Great article! One question i would like to ask is, why you skipped the long tradition of christian censorship of unorthodox and otherwise unwanted writings, culminating in famous instances of the public burning of the jewish Talmud. After all, that might by a relevant historical fact, given the dominant christian background of modern western culture (the "Abendländische Kultur")
I think we must be cautious here as to what examples we highlight, as there will always be someone who will reply: "But what about this one?"
It is a sad indictment on homosapiens that I literally could drop a blind pin on a map and discover some example of censorship. Every religion without exception at some point seeks to censor the others. The victor of every battle seeks to write out any wrongs they did in order to be victorious while amplifying every minutia of wrong the losing side may have been involved in. Every government and politician has sought at some point to censor information or commentary that paints them in an unfavourable light. While I am certain the world lacks exceptions... I am equally certain that the one rule to learn from this is: Censorship of any form is wrong. Censorship never solves a problem. Censorship never makes pain go away or a situation easier to bear. Rather, censorship amplifies an existing wrong and temporarily protects the wrongdoer. If protecting wrongdoers is your goal... censorship - whether by law or action, will almost always be one of the chief tools in your toolkit. If they are using censorship, you need to remove them and replace them with someone who won't.
I read this and ask: What shall we do about this? Have Elon establish a preprint server? Get someone else to do so? This seems like one of those issues that might actually be amenable to solution as opposed to most of those we see.
Great article! One question i would like to ask is, why you skipped the long tradition of christian censorship of unorthodox and otherwise unwanted writings, culminating in famous instances of the public burning of the jewish Talmud. After all, that might by a relevant historical fact, given the dominant christian background of modern western culture (the "Abendländische Kultur")
I think we must be cautious here as to what examples we highlight, as there will always be someone who will reply: "But what about this one?"
It is a sad indictment on homosapiens that I literally could drop a blind pin on a map and discover some example of censorship. Every religion without exception at some point seeks to censor the others. The victor of every battle seeks to write out any wrongs they did in order to be victorious while amplifying every minutia of wrong the losing side may have been involved in. Every government and politician has sought at some point to censor information or commentary that paints them in an unfavourable light. While I am certain the world lacks exceptions... I am equally certain that the one rule to learn from this is: Censorship of any form is wrong. Censorship never solves a problem. Censorship never makes pain go away or a situation easier to bear. Rather, censorship amplifies an existing wrong and temporarily protects the wrongdoer. If protecting wrongdoers is your goal... censorship - whether by law or action, will almost always be one of the chief tools in your toolkit. If they are using censorship, you need to remove them and replace them with someone who won't.
I read this and ask: What shall we do about this? Have Elon establish a preprint server? Get someone else to do so? This seems like one of those issues that might actually be amenable to solution as opposed to most of those we see.
There is quite a number of preprint servers, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preprint_repositories , and there is for instance https://vixra.org/ which was "set up as an alternative to the popular arXiv.org".
There are ways to publish preprints, of course, but that fact hardly stops the ongoing censorship :-/