The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing…representations is far greater than any real danger…from such representations. – George Bernard Shaw
The last week of September is Banned Books Week, an occasion which interests me as a librarian, as a sex worker and as a steadfast supporter of individual liberty. The urge to ban books is the urge to control thought, and the only way to control thought is to cripple it, to stunt its growth, to break its wings so badly it can no longer fly free. Furthermore, the belief that the state or collective has the right to do this is an abomination; it is nothing less than the dogma that the state owns every individual, body and soul, and has the right to torture or maim those individuals as it pleases. In last year’s “Thought Control” (which I urge you to read if you haven’t yet), I wrote:
…the urge to censor is a mental illness…In earlier times…people imagined “evil” as some sort of tangible thing that could affect everyone around it…though that sort of booga-booga nonsense would be laughed out of the conversation now if expressed directly, it still sells quite well as long as it’s expressed indirectly by referring to unproven “negative secondary effects” or burbling inane and incomprehensible neofeminist drivel about how all women are as mystically interconnected as a hydra’s heads. And of course…anything (no matter how repressive and totalitarian) can be sold to the Great Unwashed if it’s depicted as being intended to “protect” children, with “protect” in this case…[meaning] “lock into a permanent passive and vegetative state”. Young people, we are told, can somehow be “harmed” by encountering ideas and concepts that they are “not ready for”, like the protagonist of an H.P. Lovecraft story driven mad by the blasphemous cosmic truths he discovers in some forbidden eldritch tome…
The stupidest part of this whole moronic belief system is that these “forbidden ideas” aren’t cosmic truths about man’s utter insignificance and the impending awakening of horrific multidimensional entities which regard us as nothing more than troublesome insects to be exterminated; hell, even I might be convinced that keeping that sort of knowledge from the easily-panicked masses would be a good idea. No, these supposed threats to sanity and spiritual health, these books (and movies, and websites) which are so horribly dangerous that the amelioration of the peril they present justifies abrogating civil rights and choking off the air of free thought, these cognitive gorgons which will surely petrify any child (or, often, woman) who has the bad luck to encounter them due to insufficient censorship by their Wise and Benevolent Rulers…are nearly always about sex. You know, the thing every macroscopic organism on Earth (and even some of the microscopic ones) already knows about. The reason every creature reading this even exists in the first place. The process that excessive ignorance of is incredibly more dangerous than knowledge of.
In our sad, sick and twisted society, the desire to suppress knowledge and images of sex is so powerful that those afflicted with it are willing to devote tremendous amounts of money and manpower in a futile quest to that end; they are willing to deny millions of women income and freedom, to expose all women to much greater chances of rape, to risk the death of their children from disease, and to cripple the greatest tool of communication ever devised. This is not rational behavior; it is a mental illness, and for sane people to give in to the censors merely exacerbates their condition and locks all of us up into a vast Bedlam with them.
I’m trying to think of a time in my life where I came across a book, or an artwork, or anything else, that inspired outrage/revulsion/disgust in me to the level that I thought, “Not only do I never want to see this again, I want to devote myself to ensuring that nobody else does, ever again. Or anything like it. It’s just TOO DANGEROUS.”
Nope. Never happened. Not something I can even wrap my mind around.
How about devoting over a year of your life to censoring that one single thing?
For years I was not affiliated with a political party. Then there was a local school board election and some folks were running in the primary on a book banning platform. My mother and I both registered so we could vote in that primary and keep those people out of power. As I recall, they didn’t get on the Fall ballot, so my usual apathy allowed me not to worry about picking between the rest of the candidates.
We read Fahrenheit 451 in school – these people would have kept us from doing so and sent us directly on that course. I’d prefer to make my own mistakes, thank you
I read “Mein Kompf” – or however you spell it – and while it certainly infuriated me to read it – I was thankful for the opportunity. Same thing for Das Kapital.
But fascists and socialists will never back off censorship of political thought …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EosaP99J3Z8
Too bad the guy wasn’t handing out copies of the “Communist Manifesto” – he prolly would have had HELP from the faculty at this school.
So how did it turn out? What did the veep have to say?
Yeah it’s pretty ridiculous, especially the shrink-wannabee in uniform. And no, I don’t think it would’ve mattered if he’d been handing out Communist Manifestos or Bibles or Harry Potter or Tarzan of the Apes or anything else.
In the very early days of feminism, when birth control was the issue of the day, the Responsible Authorities censored speech on birth control on the grounds that it was obscene. Decades later this led to the feminist mantra that “the sexual is political” which is why Kate Millet’s book was called “Sexual Politics.” Decades later, the feminists developed an interest in censorship of their own, but they quickly discovered that “the sexual is political” is a knife that cuts both ways. So they developed a theory that porn leads to rape and sexual abuse, even though there was never any evidence that this was true: one of the great goals of the Meese Commission on Pornography was to find such evidence, and they never did. Nowadays, the evidence is that readily available porn via the Internet DECREASES rape. But that doesn’t stop the feminists who want to censor, oh, no. Because as you say, it’s a mental illness. The excuses and rationales that those who have the censorship illness come up with to justify their sick need to control others’ minds are simply symptoms.
Labeling those who think or behave differently to you as ‘mentally ill’ has got to be a mental illness I reckon.
Typo?
Did you mean to write ‘comic truths’?
Lovecraft and his blank paged Necronomicon are about as scary as Daffy Duck in a vampire cape.
If you really want to have nightmares try something like Klimov’s Idi i smotri.
Or read a well written history book – especially the ones compiled from testimonies of survivors of atrocities.
What people can do to each other is way more horrible than any monster from the mind of a third rate hack.
No, labeling people who believe they can and should have the power to control others’ minds as what they are – delusional megalomaniacs – is simply realistic. It’s not my fault there are so many of them. As for your aversion to Lovecraft, you seem to be confusing your opinion of the author with the goings-on within his fictive universe, which is what the phrase describes.
I kind of agree about the Lovecraft though- Lovcraftian horror is predicated on the fear of the unknown, which I rarely, if ever, feel, and when I do I squelch so instinctively its like swatting a mosquito, so his fiction has always comes off to me as rather mellow dramatic.
That’s exactly the point. In his work, people can be driven mad by learning things they “aren’t meant to know”, just as child cultists imagine young people’s minds are “corrupted” by things they “aren’t ready to know.” There is no difference, except that in Lovecraft the ideas aren’t merely sexual ones with which most of everybody over 18 is already familiar, or pictures of organs possessed by fully half the human race.
Yeah, he relies heavily on OTT prose while being basically unable to give form or life to his hidden horrors.
He’s relying on the idea that his readers will fill his blanks with monsters from their own minds that are far more spine chilling than anything he could describe. A neat trick the first time you see it but a pretty lame one on which to build an entire oeuvre.
Decent horror writing at least provides a range of suggestive Rorschach-blot shadows the reader can project different fears onto – not the same-old tentacled blobs of nothing.
Mellow dramatic? That’s an amusing notion. Do you mean melodramatic, or does ‘mellow’ describe your reaction to these supposed horrors?
As for myself, I draw a parallel between that style and Doc smith’s Triplanetary. Which isn’t, you know, the best stuff out there.
Hear, hear!
Or his tedious ‘Lensmen’ and ‘Skylark’.
The first line of my comment was deliberately ironic.
Did you spot the irony in the first sentence of yours?
My sentence was not ironic; it was meant exactly as written.
IMHO the label of ‘mental illness’ is the most pervasive and repressive form of censorship in society today.
Of course the Soviets were the ones who really raised it to an art form.
I retract the “seem to” in my below comment. You actually believe there is no such thing as insanity, which, to be clear, is an inability to or difficulty with perceiving and interacting with reality.
I believe people can define their own insanity.
As in “I don’t want to think about ‘x’ so I’m going to refuse to read the book or self-administer something to stop me from thinking about it”.
But when other people start claiming you’re insane regardless of your own opinion on the matter and start trying to impose their own model of ‘right thinking’ on you it’s just common or garden variety oppression – albeit taken to it’s most invasive extreme. At least jailers only try to control your body.
Check out Rich Winkel’s essay ‘Psychiatry in a Nutshell‘ for a brief history of that form of oppression.
Where on earth did you get the idea that you perceive or interact with ‘reality’?
Oh please. Assuming and objective reality (somewhere between my subjective reality and everyone else’s subjective reality) is a perfectly reasonable assumption, so don’t even bother with that inane argument.
It makes you look like a high school kid.
And not even one of the cute ones that has me checking law websites. 😉
Nah, I’m one of the ugly ones. Like Berkley, Hume, Kant and Sankara.
Apparently you don’t graduate from Storm Daughter High until you have all the epistemology lobotomised out of you.
Epistemology–the last refuge of those with insufficient imagination to imagine that the cosmos may be greater than their imagination.
On the contrary, epistemology is of the most use to people with good imaginations. It helps them to understand when their imagination has overtaken their system of knowledge and has become pure speculation.
It’s also useful to those with poor imaginations who have simply swallowed a canned knowledge system spoon fed to them by some sort of ideological authority too.
A better slogan would be “Epistemology – The cure for those too arrogant or ignorant to recognise the limitations of their understanding”.
I would accept that as a corollary, not a replacement for my statement. I’ve been around too many people who think they know everything–computer geeks especially–and then use the rules of computer logic rules to try and prove something in philosophy. Too paraphrase the late Mortimer Addler, “They’re trying to remove a hex screw with a Phillips head screwdriver.”
You seem to be implying that mental illness is not a thing and so anyone who “thinks differently” from you is of course perfectly sane, regardless of the truth of the matter. Certainly there are people who issue fals claims about the sanity of other people, just as there are people who make false claims about the deeds of other people, but that does not mean that there are no legitimately crazy people.
Her point, I believe, is that its fine to disagree, or have different opinions and beliefs from other people, but when you cross the line and start trying to “thought control” other people, you have become something less than human with no real understanding of reality (i.e. insane)
Nah, standard censorship isn’t thought control – just mouth control.
Thought control is when someone says or does something you find so shocking you have to force pills into their mouth to change the way they think.
Precisely. Furthermore, I don’t think mentally ill people need to be “controlled” (though of course they might choose it for themselves) unless they are actually harming others. One of the advantages of libertarian thought is that we don’t have to decide who’s too crazy to vote or hold power or whatever, because nobody has much power over individual lives in the first place; policies like censorship are therefore non-starters.
Just labeling them ‘mentally ill people’ against their own opinion is attempting to control their social identity and opening them up for even greater oppression.
Censorship is a non-starter precisely because it considers some kinds of non-harmful thought and expression as inherently disordered and therefore not worthy of direct engagement and argued refutation – just like the concept of ‘mental illness’.
Oh, give it a rest. Name calling, justified or not, is hardly the same thing as censorship. Ostracism is awful, but it is hardly the same thing as being forcibly brainwashed (or simply trained from birth to be willfully ignorant).
Training was it?
I’d assumed you were just particularly gifted.
*eye roll*
Mental illness is not a ‘thing’, it’s an ever moving feast of behavioural clusters used by those with power to oppress those without (and sometimes used by those who aspire to power to delegitimise the positions of others when they are bankrupt for rational arguments).
Homosexuality is a ‘thing’.
Up until 1974 it was also a mental illness.
LOL – you’re taking the position I would have taken (and have in other threads). Except, I would add something much more radical – that “psychology” is nothing but a basketful of theories from which people “cherry pick” what to believe in based on what makes them feel good and / or supports their own opinions.
It’s like a basket full of toy weapons that people reach in and pull out of for their little “play fights”. It’s not science at all – it is to science what saccharin is to sugar.
Perhaps I should pronounce THESE people as being mentally ill also? Talk about “thought control” – what else is it when the penalty for thinking differently is … DEATH?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2429074/Pakistan-church-blast-2-suicide-bombers-kill-85-attack-countrys-Christians.html
Nah – I won’t call them “mentally ill”. I WILL call them “son of a bitches” that deserve to be eradicated from the face of the earth though. And – I’m not talking about genocide here – I’m talking about eliminating only the people who won’t allow others to live in peace.
What about their supporters and enablers here in the West? Mentally ill? Nope – I just call them idiots. 😀
You know krulac, sometimes I think if the two of us put our heads together we’d have a brain between us.
Well, I do agree with you on this. If people who want to “censor” are mentally ill then people who are against abortion are mentally ill for wanting to “control” people and people who are for abortion are mentally ill for wanting to kill babies and …
Caesar was mentally ill because he wanted to invade Gaul and crush the culture there … and every King and Queen of England was mentally in because they did all kinds of “controlling” things including censorship – which also makes every Marxist leader ever to have existed “metally also”.
Usama Bin Laden was “mentally ill” for attempting to control our thinking and insisting that we all convert to Islam. George Bush was mentally ill for going after him … because GW was trying to “control” UBL …
Which … at the end of the day – all means that 90% of us out here are mentally ill and, if that’s the case – then mental illness is about as “abnormal” as heterosexuality. And if that’s the case – then it’s really can’t be considered a slur to be called such.
That’s a really shoddy attempt at a reductio ad absurdum, dear. People’s bodies absolutely can be controlled through violence; it’s the belief one can control thoughts that flies in the face of reality, and is therefore delusional.
Boy, there must be a lot of delusional marketers, spin doctors and other propagandists out there wasting a heck of a lot of money. Not to mention the manufacturers of psychiatric drugs.
Seems to me I can control at least some of your thoughts with ease.
For instance I can tell you to not think of a pink elephant.
Except that you’re missing the point that censors really aren’t trying to control “thoughts”.
They could give two shits what you “think” – they are attempting to control YOUR ACTIONS. Stalin didn’t care if you THOUGHT he was an idiot – as long as you were a good little serf and didn’t try to spread that notion around. And censorship is one tool to control actions – because the very act sends a message that the topic is “out of bounds”.
And, if you want to take it farther (or is it “further”?) … for that matter, we do know that minds and thoughts can be controlled through a combination of propaganda and censorship. Look to American college campuses to see how effective it has been. There is virtually universal MONOLITHIC thought in our upper academic institutions … in fact, they have their own word to “put down” those who disagree with them … “anti-intellectual”. So it’s not INSANITY to think that thoughts can be “controlled” – you just have to work real hard and try to make it non-obvious.
And Lincoln won a civil war where he, amongst other things, imprisoned newspaper editors. I believe his statement was something like … “How can I punish a soldier for deserting his post and do nothing to the journalist who obliged him to do it?” Certainly – Lincoln’s action was a form of censorship sooo … was he mentally ill also?
Also – haven’t you referred to prohibitionists in the past as being “mentally ill” also?
I just think it’s a tired old saw … being called “mentally ill” these days has the same effect as calling one a “racist” …
*Yawn
I’m sure you saw this from Popehat: http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-ralph-ellison-invisible-man-banned-north-carolina-20130919,0,3907081.story
Yes, we must protect 11th graders from “lack of innocence, its language and sexual content.” Because God knows that 16 year olds never think an impure thought unless some book deposits it there.
The state-sponsored Child Cult’s sacred Doctrine of Shazam teaches that sex is unnatural, and that without external “sexualization” every 16-year-old would be just as “innocent” (read: ignorant) as a 6-year-old. And woe betide those who question it.
I kinda freak out (as in, go she-hulk) whenever I hear people say things like “ignorance is bliss” or “the innocence of youth”. As far as I’m concerned, no eviler words can ever be uttered by a human being.
OK. I’m going to say something REALLY unpopular here.
Every year I see the “Banned Books” display at my local Library, and every year it strikes me as a prime example of smug self-righteousness. It always includes Huck Finn, and somehow never seems to include THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION. I think that Censorship is always wrong, but I also think that in the case of a manuscript made up entirely of lies, by a political hatchet man, for the expressed purpose of justifying mass murder, the issue isn’t simple.
I’m against censorship, in the sense of a government suppressing the publication of something. I am FOR selectivity. No Library can buy everything, no school can teach every book. Some selections must be made. Yes, the results will be biased. Sometimes they will be offensively so. That is not an excuse for pretending that any other selections would NOT be biased.
A school district that chooses not to buy copies of a book is not committing Censorship. They may be being blundering godsdamned fools, bigots, and swine. That’s a separate issue.
Nobody’s criticizing library selection policies; book banning is when people want to remove what has already been selected. When I was a librarian, the director delegated to me the decision whether to buy Madonna’s book Sex, for which we had a number of requests. I decided against it not for the content, but because the original edition was extremely expensive ($70 if I remember correctly) and had sheet-metal covers held on by a plastic spiral binding, which wouldn’t survive even two months of normal circulation. In other words, my decision was a practical one based in the need to allocate scarce resources wisely. Had the book had a normal binding and price, I would have bought it without hesitation as I did a number of other controversial titles.
I would argue that even removing a book from a Library isn’t “Censorship”. And people have a legitimate interest in removing approval of a book they consider vile. And other people can then ridicule them for it. It just isn’t the same as preventing publication.
Its is unjustifiably waistfull to remove a book from a library- no one is forced to take it out and read it, and if its there, clearly someone wanted it! Censorship is the removal of “undesirable” intellectual content and/or the enforced restriction of content from a willing audience. If the information is available, its too late to take it away, and if someone wants it, then it is censorship to deny them the content solely on the basis of its “unsuitability”.
If the library is being supported with tax meney, then the presence of a book in the Library carries the sense of approval by the society which pays the taxes. If it isn’t ok for a twon to erect a Creche at Christmas because that offends Atheists, then the same logic applies to books that offend, say, prissy Christians.
And, personally, I have heard and seen too many “I know better than these peseants” twits in low level bureaucratic positions to just accept “well
The library bought it, we can’t waste it”
Religious separation is not the same as censorship- allowing the library to carry a copy of any and all religious texts is not only common place, but entirely different if the library only carried a copy of the christian bible and nothing else. If a town erect a Creche, then it also has a responsibility to erect an idol for any other religion. If the Creche is put up on public land by a private citizen with a permit, that is also fine, because it implies that anyone can put up a religious symbol if they ask for it.
And you are making a huge assumption that everyone even within your own community is up in arms about a book being present at the library- unless you have a majority opinion to pull the book, your society does approve of the books presence, even if it doesn’t necessarily approve of its lessons.
Just because information is there, doesn’t imply that you believe in the message, just that you believe there is value in knowing it. Reading about bad things so you can identify it is just as valuable as reading about good things so you can identify them.
I still contend that censorship is more about asserting dominance than anything else. If I can force you to ban a book, or stop carrying it in a bookstore or library, or force people to not read that book in public, then I’ve made clear where the power (in this situatio) lies. I’ve exerted control over your actions, made you submit to my will.
After all, properly applied, a convincing case could be made that the Holy Bible ought to at least be on the restricted stacks, if not completely banned. The Bible contains scenes of rape, torture, mass muder, treason (which is rewarded by God!), and all sorts of sex. Not only that, this book has inspired countless acts of murder, oppression, and cruelty. Seems dangerous to me…
The Bible IS banned in most Mohammedan countries – with a penalty of death for possessing one not being that uncommon.
Again, I would like to see a distinction between Censorship (you may not publish, sell, or buy that book of which I disapprove) and saying “My taxes pay for this library/school/what-have-you. If the library/school/what-have-you shelves a copy of this book it looks like I approve of it. I don’t. If people want to read that trash, let them buy their own goddamned copy.”
This is a point that really gets under my skin about mainstream Liberals (not that I’m accusing anybody here of being one); they can see (or apparently see) why a town putting up a creche on public land makes it appear that everyone in the town, including devout Atheists, approves of Christianity. They can’t see that shelving, say, Ginsberg’s HOWL, in the public library makes it appear everyone in town, including prissy little maiden aunties, approves of buggery.
Different venues, different rules.
Your logic would mean that poor people only get access to books deemed suitable by tax-payers. I’m sure that this would meet with approval by major corporations (“We’d prefer if the library did not stock volumes critical of capitalism or our company in particular”) but might not be in keeping with Enlightenment ideals.
Whereas our creche also involves ‘establishing a religion’ proviso. So, it involves both Free Speech and Freedom of Worship and a collision between those values.
Letting individual preferences (and desires to not be offendedx) rule library selections is a dangerous road to travel.
There are no people in our society so poor that they cannot buy a book on their own account. They may not WANT to…..
Not quite true. There are textbooks out there I would love to purchase, but because I am disabled on a fixed income, I cannot afford to buy them. Thank God Ben Franklin invented the Public Lending Library, or I would be SOL.
You should also give thanks for Andrew Carnegie, whose multitudinous gifts of Libraries may well be why Free Libraries are considered normal in the United States.
But it is not your money alone that pays for a book- you can make your opinion known, but democracy means that even if you didn’t vote for someone, you alone, or even you and a sizable minority, are not allowed to remove them. Majority rules.
So you’d support removing books promoting Global Warming if the majority disapproves of them?
My politics lean more to the “right” than the left – I think Global Warming is hogwash. BUT – I am a firm believer that, on a level playing field – truth wins out in the end. Which is why people who have no faith in their beliefs turn to censorship – as the Global Warming crowd does when they insist that meterologists who don’t buy into the Global Warming scare, lock stock and barrell, should be decertified or kept from working in their chosen profession.
If I ran a library … we’d have all ideas represented there (this isn’t the case now). Go to any college library and see for yourself – leftist propaganda is WELCOME in ALL forms. But try to find Mark Levin’s book or the book that Rush Limbaugh wrote … yeah – don’t waste your time – the leftists censored it.
Bill Ayers is a hero on every college campus in America and he’s welcome on any campus – at any time. Ann Coulter? Not so much.
Which is why I won’t be lectured on “censorship” – my house is clean in that regard. I suggest leftists look around at their own house though – because something smells … bad.
I’ve never had trouble finding any book I wanted from the library, regardless of content, because I know how to use the inter-library loan system. 🙂
Really, if a community is that set on removing books about global warming, I’d leave the community, at all costs. I’d even declare them evil and unamerican.
I don’t want any knowledge hidden or restricted, ever, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect intellectual property rights, or the right of someone too keep a secret (even if that someone is the government), I just don’t like it and I would prefer if all information was available to everyone everywhere.
Let’s say that another community elected to ban “Creationism” books on the grounds that it’s “bad science” or not “science” at all … would you call them “unamerican” and “evil”?
My guess is that – you would not – because the only people truely “unamerican” and “evil” are those people who THINK differently than you do.
Okay, your wrong- that is evil and unamerican! You assume that because I disagree with an idea means I want it gone. That is evil, and that is my point. If the idea was not there, how could I disagree with it?
You don’t need to ban anything, just reclassify them as “not science” because… creationism is religion, not science. If a book is written claiming its science- still a book on religion. (duh)
If enough people object to a book, then it shouln’t be in a library maintained by money obtained from those people under threat of force. Will this tend to reduce Public LIbraries to repositories of pap? Possibly, but I don’t think so. Also, I am fully in favor of holding up to public ridicule any pillock who wants Harry Potter out of the library becase he promotes witchcraft. I just don’t think he’s a censor.
He is a censor, by definition, and how many people are “enough people”, and honestly, who would want to live in a society that is okay with book banning? It sounds like a horribly close-minded and ignorant crowd to me.
No, he isn’t. Preventing people from publishing, selling, or buying is censorship. Wanting to keep something from having what appears to be public approval may be stupid, depending on circumstances, but it isn’t CENSORSHIP.
No, it is the worst sort of propaganda. You are making people’s minds up for them, just as the Vatican’s Office for the Propagation of the Faith used to.
“cen·sor·ship
ˈsensərˌSHip/
noun
noun: censorship
1.
the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.”
Yes, he is.
Score one for Storm Daughter!
cspschofield’s argument is one I would expect from somebody who disapproves of public libraries in general. Argue that censorship isn’t really censorship if the government is paying for it with taxes, and that it’s OK for the government to control the content of public libraries because hey, they’re paying for it. And thus the only real solution is to get the government out of the library business altogether! Oh, and since you’re not paying for that anymore, could you lower my taxes?
Put constraints on government? throw a fit if you catch them censoring? No no no, that still leaves the government spending MY MONEY on books for people who just don’t want to buy them! Bad! Bad!
BTW, the only reason I haven’t bought Imaro 2 : The Quest for Cush is because it costs $50 and up. And no, I can’t really afford that. I mean, if Imaro 2 : The Quest for Cush is the ONLY THING that matters to me I suppose I could, but I think I’ll try Ben’s invention instead. And yes, Carnegie did a great thing with his libraries.
How about instead of another remake of Conan the Barbarian, we have an Imaro movie instead?
See, I am a great believer in the public library system. As Matt Damon said in “Good Will Hunting,” “You spent $250,000 to get an education that is not as good as the one I got for nothing but a couple of bucks in library fines. (OK, it’s a paraphrase, but it is close.) No censorship, but a segregated reading room for those who want to read or research books, computer sites and magazines on topics like sex, eroticism, pornography (whatever that is), sado-masochism or for that matter any type of graphic violence that might disturb the impressionable mind. The thirteen year old can come down to the room and read if mom or dad, first time around, comes with and gives permission. Anyone over 17, well the sky’s the limit. I would exclude the parental part, except everyone and their brother will raise hell if you do, and the system won’t get adopted. A flawed system that gets you most of what you want is better than a perfect system that has no chance of adoption.
I remember back in Jesuit High School having a summer reading list, where we would have 4 books to read and we’d get tested on them first week of English class, As a teenager it was a bore and it was work. The books were the usual suspects: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, Julius Caesar, The Great Gatsby, etc.We did the work and promptly no longer cared about those books. Fast Forward out of the 80’s to 2006 when the ALA (American Library Association) published the most banned books in America and *it was my summer reading list*. Sure a couple more modern offering were there, but what I read was on that list. It blew me away. It was the intent and design of the Fathers to expose us directly to what had scared America most. It stood in stark contrast to the Presbyterian method of hysteria and.running for cover that would happen at my previous middle school. Here was a group that found it more important to confront and challenge the boogeymen that reside in the mind. Here was a group that believed in “think for yourself” (they said it directly) rather than “it’s God’s will”. A group that believe in the dignity of *every* human and to put others first and taught those ideals. I was blown away. Funny part is I’m Atheist/Agnostic (Atheist because it is my opinion there is no god, Agnostic because there is no answer to the question “Does God exist?”- it is unknowable.) For obvious reason, I will always respect the Jesuits, even if we fall on different sides of the theological fence.
Why is it that religionists are always blamed for censorship but what liberals are doing on college campuses isn’t “censorship”????
But… wasn’t Huck Finn banned by racists, not necessarily religious people? I think your stretching here- Bigoted jerks come in all shapes, sizes, and ideological colors.
Huckleberry Finn is banned by people for whom the word “nigger” causes electric shocks of offense to run through their bodies. They cannot see the novel’s overarching anti-slavery and anti-racism themes because they are so overwrought by the presence of that word. It trumps everything else.
Says who? Of course it’s censorship!
My object – as the ornery “Empire Guy” is to point out that it’s really easy for us to denounce censorship when given examples of things being banned that we like or feel apathetic about.
But when it’s something that we don’t like – like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or someone else … many people stop and think twice.
I know YOU DON’T … because I’ve read this blog long enough to know how you think – and admire how balanced you are … I may disagree with your language or approach sometimes – but you intellect I have nothing but admiration for.
I’m not the only one; libertarians in general and free speech advocates in particular are all over this. And there’s an organization called FIRE which is wholly dedicated to fighting campus censorship.
Maybe its easy for you, but not so much for the rest of us- censorship is evil, regardless of the content being censored. You can’t make evil go away by pretending its not there, so why would you suppress any information? You can’t learn from mistakes if you can’t know, learn about them.
Oh hells yes it’s censorship! Whether inflicted by religious puritans or ideological puritans, it 10000% is. Anyone who makes the decision, “This is not suited for other people to read and I will forbid them from reading it” is A. CENSOR.
I know what you’re thinking Krulac, and this is different from the discussion we were having a few weeks ago about the shop owner who chooses not to sell racy magazines. That shop owner is not preventing people from getting their smut elsewhere. He simply chooses not to provide it. THAT isn’t censorship.
It would be difficult to find anybody with a lower opinion of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh than me. And I don’t think their books, speeches, and associated warblings should be censored. If even one person wants the book in a library (and it isn’t bound in sheet metal and plastic and doesn’t cost $100, see Maggie’s example of SEX above), then it should be there. I will not be very high on the list of people eagerly awaiting the book’s availability, but it should be there for those who are.
If there is one case where I hesitate on free speech issues, it’s in whether or not people who do not support it for EVERYBODY should be allowed to call themselves “liberals.” Like hell they are.
Which is the reason I’ve adopted Alan Colmes descriptive “liberaltarian” Sailor. I, like Voltaire, believe in your right to say it, period. Of course, if you are trying to egg a crowd on into violent action, I reserve the right to smack you across the head with a 2×4 in self-defense. Of course then, I’ll have to do penance for acting in a violent fashion, but it is better than a riot that might kill or injure dozens of people.
I keep coming across references to something called “left libertarianism.” Maybe that’s us?
No. From what I understand, anarcho-socialist libertarianism, aka left libertarianism, might be a distant relative, but it is not liberaltarianism. That particular viewpoint is similar–if not identical–to what is espoused by the Green Party.
OK. It does seem to be like libertarianism, except for the constant fear that government is too big… exists.
Something like that.
Reading a book about architecture, I was reminded of Willhelm Reich, an émigré psychologist from Austria with decidedly odd ideas about sexuality. He invented the ‘orgone accumulator’ and founded an institute in Maine to promulgate its use. The Food and Drug Administration brought a case against him in the mid 1950s, he lost, was imprisoned, his institute fined, his publications publicly burned and the institute forbidden to distribute any material about the orgone accumulators. “In short, Reich suffered one of the most complete acts of censorship brought against an individual in a democracy.”
Orgone accumulator:
In the descriptions I’ve read, it’s a box that you sit in for 15 minutes or longer. Apparently, because it’s made of alternating layers of organic and inorganic materials, it accumulates the stuff. The more layers, the better. You can still get them from:
http://www.orgonics.com/humorac.htm
along with all sorts of stuff.
There’s more than one kind. I’ve read about it quite a lot; I’m fascinated by the history of pseudoscience. 🙂
There’s still a lot of pseudo-science about, plenty of snake-oil salesmen etc.
e.g. psychiatry
Not all psychiatry. As a person who has slowly been fighting my way to sanity for 25+ years, let me say that psychiatry’s biggest problem is understanding the human mind and all of its complexity. For example, when I was initially diagnosed in 1986, my final diagnosis–type III bipolar disorder, or cyclothimia–was not even part of the DSM-III yet. Because of this, it took 20 years to get a correct diagnosis and medications. Because of the difficulty in diagnosing the non-classic, bipolar disorder–type II and III–probably half of all sufferers are running around undiagnosed today. Mental illness in most U.S. health plans are an after thought at best. Until we get serious about the problem, situations like the Navy Yard, and the Aurora Theatre shootings are going to continue.
It typically takes upwards of 20 years even to diagnose bipolar I, so don’t feel too left out. In my case it took almost 25 years to get a bipolar I diagnosis but that’s largely because I’d been deliberately hiding it. I’d already self-diagnosed while I was at uni but as I knew too well what it means when authorities hang a psychotic illness diagnosis off you – especially when you’re a young black male – I encouraged my quacks to think they were dealing only with unipolar depression and PTSD.
But why get a label anyway?
Without known cause, physiological diagnostics or reliable treatments it becomes just an arbitrary circle drawn around a symptom cluster that can be used to stigmatise you.
A good example of that stigma is the way the US media is always trying to link mental illness with violent crime. In fact even the least conservative studies put increased risk of violent crime due to psychotic illness at only 5% with most clustering in the 2-2.5% range. Of course the risk of being a victim of violent crime is much, much higher if you carry a diagnosis – even if you eliminate approved violence by police and medical authorities from the stats.
But with the increasing psychiatric pathologisation of the US population – set to surpass 40% with the new DSM-V criteria – you will get more and more violent criminals who now qualify for a diagnosis and media coverage (boosted by pharma-funded lobby groups like E Fuller Torrey’s ‘Treatment Advocacy Center’) will lead to an even stronger link between mental illness and crime in the public mind.
Even if people at risk of psychotic illness could be promptly identified and effectively treated – which they can’t – you will still get plenty of mass shootings in the US. It’s a cultural thing not a psychiatric one. We have the same rate of psychotic illness in Australia and have had no mass killings since gun laws were tightened in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre.
Cyclothymia is a good example of what is wrong with psychiatry. There are two good reasons it didn’t exist until DSM-IV-TR. Firstly the symptoms were too mild to classify it as a mental illness until a combination of the pharmaceutical industry and reduced social tolerance for deviance and ‘malingering’ resulted in the pathologisation of almost all mood changes. Secondly, most cyclothymia is rapid cycling and most – if not all – rapid cycling bipolar is drug induced. Some by street drugs but increasingly – since the 1980s – by antidepressants.
Of course the pharma-dominated psychiatric industry is in denial that many of their treatments are the cause of the very illnesses they treat, but in the case of rapid cycling bipolar and SSRI/SNRI antidepressants the evidence from the STAR*D and STEP-BD trials is about as strong as you ever get in medicine.
That hasn’t stopped the quacks prescribing them to people with bipolar symptoms though.
Oh yeah, another major correlate for cyclothymia diagnosis is grief.
Apparently you are now mentally ill if you get upset for a long time after losing a loved one.
I’ve just started “Adventures in the Orgasmatron”, a biography of Willhelm Reich by Christopher Turner. In the introduction, he describes the box in your picture as a “shooter”; the idea was that you put the funnel next to or on an afflicted body part, rather than breathing from it, as the model seems to be doing. I haven’t discovered the significance, if any, of the pointy hat yet.
He also describes Reich as a possible inventor of the “sexual revolution”, and Freud’s apparent successor. Reich was also “diagnosed” as a paranoid schizophrenic by a psychoanalyst.
This picture is reproduced in Christopher Turner’s book Adventures in the Orgasmatron. The caption reads: “A Food and Drug Administration official holding the funnel of an “orgone shooter”, used for directing orgone rays at localised wounds and infections, and modeling an orgone blanket and hat intended for bedbound patients.1956. (Food and Drug Administration Archive)
The reproduction is in back and white; it’s on the left margin of a verso page, but is laterally reversed, so that the model is ‘looking into the book’.
To celebrate, if that’s an appropriate word, banned books week, The Guardian has a quiz to test your knowledge:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/quiz/2013/sep/26/banned-books-censorship-quiz
I’ve read some of the banned books. Some of the boy wizard’s adventures, a certain ape-man’s biography, a young fellow who was fond of traveling on a raft. Probably a few others, though I haven’t gone through the list this year.