alt Hacker NewsI see a huge difference between a bookstore choosing to not stock 1984 by George Orwell and the government prohibiting that book from being sold by anybody or openly discussed. Neither situation is good, but one is way, way worse than the other.
I see a huge difference between a bookstore choosing to not stock 1984 by George Orwell and the government prohibiting that book from being sold by anybody or openly discussed. Neither situation is good, but one is way, way worse than the other.
the one that's worse is the first one though, because it's significantly more sophisticated in its manipulation. A society in which censorship is so pervasive that it has been baked into the commercial or moral infrastructure is significantly more asinine than a government that literally just makes a list of things that you can't read, because at least I can look at the list and know what's off limits.
There's a hilarious moment with Noam Chomsky where an interviewer asks him. "Do you think I'm a US propagandist, that I don't believe what I say?" And Chomsky replies "no I think you believe what you claim to believe, it's just that if you didn't you wouldn't sit here to ask me the question". That is far more sinister than any ban could ever be because the censorship has already become implicit without even an order.