IN round 1 of the SuperBlogger debate over at News.com.au neither Bernadette McMenamin nor Senator Bernardi were willing to put any back into their posts.
It’s interesting to see that the opening shots fired in the battle were between a woman for whom public terror equates to pay day and the man that tried to have Gordon Ramsay kicked off the air for swearing.
McMenamin is no surprise as a participant in this debate, we have all come to expect Bernie McMenamin to use children like a human shield when she’s not stepping over them to get to government funding.
The Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, however, is a self confessed social conservative and surprise supporter of the No Clean Feed movement.
The points that both have raised in their respective posts have been made before, there hasn’t been anything terribly original and to analyse it again here would be wasting your time. The way these points were made, however, is telling about the broader reality of the subject.
The point of McMenamins post was, besides scaring the bejesus out of anyone with kids, to ask politely if filter critics would be willing to wait for this next trial to finish before we say it won’t work. It was a passive-aggressive whinge.
Cory’s language in particular was passive and gentle. It’s no surprise, McMenamin had just written about the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people wanting to watch children being raped. His appeal to the government to stop barging parents out of the way was softly spoken in a situation where a roar would barely suffice.
McMenamin’s bullshit about the filter being supported by child abusers is horribly irresponsible. Any trained psychologist that works with these fiends knows that normalisation, even in the tiny excuse she offered them, is dangerous.
Of course child abusers support the filter, they’ll just keep using their technological back doors and enjoy the fact that it’s now harder to catch them out because of the filter.
Of course child abusers support the filter. If the filter goes in then parents will slowly but surely rely on it to protect their children, making it easier for predators to use more direct methods of online predation as parents allow themselves to turn their backs ‘for just a second’.
Of course child abusers support the filter. The filter will look like the government has won against the final boss of the Internet and can start cutting funding to the police that track down these predators without anyone causing a fuss.
Bernadette McMenamin is unwittingly playing right into the hands of child abusers everywhere by supporting this filter. Unfortunately the joke won’t be on her, there will be no joke, there will be unintended consequences caused by the myopia of Bernie herself, her organisation and the government that pays her.
Her tactics may be reprehensible but her heart is well and truly in the right place, and for that, I applaud her. Until facts prove me otherwise I believe it is right that her organisation is funded and allowed to continue its good work. I believe that anything to protect children is worth investigating.
Just because you say you’re doing something for the children doesn’t mean it will actually protect them. I think McMenamin’s research assistants need to have a better look at the situation and realise that there is a reason child abusers support the filter, and it’s not the reason they gave publicly.
For my analysis of Bernardi’s post, refer to my article about Parents against the Clean Feed.
P.S. Does anybody else see an uncanny resemblance between Bernie and Ita Buttrose?
