Every time a thing is censored that is one less thing to censor.
That suggests that subsequent acts of censorship should be less likely, not more likely.
But a legal success encourages more legal action. On the other hand, having your case tossed out summarily discourages more legal action.
Say, hypothetically, that a group wants to get rid of the single most offensive book in the public library. That book is gotten rid of.
So everybody's happy, right?
Nope. The group wanted to get rid of the single most offensive book in the public library. Their initial quarry is no longer the most offensive book in the library... the second most offensive book was promoted when they won on removing the first book. And eventually the library would be empty.
In practice, winning the suit will attract some, while a few who really only cared about that first target book drift away. The 'movement' churns around a core of people fighting for a "cleaner" library. Fighting for a cleaner library is a process... a daily struggle between the righteous and the wicked. And to the righteous the struggle, the process itself is a good unto itself.
Auto de fe. "Act of faith."
No level of censorship will result in a wholly contented and non-offended populace. It cannot. So anyone setting up a society has to recognize that the optimal baseline level of calls for censorship is quite high. Even Utopia features a lot of calls for banning and restricting and outlawing.
And pro-censorship discontent is a feature, not a bug. If an open society is not pissing off a big chunk of people then it is not open enough because even Utopia would piss off a big chunk of people.
This rumination on censorship was inspired by something I read earlier today:
If your goal is to pretend certain attitudes not exist, then censorship might work. But let's be honest here -- back on DU2, when we deleted anything that might possibly offend someone, and lots of stuff that didn't offend anyone -- we still weren't deleting enough posts for some people.
I spent a decade trying to make people happy through censorship, and ultimately I came to believe I utterly failed. Because people still weren't happy, and kept asking me for more and more censorship. The system that I had created on DU2 was a complete betrayal of my own strongly held belief in the value of speech over censorship.
This is a discussion forum. Let's have discussions.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1259315
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