daniil's Journal: Censorship?

As Soren Kierkegaard once noted (somewhere in his journals), "People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation." I find this to be true for many, if not most, of the people on the Internet. They demand the freedom to express themselves in any way, yet they rarely put any thought into what they say -- only emotions. "This sucks!" "You suck!" "omgwtflol!!" And so on. If their thoughts are being deleted, they're quite eager to call it censorship. In a sense, I suppose, they're right, as they are quite clearly being restricted from expressing themselves. They should, however, not two things:

1) Freedom of speech is not absolute. Freedom is not absolute. There'll always be some restrictions to what you can do or say.
2) Censorship is not absolute. It only works here and now. You cannot ban something everywhere. You cannot ban it forever. You can only make sure that people don't read a book, an essay, or a comment here and now. But this is really what counts for anyone using censorship as a weapon or a tool. What the future might bring, does not concern them.

Right now, as I write this, there's a censored book on the desk in front of me. Not one of those that have once been banned somewhere (although there's lots of these in my bookshelf), but one that's actually been censored (It's a strange feeling, looking at it, knowing that it actually happened). It's a collection of papers from a meeting of the Soviet Estonian Academy of Sciences held in late 1948. The subject discussed there was the conference held in Moscow earlier that year where Genetics was declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience" (see the Wikipedia article on Lysenkoism for some background information). Several pages have (rather sloppily) been cut out from the book; the title of the censored paper and the name of its author have been blanked out with black ink. The unknown censor has done his (or her) job well -- you cannot make out neither the name nor the title. But the Machine as a whole hasn't done (couldn't have done) as thorough a job as one of its parts. I was still able to find out who the author of that paper was -- it was actually a speech by the President of the Academy of Sciences (he was arrested a few years later). I could even read the text of the speech if I wanted to: it was published in a national newspaper the next day. But I haven't read it. It's not a part of this book anymore.

The thought isn't always as important...

[Short Circuit]

Just having the right to be able to say--in print, even--that such-and-such an official "sucks" is good. In many countries, a false sense of presidential popularity is projected by the forbiddance of the expression of any other opinion of him.

Well-reasoned speech isn't all it's cracked up to be, for another reason. In such cases where it might be constrained in other environments, it's usually used among like-minded people. Take Slashdot, for example. Most of the replies to the main article are articula

Similarly

[leoPetr]

There are the some pictures in my family album with arrested family members blacked out or cut out. I haven't looked at the pictures in several years, but they are there.

One party rule leads towards madness. Some dissent is a good thing. Free speech ties into that.

Re:Similarly

[ces]

Which is as good a reason as any to make sure the GOP doesn't succeed in their plans to turn the US into a one party state.