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India Blocks Adult Websites In Sweeping Censorship

1024px-Flag_of_India.svgThe India government is under fire for a sweeping censorship move blocking hundreds of adult websites as a social nuisance. A total of 87 websites were blocked — denying millions of adults the right to choose their own associations and entertainment. It is a triumph for morality codes and a significant erosion of free speech and privacy protections for the Indian people.

The government issued a 17-page order on July 31st that listed sites as immoral and indecent for blocking by service providers.

Notably, the move by the government is in defiance of the Supreme Court which ruled last month that it would not approve a ban on such sites and that individuals should be free to access such websites in private.

The government then moved unilaterally and over the weekend several sites became inaccessible and displayed messages that they were blocked on instructions of the competent authority.

It is the latest move by a government that has increasingly sought to deny citizens access and the right to choose their own entertainment. The government sought to ban twitter accounts as well as some movies. Notably, adult Internet sites like Pornhub have noted that India ranks fifth for daily visits in the world.

The continued attack on free speech in India is worrisome, particularly given a trend in the West. We have been discussing the crackdown on free speech in the West, particularly in England, France, and Canada.

I have long been a critic of the criminalization of symbols and gestures, even deeply offensive symbols like Nazi gestures. Europe has plunged into speech regulation and criminalization – showing that such laws create a slippery slope for the criminalization of unpopular speech. This course inevitably leads to increasing — and increasingly absurd — speech crimes. For example, I fail to see how arresting a man for a Hitler ringtone is achieving a meaningful level of deterrence, even if you ignore the free speech implications.

The problem is trying to draw such lines rather than embracing free speech as protecting not just popular but unpopular and even hateful speech. Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. For example, we have been following (here and here and and and here and and here and here) the worsening situation in England concerning free speech. As noted in a recent column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.

India has long shown an appetite for censorship that appears to have only grown — even in the face of the instructive decision by the Supreme Court. As a country with with one of the world’s oldest democratic governments and a society that has a rich artistic legacy, the attack on free speech in India is self-defeating and alarming. The effort to impose a state morality code harkens back to a bygone era in the West — a legacy of criminalized speech and associations. Not only will this effort to ban sites fail, the effort itself will only fuel greater and greater demands for speech laws and morality codes in one of the most pluralistic nations on Earth.

Source: Yahoo

21 thoughts on “India Blocks Adult Websites In Sweeping Censorship”

  2. @Squeeky

    No. It’s not “Going Japanese”. It’s called the “Grasseater”. They’re the type of guys who abstain from sex, marriage, and everything tangible when it comes to Japanese women. They buy tengas to play with, which is relatively cheap.

    For starters, there’s a youtube video about the ‘grasseaters’. Be warned that the media portrayed in the video is not accurate; rather, it paints and shames men into saying that they’re wrong and women are right. Basically, the interviewer asks male interviewees about their current situation but never asks women what became of their situation. He props them up, supports them, and even encourages them to shame those guys. It’s a one-sided horrorshow made to put “grasseaters” in a negative light. I can’t find the video but when I do, I’ll link you.

    On the strange side, they do have what’s called she-men who appear to be women but are biologically male. They pass off as true women in a club, act feminine, and hook up with guys who have a fascination with them. They have clubs there, as we do have clubs here in the United States. They’re more into that in the West or New York but in the State where I live, they fear people so much they don’t show up in the streets. Instead, they congregate with known people that are either a part of their clique, or are truly specified by a certain sexual orientation.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdrF_dAaZO4 <— this is about Japan's herbivorous men. They're figuratively called "grasseaters" where they stop having sex with women. They don't have relationships, and are turned off. They don't even view porn as a means to exert their need to satisfy through sex. They use tengas to do the job. And those men, in numbers, are rising fast!

    India's on that path. Either they cut down on the porn, restore their traditions, and start having men treat women with respect. On the other hand, if women keep browbeating men down, putting them down, even after they recover, those men will become grasseaters vowing not to respect women ever again.

    So, when women ask for too much, they end up finding out they get very little in return. Oh, so true even in the West.

  3. @Byron

    LOL! Well, them, too. But even those idiots are better than watching porn. I can’t understand all the liberal weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth about crap like porn. Our nation became great without easily obtainable porn. It was only like in the 1960s that porn became widespread and readily available. Have we become a stronger and better nation since then??? Hardly. Consider this:

    You may say, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about, Dr. Zoldbrod, you’re just being rigid and uptight and moralistic. I saw a ton of porn when I was a teenager, and I would have to say that it helped me be a well-adjusted sexual human being.”

    But that was porn back then.

    Few of us are in a position to listen to large numbers of people whose experiences with today’s porn have been devastating. In this society, talking about sex is pretty much off limits. But I talk to people about their sexual problems all day for a living, and people tell me the specifics about the mechanics and dynamics of their sex and sexuality, partnered and alone.

    So let me give you a brief outline about how porn is used these days by some boys and men. Unlike the olden days, when you looked at magazines like Hustler or Playboy and fantasized, or bought porn DVDs and masturbated to the stories — a thin plot starring a specific cast of characters — today’s free Internet porn is an unlimited, endless series of raw sex acts. There is no plot. It is non-stop penetration and orifices, with a large serving of violence. This is nothing like the porn experience of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s.

    Teens click from image to image, quickly looking for new sexy or shocking pictures. Teen brains are hyper-reactive to stimulation, and they are hyper-plastic. There is a saying, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” That means that just like Pavlov’s dog, teens who watch a lot of Internet porn are learning to associate this kind of insanely high visual stimulation to sexual arousal. There is no way that being with another human being can provide that kind of sexual stimulation.

    And notice, it’s all visual stimulation. There is no part of the arousal that is fed by touch, taste or smell.

    When teens use porn like this and actually still manage to have sex with another flesh-and-blood human being, sexual dysfunction is common. How can a boy navigate the give-and-take of real sex when his sexual template has been entirely centered on meeting his own timing and needs?

    http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/11/sex-therapist-internet-porn

    Not to mention the “going Japanese” effect we see n Japan, where 25%+ of young adults haven’t ever had a sexual relationship, and don’t reproduce. But, they have “Rape Man” to read about!

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  5. Hmm, is anyone else here having slow computer uploading problems today? Josh?

  6. Did quick check on India Adult websites. Nasty and perverted. Gay men having sex with boys, live sex, cam shows live, hookups. Women being beat, then have sex. Live peep shows.

  7. Pro-Russian blogger says France now in the grip of not-so-soft tyranny:

    http://www.unz.com/tsaker/frances-crif-run-regime-has-unleashed-a-vicious-persecution-campaign-against-dissidents/

    2. The French Zionist Lobby has now completely broken cover and is now engaged in a campaign of persecutions against those few who dare openly challenge its influence in France. All parties have been given an ultimatum: submit or be destroyed. The level and nastiness of the propaganda on French TV is now worse than anything I have seen in the USA or Soviet Russia.

    3. As I had predicted a long time ago, Marine Le Pen has caved in to the pressure of the Zionist Lobby and has turned against her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front who has now been basically booted out of his own party (for his allegedly anti-Jewish views). The Zionist Lobby appears to be unimpressed and continues to ostracize even this emasculated National Front.

    4. Alain Soral and Dieudonne are now the object of an open and systematic persecution by the French authorities, especially the Prime Minister Manuel Valls. The kind of persecutions methods used very much remind me of what the Soviet regime did under Leonid Brezhev: constant bureaucratic harassment, police searches, lawsuits, smear campaigns, threats, etc. I don’t even know how many lawsuits both Dieudonne and Soral are facing right now, but the total sum for which Soral is being sued right now is 264,523 Euros. Since Soral cannot and will not pay (on principle) it looks like he will have to go to jail, though before that he promised to appeal as high up as the European Court of Human Rights.

    5. The political scene in France is dead. With the sole exception of the tiny Égalité et Réconciliation there is no more resistance against the Zionist regime in power. Like in the rest of Europe, the Left and the Right have more or less merged into an “extreme center” which caters to the need of the comprador elites in power and which is totally subservient to the USA.

  8. Paul:

    Bride and prejudice was great movie. Does the Mike Myers film count?

    They have had porn for thousands of years although maybe the Kama Sutra doesn’t count since it is a how-to book.

  9. Squeaky:

    ” Watching a bunch of trash on a computer does no good for a society.”

    I guess you are talking about Rachel Maddow, salon.com and other liberal websites.

  10. India needs to move past pornography.

    The only way for India to become a great nation, led by example, with leaders who emphasize the symbolic spirit of India is to move forward from the quagmire of pornography, gang-raping women (which isaac is correct here), and more that seems to deteriorate the conditions of India.

    I think banning pornography and severely curtailing those efforts will no doubt cause a porn withdrawal among all the afflicted. They will be clamoring to ask for porn, want to see it, and/or will go to great lengths to see it. After all, the mind must have what it needs, regardless of its lack of value in the contributions of the afflicted to society at large.

    I don’t see it as part of a morality code. If anything, I see it as a way for addicts to start coping with the fact that pornography is addictive and the mind is a very powerful thing. If it can enslave, compel, and trick you into visiting more, it will. The hardest thing for the addict is to make the choice to overcome it.

    By the way, had the Supreme Court decisions been discussed among the pornographers and the attorneys fighting against it, I would have no doubt the decisions might have had some sway had the publication of the neurological science behind porn addicts been published, produced, and given to the Justices.

    India needs to go here: http://www.yourbrainonporn.com and join an E-SLAA group. This way, they’ll learn to cope with their addiction. If they truly want India to be great, instead of a laughingstock and a raping playground, they need to admit they have an addiction, resolve to overcome it, and fight against it. In 5 years after the addiction’s fully purged, they’ll start to see women, of all curves, as being fantastic. There’ll be no bias…

    Take it from me as I know what it’s like to be an addict, even still now and trying to recover.

  13. This appears to be an attempt to counter the activity of gang raping women in some parts of India. A stronger reaction to rape by the justice system: stronger penalties, eliminating ‘traditions’, focused education, women’s rights, etc would be the way to go here. Banning ‘adult entertainment’ is somewhat like hiding the problem.

  14. Free speech seems irrelevant to many until they are told or force to shut up! One mans obscenity is another’s manifesto for union organization or women’s rights.

    If the government of the US truly believed in the importance of free speech, the US wouldn’t defend Saudi Arabia, India and many others. Western nations should be wary of those who say they are doing it for the children!

  15. At one time in the United States bikinis, interracial relationships, gay relationships and mixed race classrooms were considered obscene by some localities and the government tried to ban them.

    The good news is citizens usually have more sense than bureaucrats and politicians in any nation. Ridiculous laws usually get overturned.

  18. The bans of certain websites are easy to circumvent. It is more symbolic than anything but regardless it is troubling from both a civil rights perspective and for adherence by the legislature to constitutional courts’ orders.

  20. After watching a ton of Bollywood films, I did not think India had access to adult sites. Learn something new every day.

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