’bout Censorship
Friday, February 29th, 2008This time, I’ll use energy-rich gamma rays to point out things, but immediately after pointing them out, they’ll be as black as a black hole. Why? Because this time it’s all about censorship!
First, what the hell is censorship? It’s the act of removing some things from publications that are publicly available. It happens mainly because the publication breaks certain laws, e.g. includes hate speech. Sometimes, it is done because the legislator didn’t like it as it may reveal some bad details about him/her. The second version is alarmingly becoming more common; take America, for example. If you’re anti-war, pro-environment, libertian or any other thing that the current administration doesn’t like, chances are high that you’ll be under surveillance. If you’re getting more annoying, then it’s likely that you’ll be abducted to something like Guantanamo Bay, a gulag. If the government fears that they’ll be heavily criticized, then, once you publish anything, they censor it so that it looks like a text breaking certain laws. (Search for a logical fallacy called “straw man”; that sort of censorship extends that one extremely.)
Because of this, once any government receives the ability to censor things, it takes a nice chunk of freedom away. Censorship isn’t good in any way; and for those “But the children!”-screamers, parents are responsible for them, not the government. If they care for their children in the age of the internet, they should take courses about blocking IPs from pages with sexual (or any other, which the parent doesn’t deem right) content. The government has no right to play a parent and never shall have. (Currently, it sadly does.)
Some jerks that dress like politicians are trying to make a grown-up person in Germany not able to buy the so-called “Killerspiele”. That is extreme censorship, protecting as much people as there are in the core of the sun. In this case, the government plays the role of a parent. See what happens?
Another example: Finland. A page which documents the censoring of so-called “pages containing child pornography” (or something like that; I forgot, for I have insufficient memory) is put on the blocking-list for ISPs, thus censoring it. Why? Because the government plays the role of overzealous parents that won’t believe that a lot of pages which are blocked aren’t endangering their children. The actual reason for that isn’t that one. It happens because governments want to censor anything that doesn’t fit their views and as long as the censoring can be kept in a legal grey area. Whether censoring, abducting and other things are actually acceptable in respect to human rights is a good question; but the government doesn’t care, as it naturally seeks to eliminate freedom and human rights.
So long.
[stream-of-thought, several Human Memory Leaks (TM), proof-read once, thus having an extremely high chance of likely and unlikely errors, including superpositions]

