scott wrote:
> The problem comes when you say something that is your opinion/stance, 
> and it harms someone else enough to warrant action. 

I believe the expression for that in our country is "tough noogies."

No, you don't get to beat me up for expressing my opinion, no matter how 
much you dislike it. Instead, you too have freedom to explain why my 
opinion is so wrong.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Warp wrote:
>   They must have come up with *some* rationalization to pass the law other
> than that.

Well, I *think* the reason is "Nazism was awful, and killed millions and 
millions of people in the worst war the world has ever seen, so it makes 
sense to prevent people from advocating we do that again."

It's rational. Not what I'd think is a good idea, but rational.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Aaaaand, welcome to the UK!
> 
>> http://gnuru.org/article/1400/uk-government-ban-content-it-doesn-t-like
> 
>   I really don't see too much of a difference between that and the internet
> censorship in China...

You mean, other than China being a developing totalitarian state 
struggling with economic and political stability, while the UK is a 
stable democracy?  No, not too much difference. :-)

>   (The scary thing is that that kind of attitude is getting more and more
> common in western countries.)

Well, yes, that was kind of my point there. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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scott wrote:
> have the laws to give the police power to really stop anything like that 
> ever happening again.

So, no matter how much the population might want that, they can't have 
it. Welcome to lack of democracy.

> It's not so much the arresting them, but the seriousness of the 
> situation that it instills on everyone else.  

So, we don't really want to arrest you. We want you to just understand 
we really, really mean it.

 > It's like saying "look
> this is a really important part of history that we must never forget, 
> there's no way anyone is allowed to try and mess it up by spreading 
> false information and beliefs".

And I'm sure there are large numbers of people in the USA that would say 
*exactly* the same thing about the Bible, and large numbers of people in 
the middle east who would say *exactly* the same thing about the Koran.

>> The problem comes when you start arresting people next for not 
>> believing that men are superior and that God exists and should be obeyed.
> 
> I think the holocaust is a just exception to normal beliefs.

Why?  Isn't it better to show people they're wrong than to arrest the 
people who hold unpopular opinions? And don't think they don't get 
arrested - that's what laws are for.

> I think with that one they just don't want to define a line to divide 
> what is ok and what's not ok regarding the nazi symbol, far easier to 
> just say nothing is ok.

And that's the other half of the problem. Censorship isn't OK just 
because you're censoring an unpopular opinion. Indeed, that's kind of 
the point.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> >   They must have come up with *some* rationalization to pass the law other
> > than that.

> Well, I *think* the reason is "Nazism was awful, and killed millions and 
> millions of people in the worst war the world has ever seen, so it makes 
> sense to prevent people from advocating we do that again."

> It's rational. Not what I'd think is a good idea, but rational.

  Yeah, I see how history books advocate nazism and thus should be banned.
Very rational.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >> Aaaaand, welcome to the UK!
> > 
> >> http://gnuru.org/article/1400/uk-government-ban-content-it-doesn-t-like
> > 
> >   I really don't see too much of a difference between that and the internet
> > censorship in China...

> You mean, other than China being a developing totalitarian state 
> struggling with economic and political stability, while the UK is a 
> stable democracy?  No, not too much difference. :-)

  Ok, there is a difference: China has some kind of excuse.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   Yeah, I see how history books advocate nazism and thus should be banned.
> Very rational.

I think everyone involved realized that it wasn't intended to apply in 
that situation, no.  I'm saying "it's rational to ban advocating it." 
They just did a poor job of defining "advocating", and wound up 
including "displaying or distributing nazi symbols" without thinking 
about things like historical photos.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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Warp wrote:
>   Ok, there is a difference: China has some kind of excuse.

Yep yep.  Also, having been there and having relatives there, I think 
the amount of repression is vastly overblown. It seems to be a 
benevolent dictatorship (so far), and most of the people really 
appreciate what the government is doing for them. I wouldn't be 
surprised if the Chinese government is better for their people than many 
western governments were (say) 100 or 200 years ago. Certainly the 
French wouldn't have felt the need to create a machine to more 
efficiently behead their politicians if their government wasn't pretty 
abusive at the time. :-)

Sure, when the police and the army are the same group, you get things 
like tanks being brought in to suppress what's seen as a revolution. And 
now that there's actual live international news broadcasts, you see that 
stuff. But the US has done some pretty awful stuff not too different 
from that in fairly recent history too.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:01:34 -0500, Warp wrote:

>> I'm just speechless, Warp - that you'd equate protecting copyrights to
>> the Tienemen Square massacre....well, like I said, I'm at a loss for
>> words.
> 
>   I was not talking about copyrights.

That's how it looked to me - you started with a topic about how not being 
allowed to post materials you don't have rights to is "censorship" and 
then said "before you know it, you won't be able to criticize your 
government".  Now you tell me how the former is not about copyrights.

Jim

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yep yep.  Also, having been there and having relatives there, I think 
> the amount of repression is vastly overblown. It seems to be a 
> benevolent dictatorship (so far), and most of the people really 
> appreciate what the government is doing for them.

  What I really don't understand is that China is *supposed* to have some
kind of communist (or similar) government, yet you couldn't see that there
*at all*.

  I have absolutely no experience nor sure knowledge about how life was
in the Soviet Union when it was still fully communist, but if I'm not
completely mistaken, it at least worked at some level, in that the vast
majority of people had a home and some kind of living (and, on the other
hand, there were no rich snobs). The same is probably even truer for Cuba
(at least deducing from their health care and schooling system).

  In China, however, the difference between poor and rich was extremely
glaring. On one hand there were people with brand new expensive Mercedes
cars, cellphones and all that crap, and at the same time there were
enormous amounts of beggars living in underway passages (literally!) which
didn't look like they owned anything else than the rags they were wearing.

  If China is supposed to be some kind of communist nation, from what
I saw it doesn't work at all.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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