Mark Newton on censorship and power dynamics
Tuesday July 13th 2010, 5:33 pm

My second post in 5 years which is devoted solely to a single link:

The State of trust: it’s a one way street

{…} A decision to censor is, at root, a failure of trust. When a Government prevents you from reading or viewing something, they’re saying a number of things about the electorate.

To begin with, they’re assuming that you, personally, lack the intellectual and emotional strength to view the censored item without being somehow damaged. Yet the censor has been able to see it without being damaged, so they’re really making a value judgement that says you are inferior to them.

You can try to convince them otherwise, but you’ll be dismissed as inherently unworthy: Once the censor has made a decision, it’s too risky to allow even one person to successfully demonstrate that they’re sturdy enough to resist the censored onslaught without scarring, because that’d wreck the whole system by undermining the censor’s inherent superiority. […]

Eloquent as always, Mark bangs it home.

-weez


No Comments so far
Leave a comment



Leave a comment

(required)

(required)





Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function show_subscription_checkbox() in /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-content/themes/benevolence/comments.php:155 Stack trace: #0 /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-includes/comment-template.php(1618): require() #1 /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-content/themes/benevolence/index.php(28): comments_template() #2 /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include('/home/www/machi...') #3 /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home/www/machi...') #4 /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/index.php(17): require('/home/www/machi...') #5 {main} thrown in /home/www/machinegunkeyboard.com/wp-content/themes/benevolence/comments.php on line 155