>
> I guess my fetish is showing, but I'm kind of attached to
> written words
> and their free circulation. Call me a liberal, but I believe
> that even
> vile pigs like Horowitz should be free to say and write what
> they want.
> And saying there's no state involved, and therefore no issue
> of
> censorship, is a bit of a dodge;
More than a bit of a dodge, but one with a point. I've always been fond of John Stuart Mill's rather subtle analysis on this point. He's very good on the fact that government censorship is a very small part of total censorship, but in a way that, I think, probably supports the newspaper thieves.
Stealing newspapers is one way of making it difficult for an idea to be heard. If Horowitz were to be totally silenced -- if every thing he ever wrote was always stolen between press and newsstand, then he would be censored, and that would be extremely bad. However, I'm not sure that his general right to say and write what he wants can be parlayed into a specific right to have specific acts of his expression protected against anything that other people want to do (particularly when, it has to be admitted, there can be occasions upon which burning a book is every bit as much of a statement as writing one). The proposition that the American government should not pay reparations to the descendants of slaves is actually, despite the best efforts of the BRC, quite widespread in the USA at the moment.
Furthermore, Mill points out that the most common, and indeed probably the most pernicious way in which ideas are censored is through the ridicule and conformity of common opinion. Far more genuinely radical ideas have been laughed out of existence by complacent, smug types with something to lose than have ever perished in gulags or autos-da-fe.
Reparations for slavery is a brave, radical idea. It deserves better than to be patronised out of existence by a set of sophistical, poorly argued but superficially appealing slogans of the kind which made up Horowitz' ad. The advertisement was, by Mill's criterion, an instrument of censorship itself; it was specifically designed to strangle a political idea at its birth, without having taken it seriously. The fact that its method of censorship would be more dispersed and less visually striking than a mound of burning newsprint does not alter the fact that it is almost certainly a victory for the free exchange of ideas when crap like Horowitz' advert fail to make it into a newspaper read by young people.
As for the tactical argument, it doesn't convince. All the popular press coverage seems to be telling the world is that a) leftists are bad people and b) some people think that there should be reparations. Since a) is not exactly new information to the vast majority, and b) is something that they wouldn't have been informed about otherwise, it's certainly not unarguably a loss.
sorry for the incoherence of the above -- I used to have much better command of "On Liberty".
d^2
===== For the stronger we our houses do build The less chance there is of being killed
-- William McGonagall.
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