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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: 2, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday October 03 2018, @03:32AM
That is mostly because they all know the scam they are running depends upon, at all cost and sacrificing all other goals if required, the masses never getting wise to the reality that Progressivism is a religion. Their great hack of the Constitution is perverting the prohibition against a State Church into a total exclusion of all religion from the public square, while at the same time establishing their own "not a religion" as the official Faith, where all knees must bend toward its idols, all schools must teach its creed and all laws conform to its moral code.
Sorry, lack of a god or gods does not make an otherwise totalizing theory of the universe, Man's place in it and a comprehensive moral code a non-religion. Otherwise there are a lot of other fine candidates for being deemed non-religions and permitted into the public square. But of course they aren't and won't be permitted because we have the One True Faith already established as the State Religion. It just doesn't call itself that. And that is ok because it is a Lie. Every smaller lie in its service is an act of worship offered up unto it.
Thee and me may nor may not believe in the Devil, but it is a virtual certainty that they do, at least in the higher ranks. They would find it both amusing and useful to keep the minions in the dark, so to speak. They wouldn't have the moral code they do any other way because it is a perfect negation of Enlightenment Christianity's code. That can't be random chance, it was a choice. It also provides a good clue as to when this particular Devil cult got spun up.