The wall separating Germany
Posts tagged censorship
Bullshit and other ideologies
May 8th
The bottom-line in today’s society is that security and safety are important, while liberty can be limited in order to make crime-fighting more effective.
The problem with this is that the arguments for it are rather rational – Yes, since all citizen have the right to privacy, criminals can hind behind these rights as well. Here is usually where the “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”-argument comes in. Which is completely the opposite to reality. For if a society is turned into such a society where the state knows even the smallest of your mistakes and will punish you for it (since you have done “something” wrong, you will logically have to fear as well), that my friends, is a police state.
Ergo a society where the state wants to be able to see behind your wall of integrity, is a police state. If, however, they would not punish for smaller crimes, consciously, a fault in the system would appear, and I can assure you they would not hesitate to fix it.
The very idea of fighting crime is, in itself, dangerous. If everybody has to be checked, everybody is a potential thief, murderer or terrorist. Of course, it More >
Dear Censilia Malmström,
Apr 3rd
I am now going to take your bait and say something generally not accepted, or rather, expose myself to more of your emotional arguments, by questioning your values.
In her letter to the editor (in swedish), she states, among other things, the following:
“Second, there are unfortunately huge amounts of strong images available. If we do not act, we risk that people visiting uncontrolled [sic!] web sites will regard viewing such images as normal and acceptable.”
Credits to ChrisK for the translation.
This whole argument is based upon the fear of changed values. She expresses directly her fear of her values becoming a thing of the past, a fear of a new society where paedophilia is accepted. The problem I have with this, partially due to excessive studying of philosophy, is how her opinion is relative to the existing values. According to her, the mere existence of such images on the web, is enough to turn everybody into thinking it is okay. Now, if that would be possible, I am quite certain there would be no reason to object. Let me explain: If indeed the explicit images would be enough to turn everybody into accepting paedophilia, it would become okay, and thus objectors would be irrelevant. More >
