Censorship pisses me off! Seriously! It especially pisses me off when it comes to natural things (e.g. nudity) when other topics, such as violence, are totally accepted. I’m fucking tired of it.
It has been said by many others, but I’ll repeat it with my own addendum: those who control the money control everything else eventually!
It often starts small, and we may even make justification at the time regarding the reasoning, but it is never just a one-off: it always grows, or rather erodes, over time. Safety and risk are often used as excuses, but they are not the only ones that carry weight.
Liberty (social) and Freedom (individual) are not the same thing and it is difficult to strike a balance between the two, but it can, and has, been done (e.g. Twelve Tables of Roman Law (451–450 BCE) [Lex Duodecim Tabularum]).
It is very rare for either Liberty or Freedom to be restored once one has been taken away. It is usually a one-way, slippery slope. It can happen quickly, or it can happen slowly (i.e. death by a 1000 [paper]cuts). In the end, the result is always the same.
Short of a major event (e.g. revolution) it typically cannot be undone.
The next time you get pissed off at something, try and think about the long term, multigenerational effect, before you jump on the “this should be banned” bandwagon.
If we do not have an independent, localized group to catch and filter public anger, a democracy will collapse into a centralized tyranny of the majority.
FYI that last sentence is a paraphrase from Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, Part 2, Chapters 7 and 8 (where he coins the phrase “tyranny of the majority”), and Volume 2, Part 4 (where he warns how centralized states absorb “secondary powers”).
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