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The title of the article is: My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas. blacklisting (wiki) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
by readonthegoapp 5y ago
The title of the article is:
My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas.
blacklisting (wiki)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting
Blacklisting is the action of a group or authority, compiling a blacklist (or black list) of people, countries or other entities to be avoided or distrusted as being deemed unacceptable to those making the list. If someone is on a blacklist, they are seen by a government or other organization as being one of a number of people who cannot be trusted or who have done something wrong. As a verb, blacklist can mean to put an individual or entity on such a list.[1]
Are you saying the book is _not_ blacklisted? Or not blacklisted in Texas? Or, since it's available for sale in Texas, it is not, in fact, blacklisted?
...ah, i think i see part of what your issue is -- he says in the text of the article that he's never been "censored" in the US, with the implication being that he either has now been censored in the US might be soon, based on the fact that his book has been blacklisted in Texas, and therefore is being "censored" because of how blacklisting and censorship work, and you don't buy that "censored" is the correct word here -- it's not accurate -- it just some people criticizing a book. I guess that's one way to think about it. To me, if someone wants to criticize a book, fine, if some group wants to criticize a book, fine, but ones a legal authority criticizes a book, then it moves towards censorship very quickly, as i believe is the case here.
the following paragraph sounds like something from orwell - how he described how free speech and censorship actually work in practice -- it's actually extraordinarily rare to see physical violence used to suppress anything -- it's more of a learned response:
The political historian and commentator Anne Applebaum wrote in “Iron Curtain” (2012) about how the Stalinization of Eastern Europe depended not primarily on the gulag and the firing squads, but on the intimidation of people who felt compelled to spew the same idiocy they heard, pursuing a grotesque conformity. “Actual censors were not always needed,” Applebaum told me in a recent email. “Instead, a form of pervasive peer pressure convinced writers, journalists and everyone else to toe the party line; if they did not, they knew they risked being ejected from their jobs and shunned by their friends.”
Guess I could see arguing the point, but....don't agree, and don't think it's a strong point you're making. Really, it's an extremely weak argument, imo.
...also, if we're being super-strict, it seems like "censorship" is the process of reviewing material for possible expungement of certain material, whether or not that expungement actually needs to happen. for the authorities, most authors will have already learned -- possibly the hard way -- that they should self-censor, and they do, but they would still be subject to the censorship process.