October 6, 2010
Fielding and Conroy’s race to the bottom. Voting distributions from ABS show that ‘Vote Below the Line’ campaigns were extremely successful.  Long story short, people either voted for right at the top, or right at the bottom.  People WILL remember your asshat behaviours on voting day and they will mobilise in large numbers to inform others of how to vote you out.  It may not have been totally successful but for zero funding and only word of mouth, being able to get 8% to intentionally vote someone last is a big achievement. Thanks to Gary Pendergast for his article that explains it all much better than I could.

Fielding and Conroy’s race to the bottom.

Voting distributions from ABS show that ‘Vote Below the Line’ campaigns were extremely successful.  Long story short, people either voted for right at the top, or right at the bottom.  People WILL remember your asshat behaviours on voting day and they will mobilise in large numbers to inform others of how to vote you out.  It may not have been totally successful but for zero funding and only word of mouth, being able to get 8% to intentionally vote someone last is a big achievement.

Thanks to Gary Pendergast for his article that explains it all much better than I could.

3:25pm  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/1254163067/fielding-and-conroys-race-to-the-bottom-voting
(No. OF NOTES: 3)
  
October 6, 2010
"The federal government has confirmed that circumventing the proposed internet filter could constitute a criminal offence."

—

Commsday, October 5th, 2010.

Shit just got real, people.  All the lies, god, so many lies.  How .. how can a person lie this much and keep their job?  How is this possible?

Get scared, get active.

9:30am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/1251929054/the-federal-government-has-confirmed-that
(No. OF NOTES: 8)
  
July 15, 2010
Politicians complain about parliament web filter

Internet filter running on Parliament net connection blocks things it wasn’t meant to, including several public transport timetable sites, iPad reviews, and a News Ltd talkback site.

Top quotes from the article:

“Getting individual sites unblocked is a particularly laborious process. If you need to use a website, you often do not have time to do that,” Ryan said. “How do you oversee what this thing is picking up?”

Department of Parliamentary Services deputy secretary David Kenny told Ryan the filter had been replaced in 2009 and that it blocked a list of sites. If members of parliament had complaints, he said, they should contact parliamentary official the Usher of the Black Rod as a first step.

10:56am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/813014958/politicians-complain-about-parliament-web-filter
(No. OF NOTES: 1)
  
July 9, 2010
Evaluation of latest comments

“We support the review that was announced today, we support and are willing to voluntarily commit to the blocking of the ACMA list of child pornography sites and we’ll continue to work constructively with the government as it undertakes this review,” Telstra public policy and communications director David Quilty told reporters in Melbourne.

What child pornography sites?  Conroy’s said on multiple occasions that child porn does NOT happen on the web and that’s not what the filter is about, so why’s it so important to block these sites that don’t exist?

“We’ll have to wait and see what the review comes out with, but we’ve said all the way through this is about blocking the worst of the worst,” he said.

Not true - this has changed constantly from Refused Classification, to illegal, to Child Porn, to “unwanted” material.  It has never been about any one thing.  We keep getting lied to about what this is actually supposed to stop.

RC content includes child abuse material, bestiality, rape and other extreme violence and terrorist acts.

Correct, however: the fact that paedophiles live in QLD does not mean all people who live in QLD are paedophiles.  Stop Affirming the Consequent.

Senator Conroy remained adamant that the internet filter proposal did not amount to censorship.

“I don’t think any Australian actually tries to describe blocking child pornography or bestiality or pro-rape websites as censorship,” Senator Conroy told reporters in Melbourne.

No, we don’t.  We do, however, not want to hand the keys to our freedom of information over to someone who can’t even decide on what he wants the filter to block, let alone have any measure of transparency in place.  This will stop material that is 100% legal, and anything else ‘unwanted’ that the government doesn’t think it’s in their best interests for you to access.  Especially not a government who has made it clear they are prepared to lie to and intentionally try to confuse the public as to its true goals, hiding it behind scare-tactics and throwing the words “child porn” around to try to squash criticism.

2:23pm  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/788031673/evaluation-of-latest-comments
July 8, 2010
Why do we keep hearing about child porn when that's not what the filter is about?

We constantly, constantly hear Conroy using claims about opting in to child porn, accusing anyone who doesn’t want a filter of being pro-sex-with-kids.

BUT NOW:

‘Senator Conroy said the Government had never claimed the filter itself would stop child pornography.

“We’ve never tried to pretend that this was a silver bullet, we’ve never tried to suggest this was the sole solution,” Senator Conroy said.’

In 15 years of Internet usage, I’ve never come across any of the kind of material he uses as scare ammunition.  Have you?  Has anyone you know?  Ask around - this is a boogeyman, used as a political camp-fire story.

10:53am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/783093601/why-do-we-keep-hearing-about-child-porn-when-thats-not
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
July 8, 2010
Historical view - lie counter on the original announcement

Logical fallacy: “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”
Reality: The filter will not stop child pornography, a fact that Conroy admits freely, but still uses the correlation to quash disagreement.

Lie: “Anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.”
Reality: They aren’t going to be able to.

Misleading: “The internet hasn’t ground to a halt in the UK, it hasn’t ground to a halt in Scandinavian countries and it’s not grinding the internet to a halt in Europe.”
Reality: That is because none of these places have mandatory filters.

10:41am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/783055886/historical-view-lie-counter-on-the-original
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
July 8, 2010
Affirming the consequent

Logical fallacy of the day - Affirming the consequent.

Affirming the consequent is a formal fallacy of reasoning that works backwards from an outcome to establish a cause, despite the flow of cause and effect.  It is a three-step argument.

1. If P, then Q.
2. Q.
3. Therefore, P.

Senator Conroy uses this often, and it’s parodied well at http://conroylogic.com/, which takes a nonsensical statement and uses it to accuse you of hating children, if you don’t want to protect them (with a filter).

1. Child pornographers would not want an internet filter.
2. You do not want an internet filter.
3. Therefore, you must be a child pornographer.

This ignores the virtual plethora of reasons a sound, rational person would not want the government controlling its access to information.  Conroy indirectly levelled this accusation at Kate Lundy for her proposed “opt-out” amendments to the filter.

“We have got an election commitment to deliver,” he said. When asked about his personal views of the proposed amentments, Conroy said: “I’m not into opting in to child porn.”[1]

10:22am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/782995113/affirming-the-consequent
(No. OF NOTES: 3)
  
June 18, 2010

New from Kogan:

Are you sick of spams and scams coming through your portal?  Never fear, the Portector is here!  

(context)

3:21pm  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/710447776/new-from-kogan-are-you-sick-of-spams-and-scams
June 13, 2010
Conroy's now defunct blog - 32+ pages of commenter outrage

For a while there, Conroy was operating a blog, despite a fundamental lack of understanding about how blogs worked.  Surprised and shocked that people could leave comments he didn’t like, moderation quickly started, and comments on nearly every article are filled with pages of unhappy people.

A blog whose comments were meant to provide accurate feedback on what the public thinks, was moderated.

The whole thing only lasted a few weeks, and the blog was pulled from the DBCDE web site after 10 months, remaining online only in their archive.

11:27am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/692165150/conroys-now-defunct-blog-32-pages-of-commenter
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
June 13, 2010
Conroy busted lying about Google's Wifi captures

He said: “[If] you were doing a banking transaction, or transmitting personal information, they could have hoovered it up, sucked it up into their machine”.

They said: “The use of encryption in this manner is a proven technology and is part of banking industry standard practice throughout Australia. Even if portions of Internet banking communications were intercepted by Google’s Street View cars, it is not possible for that data to be decrypted by unintended recipients such as Google.”

11:19am  |   URL: http://stephenconroyisanidiot.tumblr.com/post/692145345/conroy-busted-lying-about-googles-wifi-captures