Our current government, joyless shitbags that they are, want to jail you for three years for having downloaded the above pictures.
Yes kids, the home office has proposed yet another badly-drafted piece of astoundingly illiberal legislation that helps nobody but themselves (and then only when it comes to arguing the case for increasing their budget). We are expected to happily fork out yet more of our cash to let a department-ful of civil service busybodies protect us from ourselves.
Unsurpisingly, the BBC is presenting this as a great victory for common sense, and is reporting that it has the support of various Labour and Lib Dem MPs. The only dissenting voice that they present is that of a headbanger-wing tory thinktank. Strangely, the utter opposition from rabid free speech nutters such as, er, the Law Society, hasn’t been mentioned.
Why’s it so bad? Surely noone can be against pissing on a few Intertron Perves? Well, the offence will “…apply to images of acts that appear to be life threatening or are likely to result in serious, disabling injury.”
That “appear” is, of course, the heart of the issue. That means a picture, taken in isolation, of hands placed around someone’s throat can be construed as “breath play” - so banned. God only knows what they’d make of the above pictures - taken from Eyewitness Production’s “Drowning”, and found after a quick search for “asphyxiation” on empornium.
Since “likely to result in serious, disabling injury” has already been taken to mean “anything involving blood”, then anything vaguely titillating, from 1970s vampire b-movies to pictures of a severe caning (y’know, like the sort of thing that seemingly every english ex-public schoolboy rushes off to pay for at least once a month), huge swathes of society are about to be criminalised. Infact, since unprotected sex can be equally life-threatening, there’ll be good grounds for banning any portrayal of that, too.
cunts.
