This is a reason why I believe piracy and DRM evasion are in fact morally correct by default. Imagine if this took place before streaming and record stores pulled CDs because some foreign nation demanded it. The fact that there are multiple avenues to find a particular song today doesn't change the fact that your culture and way of life are being violated. Save your own local copies of everything that matters to you, share with friends, and remember that none of these corporations or countries care about you; you're an ant in their ant farm.
I don’t think there can ever be a legitimate case for banning a piece of media - a video, a body of text, a photo, audio or music - I don’t think that anything like that should ever be banned.
Removing a book from a school library is not banning it. But even if it were, why does posting a bunch of examples of people banning things contradict someone saying "I don’t think there can ever be a legitimate case for banning a piece of media". Are you trying to say that banning things is obviously done and therefore it is good, or...?
The fact that governments have banned media speaks more to their abject failure than of the actual need to ban it. Someone could make a case for killing all life by on the planet, but that doesn’t mean we should respect that opinion. It also doesn’t mean the underlying logic is sound or guarantees the desired outcome.
You picked an egregious example to make it seem frivolous and impossible. But what about in the more mundane situation where someone is making a case that many people do agree with? A little genocide of an unpopular minority group maybe. Their desired outcome may not be guaranteed but it is certainly possible, and spread of propaganda media can be an important prerequisite for its success. We don't have to respect an opinion to oppose it.
A government doing something doesn't imply that it is a legitimate thing to do. It's Hume's guillotine: you can't derive an "ought" from an "is". You can't derive "banning can be legitimate" (banning ought sometimes to occur) from "banning sometimes happens" (banning does sometimes occur).
Taking your particular example, the mere fact that governments do ban "advocacy of genocide" doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do. If you ban "advocating genocide" then you encourage people to label everything they don't like as "advocating genocide". And look what has happened: that's what people do. For example, TRAs now sometimes claim that anyone that disagrees with their worldview (ie. disagrees with their ontological claims about sex and gender) is an advocate of genocide against them. And certainly any criticism of them at all is "hate speech", also banned in many places.
I'd rather not give bad-faith actors another weapon. Bad-faith actors already twist language to get what they want. If you give them the power to twist language so that people opposing them are at risk of going to prison then the situation is very dangerous indeed.
That would be my argument against banning that kind of speech. But I also think that the argument for banning it is very weak too. People might agree with it? The idea that you need to suppress certain views because people would be swayed by them otherwise, what does that say that you think of the average person? Do you really think that the average person is going to be convinced by Nazis if only they had the chance to hear from them? When I put it like that, doesn't it seem absurd? "We need to stop the Nazis from speaking because they're so damn convincing"? I think people are more likely to latch onto something that is suppressed and forbidden anyway. "The government doesn't want you to know this" is more powerful than "everyone I try to talk to about this calls me a piece of shit and doesn't want to hear a word I've got to say". Social power is much more powerful than government edicts.
"Pornographic" is a big stretch there. It doesn't appear to intend to be arousing, so I have a hard time calling it pornography. The subject matter combined with the art style is a little jarring, but less pornographic than half of Instagram or Tiktok.
> Why do you want this to be shown to children?
Because our sex ed is terrible to the point of being useless, and this seems better than "sex ed brought to you by PornHub". From the bits of the book I saw (Let's Talk About It, if I'm not mistaken), it actually talks about how to have positive sexual experiences and includes non-cis and non-straight folks. You know, all the stuff that people normally have to figure out (or not) by trial and error over years.
It's worth bearing in mind that the average age of virginity loss in the US is 17, so ~ half of the students in a high school would have had sex already. The average age for someone to first see pornography is 11-12 in the US. This book is likely not the first place someone would see a penis or vagina, and I would prefer that children had some reference other than literal porn for what healthy sexual activity is.
As Marxist as I tend to be, I view banning media outright is counterproductive. It lifts that work up an ideological martyr and encourages seeking it. If you disagree with an ideology, then dissect it intellectually and reveal the full history of why it is suboptimal.
2 books worth reading:
1. "The People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
2. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) 1552 by Bartolomé de las Casas. If you thought the slave trade in the British Colonies was brutal, the Heart of Darkness-like massacre of indigenous peoples by the Spanish was akin to the Cambodian genocide multiplied by 10: ~30 million deaths from imported diseases and brutal mass murder, exclude ~11 million African slaves.
Few of the specific dirty deeds done in the name of Manifest Destiny and white supremacy are taught in school. Garrison Mob of 1835, Detroit 1863, Washington and Norfolk 1919, Chicago 1919, Garfield Park 1919, Jenkins County GA 1919, Charleston 1919, Texas 1919, Arizona 1919, Tulsa 1921, Washington DC 1925 (KKK march), and on it goes.
I remember someone claimed (I can't find it again) that the early Christian anti-heresy writers were pioneers in this regard. They believed that suppressing heresy was not enough, that unless a particular religious error was described and refuted it would surely be reinvented. This wasn't the norm.
Of course, it wasn't exactly defense of free speech, they still certainly didn't believe in letting heretics describe their beliefs in their own words.
Welcome to hacker news! It can take some adjusting to get used to how we do things around here if you’re coming from somewhere like Reddit. If you have something to add to the conversation, please do so. Otherwise, avoid posting flame bait comments like this which are entirely void of substance. Frankly most people couldn’t care less about your (or the person you’re responding to) opinion on colonialism. The proper place to express your angst is with your therapist, not in a hacker news thread.
Hey thanks I've been here since 2011 and the thing I have to add is that excuses for atrocities are and always remain shitty and you are shitty for not thinking so!
Listen to me. An opinion is not a meaningful contribution to this conversation. No one shares your exact perspective, by definition. Opinions are subjective, by definition. Stop replying unless you have something meaningful to add. Additional context, such as what was presented by the person you replied to, adds to the conversation. Sarcasm does not. "[I think] You are shitty" does not.
I neither wrote nor implied that. More than one thing can be bad at the same time.
> excuses for atrocities
You are conflating "excuse" for "context". Removing context is how one demonizes a people. For example talking about the "savagery" of Native Americans, while omitting the savagery of Europeans.
You would readily recognize that for the demonization it is. Yet swap the actors, and you confuse it for honesty and virtue. Why?
Selective coverage of human rights violations is not history, but propaganda.
any plain reading of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the name
of their constitution, shows it was always had a backdoor for Beijing control
so I can understand why people then defer to the Sino-British declaration, which has no legal force after the subsequent Basic Law was codified. They defer to it out of desperation because there is no framework for their beliefs
but I cant play pretend that the corporations are bowing down arbitrarily, or that Beijing is violating the 50 year agreement enshrined in law, the Basic Law is not a form of sovereignty aside from just acting like one until the last few years, legally it just puts one administrative step in front of Beijing shoehorning any preference it wants into that SAR in accordance with the legal method already proscribed
if anything, the blame should always be put squarely on the UK for leaving the residents without any hope but false promises
