> Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.
How about the Red Scare or Huckleberry Finn? Problem with censorship as a tool is that it will be abused. What makes you so sure that the party censoring AP African American studies won't be back in power next?
Re:Senate Bill to Ban TikTok
by dragontamer on Thursday March 30, 2023 @02:30AM
(#35368844)
There's plenty of evils available to the US Government today. As some people like to point out, a government is an entity that has monopolized violence, which is an arrangement that's largely to the benefit of society (at least, in the cases where it is used correctly).
Execution, jailings, regulations, etc. etc. Plenty of ways for the government to be abused. Its inevitable that we give the government power to do what is necessary in society, whatever it is. Censorship is just one more power that the US Government has toyed with from time to time over the centuries.
To prevent abuse, we need to elect the right people to be our leaders, and the ones who wield that power.
Free Speech comes and goes in the USA. We tend to lean towards the freer-side of things, but if we need to, we clamp down on it to meet our other goals.
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WW2 is hardly an outlier either. WW1 had Espionage Act of 1917, Civil War didn't even have a law, Censorship and seizure of printing presses was just so common. Pre-Civil War, the Postmaster General of slave states commonly censored pamphlets from abolitionists. I mean, the "Alien and Sedition Acts" were passed within a year or two of the Bill of Rights, allowing the President to arrest various members of the press in the 1780s. Etc. etc. This stuff has been going on since the dawn of the USA as a country.
Book burnings and other such events were also widespread in the USA throughout our history... and even have legal precedent like the Comstock laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
IMO, we've gone too far into the free-speech side of becoming absolutely idiots about the subject in recent years and all of us can benefit from researching the actual history of the USA.
Free Speech, both opening up, and restricting it, has its uses. And if you're a student of history, you'll be able to feel the ebbs and flows of this subject throughout time.
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Censorship is a tool. A tool best used rarely, maybe only a few times a century. But I unfortunately think we're coming to the point where we need to start using it within this decade or so. And no, not for the stupid AP African American class crap. I mean for the part that matters right now, the China-Taiwan conflict that is obviously brewing up.