How can you discuss American censorship without *some* reference to politics?

What's more, how come others can write about politics non-stop but if I even hint at it I'm scrubbed? I can't even write criticism of the media without being scrubbed.

Nice.

Oh well...

Where's my violin ?

can you play?

Hey, I responded, and then hit 'post', only to find that your original was gone. But heck with it, here's what I said to your original post:


I will admit to a limited interest in this possible discussion: There are thoughts/positions/stands that I would not mind being hidden away from casual public view. It's likely that a majority of us would agree on some of these positions.

I see the problem arising when all of us against the production of, say, 'snuff films' lack the same unity when it comes to 'pretend snuff films'. It's easy to see how the previously united whole can fracture over the distinction between the two.

Weird, isn't it? There are numerous depictions of pretend wholesale slaughter in movies, but pretend snuff movies would likely result in quite the outcry.

I can't reject the concept of 'censorship', and therein lies the problem. Who gets to play the role of Thomas Bowdler, MD?

I think it's in the nuance.

I think it's Colonel Mustard, in the Kitchen, with the garbage disposal!!!

:P

It wasn't in the kitchen. It was in the library.

Until I see it with mine-eyes-have-seen-the-glory, I will NOT believe you have a garbage disposal in your liberry.

You seem obsessed with proving you know what the inside of a library looks like.

Madam, I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, in my very own liberry.

Amen.

I am NOT going into such a library until you get rid of the garbage disposal and the bidet.

Now, now, a bidet is a sign of civilization, culture and distinction - all qualities I immediately associated with Elderolddog the first time I encountered his pungent wit upon this very board... Zut alors, Madame Lot ;-)

Yes, but he uses it to brush his teeth!

You have a garbage disposal in your library? That's weird. ;P

I would refer you to Parler, but unfortunately it's not operational right now. I wonder why?

Damn that free enterprise !

Subscribe.
Submit.
Surrender your privacy.
Or else.

Democracy is an anamoly. Not our nature. Humanity is sinful, irrational and superstitious.

Get used to it.

It is going away. In the whole west. I was born and raised in the swedish welfare state and have seen it being dismantled. The party that built the welfare state was founded in the year of 1889. This year it is 100 years since women achieved their right to vote.


The social norm is Hobbes Leviathan.

Development countries = one party state
Republics = two party state
democracy = multivparty state

equlibrium = monarchy

Who said a republic had to be a 2-party state? France is a multi-party Republic, for example. So are most of the countries in Europe. Certainly, social progress has been under attack across Europe since the 1980s, but much of it remains, at least in some countries.

You are right. A republic can be organised in many ways.

I am just grumpy and old-fashioned because I am more into monoculture because that was how I grew up. The old modernist times were good times. Subject and object in a sweet and direct connection. Language had references to stuff that existed and everybody could see. You did not have to be a member in MENSA to feel normal.

Todays world is to self-reflexive for me. What is everyhing? Do truth exist? No. Back in the 1900s we first had one tv channel later we had two. Things we saw we shared. Slept well at night.

That is way I am into religion and stuff. Subject and object. No phenomenology messing things up.

You got me to look up phenomenology. I have to consider myself a materialist. I think consciousness is a combination of processing and architecture. I don't insist this. I lean to it, because, if I'm right, the fact remains that I am part of the mechanism making the judgment. I'm too close to see it. I am it.

You have ABBA.

Italian movie from the 60s !Explicit material! Nakedness! Erotic material!

Sweden - Heaven and Hell

Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYzw_a0ss74

Some guy mixed a night club scene from the scene with groovy elevator library-music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD1Knc6yRg8

Drudge has a link at this moment titled, "YouTube bans channel that spread virus misinformation..."

With regard to a discussion of censorship, are any of you taking the very, I think, tenable position that YouTube's decision to play nanny for its viewers should not be supported?



(I didn't click on it; I just said 'thank you' in my head.)

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Drudge has a link at this moment titled, "YouTube
> bans channel that spread virus misinformation..."
>
>
> With regard to a discussion of censorship, are any
> of you taking the very, I think, tenable position
> that YouTube's decision to play nanny for its
> viewers should not be supported?
>
>
>
> (I didn't click on it; I just said 'thank you' in
> my head.)

Who watches the watchers? Who polices the police? Without debate, there is no democracy.

Is the YouTube ban censorship or is it part of the debate?

Are certain parties crying about censorship because they're under threat of prosecution, or is it that they are just frustrated by losing the debate?

For progress to be made, there needs to be a winner...

> Who watches the watchers? Who polices the police?

Who uses Google Translate to look clever?


----------------------
> Without debate, there is no democracy.

Yes! And where would democracy be without witless neologisms like cultural Marxism and intersectionality? Where would civilization be without the occasional whoosh of uninspired earnestness?

YouTube and Twitter can do whatever the hell they want, within the laws relating to publishing or hosting in each of the countries where they operate. Those who want to misinform or be misinformed will create or find their own platform somewhere else.

Censorship only happens when the Government itself starts to ban the expression of certain ideas or news or other content.

Skrubbed. Yep, they want you to be clean, even behind the 'years'.

Dirty as we might can get at times, it doesn't carry over to how clean we eventually get, and then we might even get judged on the differences, OR the similarities!

But, I don't manage or make the rules.

I didn't read the post so I really can't say anything about it.

If you mean "party politics" then that's easy. If you take the ultra-feminist line that "the personal is political", then everything is political.

We are in a very dangerous time right now. Not just because of the virus, but because it is easy to bring in restrictions of freedom and harder to get rid of them.

There are subtle forms of restrictions. Some Russian writers for example complained that during the Soviet period they were subject to open censorship. Now they are technically free to write a lot of things, but they can't get them published by major outlets or distributed properly.

There have always been informal forms of censorship in western countries. If your view is out of line, you will always have struggled to get it in major newspapers, magazines or TV stations. The only exception to that is the Unabomber, who somehow managed to get his manifesto into the mainstream media.

Also we have a media which is more interested in garbage about celebrity sex lives than debates of public interest.

I've been watching a report on health problems from Corexit, which was sprayed on the Gulf oil spill. They're pretty horrific, but few news outlets even mention it. And over the past year, three news items have dominated media to the expense of everything else. Covid being one of them.

Every existimg nation state is a modern creation.

There is a top list in the world. Some states are better than others.

But, every nation state starts somewhere.

The majority starts as One-party states to get things going. The list of failed One-party states are very long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-party_state

If freedom is shrinking in the top states it means that it can not hold the foundation together if present things and processes keeps on going.

Many people have a hard time making a living in the western world. Too many men and to little women. Too lite stability.

Personally I love internet but all the western world is turnimg to partisan and prone to creating endless schisms in whatever thing going on.

And now "ultra-feminism" enters the pantheon of patronizing neologisms previously inhabited by cultural Marxism, intersectionality, Trotsky-under-the-bed-ism, Antifa nightmares, the war on cash, "Red" China, and always the Kardashians.

Freedom of speech, Jester of a Thousand Names, is a restriction on state power and not on private-sector decisions. You need to choose between anti-state critiques and your War on Culture. Only in a totalitarian state are they the same thing. Do you live in a totalitarian country, Jester? Is your beloved Justin a tyrant?

Russia, yes the USSR's child: you think that state censorship has become private censorship, the prevention of publications by Russian authors. And yet so very many Russian authors get published outside of Russia, as do writers in the UK, the United States, and even that maple leaf place. So what you write sounds a bit like a frustrated author who could not find, the world over, a publisher with a friendly ear. Is that you?

And then there's the disparaging allusion to "celebrity sex lives," another of your hobbyhorses. But do you really disapprove of such coverage? I mean, you constantly bruit about show names like Good Morning America, most recently the View; the names of pop stars like the Kardashians; the neo-imperialist influence of Hollywood; and surprisingly informed gossip about those randy royals and all they get up to. You really can't look away from the train wreck, can you.

Yes, yes, you try so very hard to offer wisdom from on high like Nietzsche walking around that alpine lake. But it's a mite too pretentious for such a plodding thinker to present himself as a scholar of Orwell and race and an expert on geopolitics.

Perhaps you could write for The Sun? Maybe they are one of the potential publishers who wouldn't give you the time of day. But that's your target, Jester, a place where you could whine at will about those salacious pop stars and Prince Andrew and conceivably even garner some adoring fans.

A christian should have no real problem living in a command economy or market economy. The question is at what level there is a worship of the economic arrangement? It is obivious that the Soviet Union worshipped Marx, Lenin, Stalin and so on.

Is the worship in marketeconomicism more subtle? I think it is.

All the example you give are symptoms of how people look at perspectives.

The right to speak
The right to be heard

Are these one and the same?
Are both "rights"?


(Outrage over 'censorship' appears to concern the latter)



As for concerns over "fairness":
Is anything "fair"?

Uh oh, I’m getting an earworm.

What do I do to make you want me?
What I got to do to be heard?
What do I say when it's all over?
Sorry seems to be the hardest word

Anyway

I particularly cherish the freedom to STFU.

You were censored because you were posting ex-Mormon questions or statements? There are not politics in that subject. Which by the way this board is for.

I've had lots of posts removed even though I was coming from a very leftist perspective.

So have a lot of us with politics in your general skating rink. We just aren't as impelled to claim victimhood as those on the right.

The Mormon church is well known for preventing objective free speech or any free culture when it comes to being critical of the church and its harmful culture and policies. Anything that does not promote what the church wants to be promoted, gets promptly crushed by the church and its leaders. That worked out really well for them until the internet came along and rained on their parade. The mormon church is very comparatively small and could not control what is said on the internet.

Although it's taken some time, the same thing is starting to happen now in politics. With so many people involved now, it is possible to control what is said on the internet. One has to ask what would have happened if the Mormon church could have controlled free speech on the internet. What affect would that have had on society? How could RFM ever have become anything other than a Mormon apologist forum if the Mormon church had controlled the narrative here?

So back to the rest of the world now. Do we really want to control what can be discussed in public forums where politics is an acceptable topic based on the type of forum? So Twitter and Facebook and Amazon win today. They ban certain ideologies from discussion on their platforms and undercut supplier relationships to prevent certain political ideologies from being discussed on other platforms where people want to pay for their own platform. We're not talking about real white supremist hate speech. Yeah, that happens and it is terrible. I also recall seeing freaky-looking, semi-naked painted-up individuals en-mass, marching down the public street in SanFrancisco, getting in-your-face violent and sometimes even grotesque as a response to how terribly they had been treated. Does that image fit every gay Mormon who just wants to be honest to reconsile their beliefs with who they are? No. When it comes to conservative platforms, we're talking about an ideaology that is shared by roughly half of the US population and not just those in the fringe who like to get attention by saying outlandish things.

We could call everyone who supports abortion a murderer and promptly de-platform them out of an anti-murder policy on any platform. We could call all homosexuals sexual deviates and promptly cancel any attempts to let them express who they really are and what motivates them. The church did this for a few centuries and it worked to unfairly supress a whole segment of the population. Now is the time to decide whether every white person is really a racist and whether they should carry personal shame around in their daily lives, because of the terrible things that their great great grandfathers did, and if every conservative is guilty of exploiting others. We need to decide if everyone with a job owes a large amount of their income to the unemployed and whether an unskilled person should be paid equally as someone who chose to invest in their own education. Should we give these people who made different choices to improve their own lives in honest ways, negative labels that justify the unfair treatment of them? If they are less than human, one can even justify not only de-platforming them, but can justifiably prevent them from communicating with eachother. Is this the right thing to do? Does it really benefit society? This group here should support more than anyone else, the free expression of thoughts and ideas on public platforms. If someone wants to leave and create their own platform, we shouldn't try to stop them from doing it. If we do that or support others doing that, we're worse than the oppressive Mormon church, the way it was before the internet started punishing it in to becoming more mainstream.

I don't think there will ever be a completely wide-open marketplace of ideas on los Googleable interwebz.

That's why I do most of my important work on the Dark Web, where censorship is censored.

Notice the Parade of Horribles. Whom does azsteve present as his counterfoil, his target, the definition of social irresponsibility whom which he and his militant allies should be judged?


------------------
> freaky-looking,
> semi-naked painted-up individuals en-mass,
> marching down the public street in SanFrancisco,
> getting in-your-face violent and sometimes even
> grotesque. . .

THAT would be the Folsome Street Fair. It is a peaceful event every year, licensed, policed, friendly. But hey, "grotesque" is in the eye of the anxious beholder and to the ultrasensitive bigot, "freaky-looking. . . individuals" might feel like "in-your-face violence" even if vicariously from a televised remove.


------------------
And again. . .

> We could call
> all homosexuals sexual deviates and promptly
> cancel any attempts to let them express who they
> really are and what motivates them.

It's evidently gay people who keep azsteve up at night, the equivalent of our troll's obsessions with cultural Marxism, "Red" China, and anyone left of Stroessner.


----------------
The problem for our cult-of-victimhood crowd, the MGTOW-ers, the Coupists-R-Us advocates, the "black people will not replace us" pearl-clutchers, is that gay and queer people don't bother the rest of us.

If you want to frighten us onto your side, you need to come up with a better example of anti-social elements. Rather than gays, for instance, perhaps there are willfully deluded thugs who insist that they deserve by dint of birth and legacy political predominance and take offense when their patriotically-motivated violence is punished according to the law, the cruel law.

But that wouldn't work well, would it, since you can't be your own foil. But hey, the night is young. Maybe you can assign the role of scapegoat to Latinos or Muslims, Jews or Democrats. Maybe they dress funny and participate in violent (metaphorically of course) street fairs.

Good luck with your search. May you find a prominent group as repugnant to the country's traditions and society's values as the people you so desperately seek to normalize.

But the world is, in reality, actually very complex.
Doesn't fit in the box.

It is that delta between the two causing perpetual bepissment:
Things Are Not As They Should Be.


Totally get it and feel for it.
But can't fix it.

How do we know how things should be? Here’s where LW disagrees with my endorsement of Gottfried Leibniz’s “Best of all possible worlds” theories, from his 1686 “Discourse on Metaphysics”. It was lampooned by Voltaire, but so what? Call me a Panglossian.

Religions are expressions of Platonic Idealism, where the world is a projection of higher ideal realms. This God-like universe of potentialities anneals into the Now through a very controlled process that is divine perfection in motion but looks like a howling cock up to the average human.

> Religions are expressions of Platonic Idealism,
> where the world is a projection of higher ideal
> realms.

Really? So there was no Fall? There was no cataclysmic fracturing of the universal reality such that Eden, or the Indian God, fragmented? This is not a realm temporarily signed over to Satan in one of his myriad guises? There will be no recreation of the universe at the end of the Kalpa/Millennium?

Seriously, bradley, what religion are you talking about?

I do give them too much credit. Sometimes I need to be reminded why I don’t chow down on poop stew. If they saw things my way, religions wouldn’t have much reason to exist. Where’s the money in that?

The Church of the Divine Woo.

My post was clearly in support of gay rights and the example couldn't be anymore applicable than with respect to how the church has treated its gay members. The examples I gave were real hurtful positions that the church and its members have taken against the gay community and I clearly don't approve of them. Perhaps the irony is painful to some people who don't want to give up their own brand of bigotry. It's amazing that even after writing in support of someone's rights, a person can be accused of their keeping you up at night and you're labeled a troll. Since church censorship of the narrative was the example, it looks like some people are just looking for a fight, no matter what is said.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/2021 01:20PM by azsteve.

You were writing in favor of gay rights?

You describe them as "freaky-looking, semi-naked painted-up individuals en-mass, marching down the public street in SanFrancisco, getting in-your-face violent and sometimes even grotesque. . ."

How open-minded of you; how very tolerant you are.

Human Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> How can you discuss American censorship without
> *some* reference to politics?
>
> What's more, how come others can write about
> politics non-stop but if I even hint at it I'm
> scrubbed? I can't even write criticism of the
> media without being scrubbed.
>
> Nice.
>
> Oh well...


Seems anytime I post anything slightly to the right of center it gets deleted.

I can imagine when I post anything, it pops on the administers monitor and I get an immediate go/no go if it's "okay".

tumwater Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I can imagine when I post anything, it pops on the
> administers monitor and I get an immediate go/no
> go if it's "okay".

I wish I were that important.

Elder Berry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> tumwater Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > I can imagine when I post anything, it pops on
> the
> > administers monitor and I get an immediate
> go/no
> > go if it's "okay".
>
> I wish I were that important.


EB

With a little practice you too can be down at my level.

There is supposed to be a no politics rule but some regulars post almost nothing but politics. It all seems pretty one sided.