08.26.05
Politics Roundup - .xxx TLD and Cindy Sheehan
First up, I was reading this piece on boingboing about the Bush administration’s concerns about going forward with the already ICANN-approved .xxx top level DNS domain. In addition to the boingboing entry, I’ve seen stories on slashdot, and other places as well.
Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the Commerce Department says:
“The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children.”
I don’t get it. First let me state my position, I am a Republican but an honest conservative and I don’t see how it’s governmernt’s business to decide what should or should not be on the Internet in any case. I think all porn all the time is fine if that’s what the market decides.
On the other hand, I don’t have kids. But I don’t think that matters. I am sure that parents would not want their small children to have unrestricted access to the wild world of Internet porn. Certainly some adults also would prefer not to see that. But creating a .xxx top level domain and encouraging pornographic adult-oriented “red light” web sites to live in that domain would make it so much easier to filter.
There are many commercial products available today that provide you with a blacklist of objectionable sites and try to filter pornographic content out. It would be much easier for those products to work if porn were contained in .xxx and you could easily block access to the whole domain. I would think concerned citizens groups would be all in favor of a .xxx top level domain. In any event, I don’t see how it’s the US government’s role to weigh in one way or another.
Then there’s the stupid Cindy Sheehan non-event. Maybe it’s because I’m not a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t get what the big deal is. Her son volunteered to join the military, was deployed to Iraq, and was killed. That is unfortunate. But what is Ms. Sheehan’s goal at this point?
Apparently she wants to meet with President Bush, and when I first heard the story I thought to myself, “Well, that’s a reasonable request considering that her son did die for his country” But then I took one step beyond the bleeding hearts and actually did a tiny bit of Googling. Turns out, she did meet with President Bush shortly after her son died. From the Washington Post article:
Others have also raised questions about Sheehan’s account of her first meeting with Bush, which occurred two months after her son’s death in April 2004. Sheehan was part of a larger group of grieving family members who met with Bush at Fort Lewis in Washington state.
After the meeting, she was quoted by the newspaper in her hometown of Vacaville, Calif., as saying that the president seemed sympathetic. Subsequently, she has said that Bush treated her callously during the meeting.
So I don’t get it. She wanted a chance to meet with Bush and tell him her thoughts, and she got it. Now she has the national media focused on her political anti-war agenda. What more does she want? In a perfect world it would be great if the leaders of our democracy could meet with all of us on an individual basis whenever we wanted. That’s just not practical. I’m the first to agree that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The government does need to be accountable to us. But let’s be pragmatic.
