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"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited. Speaking

"The people have their own opinions! We must shut them up for the sake of democracy!" Next you'll tell me that fighting in the war room is prohibited. Speaking of prohibition and the past, let's talk about the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Inquisition: "[...] Subsequent pontiffs continued to exhort the episcopate and the whole body of the faithful to be on their guard against heretical writings, whether old or new; and one of the functions of the Inquisition when it was established was to exercise a rigid censorship over books put in circulation. The majority of the condemnations were at that time of a specially theological character. With the discovery of the art of printing, and the wide and cheap diffusion of all sorts of books which ensued, the need for new precautions against heresy and immorality in literature made itself felt, and more than one pope (Sixtus IV. in 1479 and Alexander VI. in 1501) gave special directions to the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and Magdeburg regarding the growing abuses of the printing press; in 1515 the Lateran council formulated the decree De Impressione Librorum, which required that no work should be printed without previous examination by the proper ecclesiastical authority, the penalty of unlicensed printing being excommunication of the culprit, and confiscation and destruction of the books. The council of Trent in its fourth session, 8th April 1546, forbade the sale or possession of any anonymous religious book which had not previously been seen and approved by the ordinary; in the same year the university of Louvain, at the command of Charles V., prepared an “Index” of pernicious and forbidden books, a second edition of which appeared in 1550." It's almost as if the printing press had given anyone with paper access the sort of message amplification that John Wycliffe and Jan Hus could only dream of, and that Catholic society was being damaged by contextless applications of principles intended to protect it. The parallels with certain other principles written for a time of longbows that have unintended consequences in an era of muskets should not be ignored. It always astounds me that hysterical moralists today believe that they would be the ones resisting despots and authoritarian regimes, when it's clear that it was precisely those same hysterical moralists in different times wearing different costumes that would, on the drop of a dime, passionately support and install them for the sake of their own naïve sense of moral propriety.

bonaldi 8y ago
Smashing analogy! Oh, except that society was in fact negatively affected by the early unfettered press, and accordingly came up with all sorts of methods of regulating and managing it. It’s where we get libel laws, for one thing. You print something provably false about someone, and you’re going to face consequences for it. This is clearly us heading to a similar point online. Cowering behind common carrier exemptions and appealing to fundamentalist understandings of “free speech” aren’t going to wash for much longer. Speech has consequences. It astounds me that it’s so often the supposedly pro-market right who get outraged when market forces sock it to publishers of dross like InfoWars
- froasty 8y ago
  Amazing! Now the right to freedom of expression, as historically understood and instantiated by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is now considered a fundamentalist understanding of "free speech". And what exactly is Article 19? "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Clearly, the long, moral arc of the universe eludes you. Yes, those with power did everything within their power to repress and dispossess those utilizing nascent means of communication to spread free inquiry and discussion outside what "respectable" society desired. The end result of that attempt at suppression and repression was the Thirty Years War, the Commonwealth of England, more than eight million dead in Europe, and a safeguard so enduring that within a generation of the aftermath, freedom of the press was established in the United Kingdom--as well as the dissemination of certain, how shall we say, liberal philosophies that led to the draconian view that freedom of speech is fundamental to an open society and must be purchased by eternal vigilance against those that would take it away. As previously noted: different times, different costumes.
  - bonaldi 8y ago
    The United Kingdom is a strange place for you to pick as your model of laws protecting free press. And, as seems to be eluding you, we're talking about Spotify here. I don't believe Article 19 is intended to cover them. It'd be a - yes! - fundamentalist reading for sure that read "any media" as meaning Spotify had to carry InfoWars. As for your "eternal vigilance", Popper already has you there. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. And I'm sure you wouldn't want that. Well, sort-of sure.

bonaldi 8y ago

Smashing analogy! Oh, except that society was in fact negatively affected by the early unfettered press, and accordingly came up with all sorts of methods of regulating and managing it. It’s where we get libel laws, for one thing. You print something provably false about someone, and you’re going to face consequences for it. This is clearly us heading to a similar point online. Cowering behind common carrier exemptions and appealing to fundamentalist understandings of “free speech” aren’t going to wash for much longer. Speech has consequences. It astounds me that it’s so often the supposedly pro-market right who get outraged when market forces sock it to publishers of dross like InfoWars

froasty 8y ago
Amazing! Now the right to freedom of expression, as historically understood and instantiated by Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, is now considered a fundamentalist understanding of "free speech". And what exactly is Article 19? "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Clearly, the long, moral arc of the universe eludes you. Yes, those with power did everything within their power to repress and dispossess those utilizing nascent means of communication to spread free inquiry and discussion outside what "respectable" society desired. The end result of that attempt at suppression and repression was the Thirty Years War, the Commonwealth of England, more than eight million dead in Europe, and a safeguard so enduring that within a generation of the aftermath, freedom of the press was established in the United Kingdom--as well as the dissemination of certain, how shall we say, liberal philosophies that led to the draconian view that freedom of speech is fundamental to an open society and must be purchased by eternal vigilance against those that would take it away. As previously noted: different times, different costumes.
- bonaldi 8y ago
  The United Kingdom is a strange place for you to pick as your model of laws protecting free press. And, as seems to be eluding you, we're talking about Spotify here. I don't believe Article 19 is intended to cover them. It'd be a - yes! - fundamentalist reading for sure that read "any media" as meaning Spotify had to carry InfoWars. As for your "eternal vigilance", Popper already has you there. Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. And I'm sure you wouldn't want that. Well, sort-of sure.