K: I think you make the fundamental point (in practical terms): SI gives us the tools to handle speech we don't like. It's the same way in the larger world. If there is a violent television show or a sex drenched movie, we can watch or not. We have the ability to change the channel!! Or pass by the theater!! Amazing isn't it?
Most instances of censorship in recent years have involved sex and violence in the media. That's typical in this country and usually there is a larger, unnamed target beyond the immediate subject of attack. The fundamentalist campaign against the arts and the NEA in the nineties, for instance, focused on obscenity and blasphemy. The real targets were women and gays. (And their liberal buddies, natch.)
Recent events in Florida, by the way, have taken a bad turn. Don't know if you read the account in the NY Times -- it was in Thursday's paper I think, buried inside -- of the orchestrated violence outside the Miami-Dade counting HQ. Gangs of Republican thugs -- who had been rounded up and directed for just this purpose -- were attacking and beating people outside the rooms where vote counting was going on. According to the Times, at least one canvassing board member was so intimidated by this scene that he voted to discontinue the count.
Now I don't know how you feel about this sort of thing, but it seems to me it is a little too reminiscent of incipient European fascism in the 20s and 30s. That's the thing with censors and the censorious impulse, all too easily they boil up something broadly repressive and, ultimately, violent. I can't imagine that most Republicans will sanction this sort of thing. But we shall see. M2 |
