Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Outrage, fine

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.
The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.
"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.
Other countries have different answers.
"There is no way to defend this heinous incident," Alheli Picazo of Calgary, Canada, told CNN by phone. "People often claim their right to free speech to mask blatant racism and insulting bigotry, and always seem to get away with it. When it comes to issues of discrimination, hiding behind free speech just doesn't cut it."
I greatly prefer our ironclad First Amendment guarantees.

Update (11/26): Clarity in the first paragraph.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Happy Thanksgiving assholes!!

Mikhail Silverwood said...

Unfortunatley, my country Australia is the beginning stages of developing a censorship program. They say it's to cut out child porn.

The program will be controlled by government bureaucrats, not normal everyday citizens, there won't be representation or accountability, and there's no way of knowing if it'll work or not.

There are two parts to the censorship question: one is legality (are they allowed to speak at all) and the second it medium (how much of an audience are they allowed).

I argue that unless under extreme conditions, you don't ban someone from speaking. If there's a Nazi who wants to talk about his theories on the world, and wants to recruit members, I say let him go - surely an ideology that has no relevant baring won't get an audience of influence to cause problems.

If there's a person who wants to build a convention around raping women, then it should be banned.

And I get annoyed when there's a rigid mainstream-factional polarisation with the audience:
If there's a Democrat or Republican who wants to speak, mainstream television gets onto it and they get millions of viewers. No matter how dumb or foolish their ideas are, they are treated with good merit.

But if someone else wants speak, Libertarian, Constitution, Green, Tea, they are limited to only factional avenues and a much smaller audience.
No matter how sensible and interesting their ideas are, they get chicken scratch.