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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 Pav on Wednesday October 03 2018, @09:57AM
You're the worst kind of moron... You've learned a little history and a little science and applied both badly. There are plenty of "hard" men in every hellhole throughout history, and precious few raise themselves out of tents and mud huts. Democracy is bad? Have you been reading Thucydides?? The Athenian democracy was overthrown mainly because the Spartans got Persian support, although if you listen to Thucydides it's because Athens was a corrupt Democracy. (Of course this had nothing to do with the fact that Thucydides was exiled from Athens... nooo nothing at all). After they destroyed eachother it certainly made things easier for Phillip of Macedon, and Alexander later. Alexander The Great was no simple "hard man". He was taught by some of the best minds of the age including Aristotle. He applied that knowledge, which offended conservative Greeks everywhere - he "went native" and embraced Persian and Egyptian "soft" ways (some Greek sources speak words such as "soft", "moist" and "femanine"), also marrying Macedonian nobility (including himself) into these "untermench" cultures.
Ghengis Khan also famously offended conservative Monguls by befriending and incorporating defeated tribes rather than slaughtering them, again cementing alliances by marrying into their families (and this policy goes a long way to explain his genetic legacy). He was also in the habit of elevating average people rather than the great and the good (ie. the wealthy and the traditional nobility). Ghengis got his ass temporarily overthrown because of these "soft" policies. Also, if Alexander and Ghengis aren't R strategists reproductively speaking I don't know what you could possibly mean. BTW, Hitler failed to recruit even Russias bitterest enemies (ie. most of Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine), instead starving them for grain because in his eyes they were untermensch. That didn't work out so well did it?
Those who divide the world into the worthy few (usually them) and the unwashed masses mostly fail at anything requiring much cooperation... y'know, stuff like sustaining a civilisation. Or even stuff like reproducing.