The purpose of this page is first, to link to things that censors have tried to ban,
and more generally to show how the Internet can be used to render such bans impotent.
Please do not think that I agree with (or am even particularly interested in) all the things below.
I'm just anti-censorship.
I do not accept that any other adult has the right to tell me what I can and cannot look at.
It may be (and I certainly hope) that the Internet will finally put an end to this power that adults have wielded over other adults
since the very dawn of mass culture.
Freedom of speech. (Some of my books.)
If these books are not all legal in your society, then there is something wrong with your society.
I support freedom of speech
on the Internet.
Obviously we must discuss what that means,
since there are many hard cases about privacy, libel, threats, espionage and so on.
I think I'm on the same side as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
on most issues, but maybe not all.
Index on Censorship
was disgraced in 2004 when it made the error of employing a man called
Rohan Jayasekera
as Associate Editor.
Filmmaker and critic of Islam,
Theo van Gogh,
was murdered for speech by Islamic jihadists in the Netherlands on 2 Nov 2004.
He is the most prominent free speech martyr in the West
in our lifetime.
And yet Rohan Jayasekera, in the pages of Index on Censorship,
wrote a sick article on 11 November 2004 mocking his killing:
"Free speech fundamentalist on a martyrdom operation".
The article blames van Gogh for his own death, in a mocking, but also fairly serious way.
"Take that article down. In Index it's disgraceful"
by Frank Fisher:
"What on earth has gone wrong at Index?
A publication that once vociferously defended Salman Rushdie now parrots the same sentiments
you hear from Muslims and so-called liberals on every talkboard:
"I don't condone his murder, but he asked for it ..."
... Please take that article down. If Rohan wants to applaud a murder
and support religious censorship, then let him find a more appropriate place to do it.
In Index, it's disgraceful."
Censor and sensibility
by Nick Cohen, 12 December 2004:
"What was most telling was Index's treatment of
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who worked with van Gogh
on the film. I can remember when she would have been a liberal heroine.
...
In the 20th century, feminists had a little success in persuading Western liberals that women should be treated
as independent creatures whose intelligence ought to be respected. But these small gains can go out of the window
when brown-skinned women contradict the party line that religious fundamentalism is all the fault of poverty
or racism or Bush or Israel and isn't an autonomous totalitarian ideology with a logic of its own.
Jayasekera dismissed Ali as if she was some silly geisha girl."
But in
July 2009,
they cancelled a discussion on Islam
when Islamic fundies
and leftists
kicked up a fuss that counter-jihad writer
Robert Spencer
was going to speak.
The ALA said they would organise a new discussion on Islam
without a counter-jihad voice.
David Irving
sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996,
allowing
the judge to declare in his ruling in 2000:
"The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges that
Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented
and manipulated historical evidence; ... that he is an active Holocaust denier;
that he is anti-semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
So I've no sympathy for his speech.
I might even support not letting him visit one's country.
But to arrest him or ban his writing is a step too far.
I am appalled that he was arrested in 2005 in Austria and actually
jailed for 1 year.
This is not what a free society does.
Deborah Lipstadt, to her great credit,
after all he put her through, agrees.
She did not want to see him jailed (or even convicted) for his speech.
PC speech codes don't just stop with neo-Nazis or Holocaust denial.
PC people would ban all speech they dislike.
See the incredible case of
Andrew Bolt,
where these interesting, amusing and entirely non-racist
(in fact, highly anti-racist)
articles
were held to be somehow illegal in Australia:
"Hate speech" about gays - Attempts to make religious attacks on homosexuality illegal:
Now I support sexual freedom for consenting adults.
I even regard tolerance of homosexuality as a litmus test of a free society.
And I agree that
the Bible is hate-speech.
But to make it illegal?
This is tyranny.
Canada prosecuted Christian conservative protester
Bill Whatcott
for "hate speech" against gays.
The Canadian Supreme Court upheld Whatcott's prosecution.
Bruce Bawer, 1 Mar 2013, mourns the loss of free speech.
He is himself gay but, importantly, is a liberal
(unlike the Canadian Supreme Court).
He attacks:
"the lie that "hate speech," in some way, silences its targets. No, "hate speech" doesn't silence - the prosecution of "hate speech" does."
The US has robust freedom of speech and, outside of universities, all sorts of offensive speech is legal.
American universities however are becoming famous for restricting speech and thought.
Some people have described American universities as:
"Islands of Repression in a Sea of Freedom".
Why Do Only Conservatives Require Campus Security?
by Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, Jan 2004.
"The incipient threat of violence on the university makes it unique in North American life. Minority views can be espoused without intimidation in the media, in political forums
and even in corporations."
Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment
by Ahmad Al-Qloushi, January 6, 2005.
An America-loving (and Israel-loving!) Kuwaiti Arab Muslim
comes to the US to study, and is attacked by his lefty professor
for his support for America.
"The Americans
.. came in to liberate us and asked for nothing in return. I love this country for the freedom
it provides and for rescuing Kuwait's liberty in the first Gulf War.
12 Years later, America once again has selflessly protected my country and my people by removing Saddam Hussein."
"I have since learned that mine is not an isolated case.
Many students in American universities are being indoctrinated and silenced by biased professors who hate America.
America saved my life and the lives of my family. How can I not speak out?"
Non-PC statistics
(such as sex abuse by family type,
or crime by race)
are the kind of thing you must be careful about even mentioning if you want to keep your job.
Cases
Chris Brand
was sacked by the
University of Edinburgh in 1997 for his opinions on race and paedophilia.
Arab professor Rima Azar
was suspended by Mount Allison University, Canada, in 2021
for her alleged "racist" (against blacks) opinions.
Here
are the initial complaints about her opinions.
I see nothing wrong.
Where is the racism?
She opposes BLM. So do I. Opposing BLM is perfectly normal.
A white mob comes after an Arab-Canadian professor, Jonathan Kay, 24 Feb 2021.
Points out it is a white mob attacking an Arab:
"The President of Mount Allison is, by appearances, a white man, as is student-union president
... As far as I can tell, so are the .. reporters, "Izzy," and the vast majority of people denouncing Azar on social media.
... Then there's my favourite white-person comment, .. tweeting - you can't make this up - "I am a privileged cis white 50-year-old woman. How is (it) that I understand systemic racism and she doesn't? She needs to be removed immediately!""
Students hate free speech:
The
"Irvine 11",
a group of students from the Muslim Student Union, repeatedly shout down a speech by the
Israeli ambassador to the United States at the University of California, Irvine,
in Feb 2010.
It is typical of the far left that they think free speech means stopping others from speaking,
and forcing everyone to listen to their inane views.
The Muslim Student Union was
explicit about stopping free speech.
Their internal email
said
the goal of the protest was to "send the speaker a message" and show him that
"he can't just go to a campus and say whatever he wants."
The protesters, for once, ended up in all sorts of trouble with their university
and with the law.
They were prosecuted for a misdemeanor and
10 of the 11 were convicted.
As I say,
I'm a libertarian or a classic liberal, not a conservative.
I believe in hard work and responsibility,
but I see no reason why consenting adults cannot
do anything they like.
It's your life.
It's not for the state to tell you what to do.
You can have fun,
but similarly it's not for the state to save you from yourself.
You can have fun,
provided you take responsibility for your own choices.
Starting in the 1990s, the Internet
has made porn for the first time
mainstream, free and easy to find.
Some high-brow, some low-brow.
Some tasteful, professional and artistic, some amateur and ugly.
Is this a good thing or bad thing for society and for human relations?
I don't know.
But the basic evolutionary drives that led to it are never going away.
We are evolved animals,
and so porn will always be a part of human culture.
The porn issue is over, and the censors have lost.
And if you don't like pornography, don't look at those sites.
Is that so hard?
Parental control
Children, children, children, children. Sigh.
OK, let's talk about children.
You do realise this is all just an excuse, though.
There are people out there who want to prevent adults communicating with other adults.
But since the Enlightenment and the idea of free speech and human rights, they have had to restructure their attack.
They used to talk about corrupting the sensitive minds of their wives or their servants
and the lower classes.
But that's not allowed any more.
So they talk about children. We must protect children from pornography.
Therefore all adult communications must be reduced to a level suitable for a child.
You do realise this is all just an excuse?
There are many answers to protecting children from indecency.
Firstly, you assume we all agree it's bad for children/teens to see pornography.
Well it's not so simple.
If the child's not interested, then, well, they just won't be interested.
If they are interested - in the teenage years - then is it so bad if they see it?
But let's leave that aside.
Let's grant you the right to decide what your children can see.
The point is that you can do this
without bothering anybody else.
You buy a whitelist filter
that allows access only to 10,000 hand-picked child-friendly sites.
You can't type in URLs, you can't follow links to new or unknown sites.
You can only wander round the space of hand-picked sites.
The Internet can be awash with pornography, but the child can never see it.
It may seem restrictive to block all sites by default, but the parent can add hand-picked ones as the need arises.
It may seem that such a filter spoils the serendipitous nature of the web, but not so,
you can turn off the filter when you're present, and wander the web with your child.
You can censor yourself without bothering others.
The technology exists, so leave everyone else alone.
Go away.
You're still here? You're complaining that little Johnny has managed
to hack his own Internet access.
That he's disabled the filters, written his own browser?
If he's smart enough to do all those things,
I think the days of you controlling what he looks at are coming to an end.
I am in favour of the sexual revolution,
as are (it might surprise you) many on the right.
Photo from
here.
See terms of use.
"I will not criticize the power of pictures and words to arouse;
to arouse passions or ideas, erections or damp panties, fears,
curiosities, unarticulated yearnings and odd realizations.
Sexual speech, not MacKinnon's speech,
is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world,
and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it."
- Susie Bright
replying to pro-censorship campaigner
Catharine MacKinnon.
Drug use should be legal.
Adults want to mess with their bodies and minds - always have, always will.
It's science's job to make it interesting and safe.
It's not the government's job to enforce someone's idea of a religious or moral code of behaviour.
We lock up in jail
people who take drugs even if they harm nobody and are leading productive lives.
This can only be based not on public health
but on the idea that one adult can tell another adult what to do in his private life.
Just as bad as all the innocents in prison
is that the drug laws,
just as alcohol prohibition did,
have created a vast, violent underworld which would vanish if drugs were legal.
Think of all the muggings and burglaries that would stop
if the poor could afford their habits.
History will judge
the
War on Drugs as both the great denial of civil liberties
in the West in our age
and simultaneously the major unnecessary cause of crime.
Note that I do not take drugs myself, except alcohol.
In fact, I live a very abstemious life.
But any supporter of liberal democracy
must oppose the drug war,
whatever their personal lifestyle.
There are more than 3,000 people in the US serving
life without parole for nonviolent offences.
Mostly for drugs offences.
Life without parole!
For something that should not even be illegal.
The book
Tricameral Sinsemilla
by Mick Marlow
is banned in the UK,
and the author has been jailed for writing the book.
With the banning of books now, what more evidence do we need that the War on Drugs
is an offence against liberty and civilized democracy?
Can be used when local DNS servers are down
but remote ones are ok.
Anonymous web publishing:
The world of
social media
shows how it is now possible to reach a global audience
while still remaining anonymous.
Some anonymous authors have millions of readers,
yet no one knows who they are.
Free web publishing services
mean that even the website host may not know who you are.
And your website can be hosted in another country (as mine is).
In many cases this gives real protection from your country's laws.
For example, American courts will not co-operate with demands from Iran to shut down
pro-democracy dissident websites.
Carl Kadie
suggested that one could anonymously post web pages to usenet
which refer to each other via message-id,
thereby creating an anonymous "floating" web server within
Google Groups.
Software exists to allow you filter sites,
without bothering anyone who wants to see the site,
or the site owner.
I am completely in support of personal, voluntary filters,
and much more technology is needed in this area.
People do want some control over what they see.
For example, I would set up my TV to filter out
all soaps,
celebrities, the royal family, reality TV,
religion, astrology, and anything New Age,
the lottery,
music and sport.
Then I could TV surf more happily.
You could set up your machine to filter out pornography, say, if that's the kind of thing that bothers you.
So long as I'm not forced to use your machine, I don't care.
The Eternity Service
by Ross Anderson
discusses the fragility of the web model, where a document's persistence depends on the author's survival.
In practice, not much of interest on the web really vanishes without eventually turning up somewhere else.
But the constantly-changing URLs, and the need to often return to search engines to re-find something,
mean documents can be lost in practice, even if they still exist in theory somewhere out there.
What we need are permanent URLs,
that we can be confident will still be around in 10 years time, or even 50 years.
Who is going to provide the documents themselves on a permanent basis?
It is the job of large
libraries of course.
When are libraries throughout the world going to wake up and offer free, regularly-archived, mirror services for web publications?
With multiple distributed, permanently-available, permanent-URL mirror sites.
After all, what is a library for?
The Wayback Machine
re-creates the Web of any period from 1996 onwards.
It converts the links to point to a Wayback Machine
copy if possible,
so that links take you to the page you would have seen back then.
Then you can travel round the Web as if it was 1996 all over again.
Close
A few essays I like,
from the exciting moment when the Internet exploded:
The Age of Paine
by Jon Katz, Wired magazine, May 1995.
Thomas Paine's vision of what the media should be.
I signed the
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
when it came out in 1996, and I have a lot of sympathy for it.
When a group of people have constructed a new world,
as we did,
it is shocking when government,
once it finds out about that world,
threatens to destroy it,
as government and media did once they discovered
the Internet around 1995.
But things worked out differently.
Western governments did not destroy our world.
They mainly allowed it to flourish.
And the real threat to our world
- the real people introducing censorship where once there was none
- are the
social media companies.
Big tech are the censors now.