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The Futility of Censorship
- whatever1 5y agoI don't care if one can search and buy Mein Kampf even for profit. I do have problem if publishers / media / shops are actively promoting it.
- ch4s3 5y agoyou can let them know by ceasing to do business with them and spending your money elsewhere.
- thweori23443 5y agoI'm sure you also boycott people who promote war-criminals and genocidaires like Churchill and the many other criminals of the Anglo-American Empire right ? Thought not.
- delecti 5y agoIt's absurd to act like there's a list of people comparable to Hitler who we nonetheless still recognize as authors despite their deeds. Nobody is as recognized for their crimes against humanity, no books by other genocidal/empirical figures are nearly as noteworthy, and the intersection between those two lists leaves only Hitler.
- juanani 5y ago
- kbelder 5y agoMao and the little red book? He arguably killed more people, and was more widely-read.
- delecti 5y agoThat's an excellent example. I still feel comfortable asserting that there is an extremely small intersection between genociders and people significantly known for having written a book, but you're right to point out that it's not solely Hitler.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- GauntletWizard 5y agoI think everyone should read Mein Kampf. I think it should be promoted in every school, assigned as coursework in at least one course in every curriculum. You can encourage people to read and understand even the most detestable ideas. You should be training everyone how to analyze them, how to argue against them, and even how to understand the mindset they worked on and what right points they had. Mein Kampf is important reading.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoThere are other works that can teach that sort of critical thinking where a teacher failing to properly get the point across won't lead to people becoming more antisemitic.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoThe point of using Mein Kampf is not that it's a great work. It's a terrible one, poorly written and full of platitudes and barely competent thinking. It's also an important one, being the "Magnum Opus" of Hitler. If you're going to teach the holocaust properly, you should let his own words speak against him. Anyone can write a crappy book. Anyone can get the wrong message from a crappy book. The import of Mein Kampf is that you are directly refuting Hitler and are unafraid of taking him on. If you're too afraid to talk directly to his "points", you are giving him power even in death, giving the power of mystique to his followers.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI don't imagine my high school literature or history teachers easily challenging him. My class lecture's would have sounded like "and here Hitler said x, it's not true because of y and he was saying it to blame Jewish people for z problem." And the multiple choice quiz at the end of the week sounds like a complete mess. If it were trivial to counter it as a poorly written book, it never would have gained the influence it has. A well intentioned mediocre teacher could lead to people agreeing with the book, and I'd guess making Mein Kampf a mandatory study would also draw in a lot of teachers that aren't well intentioned.
- oh_sigh 5y agoAs an almost 40 year old American, where it is perfectly legal for publishers/media/shops to actively promote Mein Kampf, I have literally never seen it done.
- pyuser583 5y agoReally!? Maybe this is a regional thing. Back when my mid sized city had multiple big book stores, they all carried it. Come to think of it, I live in a university town. Lots of students probably have it as required reading. But there is/was never any shame in selling or promoting it - “promoting” in the marketing sense of putting it where it can be easily seen by someone passing by.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoHow is carrying a book actively promoting it? Isn't the point of a book store to carry books? If it's not on a shelf in the first few steps of the store (or at the register), I wouldn't consider it promoted.
- belval 5y ago> I do have problem if publishers / media / shops are actively promoting it. And what does active promotion mean in your example? Is having it on display in the "historic" section promotion? Should it not be in libraries at all. I think most of us would agree that a bookshop proudly displaying Mein Kampf with a neon sign saying "Bestseller in Politics" might be overstepping, but the complexity comes from drawing that line.
- slibhb 5y agoWhat if it's a new edition of Mein Kampf annotated by Deborah Lipstadt?
- pyuser583 5y agoLast I checked, big box booksellers always carry Mein Kempf. Most mainstream publishers have a translation. Even during WWII, UK bookstores sold Mein Kepf (with an intro by George Orwell) with proceeds going to the Red Cross. I strongly recommend reading it. You can’t deny the holocaust after reading it. Or be suprised at the any other part of Hitlers rule. He spells it all out. I think the big concern with Mein Kempf is neo-Nazis will venerate it. But it won’t convince anyone of anything they don’t already think. It’s literally Hitler talking to himself.
- mitchbob 5y agoArchived: https://archive.ph/KoTSv https://archive.ph/KoTSv
- yucky 5y agoAnyone else have trouble opening archive.ph links in Firefox? Using uBlock if that matters, tested on more than once device.
- ayngg 5y agoI had no issue with that link on Firefox with uBlock origin.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI've had issues with both archive.xx and outline.com for the past week or two. They just don't load.
- livueta 5y agoAre you using Cloudflare DoT? about:preferences => Network Settings => Enable DNS over HTTPS: Use Provider: Cloudflare (Default). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- car_analogy 5y ago> The second example is the notorious Nazi bonfires in 1933 that turned to cinders and smoke hundreds of thousands of books [..] this was so widely condemned that it seemed no one would dare to repeat it, or at least would not film and display it to the world. And yet in Chile, forty years later, that is exactly what happened It happened rather sooner than 40 years later: on May 13, 1946, the Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation of all media that could contribute to Nazism or militarism. As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in principle no different from the Nazi book burnings. [..] Artworks were under the same censorship as other media: "all collections of works of art related or dedicated to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism will be closed permanently and taken into custody." The directives were very broadly interpreted, leading to the destruction of thousands of paintings and thousands more were shipped to deposits in the US. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship But while blunt censorship more often than not backfires, there are plenty of ways to effectively suppress ideas. News guidelines on what should or shouldn't be included in articles, which movies or research* gets funded, which books get published.. A recent HN submission on literary censorship went into this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836184 *The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
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- unknownus3r 5y agoIf they succeeded, you wouldn’t know about them
- swayvil 5y agoOne funny thing. By banning the bad stuff you prevent us from intelligently studying it. Prevent us from coming up with intelligent ways to deal with it. So whatever (or whoever) actually caused the bad stuff gets lost in the shadows. And the next time the bad stuff comes around we're blindsided like a bubbleboy catching the flu.
- swayvil 5y agoSocial media is the KING KONG of censorship. Downvotes that hide your reply. Post removal. Automated post removal. Secret forbidden word lists. Banning. Shadowbanning. Blocking. We have so much censorship now that we need to create a new language to talk about it. Forget piles of burning books. The library is on fire.
- monkeybutton 5y agoSocial media websites are NOT obligated nor are compelled to carry/broadcast each and every person's opinion, how shitty it may be. That is is their choice and their freedom.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI don't think they're obligated to do anything, but people using them also do not expect or understand how it works. It is a whole new breed of concealed censorship which is not obvious or visible without research.
- swayvil 5y agoThere's an assumption of sincerity in a conversation. Censorship, banning, and the threat of all that, definitely steps on sincerity like a 5000 pound gorilla foot. ESPECIALLY the sneaky invisible kind. It turns a nice conversation into mass psychosis. Are we seeing a lot of that these days. Maybe.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoYes, I've seen this first-hand on reddit as a minority-opinion mod of a large sub-reddit. One side of an argument was removed consistently, often without public notice, and the other side was allowed. You can probably guess it was about.
- XorNot 5y agoThis is so many possible subreddits as to be meaningless, though it seems telling that you don't want to use the name.
- barry-cotter 5y agoCensorship isn’t futile. The regimes that use and used it aren’t stupid. It works. See how Milo and Gavin McInnes just disappeared from notice once Twitter/Google/Facebook decided that it was time to bring down the banhammer. Censorship works.
- traviswt 5y agoWow I didn’t realize it but you’re very right about those two. Can’t even remember the last time I saw anything related to them. So, does banning individuals from social view preferentially on one side actually shift the Overton window, or centrism itself?
- ayngg 5y agoIt depends on what your goals are. If you want to de-platform individuals it can be effective (but it isn't guaranteed since people like Trump have remained very popular in spite of it), but these individuals are just grifters who exploit an underlying sentiment, people who are de-platformed and forgotten are just replaced by someone else. Right wing populist sentiment which feeds it all is just as prominent as it has been before the censorship.
- throwaway82652 5y agoThat isn't censorship at all though. Both of those people still have wikipedia pages and it's fairly easy to find their writings. Calling this "censorship" is like saying it's "censorship" to kick someone out of a zoom meeting for being disruptive. What seems to be actually happening is everybody who tries to do business with those people knows what they're trying to do and finds it objectionable. At what point will you consider that if nobody wants what they're selling, what they're selling might actually be bad? How many times do they have to fail before we can collectively accept this? If you keep getting kicked out of zoom meetings for being disruptive, at some point shouldn't you accept that you are at fault? I get the feeling that some entrepreneurs get sucked up into this idea that we can create a world where no one is ever wrong, without realizing that's a horrible idea. That's another form of toxic positivity.
- incomingpain 5y ago>Censorship isn’t futile. The regimes that use and used it aren’t stupid. It works. See how Milo and Gavin McInnes just disappeared from notice once Twitter/Google/Facebook decided that it was time to bring down the banhammer. Your 2 examples are people who are clearly not censored. Censorship have made them greater in celebrity because of the censorship. Both of them have nice long wikipedia pages and you can go read or listen to what both of them have to say. “When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings By censoring these 2 people, and even naming them right now, you have made them a greater celebrity than they were ever going to be. >Censorship works. I honestly haven't cared to listen to either of these people, they aren't in my political sphere and they are not my political opponent. However absolutely not. These 2 examples are censorship backfiring to huge degree.
- slibhb 5y ago> How to balance the need to restrict hate speech with the need to safeguard people’s right to express repulsive, immoral, toxic, and, yes, dangerous ideas? How to deal with evident falsehoods that poison today’s polarized electorate and undermine democracy? How to make sure that the need for new ways of including racial and social equality in our common conversation does not lead to the false innocence of hygienic “safe spaces” that preclude genuine debate? How to counter those who have been the beneficiaries of the vicious suppression of the right to speak of the enslaved, Native Americans, immigrants, and gay people and who now weaponize free speech to safeguard odious prejudices about gender and race, privilege and history? Who will be the judges of what can be disseminated without themselves becoming censors? I wonder about this paragraph. The author is comfortable summarizing conservatives censoring left-wing ideas but he becomes flustered when dealing with the reverse. His prose suffers. Of course using free speech to "safeguard odious prejudices" isn't new, what's new is civil libertarians losing their nerve. Why is free speech important? Is it an end in itself, a natural right? Or is it important because open debate is necessary for truth-seeking and truth-seeking is how we make the world better? The problem with the latter justification is that it's contingent. If we decide that free speech does not lead to truth-seeking, or that truth-seeking won't lead to a better world, we can withdraw our support for free speech. I think we should keep with free speech even if it ruins us. At least we'll have learned something. If we give up our values, we'll be just another example of a culture losing a game of chicken with itself.
- traviswt 5y agoSpeech is the mechanism of collective thought.
- cryptonector 5y agoCan you explain your point?
- traviswt 5y agoIt is an answer to the question “Why is free speech important?” Nobody questions the importance of individual thought. Collective thought might even be more important. By squelching free speech we lose the ability to think collectively. Free speech is important because thought is important.
- AniseAbyss 5y agoChristians had a good 1500 years, although yes thankfully ultimately futile- degeneracy always wins out in the end.
- incomingpain 5y agoAll of western society wants to censor child porn, fictional animated isn't even legal. I would bet literally nobody will reply to me and say they think it should be legal. This is pretty successfully done in the western world, you really dont see it. When they bust people for it, it's always TOR or whatever. But it's literally uncensorable. Child porn is explicitly legalized all over africa and asia. What are you going to do? Go to their sovereign country and tell them to stop? What if they tell you no? Censorship even on this subject is effectively impossible. So flipside, how about subjective political issues. Age of consent isn't much further from this subject and there's literally no correct answer. Middle east sometimes has 6-8 year old girls in arranged marriages. Africa and Asia age of consent is somewhere around 10-12 often. So can we censor this subject? How about other hot topics? Gender roles, gender identity? Again big differential in the world. You literally can't censor the subject but boy do we ever. What does this censorship do? Make people think that the issue is solved or unified? No. Clearly the censorship doesnt work, and instead shines a light on the issue and radicalizes people on the subject on both sides. Often making things much worse.
- lilboiluvr69 5y agoAt least in the United States fictional depictions of children having sex, without the involvement of actual children, are legal.
- kingcharles 5y agoThere are over 50 legal jurisdictions in the USA (states, federal, military, tribal etc). Many of them now criminalize fictional depictions.