youkrst wrote:yeah reminds me of when some kooky christians were all up in arms over harry potter being demonic

then you pick up the bible and read about the zombie witness resurrection or the more repulsive portions of scripture

...The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

it seems many have been left behind in the rapture of common sense.

That last line cracked me up.

Cattleman wrote:Kevin, you can tell me all day not to read a book; that is not the same as telling me I CAN'T read it. Of course, your are right; unless you have some authority to enforce your ban (power to stop book being printed, or to have it removed from libraries and bookstores), it is still just words.

There is also the issue of self censorship, which i believe was brought up earlier in the thread.

youkrst wrote:censorship reminds me a little of the prohibition on alchohol...

you can't legislate morality, and to enforce yours on others through law seems like dirty tactics..

The problem isn't legislating morality in general, but rather on whose authority are we setting moral laws in place.

We have laws against murder, theft, rape and various other crimes which we would presumably deem moral issues. They aren't based off of God or any religious pretext perse; rather, they are set in place because as a general practice those things suck for the victims and altruism kind of rocks. That's just my opinion.

That's just my opinion.

mine too.

sometimes i type things so hazy even i'm not sure what i meant.

i like to see change from the inside out, growth

not

change from the outside in, sculpture

i'd rather feel the force of life bubbling up from within and flowing out than some hacks chisel ruining the contour of my nose.

the trouble with the law (censorship) is that good men dont need it and bad men dont obey it.

and besides who is more immoral than the leaders of our great institutions.

we always think we can improve on nature, like we are scared that things might actually work out ok without our intervention.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

then there is the sort of censorship in the doco "outfoxed" where people know what not to say if they want to keep their job.

like at work where you wont let yourself say to the boss, that is a really dumb thing to do, it hurts people, coz you know the guy just doesn't get it, after all the dumb idea in question is his pet project, or in another case perhaps direct orders from HQ so nothing at all he can do about it anyway, if he wants to keep his job.

great vid that has some relevance to censorship.

loved the opening remarks by Barbara Forrest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKVNWwk7LIg

youkrst wrote:then there is the sort of censorship in the doco "outfoxed" where people know what not to say if they want to keep their job.

like at work where you wont let yourself say to the boss, that is a really dumb thing to do, it hurts people, coz you know the guy just doesn't get it, after all the dumb idea in question is his pet project, or in another case perhaps direct orders from HQ so nothing at all he can do about it anyway, if he wants to keep his job.

I'm experiencing the work thing right now. I'm just a waiter at TGI Friday's at the moment, but our new general manager as of the summer is a real douchebag, and I'm afraid of saying anything about just how much he pisses me off with his crap because he might fire me. He really doesn't need much of an excuse; Virginia is a right to works state, and this guy is a little fire-happy.

I am trying to find a new job, but I am afraid I might experience the same, if not worse, problems as before, and I am at a loss for what I should do.

I was reading about The Anarchist Cookbook the other day. For those not familiar with it, it's manual on how to build bombs, how to make a garrote, how to booby-trap anything from a ballpoint pen to a smoker’s pipe to a policeman’s whistle (the last two will blow the person’s head off), how to make a blackjack, how to make poison darts, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher, how to sabotage a moving vehicle without firearms or explosives (but with results every bit as messy), how to mix chemicals for explosives or hallucinogens, how to make weapons out of hat pins, beer cans or a pair of gloves, how to conduct electronic surveillance, how to jam electronic signals, how to broadcast free radio, how to place explosives to take down buildings, how to make and dispense poison gas, how to make silencers and what types of firearms to procure to conduct guerilla warfare.

I realized from reading it, how easy it is to make a bomb. I even designed a few of my own--on paper. I know they would work because I work with electrical and electronic circuits. It wasn't the simple circuits that go into making a bomb but just how easy they can be packaged and planted to kill large numbers of people. That really opened my eyes.

A dangerous book? Certainly. An evil book? It could certainly be employed for evil purposes. The Cookbook definitely has been read by evil people although I do not know if they concocted any of the explosives, bombs or booby-traps shown therein. These people include Tim McVeigh, Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, the London railway bombers, the Columbine killers, the anti-abortion radicals and a host of other imbeciles. When the Boston bombings occurred, that they pulled it off wasn't the tiniest surprise or shock to me. Powell's book made me realize long ago how easy that is. The only thing that shocks is that it does not happen far more often.

Powell wrote the book when he was 19 and filled with revolutionary fervor. It was published in 1971. My copy was published by Barricade Books but, in 2002, Billy Blann bought the copyrights of the book and sells it online through his publishing house, Delta Press, along with a host of other books that detail things like how to build a dirty bomb to how to build homemade hand grenades with butane lighters. But, Blann admits that The Anarchist Cookbook is his biggest seller. Delta Press’s catalog has earned Blann a $3 million-a-year business and netted him a nice income on which he lives comfortably in semi-retirement. Since Blann owns the book now, Powell gets no say in whether the book will continue to see publication. Blann states that he has no intention of stopping. Nor have Amazon nor Barnes & Noble stopped selling the book (I bought my copy some 20 or more years ago at Border’s—with cash--I bought an earlier copy at a tiny bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY when I was in the service but I lost that one).

Of his book today, Powell states, “The Anarchist Cookbook should go quietly and immediately out of print.” Blann, in turn, states, “You know, we don’t ban books in America.” To be precise, Powell is not calling for an outright ban. The book would still be available but there would be no new copies being printed up. Eventually, there won’t be any more copies around. This is more a banning by attrition or what I call “soft-banning.”

I must say that I find Powell to be a disappointment. His position today looks disingenuous—washing his hands of a book he knows is not ever going to go out of print. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. His attitude is, “Yeah, I wrote it and it changed the world but since I don’t own the copyrights, I can distance myself from it so I don’t have to answer for anything. But it will still and almost certainly always will be available to anyone who wants it.” The young revolutionary has turned into the world’s biggest old hypocrite.

His opening paragraph in the book’s original published form laid a perfectly valid rationale for making such a book available to the public:

“This book is written for the people of the United States of America. It is not written for the fringe political groups, such as the Weathermen, or The Minutemen. Those radical groups don’t need this book. They already know everything that’s in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book.”

I agree, you can't combat terrorists without knowing what they know. You don't have to necessarily do what they do but you MUST know what they know.

I have talked with a few different types of people to get a range of views on this. One man I spoke with felt that the book should be banned because it made killers of people with kooky views. “But didn’t they always have the ability to commit mass murder in them to begin with?” I asked. After all, I read the book as have some two million others and the vast majority of us didn’t become crazed guerilla assassins. He agreed with that but said the book nevertheless helped them formulate this loose assemblage of ideas they had into something coherent that could be and eventually was acted upon.

Others said that if we ban this book, we are opening a door to banning other material because some group or other finds the content objectionable. There are parents who want Huckleberry Finn banned from schools because of its liberal use of the word “nigger.” As it is, many school districts now issue a censored version where the word “nigger” is now replaced with “slave” which opens to the door to what I call "benevolent revisionism." Some groups think The Communist Manifesto should be banned while others want Mein Kampf banned. This is upsetting to me because in a free society, YOU have the right to read this stuff if you so desire. If you decide to act on anything you read, YOU take the responsibility for your own actions. That’s the deal and that’s always been the deal from the day this nation was founded. Some people are acting like they only just figured this out and don’t agree with it on top of that.

The bottom line is, who gets to decide what gets banned and what doesn’t? Not the government as the First Amendment makes clear:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The people, then? Which people?

I view the First Amendment as the most important in the Bill of Rights. The subsequent amendments arise out of the first and are differentiated because they deal with different issues. Through speech and press do we come to the attention of the government especially if we speak or print criticisms of that government—or manuals detailing a that government might be overthrown. Only then do we require the protections and legal processes guaranteed in the subsequent amendments.

“Abridging” is the key word. It means to curtail or diminish, to cut short—not just to outright ban or outlaw but simply to in any way hinder or shorten a legal process. Freedom of speech and a free press cannot legally be curtailed or cut back in any way by Congress. While Powell is not, to my knowledge, calling on Congress to do so, his advocating soft-banning is something that, were it enacted by Congress, would be unconstitutional. After all, if Congress does not spearhead a drive to soft-ban the book then how else would Powell’s wish to see this happen come true? Forcing a book out of print based upon the opinion or belief that it contains objectionable material is an abridgment of freedom of the press and, by extension, of speech. This does not mean that a book cannot be taken out of print—many are every year due to a variety of reasons—but it must be accomplished by other than by governmental action or legislation.

If you ask me which books should be banned, my answer is “None of them.” Others would disagree. So NOBODY gets to make that decision. No books should be banned by default. It is no one’s decision. Anyone who detonates a bomb they learned to make from reading Powell’s book is responsible for that bomb and whatever damages it caused not Powell and not his book. With freedom comes responsibility. But then we always have to be watching what people are doing. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” NSA snooping notwithstanding.

DB Roy wrote:I agree, you can't combat terrorists without knowing what they know. You don't have to necessarily do what they do but you MUST know what they know.

No. Does a manual on how to manufacture IEDs or details on decapitation techniques have to be on the bestseller list in order to defeat them? Military experts need to know the former, but I don't see any benefit to the general public for either.

So you can't conceive of any book that should be banned? How about a book that details the floor plan of your house showing where to cut phone connections, how to jam your wifi, schedules of your wife and kids, and so on? Or a secret/encrypted book on exactly how to cyber-steal from your bank? We have previously run lengthy lists of information that is not covered by free speech such as contractually restricted trade secrets, legal restrictions on settlements, classified info, shouting fire in a theater, etc. I agree the 1st amendment is the most important one in the Bill of Rights, but just can't accept there are absolutely zero limits to what can be published.