Let me propose a scenario. You are walking down a street in a city. A man walks by and asks you what time it is, so you look at your phone and tell him. He seems nice and starts to follow you and you both talk about some random things and continue on your way. He ends up becoming your friend and for the next month you talk to him alot, go out and do things together, and have a few discussions on things that you both really agree on. You feel you have found yourself a "friend".
All is well in the world, right?
Good...
Now imagine, that you are with him and bump into another person. He asks what time it is, and you look at your phone and tell him, but your friend quickly interjects and calls the person the worse insult you can think of (imagine the worse thing you could ever imagine calling another person in your opinion) and starts putting the person down.
The stranger gets angry, curses, and walks away... but you run up to him and apologize, leaving with this new person instead of your "friend".
How did you know that your "friend" was something that you could not tolerate?
He spoke his mind. He used free speech.
See, I'm doing what I typically always do in my videos... making a point with a dumb little story with the intent on making you think afterwards. You realized the true person that your "friend" was because your "friend" was able to speak his mind about how he felt about another person based off of judgmental prejudice thinking (which for the sake of argument you don't like but hopefully you don't like it outside of this argument also). If your "friend" was not able to speak his mind you would have never known he felt this way but his hate/prejudice would have surfaced in other ways.
This censorship I'm speaking of does nothing but causes someone to hide how they really feel inside. I attest to you that the censorship does nothing to show the person how they are wrong to judge someone because of things that person cannot control.
There is another level to this also though, because this kind of censorship also would have stopped you from discovering what kind of person your friend is. So we have a two fold problem here, 1 - the person cant learn that he can lose friends by harboring hateful feelings towards others and 2 - that you would never learn the truth about others if they are censoring their true feelings.
Its a double bladed sword of evil.
That is not the end though, it gets much worse.
There is a thing that you learn about lying very quickly if you encounter a liar. That the liar didn't start out telling big lies. Every liar starts out by lying about small things, and it escalates and grows inside them to a full blown disorder. Lying is contagious. When someone starts lying they notice it, and they feel bad about it. After lying for awhile, though, this feeling wears off and it becomes not only easy to lie but even worse the lies grow and start to manifest themselves in important situations that a seasoned liar rarely even notices that they are lying. Adding more to this, the liar becomes convinced that the lies are real. Once you have told enough lies you lose track of which details are lies and which details were truth and everything not only becomes a lie but the liar is completely convinced in their memory that things happened the exact way they have said.
So why am i talking about lying? Lying and censorship both share this quality. When you start censoring others, you create reasons for doing it. These reasons may seem valid at first (even though there could never be a reason for censorship) but very quickly censorship takes over the censor in the same way the lie takes over the liar. The censor will create a reason for censoring even if the censorship isn't valid to the censors original reasons (try saying that 3 times fast). Very quickly the censor will even start using censorship for other means, personal ones or even in situations that benefit only the censor.
Lying and censorship share this quality because they both come from an evil place. In fact most evil things all share this quality. They both are this way because they rely on a dictator, a decider, a judge to function. These 2 things exist to stop a person from knowing the truth. The lie outright tells fabricated facts to mislead someone, and censorship prevents someone from knowing the facts outright in an attempt to mislead someone. This is all pretty basic but I think that we need to hear this point right now with all the lying and censoring going on.
So if we all know that by definition these 2 things in every situation take away someones right to know something to prevent them from making up their own mind or protect them from knowledge that they would use to make up their own mind we can come to the next logical place.
That in order for a person to fully understand why something is the way it is they need the facts so that they can make up their own mind about how they feel. Keeping the facts away from people is done because censors think that the information would be taken the wrong way, that the person isnt smart enough to come to the right decision on a topic. This is a problem from the start. It shouldn't be someones right to decide what information is ok for others to know, people should be given all information.
The argument has been coming up now that we should stop people who speak hate speech from being allowed to speak it. There is a massive problem in this scenario that is in line with the story I told earlier. When someone is given the right to speak what they feel, others can learn the real feeling of that person, and choose to not listen to them anymore. They can choose to stay away from them. The biggest problem about stopping people from speaking hate speech is that they still harbor those feelings regardless if their video or article was deleted, it just robs others from learning the true person under neath the lying exterior.
We have to ask ourselves why the internet has become a highly censored place and what the end goals are. Driving hate speech under ground has never turned out good in any historical situation. In fact, we could make the argument that people start to lash out in more extreme ways to get their point across.
Lets just let that point go though, because of course I'm attempting at making a point here.
We cant just sit around and be stupid ourselves and act like all this censoring isnt serving a bigger picture. Everyone that will try and connect political things to this concept I think are misguided but I would love to have someone argue to me that I'm wrong there... because I feel that all of these small instances of censorship (and of course the big ones) are an attempt at creating a change in the younger generation. We are already seeing many kids speaking out that censoring people for gun control, for hate speech, for bullying is ok when they are the censor. Of course when they get censored they cry the other side of it. Statistics are coming out that say that 70% of college students are ok with censorship now if it stops people from attacking others and serves there own goals. I normally wouldn't believe this but from the speeches, videos, and essays I've read I could believe it with a little push.
We all know that lying and censorship is to starve others of the information they need to do the right thing, and come to an informed decision. We must continue to unite and expose the people doing this and fight them until our last breath.
That is, if we want anyone to be able to hear the words that our breath pushes out.
Uni
of UNIRock
www.youtube.com/c/unirocktv
www.twitch.tv/unirocktv
www.youtube.com/c/unirocklive
[email protected] & [email protected]
As a manager for steem punk radio I could hook you up with a uncensored channel.
Keep on bloging here !!
And maybe play my game ;)