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from the I-Disapprove-of-What-You-Say,-But-I-Will-Defend-to-the-Death-Your-Right-to-Say-It dept.
From an editorial in the Otago Daily Times out of New Zealand, Censorship a Trojan Horse:
It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.
It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.
A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.
Yet calls for the banning of certain opinion pieces, cartoons and commentary have risen in recent months, especially from those using social media, a world where such talk is becoming a trend. It is a trend we must confront.
Censorship is to suppress the harmful, the unacceptable, the obscene and the threatening from the media and other forms of public communication. Like a virus attacking democracy from the inside out, it was traditionally the tool of the dictator, though it is one used by many in power.
[...] It pays to query what those demanding censorship — be they celebrities, social-media activists or anybody else — see their ultimate goal as being.
To reduce hurt? To make the world a better place? Possibly, and those motivations are laudable. But the method employed to achieve them is not.
While censorship may be meant as a figurative horse upon which a better future rides, inside the belly of that horse lurks an army of conformity, quite capable of unwitting oppression.
History shows what happens when the fourth estate is no longer free to table all opinions.
It is a bleak picture. Without the disinfectant of exposure, power and ideals tend to corrupt even the most seemingly incorruptible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:01PM (11 children)
Some minor factual clarifications:
1) The cultural group and opinions of the people controlling the press are in no way even remotely representative of the greater demographic and their opinions. Essentially if you have an opposing foreign group propagandizing another country that is seen as "normal good propaganda" but if its one very distinct and unique cultural group propagandizing their own countrymen we're assured thats the wrong way to look at the problem, even when its the same issue. Note that once a theocracy gains power, its impossible to change from within; if 99% of the workers in a field see their job as obeying the Democratic National Committee, no opposing voices will ever rise up in that entire industry.
2) The government grants those press monopolies via massive regulation of TV stations, tax codes for newspapers, and most importantly access. Far more people read the daily stormer than read many legacy newspapers or watch some of the legacy TV news; Obama (or Trump) would never let a Daily Stormer correspondent into the white house press pool. We might not have a King in the USA, but the government is the King Maker in our supposedly private industry.
3) They're just not allowed to have DNS registration, to accept any form of payment processing, etc. "We have freedom of religion because we'll shoot at you all the way on your pilgrimage to the desert in Utah" is not really freedom, and also has not been practically possible for a century or so.
Aside from a purely theoretical model, speaking solely practically, I'm old enough to remember 1980s Soviet Union and Pravda, and unfortunately the left seems hellbent on re-implementing that in the USA, single party rule, death to opposing opinions, if we just tell each other we believe strongly enough then the pressures of reality won't make the crumbling system that doesn't work go into collapse, LOL. What was so appealing about that, anyway? Doesn't anyone trying to implement that remember how it turned out in the early 90s? Do those people actually want to re-enact the early 90s soviet union breakup? Most likely this mad censorship and virtue signalling storm of leftist hatred of anything that doesn't suck is just the chaos before the storm when we can't admit in public that leftism is dumb and doesn't work, but freedom to do so is just a decade or so away. Sure, leftism doesn't work, but we'll fix that in the very short term by punishing anyone who points that out. It just seems very short-sighted.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @02:09PM (3 children)
Let me put it fewer words than in your incoherent babble: you're a delusional idiot, mon cher.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @05:57PM
Finally someone else pointing out the obvious.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02 2018, @06:40PM (1 child)
Seemed pretty coherent to me.
Didn't agree with every word, but it was coherent. And not obviously delusional.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 03 2018, @11:35AM
What original AC meant was AC admits in public I'm completely correct and there's no facts or the sophistry to brawl in opposition.
Original AC presented a somewhat less eloquent equivalent of the concession speech one side makes at the end of an election.
I won't rip on original AC for that, sometimes I get things perfectly correct and you can't expect the opposition to be very happy about that, but I can respect them for admitting it.
So... dogs and cats living together, the sky is falling, at one moment the right and left actually agree on some shared factual observations so where do we go from there to an optimistically better situation? My guess is nothing changes, but its still useful to ... see the situation more clearly.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 03 2018, @01:41AM (5 children)
Not sure what you're saying here. Our local newspaper only ever served several thousand people, at it's peak. The Stormer is read by more than that, granted. The papers in Little Rock are read by many times more people than our local paper.
There are several newspapers that are read by far more than our Little Rock papers. NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and more. Is the Stormer read by more people than those?
Clarify, and offer citations?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:39AM
Since it came up, I checked. [The steep part is right after the TLD change.]
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailystormer.name [alexa.com]
Global rank 17,143
Rank in United States 6,003
Even discarding the Chinese traffic as bots... that probably beats out all but the nationally-known and major-metro newspapers (most of which have declining traffic). Considerably beats our local paper (120k metro).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:01AM (3 children)
Lets see if the problem can be explained so there is no confusion.
Are we all in agreement that the newspaper in Little Rock has an all but inviolate 1st Amendment Right to publish, and to publish whatever it deems newsworthy, amusing, clickbaity or whatever? We can argue about when libel and slander laws should impose consequences on them after they publish but prior restraint is agreed to be an extreme solution to be used only in the most extraordinary circumstance and simply ordering them to cease publication, seizing their physical plant, etc. are sure warning signs of tyranny. Are all in agreement on that much?
Ok. The difference is that in the case of the Daily Stormer the consensus among almost everyone who doesn't read the Daily Stormer seems to be that it is OK to seize their press (website, domain name, etc.) and to vigorously suppress their ability to get paid by their readers for the work those readers apparently at least find amusing enough to want to pay for. What is most interesting is that the probability of supporting the seizure of their assets is inversely correlated to having ever actually read the product in question.
If you actually care about freedom of the press, freedom of speech or any of that gay shit you should be ringing the bell NOW. Censorship doesn't start with the material YOU care about, with material many people at all care about. It is noisy minorities who get the hammer first. Guys like Andrew Anglin were the canary in the coal mine, but he keeled over and nobody gave a damn. But it never stops there. Alex Jones had over a million Youtube subscribers when Apple sent the word forth to all corners of the land that he was now an unperson and struggling to pay rapidly spiraling hosting costs with no ability to collect money from viewers. Exactly the situation Daily Stormer has been in for a year. The targets aren't so small anymore. Do you think that after such a success they plan to stop? Of course not. They will continue until stopped, and that is likely to be messy indeed. The banhammer swings daily and we gather on gab to "press F to pay respects" for the latest to be cast out. Yes, being banned has already become a meme.
If you are still unclear on this issue I'm afraid I can't help, I have failed to communicate.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:15PM (2 children)
Lefties don't get "If they can do it to X, they can do it to you," because per Marxism 101, Lefties believe they'll always be in charge of the doing. Having it done unto them is a foreign concept.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by jmorris on Wednesday October 03 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
Which is why they are losing their minds now, Trump beating them up and stealing their lunch money is just not in their model of the world. They don't have a century of experience in losing gracefully. Worse, Trump is keeping his pledge to teach Republicans how to win. I'm figuring that if we get a Red Wave next month instead of the Blue one their pollsters have promised them they will go violent, not just Antifa low level action but full riots. If Ginsberg goes to Hell in the next year they will go totally postal to the point martial law might be required to regain control of the streets in most Blue Hells, especially D.C.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday October 03 2018, @07:46PM
I agree up to a point -- I think as soon as the Antifa contingent (here used as a catchall including their buddies from CAIR, the heirs to SDS, and whatever other outfits are funded by Soros and the Muslim Brotherhood) start getting actually shot, most of their "resistance" will evaporate, because most of the warm bodies are just LARPing at being revolutionaries; they have zero experience at being seriously thwarted, let alone at being live targets, and have no idea what they're getting into. (I still remember how the L.A. riots steered around Koreatown shops with their armed proprietors on every rooftop.) But afterward, I expect the hardcores will resurface as IRA-style domestic terrorists, more akin to European Antifa..
I'm also thinkin' it may cause considerable backlash in cities that have started going purple (eg. Austin), and even more so in flyover country, which thus far has not really had to deal with "inclusion and diversity" and doesn't understand how it's calculated to undermine them politically. As a northern plains native, I didn't understand either, until I did 28 years in SoCal, and watched CA's slide into collective insanity. Ain't nothin' like a real-life demonstration to make a point hit home.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @02:23PM
I hope I am not the only one that has no idea what the hell you are referencing here.
Is this some LDS (formerly Mormon) thing? I don't know of any other group that has an attachment to Utah.