Porn

I read of two porn attacks in Saturday's DT.

The first concerned a councillor in Cambridgeshire. His story was that he was innocently browsing away on Google at home, using his shiny new council laptop. When all of a sudden all this porn got downloaded. So at the first opportunity, he took the laptop back to the council IT people to find out what was going on. Following standing orders about porned laptops, the IT people reported him to the HR people, who followed their standing orders and got into a lather. The Chief Executive went so far as to suggest that the offending councillor ought to resign. In the end, he was cleared, but he has lost rank in the council pecking order.

All of which strikes me as a bit OTT. Either he was not guilty of the charge and the HR people could have let it go at that. Or he had been peeking at a bit of porn, got the guilts and cooked up this story for the IT people. But is that really so awful? There is an awful lot of porn out there and an awful lot of people spend an awful lot of time looking at it. So he was a bit dumb to have used his work laptop for such a purpose, but scarcely a mortal sin. I might also add that in my very limited knowledge of such matters, the sort of porn that young adult males might gloat over while waiting for a girl friend to turn up seems to have got a lot more tacky over the past 50 years or so. Maybe the young males of today need a lot more stimulation to get them going? I blame all those E-numbers in everything we eat.

The second concerned the European Parliament which is considering banning porn throughout the European Community, rather in the way that they banned smoking and are thinking about banning fatness. Is it all a conspiracy to occupy the European Parliament with worthy causes of the kind about which everyone can have an opinion, sufficiently occupied that they have no time to worry about real policy? Like policy about banks & bankers, the decline of manufacturing or aging populations. Is it all a conspiracy to make large quantities of hay for the legal and enforcement professions? Is it all a conspiracy to put in place the sort of machinery needed for serious political censorship of internet content? The sort of thing that we complain about very noisily when other governments do it.