No. I am glad that the commissars who want to decide what the meaning of cultural messages is and are professedly eager to censor all meanings that are inconsistent with their decisions are kept out of the halls of power.
^^^^^ CB: You would be mistaken. The U.S. capitalist system of censorship is much more efficient and repressive than the system the commisars had. Not only that, at least the commissars censored stuff, like racism , that should be censored, whereas the U.S. censors censor progressive ideas to prevent the U.S. working class gaining the consciousness to do what the whole world needs done in the U.S. And censors of the type you describe above are not kept out of the halls of power in the U.S., because the main halls of power in the U.S. are in private corporations. They just aren't called "commisars".
^^^^^
BTW, read what wrote earlier on the subject, let me even quote that for you: <<<As I see it, any cultural message is created, as it were, twice: first time in the mind of the sender, the second time in the minds of the audience. It is thus quite normal that the two creations differ from one another quite substantially - where one sees an innocent and harmless joke, the other may see malicious intentions that call for strong actions. What the message thus "says" pretty much depends not just on the contents inserted by sender, the context in which the message was created, the context in which it was received, but also on the contents inserted into it by different audiences.>>>
That means that the reader can be as much responsible for what the message "says" as the sender. Like with Rorschach blots. To illustrate - gay marriage has the civil rights contents for the senders, and the barbaric attack on the sacred core of our civilization contents for the fundie audiences. Likewise, poking fun of a medieval patriarch may be about modernity for the senders, and about crusadism, racism, or other demons for some audiences. That is yet another reason what's wrong with censorship - the profession tends to attract paranoid individuals who tend to see demons in whatever they turn their eyes on.
^^^^^ CB; Senders of ambiguous or double meaning messages are usually fully aware of the ambiguity of their message. The value of the ambiguous messages is not so great that their loss demands passing the unambiguously messages.
My position would be outlaw fascistic racist speech , not all racist speech. Advocacy of fascistic racism should be outlawed, like the French and Canadian commissars do.