[WikiEN-l] Re: What's wrong with censorship?

Wed Mar 30 03:13:50 UTC 2005

Karl A. Krueger a écrit:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> 
>>RK emerged from his lonely exile to comment that censorship is
>>suppression of IDEAS.
> 
> 	[snip]
> 
>>When a junior high school library decides not to shelve Lady Chatterly's
>>Lover (or The Story of O), that is most definitely censorship. Whether
>>you think pubescent students should be "shielded" from sexual texts or
>>not, the ACT of shielding them has a name, and it's called "censorship".
> 
> 
> While I can understand both definitions of the word "censorship", I
> think it is far more useful to draw the distinction around the type of
> behavior that seeks to suppress ideas or deny points of view a public
> hearing, as opposed to that which simply refuses to support particular
> points of view.
> 
> For instance, it would be absurd (it seems to me) to state that when I
> choose to buy novels by Neal Stephenson and not to buy novels by Stephen
> King that I am "censoring" King by not supporting his work, granting it
> space on my bookshelf, or recommending it to my friends.  To define
> "censorship" this broadly makes the term meaningless.
> 
> Censorship, it seems to me, needs to be defined in terms of a space of
> discourse, and an act of intrusion upon it.  There have to be speakers
> who want to speak, listeners who want to listen, and an act which
> stifles the speech for the purpose of keeping it from being heard by
> those who would choose to hear.
> 
> 
> (Government schools are such a bad example, and so frequently cited,
> precisely because they come already politicized.  They are supported
> with taxpayer funds which people do not have the choice to withhold;
> everyone is compelled to underwrite whatever the schools teach.
> 
> That is why people get so agitated when government schools teach things
> they disapprove of -- not just because *someone* is teaching sex or
> religion or whatever, but because it's being done with *our money* and,
> in a republic, with the presumption of the "consent of the governed".
> When than consent has *not* really been given, people get indignant at
> the presumption.
> 
> Wikipedia has none of those problems.)

unless....
unless we start making deals with government (by accepting their 
offering of cash) or with educational system (by sharing grants to 
develop certain things to them).

Then, if you add up the cases where people provide by direct individual 
donations (which makes them feel ownership in a certain sense) and the 
realisation the project is financed indirectly with their taxes...