Censorship: The Reasons Never End
Posted Sat Feb 24 19:48:46 2001 by steveg |
By Steve Gilliard
I was watching the Fox Family Channel one morning, for arguments
sake, Friday, and there was this woman who objected to having a mosque
in her town because she claimed Islam was a false religion and not a
true path to God. In one of the more oddest statements I've heard or
seen lately, she proclaimed that she was not a bigot.
Between the uproar about Eminem showing up at the Grammys and the
call to chase down anyone downloading an MP3 file, to the horrid
spectacle of Utah's virgin porn czar running amok, there has been a
rash of calls for censorship.
Let's remind people of a few simple facts:
1) No idea can be censored. Just because the KKK publishes bomb
making manuals and racist literature and the Nation of Islam publishes
racist and anti-semitic books doesn't mean you can just shut off their
ideas because you or most of America dislikes them. People found them
when they mailed PO boxes and they will find them online.
2) You cannot crush an idea. If Falun Gong can survive in China, any
idea can survive anywhere. Ben Franklin was the father of American
pornography, the most successful publishing industry in America's 225
years. There is almost as long a history of trying to crush porn as
there have been literate users. Utah's virgin porn czar will have as
much success in stopping porn as the Gestapo did in stopping the French
resistance.
3) Americans decry media violence and then spend $58 million to see
Hannibal,one of the goriest movies in American cinematic history. They
decry sex and spend $8 billion on pornography a year. While Americans
publicly embrace family values, privately they screw around, get high,
cheat, lie and steal. The biggest prudes in Congress were exposed as
adulterers. Only a fool or a moron would trust the Americans public's
statements on sex and violence.
4) Once you create barriers, people will breach them. The Chinese
students, on the run after Tienamen Square set up US-based fax
networks, then later used the Internet to organize. Falun Gong
leverages their network in China today. Czech students, with an able
assist from the CIA, used 300 baud modems to beat back the secret
police.
5) The censor usually loses the day.The most successful censorship
effort in American history was the Hays Code. It lasted throughout the
height of the studio system in Hollywood. It operated nicely to
preserve the kind of public morality that Americans so cherish. It fell
apart slowly after World War II and collapsed after Korea. Movies with
veiled and not so veiled references to homosexuality, infidelity, all
kinds of sexual deviance and variety began to be shown.
From the grimy, murderous world of post-war Vienna to the sexually
obsessed detective roaming around San Francisco, to the sly bedroom
comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, the Hays code slowly fell into
disuse as a sexually sophisticated, travelled populace wanted more than
family-friendly formulas.
Anthony Mann's Westerns with Jimmy Stewart playing a desperately
violent man, one who makes the average John Wayne character look like a
wimp, were light years beyond the Roy Rogers Westerns of the 1930's.
John Wayne's struggles with his own racism in the Searchers would have
never been thought of in the era which produced Gone with the Wind.
The Internet is not the American computer network.The Internet
routes around damage and censors are seen as damage. So no one is going
to do anyone's international dirty work, or we would have the same
levels of free speech as they do in China.
If the RIAA had quietly sued Napster, the number of users would not
have expanded to 50 million people in months. By denouncing the company
every chance they got, they not only alienated the technical people
they needed to work for them, but they served as Napster's best press
agent. The RIAA are not censors, yet, but clearly, with the call to
have ISP's pull down Napster clones, they are walking into a mistake of
momentous proportions. If you start suing and jailing people for
actually holding files, the resistance to the RIAA can only grow.
Any kind of commercial action in the US can easily be turned into
political action overseas. The same kinds of blocks on porn and now
music, can be used in brutally heinous ways. In Good Will Hunting,
Matt Damon is asked if he wants to work for the NSA, in a round about
way, he says, I could hurt my friends by helping you to fight your
wars. Well, in a roundabout way, the quest to protect copyright, which
is a fair and legal quest, can be turned into a hunt to quash ideas.
Which is truly scary.
Our "good" intentions have unleashed a hellstorm of misery and pain
on hundreds of millions of people. Whether it was being blind to
torture in Long Kesh or funding Provo gunmen with M-60's and Ar-15's.
Or overthrowing elected governments around the world to suit our needs.
Our ideas of what is and is not good can result in misery and pain to
the innocent.
Utah's porn czar doesn't want to get her hands dirty, but she
thinks if porn goes, problems go. Well, is she ready to ruin lives? Not
just the sellers, but families, married people who like and use porn?
There is a consequence for hunting obscenity, because people will pay
for it with lost jobs, ruined families, broken lives.
One may argue that porn already does that. But the difference is
that it is private. Your wife may say that she doesn't want to share
you with Jenna any more, but that's not all over the newspaper and you
aren't arrested for it. If you dislike the drug laws, laws restricting
ideas make them look fair.
The thing about freedom that the founding fathers understood was
this: it takes courage to be a free people. Thomas Paine understood
this and was almost killed by the French Revolutionaries because he
said it. Thomas Jefferson saved his life. But then, Paine served as an
infantryman in the Continental Army during the Winter of 1776.
In a very practical and simple way, the Internet can open the door
to information for billions of people, even if they can't use it
themselves. They don't need to be on it, the information just needs to
be spread. The Chinese government isn't afraid of the Internet because
a billion people have access to it -- they don't. Most Chinese towns
don't have phones, no one has ever used a phone in them. It's because
the ideas online can spread. Ideas are viral and can be spread by
nothing higher-tech than the sound of the human voice.
Any time someone calls for a censor, ask them if they need an idea to spread twice as fast, because that is the way to do it.
|
Name: JR
Email: acerado@hotmail.com
Date: Wed Feb 28 12:41:35 2001
Comment: A censor is a pig. Only a dirty pig, I say
|
Name: Carl Guderian
Email: carlg@vermilion-sands.com
Date: Tue Feb 27 05:58:04 2001
Comment:
U.S. Constitutional protections (and those of the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights--see Article 19) of freedom of expression
are still the best approach. If you can't communicate, you might as
well be dead. Most European countries, even the most progressive ones,
censor for some reason or another. In Germany and the Netherlands, it's
(neo)Nazi propaganda and racism. In the UK, it's still illegal to
publish a call to abolish the monarchy. Likewise, it's technically
illegal ti threaten the crown in the Netherlands. The UK still hides
its dirty tricks and official misconduct behind the Official Secrets
Act. The peek the public gets into the three-ring circus of MI6 is via
biased accounts like the most recent one by ex-spy Richard Tomlinson.
And so on.
I can understand Germany and NL being gun-shy about neo-Nazism, but
I think local complacency (and sometimes tacit sanction, especially in
the northeast) are more of a problem than hateful websites and a few
old bastards selling Nazi regalia and copies of Mein Kampf in flea
markets. The government even tried to block access to mirror sites of
Radikal, an often extreme leftwing site, but Germans were able to
bypass wholesale blocking by IP address.
Every well-intentioned censorship I'm aware of has been misused.
Anti-porn "feminist" professor Catherine MacKinnon helped write
Canada's porn laws, making porn legally somewhat akin to rape. Among
the first victims of the new laws were lesbian bookshops. The Digital
Millennium Copyright Act has given Scientology yet another tool for
legally hounding its critics into bankruptcy.
There are limits of course, and the ones least abused are those
narrowly based on imminent or actual harm coupled with malice. Former
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Jr.?) ruled
against shouting fire in crowded theaters, and maybe inciting a riot.
Total freedom of expression must be the starting point, with limits
made piecemeal but with some narrow and well-considered philosophy
behind them. No government gave you the ability to speak. As for gods,
well, that's up to you, but no god has ever publicly given its mandate
to any government.
Gotta run before this Mac crashes.
|
Name: chuck
Email:
Date: Mon Feb 26 16:05:07 2001
Comment: bob,
yes, sorry about that, I figured everyone knew that site was off limits at work.
|
Name: bob
Email: pale_13@usa.net
Date: Mon Feb 26 10:32:36 2001
Comment:
Just as an aside about a site mentioned by chuck earlier, please don't
visit whitehouse.com from work if you want to stay employed. Their
"interns" are a bit more risque than what you'll find at
whitehouse.gov, though right in line with what Mr. Clinton would have
liked... |
Name: chuck
Email:
Date: Mon Feb 26 09:03:37 2001
Comment: You can make people read what you want, it's called advertising.
Freedom of speech has become the favorite weapon in the battle to
push ideas at us. (eg. CT's proposed law banning "sexually explicit"
billboards...maybe a stupid law, but advertisers oppose it, not on its
merits but on free speech grounds)
While the masses are clamboring for their porn and free music
(etc., etc.), the shield of rights that you say guarantees it is being
fashioned into a sword to rob us of our ability to see the world as it
is.
It's surprising how many people think that the difference between
coke and pepsi matters, and how many people believe that if you don't
buy an SUV, you're putting your children's lives in danger. Lots of
people even believe in the psychic networks. Meanwhile the world is
changing and the vast majority have no idea. Oh yes, you can make
people read what you want them to. Dave made this point re:Chinese
walls.
Based on the article, it's not just invasion of privacy you're
worried about. Sure we don't want the government to have free license
to read our hard drives, but you are fighting this on principle alone.
You think laws that seem unenforceable are inherently wrong. I'm sure
GAP, Disney and Buffett agree, too bad you seem to be fighting their
war (for free!). Isn't it at least possible that allowing some
restrictions on our freedom to violate copyright and access pornography
may actually protect the vast freedom that remains? The alternative is
a free-for-all in which the average person will lose. |
Name: beammeup
Email:
Date: Mon Feb 26 08:44:07 2001
Comment:
The engineering of consent is happening and. . . yes steve, you're
believing that the "fight" you're fighting is not, of itself,
manufactured for some benefit you don't yet understand.
You're choosing participate, though. nobody will doubt your
volition. I think that your public forum is a good way. . . maybe not
the same old propaganda. . . |
Name: beammeup
Email:
Date: Mon Feb 26 08:29:37 2001
Comment: We ARE what we read, i think that was Orwell's point. . .
|
Name: Dave
Email:
Date: Mon Feb 26 06:07:57 2001
Comment:
One of the stories we don't see much, if anything, about concerns the
current negotiations for a hemisphere-wide version of NAFTA, called the
FTAA. These negotiations have been going apace for some time, and while
they're not being censored per se, they are being significantly
underreported in the mainstream media, as are NAFTA's failures to
deliver anything like what was promised to the American, Mexican and
Canadian people when it was promoted. Yes, there are stories, but
nothing like the rah-rah coverage that helped lubricate NAFTA's
passage.
The week around Apr. 20-22 will see some rather public
manifestations of opposition to the FTAA. Let's see how the media cover
it. One planned demonstration is in Buffalo, where the local daily
newspaper is owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and the
local NPR affiliate is run by the administration of the University at
Buffalo, which last year collaborated in Wolf Blitzer's bogus "town
meeting" with Hillary, including a hand-picked audience and written
questions submitted in advance and screened by Wolf to avoid "excessive
parochialism." There was local shame even among some liberals over the
'town meeting' label for what was basically a free commercial for the
candidate.
I'm curious to see whether, outside the radical media, anyone
reports the ways in which an FTAA would work to short-circuit
human/labor rights and environmental protection criteria in
international trade preferences.
Finally, while there have been good points made here about the
'market' for news, there has been - in less mainstream media - some
attention paid to the ways in which the major news networks have been
compromised by their corporate parents. The Chinese walls between the
corporate boardroom and the editorial desk have been replaced with bead
curtains. Even the dinky little Buffalo News, one of
Berkshire-Hathaway's better-performing assets (in terms of ROI), quotes
Chairman Warren occasionally on policy issues (e.g., on the inheritence
tax) and usually neglects to identify him as the chairman of the
paper's owner. There have been cases where GE has shaped coverage of
its activities, and Disney has been attempting to push promotions of
its entertainment business onto its news editorial staffs.
None of this bodes well for consumer access to information
necessary to make informed choices as citizens. Perhaps in the long run
some more Americans will turn to better media sources, but have we seen
this happen in the past?
|
Name: steve gilliard
Email: sgilliard@netslaves.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 21:19:31 2001
Comment: Chuck,
You cannot make people read the news you'd like. This is an old
editorial debate. Most reporters are not as lucky as we are, and they
don't get to do the 15 part story on municpal corruption. They have to
write news which makes people want to read and buy their news product.
60 Minutes is one of the rare exceptions to that. They get 12
minutes on needle safety and genetics. Charlie Rose gets biologists and
foreign politicians.
Not leading the news and not available are two vastly different
things. Most of these "hidden" stories, are reported for months, maybe
years and with the web, they get very wide exposure. You may have to
get the trade press or read a non-US newspaper, but the news is there.
Don't underestimate porn or free music. The government and big
business care less about what you report than if it makes money. The
Insider made CBS look like shit. Who cared? It made money.
But once you start hunting porn and invading people's basic right
to privacy or start searching for MP3 files on hard drives, remotely,
that's a real issue. It's important because it is at the edges of our
social compact.
Americans defend political freedom to a degree unacceptable in most
of the world. Nazis, racists, drunks, cults, all get a seat at the
table.
When you get into our private lives, that is where the real
problems start. Porn and Napster are at the edges, far more than a GAO
report on workfare. If your freedom goes, it will not be subtle,
because we are not a subtle people. |
Name: chuck
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 18:11:18 2001
Comment: Ok, you have a history degree
But unless you have a techical consultant helping you with your
articles, you are also a techie, given your command of the current
technological topology, and apparent expertise in the area.
As such, you know that censorship and copyright enforcement over
the internet is difficult, and why. However, your focus on free music
and porn as examples of American freedom is baffling.
You can pick on my examples of underdisseminated information, and
argue that they are getting the coverage they deserve, but as long as
arguments over pornography get more coverage than basic questions about
our society, a more pernicious form of censorship exists.
12 people watch C-span, about 16 read the articles in the Village
Voice. God knows how many hits whitehouse.com gets. If the object of
censorship is to prevent the dissemination of ideas, letting people
surf as much porn as possible is the answer.
I appreciate your responses and, as you say, I am upset by what
leads the news. I wish others were too. I also wish that porn and
copyright infringement were not constantly being equated with freedom. |
Name: samezone19
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 17:56:11 2001
Comment:
someday we'll all look back and wonder how we used the wonderful free
moment that the net provided to us. i hope we'll say that we used it
wisely, but I'm really not sure. every time there's a new crime out
there that's heinous enough - child porn, identity theft, or a serious
hack - the powers of "control" will try to take some of our freedom
back.
People think freedom comes like some sort of blank check. But it comes with solemn obligations too.
|
Name: steve gilliard
Email: sgilliard@netslaves.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 17:36:59 2001
Comment: Chuck,
You're wrong on several points.
First, I'm not a techie at all. I got my degree in history and I've worked as a writer since then.
Second, you're just wrong about what you're calling censorship.
CSPAN covers these issues daily, you can pick up the Economist, the
Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, the Guardian, any one of these
publications covers these issues in depth. Any issue of the Village
Voice covers these issues.
You're just upset because they don't lead the news. There is a big
difference between the two. What is news is an economic decision, which
people do not realize. The Times has plenty of stories on the GNP, the
WTO anf other fun issues.
Hell, the disaster called the Three Gorges dams of China has been
on the BBC, ABC and a National Geographic special. Slavery in the Sudan
won a Pulitzer for the two Baltimore Sun reporters who wrote about it.
None of that stuff is hard to find at all. People make their
livings finding it because it's buried in public documents issued by
the UN, GAO and other places.
Censoring porn is frankly more important to the average American than the Three Gorges Dam. It will affect more Americans.
I've heard the FAIR buried news line for years and the reality is
that most of those stories are complex. 60 Minutes is the home of
buried stories.
What you're unlikely to see on TV is not some obscure story about
advertising and mental health, those make great New Yorker stories, but
how the US government uses "mercenaries" to help foster intelligence
operations, like in Colombia and that is only a matter of time.
Don't mistake an economic decision to not cover the WTO with censorship. There is a vast and critical difference.
|
Name:
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 16:44:21 2001
Comment:
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Name:
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 16:41:57 2001
Comment:
that reminds me about the what I used to hear about slavery in Sudan. I
never believed it but hey thwere is a war there. You cannot prove or
disprove unless you are there since there is censorship in ALL media
since everyone has their own agenda.
The same goee for back in the day around '97 when I heard about
famine in North Korea I have never heard anything good about N korea
though the South Koreans I have met may know more abvout it. I may
never know thr truth about N Korea until I actually meet a North Korean
whcih will probably never happen. |
Name: ralf from bxl
Email: ooxelith@hotmail.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 16:41:36 2001
Comment: What is porn else than a commercial produce of ready-to-consume fairy tale sex for adults?
It?s to sex what fast-food "restaurants" are to eating, what Bud is
to enjoying a nice glass of beer, what a Christian contemporary radio
station is to religion. Or an American presidential election to
democracy. It?s the All American wanna be impetus applicable to all and
everything, the "Our mission is"- thang:
IT?S BIG, ITS FREE, ITS FUN!
A unique melange of megalomania, lack of hindsight and
unwillingness to accept the hard facts of life. Call it American Dream.
The stupidity to understand what "pursuit of happiness" was meant to
mean. But then after hundreds of years of naive kinder-like reading of
the Bible, what is it, if not..Yes, sheer pornography!If you add to
this the deeply routed chauvinistic self esteem of proudly ignoring the
world around you ( realist, plain and simple: B.Franklin- and the
allusion that European nations trade their liberty... ecc.,pp.)...Ever
thought that we might be concerned more about freedom instead of being
granted liberties?
Anyway. I coudn?t give a Continental! What will shield us from
being US brainwashed by the various CNN?s and "big hitting, bleeding
edge
tech transformation global needs to... whatever comes handy
bullshit ideologies" is that people in the old world lost their
ideological virginity quite some time ago, and still genuinely know how
to eat and drink and are relaxed about sex and drugs and RR. Is it for
that reason that European porn too is better than the US variety of
mechanically performed sexual exercises? My wish: Be less Calvinistic,
more relaxed and start to marry between races. May be you would become
one day Americans and not need any longer to identify yourselves by
belonging to ready-made "communities", thus delimitating yourselves
from others by selfcensorship. Good lick.
|
Name: Chuck
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 13:46:25 2001
Comment:
Steveg's recurring themes of porn, MP3, the unstoppable technology of
the internet, powerless regulators and censors (always dusted with
obscurely accurate references to military hardware to show that he's
not just a regular techie) ignore the evidence that censorship and
control of ideas are very effective, much more so than most people who
post on these subjects would like to believe.
Our sources of information in the US routinely underreport stories
that are critical to the world, such as any that question our basic
assumptions and way of life. This is a large subject and I'm not an
expert on it, but I know how hard it is to find information on the WTO
agenda, US involvement in the affairs of other nations, the
relationship of the GNP to environmental decline, or on the effect of
advertising, and mass consumption on the mental health of those in
America (just for example).
Sure, I can find more information about this on the internet than
anywhere else, but it's usually unsupported, mostly opinion and it's
tough to find and evaluate the source. Basically, these subjects are
"censored" from american discourse so effectively that most of us don't
even think they are issues. A few public radio broadcasts don't count,
obviously, because such issues are considered "fringe" and are
implicitly "irrelevant" in the opinion of most Americans.
Steve, your porn and MP3s and violent movies and the Clinton
pardons get all the ink. There may be a porn czar, but porn is not the
priority, discussing porn, and school shootings, rap music, hollywood
and survivor to the exclusion of real news is.
Censorship is more subtle than you think. It's not a big
ineffective machine connected to the internet, it's not some angel with
a sword of fire. Today's censors do not seek to eliminate content
directly, but instead, by inviting you to write the Nth article about
"freedom" and "censorship" (and rehashing the same tired outdated
arguments) you are being drawn into the problem you rail against
instead of using your writing talent to get at the real problem. Porn
is the least of our problems (they're doing a pretty good job
restricting kiddie porn, though because that is a priority). I think
you are being suckered. |
Name: Webmaster Mike
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 11:22:17 2001
Comment:
The pointed finger of rightousness has killed more people throughout
history than any other source. Imposeing YOUR will on others is a
violent act! |
Name: steve gilliard
Email: sgilliard@netslaves.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 10:54:07 2001
Comment: Enough,
How do you fight a war against your own family? Pick up a
Springfield Rifle and choose sides. We called it the civil war and in
some counties, in Missouri, in Alabama, Virginia, neighbors killed each
other with abandon. Nothing like a good cause to turn family against
each other. |
Name: Enough Already
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 10:39:31 2001
Comment:
Anyone see the movie Traffic? Excellent movie, and while its message
was aimed at the drug war it applies equally well here. One quote in
particular stood out - "We are fighting a war in which the enemy is
often members of our own family. How the hell do you fight a war
against your own family?" |
Name: eudas
Email:
Date: Sun Feb 25 03:17:50 2001
Comment: nice article.
nice post by wakeup@truth.com too.
america needs to stfu until it figures out what it really wants.
|
Name: realist, plain and simple
Email: wakeup@truth.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 02:20:16 2001
Comment:
Ben Franklin said it best "he who trades liberty for security deserves
neither". That is exactly what the American people are doing, among
others in the world (several European nations especially). Whether
passing ultra restrictive laws that are clearly in violation of
multiple constitutional amendments against certain members of society
deemed a so called "danger to society", to censorship, to some drug
laws, to copyright laws, etc?blah blah blah, we are indeed headed down
the path of totalitarianism. Inferior minded sheeple say we must have
more and more law to protect us from ourselves. Unfortunately,
legislative agendas rarely accomplish their motive. Overactive
legislatures, whose job should not be to make laws when none are really
needed, and of course, way too many parasitic lawyers (know any that
are not?) whose agenda is either to enslave American?s will through the
iron fist of law or simply greed ?lust for money are catalyzing this
devolution of America. What does America really need? How about respect
for each other, and a belief in the founding principles of this grand
country. |
Name: Lee Deity
Email: kirby1024@hotmail.com
Date: Sun Feb 25 01:57:43 2001
Comment: Of course, a simple argument is that porn sellers aren't forcing you to view it. You can look away if it offends you
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