Welcome to the fourth edition of Lib Dig Pig, being a roundup of non-Lib Dem oriented gems on the internet, as voted by Lib Dem members using Lib Dig (if you aren’t one, and are a Lib Dem member, sign up here: http://libdig.co.uk).

The rules for inclusion here are simple: they must have been “dug” for the first time in the last seven days and they can’t be Lib Dem-related or come from a Lib Dem blog. The top rated article of each category will be listed here, along with three runners up. For the purposes of this column, my votes will be discounted. Finally, I may bend or break any of these rules as I see fit (this is absolutely terrible and I am dreadfully sorry about it).

Themes for this week’s Lib Dig Pig: internet censorship, oil (lack thereof) and why the Queen hates liberals.

Issue of the week – Barbara Streisand porn

Okay, I may be guilty of conflating two things here, but the big issue on the internet last week was the Internet Watch Foundation’s decision to ban the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an album by 70s rock combo The Scorpions. The result? Well, for a starter, lots of people suddenly became interested in late 70s rock bands on Wikipedia. This, according to Wikipedia, is called the Streisand Effect – a page which Lib Diggers brought to our attention:

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized … The Streisand effect is named after a 2003 incident in which the singer Barbra Streisand attempted to use legal process to preserve her privacy, only to see the matter become far more prominent as a result.

But the final word on the subject, according to Lib Diggers anyway, goes to Chris Applegate on his blog Qwghlm (honestly, what kind of a fool names their blog after an obscure, unpronounceable reference to sci-fi?):

…the IWF are not evil. Child pornography isn’t just illegal but morally wrong, and their intentions are noble, even if we know what kind of road those intentions can pave. Preventing the spread of child pornography online, particularly when the perpetrators and distributors are beyond usual remits, is not an easy nor a thankful task. But letting them act unilaterally can lead to damaging consequences, as we’ve just seen. Good intentions must be backed up with independent cynical controls, or they are no use at all.

Scary revelation of the week

When will the oil run out? The answer, according not to George Monbiot but to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency (on whose statistics most governments base their policies), is that production will peak in around 2020. After that date, the price of oil will irreversibly escalate. Even scarier is the revelation that 2008 is the first year the IEA ran a proper survey of the world’s oil supply rather than simply making assertions. In other words, the entire planet’s energy strategy has been based on a wing and a prayer.

If the IEA is correct, and it was dismissing such talk as “doomsaying” up until a couple of years ago, we are all going to have to seriously rethink our economic and environmental policies. To put this into some kind of perspective, 2020 is the year the Lib Dem’s current policy of road user charging is set to come online.

You should be worried. Even more worrying is the fact that this story has been almost completely ignored everywhere else.

Best reason for a republic of the week

Northern Exposure: Canada’s dilemma shows flaws in monarchy system: Republic follows the lamentable situation in Canada at the moment, where the governor has aquiesced and allowed the Conservatives to suspend parliament rather than face a no confidence vote and the creation of a new coalition government:

Under the monarchy we have someone who has no democratic legitimacy, no authority whatsoever to make crucial decisions about national politics, and yet who is able to decide on the possible survival of governments.

Video of the week

You didn’t dig many videos this week – none got more than one vote. But you can never watch this one too many times:

Other stuff we dug this week

• Ben Goldacre struggles – and fails – to avoid writing yet another column on MMR. And a good thing too.
• The festively renamed Turkey Yoghurt marks human rights day (honestly, what kind of a fool litters his blog with obscure 2000AD references?).
• The trains in Kent are turning Japanese.
• Simon Jenkins assesses John Milton’s legacy, 400 years on from his birth. In short: poetry bad, politics good.
• Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman explains his light blogging activity via teh medyum of LOLcats. Is this the end of Western civilisation?

See you again next week!

Special thanks to Ryan Cullen for hosting LibDig and for helping to make it easier for me to compile this column.

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