Censorship

FROM: mclaren
TO: New practical microtonality group
SUBJECT: Censorship

As I predicted some time back, censorship offers no
solution to the problems of personal friction. Naturally the
ill-advised members of this discussion uttelry ignored my
warning, and naturally my predictions have (as so often)
come true.
I predicted some time back that once censorship gets
out of its little Pandora's box, it has a tendency to run amok
and turn on the very people who eagerly promoted it. Like
the Terror under Robespierre or the Stalinist show trials,
all efforts to crush human expression and impose a group
consensus by purges and censorship and intimidation will
inevitably fail. In the end, human nature abhors the effort
to impose a forced consensus through censorship. This
inherent human tendency to react violently against such
coercion shows up in groups as an ever-increasingly
vicious round of censorship and counter-censorship,
purges and counter-purges, until everyone winds up
cenosored and purged.
Per my prediction, this appears to have happened on
this discussion group. I have not written to yahoo.com
urging that anyone on this group be censored, but at least
one person has written to yahoo.com urging that I be
censored and prevented from posting.
That in fact happened. I have been successfully censorsed by yahoo.com. Each and every day, my posts
have been censored for the last several months. Each and
every day, Jeff Scott must go through a tiresome procedure
to turn my posting privileges back on, since yahoo.com has
turned them permanently off.
This means, in addition, that I am not only censored, I
also no longer receive a digest of the posts on this discussion
group.
My guess for the reason why other folks have been censored?
Either (A) the cowardly slubberdegullion who begged yahoo.com
to censor me saw how effective hi/r act of cowardice was, and
became emboldened to write yahoo.com to beg that others be
censored... or (B) one or more folks grew disgusted that I have been
cenosred & decided to take revenge by urging yahoo.com to
censor those who had censored me.
As I warned all of you people, censorship doesn't work. It
merely leads to an escalating round of counter-cenosotship, which
I take it has now become a reality in this little Stalinist corner
of the intellectual gulag known (with a straight face) as "the
internet."
As I also warned each of you long ago, on the original practical
microtonality group, the internet itself represents the opposite of
a forum for free and open discussion. On the contrary -- the
internet represents an engine of intellectual destruction unparalleled
in the human history. The internet is a fundamentally totalitarian system in which a kind of Gresham's Law of information operates -- misinformation pushes out accurate facts, and statements of documented fact are first attacked, then reviled with lies and character assassination, and finally stopped altogether by means of the most crude kind of Stalinist jackbooted censorship.
Those of you encountering problems because your posts have been censored do not have me to blame for it, you have only yourselves to blame. For I prefer the free-for-all of open discussion. I actually defend the right of people on the internet to tell lies about me (as the liar John deLaubenfels has told lies about me, and as Garham Breed has told lies about me, and as Dante Rosati has told lies aboutme). The reason I defend the right of people to tell lies about me in public on the internet is that these efforts always wind up destroying the perpetrators. To put it bluntly, there is no more convincing proof of the accuracy and truth of my pubic statements than the obvious dishonesty of the people who have told lies about me in order to try to discredit my statements of documented fact.
Even a small child realizes that the very weakest argument is
a rifle butt in the face to silence the opponent in a debate. Even the dullest bystander quickly realizes that censorship is telltale sign of intellectual bankruptcy, the last refuge of the debate who has run out of facts and run out of logical syllogisms and run out of scholarly citations and run out of empirical examples to prove hi/r point.
Accordingly, I welcome the lies told about me in public. Such lies merely provide powerful evidence for my main claim -- namely, that the modern American system of musical education ebodies a fundamentally totalitarian system of thought control founded on superstitions and maintained by censorship and Stalinoid purges.
Incidentally, if anyone has any doubts about the accuracy of my assessement of contemporary university-level music education, ask Joseph Pehrson. He can confirm (along with many others) that Schoenberg's and Rameau's ideas about music are promulgated in the modern unviersity music departments throughout America by a combination of censorship and academic purges.
Notice that the internet in its earlier incarnation originally served as a medium of communication among grad students and professors. Those of you on the net back in the early 80s will recall the vast difference in the level of the discussion -- people then did not stoop to the kind of contemptible lies or grotesque character assassinatiion or outright denial of documented facts which have characterizes all too many of the the posts of people like John deLaubenfels.
Alas, the fact that the internet grew largely from an academic club insures that where discussion of music are concerned, internet discussion groups show their academic heritage. To wit, internet discussions of music are characterized by the same pathologies which typify academic unviersity-level discussions of musc today -- thought control founded on superstition and enforced by rigid censorship and continual Stalinoid purges of "ideological deviants."
Well, kiddies...I warned you. And you didn't listen.
The contemptible coward who first unleashed the dogs of censorship on this group sowed the wind. Now s/he is reaping the whirlwind.
The solution, incidentally, is obvious. Shut down this discussion group and start a new one with the absolute agreement that NO ONE will e-mail yahoo.com to beg that ANYONE be censored. Kiddies, cenorship is simply not a core American value. As John Perry Barlow put it so eloquently, the net perceives censorship as a form of damage and routes around it. No one has succeeded in censoring my posts out of existence, and no one ever will. Give up the attempt, people. It's destroying you.
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--mclaren