> But then some good angel puts it into the head of a Boston preacher to read your book and take it to the Boston police, and the police go and arrest a bookclerk for selling your book, which is obscene. Instantly the press agencies flash the name of your book to every town and village in the United States, and your publishers get orders by telegraph from Podunk and Kalamazoo.
This reminds me of Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College a couple of weeks ago.
This was a speech by a fairly obscure guy (he is a place kicker) at a fairly obscure college. But because he said something our culture considers obscene, his speech was on the front page of all the news sites and talked about on Twitter.
Normally, maybe a few hundred people would have heard his speech. Now likely millions of people have at least heard a portion of his speech.
Similar tactics were used by the YIP and Situationist International some decades later. Abbie Hoffmann's Steal This Book had a rather long reach, for example both the hip-hop act Coup (1998) and the rock orchestra System of a Down (2002) released records called something like Steal this Album.
I think the problem with this is that the things that would be offensive enough to enough people to get attention are exactly the sort of things that publishers would refuse to publish.
The world has changed and its not obscenity that offends anymore, its racial slurs and the like that would get the most attention. Its also harder for most people to do honestly because its not the subjects you cover, but what you say about them that will offend. That kills the " deal with the facts of life frankly and honestly" idea - it would only work if your honest view is one that people will find objectionable - but then so will most publishers.
Plenty of books got banned in the deep south for things that are hardly obscene. Just add a teenage LGBT character, have some paragraphs that are written from his point of view, mention harassment by bigots and you have a very bannable book.
You can always count on the small mindedness of a small percentage (unfortunately growing) of the population.
> Plenty of books got banned in the deep south for things that are hardly obscene. Just add a teenage LGBT character, have some paragraphs that are written from his point of view, mention harassment by bigots and you have a very bannable book.
Banned meaning "not stocked in school libraries" and that only in a particular part of the US. That is a long way short of arresting booksellers.
It sill not get you the level of attention "obscenity" would get you, now will it it promote your book. I have read several articles about US school book bans and I cannot recall the title of a single one or the name of a single author - because the media attention is on the issue rather than on a single book.
> so books that when published were Anti-Racist, like To Kill A Mockingbird, can now be banned in places due to charges of Racism.
What that shows is that some people are incapable of understanding anything from outside their own cultural context - they cannot understand the past or other cultures. This is a common problem with anything from the Bible to a contemporary work by a foreigner.
I think its always been a high risk strategy but if you have enough popularity / power to survive the attempted censorship/ cancellation you are golden. A modern version would surely be J.K Rowling.
State loudly and publicly that trans-women are men. Real world mothers, who buy most children's books, would find this uncontroversial to the point of being obvious but the resulting publicity from the outrage and attempted cancelling has at least in part driven her to have multiple books on the Amazon bestseller lists for YEARS at time.
Where is JK Rowling subject to censorship? Around the time her first movie was put out, I recall pastors railing against the "Satanism" in her books, but that's an exercise of speech. Since then, religious folk see her as more of an uneasy ally, as LGBT folk are now critical of her, another exercise of speech. What censorship do you refer to?
A difficulty now is that we have morality police on both sides who believe strongly that they are right. And each side believes they are purveyors of uncomfortable truths for the other side. Both sides also believe in censoring their opponents. And both sides believe that they are the true defenders of American values. Fundamentally, America is divided into two sides who both believe they are fighting a Holy War against the infidels on the other side.
And both things are true. Both parties do various bad things, and their supporters hide behind the "well the other guy is bad too!" argument. The best candidate is the one who has the lowest expected badness; and yes, their chosen party membership is a valid and at least somewhat-informative prior on badness, depending on your personal badness disutility function.
One side: "This material is obscene and shouldn't be included in public school carriculums."
The other side: "We have determined this information is false and dangerous, and should be banned from all public discussion."
When you add in that the "false and dangerous" has proven time and again to be "true and embarrassing", and the attempt at censorship is more about protecting power than morals, this really is an area where bothsides-ism is a non-starter.
I expect this won't be a popular comment, but it is accurate. You can't change that.
Aside from the unnecessary inflammatory injection of firearms, I'd like to clarify and say "only one side thinks only they have the guns". Not that this should matter in a civilized country.
I didn't mean for it to be inflammatory, but it's certainly not unnecessary to the conversation. We can both-sides it all day, but the fact is that one side has a militia proudly ready to use force. Like other commenters have suggested, this isn't necessarily a concern with a functioning civil society. But if we descend into populist mob violence, the side that has eschewed firearms will be at a distinct disadvantage. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's not so improbable as to be irrelevant here.
I assure you that both sides have firearms in sufficient quantities (I looked up the statistics before I posted) such that if one side attempted armed conflict, it would end poorly and with smaller families at the end.
Individual self-defense against organized crime syndicates is not terribly effective. You shoot one guy, the capo shows up with 10 men to shoot you.
A broad organized militia may be able to monopolize enough force to keep organized crime in check... and congratulations, you've just reinvented policing from first principles.
In a civilized country, civil society and the rule of law don't depend on the ever-present threat of populist violence to begin with. The US is not a civilized country, and one side definitely not only has most of the guns, but has proven itself more eager to use those guns in the service of their ideological goals than the other.
This reminds me of Harrison Butker’s commencement speech at Benedictine College a couple of weeks ago.
This was a speech by a fairly obscure guy (he is a place kicker) at a fairly obscure college. But because he said something our culture considers obscene, his speech was on the front page of all the news sites and talked about on Twitter.
Normally, maybe a few hundred people would have heard his speech. Now likely millions of people have at least heard a portion of his speech.