A beef with online porn

The comparative risk of car accidents and mad cow disease have been mentioned before (here and here), but I found this direct, oblivious linking of the two issues in this article, which looks at reasons for youth participation in the Mad Cow protests, rather amusing:

Park Won-suk, deputy secretary-general of the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, expressed different views regarding youth nationalism. Park said middle and high school students came out on the streets as they felt their health was under real threat. "They are wise enough not to be distracted by misleading information, and they make their own, right decisions,'' he said.

If the story was about automobiles, which are not closely associated with their welfare, Park said he did not think the students would participate in the protests.

Nah, it's not "associated with their welfare" at all:

Accidental injury is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 14 in Korea .

Motor vehicle crashes, which cause 46 percent of childhood injury deaths, are the leading cause of injury-related fatalities in Korea , followed by drowning, falls, suffocation and burns.

Every day, 37 Korean children under the age of 14 are killed or injured as pedestrians in road traffic accidents.

Of course, what really must be done to improve children's welfare is to declare war on online porn. Again.

The plan is part of the government's projects to fight against lewd material on television, the internet and elsewhere in order to prevent children from accessing sexually explicit content that sometimes leads to sex crimes.

It was only 13.5 months ago that the last war on online porn was announced. That war was in response to a numerous instances of gang rapes by middle and high school students against their peers, much as this latest crackdown is in response to the recent realization that elementary school students at a school in Daegu had been victims and perpetrators of rape for some time. The crackdown didn't work then, and won't work now; in fact, it has never worked, as Gord Sellar argues in a well-written comment here (do read the whole thing):

[A]n increase in censorship is not the way to go. As with the arguments over American beef, the real solution would be open, honest discussion and cultivation of dialog… “citizen deliberation,” as Lawrence Lessig describes it in terms of a free society. Instead of cultivating a free society where debate can occur, censorship and filtration strangles it at the roots. All of Korea’s modern governments deserve criticism in this regard, but Lee’s especially seems to be embracing censorship with a vigor unseen for years.

This shouldn't be suprising to those who remember his term as Seoul mayor. Remember his response to the punk band TV pants-dropping incident three years ago?

Seoul Mayor, Lee Myung-bak, weighed in on the issue, saying each ward should supervise obscene performances and make a blacklist of the acts who do them.

"Given that the accused said that indecent performances happen every night at clubs in the Hongdae area, the performance, which is not generally accepted, has not been regulated by the authorities," Lee said in a meeting with executive members of the Seoul metropolitan government. [...]

Lee, a member of the conservative GNP, ordered officials of the Seoul City government Monday to draw up a “blacklist’’ of bands whose performances are “decadent and not socially acceptable.’’ Those bands will not be invited to events organized by Seoul City or affiliated institutions, Lee said. The mayor also demanded that each district office strengthen control over possible decadent public performances.

Given his past affinity for "strengthening control", I don't think Lee's embrace of censorship should surprise anyone.