«
»

Soft Power and Soft Thinking

Posted by Jacques Chester on Friday, August 1, 2008

Listening to the radio on my way to university this morning I overheard our Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby, talking about how he’d be telling our mates the Chinese to knock off the internet censorship thing; which didn’t exist until journalists discovered it last week.

Which is funny, because courtesy of Senator Conroy, Australia is going to introduce ISP-level censorship soon.

As an ex-diplomat the Prime Minister must surely be familiar with the concept of ‘soft power’, or as we call it, ‘not acting like a tosser’. I look forward to the next visit of the Chinese Premier to Australia, where no doubt he will take up the serious task of talking to his Australian friends about the problems with internet censorship.

Update: Via LP, tigtog’s update on Senator Con Roy.



 This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 12:21 PM and filed under IT and Internet, Journalism, Politics - international, Politics - national. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

5 Responses to “Soft Power and Soft Thinking”

  1. Francis Xavier Holden said:

    Not to mention that a lot of the technical advances in ISP censoring will be thanks to knowledge gained by google and others on how to censor properly in China.

    Posted on 01-Aug-08 at 12:53 pm | Permalink
  2. Tobias Ziegler said:

    A bit like US Senators loudly voicing their concerns that the Chinese are going to spy on visitors’ telecommunications during the Olympics.

    Posted on 01-Aug-08 at 1:09 pm | Permalink
  3. Patrick said:

    It will surely enhance our soft power no need – so many things topics of mutual interest!

    Does Kim-il Carr get a gong? He’d be mighty sore at missing out on Detailed Study of Optimal Industry Enhancement Programs with the comrades wouldn’t he?

    Posted on 01-Aug-08 at 1:56 pm | Permalink
  4. Tel said:

    As an ex-diplomat the Prime Minister must surely be familiar with the concept of soft power, or as we call it, not acting like a tosser.

    I’m sure he is even more familiar with the concept of “lip service” and “fooling some of the people, some of the time”.

    Posted on 01-Aug-08 at 6:33 pm | Permalink
  5. Stephen said:

    I know I’m writing this on the Internet, and thus am a dangerous thinker and prone to playing violent video games and being addicted to pornography, but I would vote Liberal in an instant if they promised to drop this stupid, stupid, nanny-state proposal.

    The reality is that any government-imposed censorship will inevitably lead to “inconvenient” points of view being blocked. Just like politicians can’t resist editing their own wiki pages, the temptation to control the terms of the debate is too strong.

    “No-one could object to us blocking hate speech from neo-Nazis on the Internet” can quite easily change to “No-one could object to us blocking websites by the Exclusive Brethren” … and the slippery slope from here is clear.

    Posted on 01-Aug-08 at 9:09 pm | Permalink

Leave a Reply