and to silence dissent.

If a segment of the Philippine blogosphere would be up-and-arms over the matter of comment moderation, then it should highlight how nuanced freedom of speech is.  More than that, it should highlight how important those nuances are, and how important the whole is and should be.  If the many small things we bicker about in the grand scheme of Internet usage – slow connectivity, blocked websites, cyberbullying, and so on and so forth – would add up to a profile of how the Internet in the Philippines works, then we are definitely anything but free.

In Scottish literature, the highlight of the Burns Supper is the “Address to a Haggis,” that Robert Burns once penned to celebrate the Scot’s identity through food.  Incidentally, I was refreshing my memory with the poem about haggis when I read that the Catholic Church wants to ban condom advertisements because the condom – a rubber sheath – weakens the moral fiber of the youth.

Note, of course, that the fundamentalist belief is that a rubber sheath is the source of such sin and destruction.  Never mind that the condom is one of the best forms of protection against AIDS and other venereal diseases.  Never mind that condoms can help reduce the incidence of HIV and other sexually-transmitted illnesses.  Never mind that condoms represent one of the many ways to manage our population, to safeguard public health, and provides us all with the moral right to free choice.

Never mind that common sense dictates that the sight of a condom will not encourage promiscuity and stimulate one’s sexual unless that person has a condom-related paraphilia.  Yet we’re not talking about just big powerful groups here: we’re talking about big powerful groups whose idea of morality and immorality is based on a backward, medieval sense what they say is right and what they say is wrong, and any other argument for reproductive health is a sin and should be subject to contrition and penance.

Never mind that that’s all bollocks.