The Online Safety Bill is a Cannibal Holocaust

The OSB seeks to split us into Humans and Beasts. Find out which you are.

Back in the 1980s I never watched the ‘video nasty’ Cannibal Holocaust. And thank god for that. Because exposure to low budget human on human dining would have sent my nascent teenage mind into spasms of bloodlust and sent me racing off down the youth club, ravenous for the taste of human flesh.

At least that was the basic idea put forward at the time by staunch bulwarks to moral decay like Mary Whitehouse, and her vocal backing group of busy body bishops. They believed one whiff of a ‘video nasty’ would be enough to strip the civilisation from the nation’s soft headed youth. And render us beasts.

Mary Whitehouse is sadly no longer with us. But her censorious instincts, and more importantly, her view of (sub) human nature live on.  And unfortunately, now that we live so much of our lives online, the capacity for censorious meddling has grown exponentially.

And while Mrs Whitehouse was a fun diversion, someone for teenage rebels to sneer at, while imbibing two litres of cider and ten Rothmans in a sports centre car park, (we knew how to live), the censorship we face today is much more insidious, sanctimonious and damaging. Not least because it is about to be super powered, with the full force of the law, thanks to the Online Safety Bill.

And it’s not just the online world which is falling under the censors’ baleful gaze. The desire to ban, block, proscribe, prosecute and shame is extending to our WhatsApp messages, public utterances and even, if you live in Scotland, private conversations in your own home. Ex culture secretary and ropey novelist Nadine Dorris even wanted the power to make Jimmy Carr jokes illegal, which was especially worrying for me, because over the years I have written quite a few of them. (No. Not that one.)

But while Mary and Co made a nation of worried mums and dads believe one sniff of Driller Killer would send their knock kneed kids on a power tool fuelled rampage, my reaction was, well, if exposure to this stuff is really that bad, then how come Mrs W is calmly talking to Reginald Bosenquet about it on the telly,  and not trying to drill him into bloody little bits on live TV?

Well, it was obvious, Mary Whitehouse and her frocked flock were immune to contagion from the Video Nasty threat, because, they were somehow better than the rest of us.

And that really, when you think of it, is the point of all this tut tutting and finger wagging. It wasn’t really about the videos back then, any more than these days, its really about protecting weak minded adults from exposure to the ‘wrong kind of epidemiologist’.

Just like back then, today’s censorious do-gooder’s aim is to split the population into two groups.

The enlightened. The clever people. Their brains and sensibilities have been trained in the gymnasium of right thinking, where exposure to Radio 4, The Guardian, and Rory Stewart. They have honed their moralising muscles to perfection. More rewarding than mere group think, they bask in the post coital smugness of a sanctimonious circle jerk.

These Pavlovian Progressives who retch at the sight of an England flag, and become nauseated as they rush, noses in the air, past Wetherspoons, have taken on the selfless task of deciding what the rest of us can watch, tweet, and increasingly just talk about. Only these Sensis of Sensible can separate sainted information, from malign misinformation. They are the steely brained arbiters of what is safe, and wholesome. And what is a Russian bot Q Anon Trumpist 4 Chan Conspiracy of Hate.

And then, there’s the rest of us.

We’re somehow less evolved, simple beasts who lack the mental, intellectual and emotional capacity to handle complex, or contradictory ideas. Who can’t hear the word ‘Islam’ without reaching for a pitchfork, can’t see a cigarette in a movie without craving the chance to blow second hand tobacco smoke into the face of an asthmatic toddler, and can’t pass a disabled person in the street without mocking their wonkiness.

We are the bovine, ruminating masses whose childish and underdeveloped mental facilities fail at the challenge of choosing the appropriate size of pizza, let alone, whether the United Kingdom’s future should lie within a supranational political union. A bubbling mob of uneducated thugs, nostalgic for the Atlantic slave trade, Empire, and straining to unleash its inner Nazi. That’s us, that is.

Supposedly the Online Safety Bill is there to protect minors. But the censors see us as all children. Which is why they so often like to portray themselves as the adults in the room.

But we are not children, or beasts, and this urge to censor, silence, divide, purge and restrict, is deeply anti-human.  It is couched in the language of safety but really it is all about trust. But now instead of power tools, and human sized cooking pots, this new censorship suggests that we, the little people, can’t even be trusted around ideas.

In the eyes of the censors we are so empty headed, so shallow and venal that the merest exposure to racism, ‘misinformation’, or increasingly even ‘the past’, will unleash the beast within us. Turn us into a monsters hellbent on rampage, out to enslave minorities, spread disease and metastasise ‘hate’ by having the sheer bare faced temerity to wonder aloud if ladies with ‘taches and todgers really belong on an all girl swimming team.

This instinct is deeply deeply Malthusian. These people see the rest of humanity as an ever expanding cancer,  a horde of zombies, only prevented from over running the last island of civilisation by the fragile chain link fence of their own benevolent good sense. One wrong tweet, one racy joke, one unintentionally ‘racist’ comment and it all comes tumbling down.

It was nonsense then, and it is nonsense now. In the 1980s we didn’t need Mary Whitehouse and her band of bishops to decide what was good for us. Now we don’t need an ever expanding army of increasingly shrill moral guardians scolding us at every turn about climate change, our sense of history, the cars we drive, (but shouldn’t), the people we fancy, and increasingly the thoughts we have.

Their mission is not to save us from ourselves. It is to coerce and control us, take away our freedoms in the name of safety (sounds familiar) and put us back in our boxes.

The other day I was chatting to one censorious Online Safety cheerleader. She was no fan of ‘disinformation’ and said it was hard for people to tell the truth from the lies these days, especially online.

Fair enough.

So I asked her to name for me, five people she would happily let decide which ideas she personally would be allowed to hear in future, and which ideas, should be deemed too dangerous for her fragile mind to handle. She looked at me aghast.  Of course she couldn’t name any, because humans like her do not need saving, salvation is reserved for the rest of us. The beasts.

*****

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