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[Graknorke]

Could we keep this around the next time somebody says "it's not censorship cuz it aint the gubmint" please?

[Strife26]

Yeah, private organizations can control speech within their property with much fewer restrictions (on their limiting)  than can any sort of government.

[ChairmanPoo]

That's illegal. I mean, legitimately illegal, as of recently. Internships that are equal to the performance of the work done on the job are required by law to be paid internships. You work, you get paid.

Indeed. And law is getting more demanding in this regard. However big business has been promoting this practice for years. And yeah, it's goddamn shameful. Modern-day slavery.

[SirQuiamus]

Could we keep this around the next time somebody says "it's not censorship cuz it aint the gubmint" please?

Wait, what? Does this Ames guy think that censorship in Putinist Russia is exclusively of the centralized, "vertical" type, as that Dorenko guy puts it? Is Ames saying that he never encountered any peer pressure or thought-policing when he was living and writing in Putinland? Really? Which putinbot-free computer network has he been using for the last fifteen years? The ARPANET? And all Western censorship is supposed to be "horizontal," peer-to-peer, grass-roots activism carried out in a decentralized manner by freelance moralists? HAHAHA, yeah, no gods no masters in post-liberal post-postmodern capitalist internetopia, m8.

If you think about it for longer than five seconds, this whole distinction between vertical and horizontal censorship starts to look like a bloody stupid false dichotomy: Are these things really complementary? Is it possible to imagine a world with only one of them, or both, or neither? What kind of society would have absolutely no rules of public discourse, no peer pressure, no self-righteous moralists, no self-censorship? An absolute madhouse, in the worst 17th-century sense of the word. What the article calls "horizontal censorship" is definitely not a new phenomenon, but as old as humanity itself, and it has nothing specifically to do with the internet and social media---although these have made it much more visible in our daily lives, that's for sure.

And what about a society without any kind of centralized, top-down censorship? You may think that you're living in such a society, but how the fuck do you know? Slapping mosaic on the naughty bits is trivial non-censorship because you know exactly what you're not supposed to see, but real censorship is most successful when you don't know it's there. And how do you know whether or not the individual moralists are being led from above, and whether they are even real people? (Astroturfing and Putin's robotic troll armies are poignant examples here.) From this point of view, it seems oddly naive to assume, as Ames does, that our society has been completely decentralized and flattened out, but occasionally everyone just decides to hop on the outrage bandwagon and start limiting each others' freedom of speech for fun. Here's a particularly un-self-aware paragraph:

Fact is, Swift today would be hounded off Twitter for "promoting child cannibalism as a solution to Irish poverty"; demagogic satire-shamers would trash Swift for "punching down, not up"—because as every social media Stalinist will tell you, "satire should punch up, not down." And it's all effected without the crude, violent methods used by the Kremlin censors—we do it to ourselves, thanks to our decentralized new utopia.

Who's "we" in this instance? Are you sure none of your Facebook friends are from the Kremlin, or the NSA, or the marketing department of a multinational corporation? And who told you to criticize internet outrage-mongering by writing an outrage-mongering article on the internet? Did you just come up with the idea all by yourself, because it seemed the most reasonable thing to do? Oh, and do you know who gets the ad revenues from that site you're writing on? If everything is so decentralized, shouldn't the money be flowing straight into your own pocket?

Just asking questions. :V

[Helgoland]

In Germany, what he calls 'horizontal censorship' is known as 'die Schere im Kopf' - the scissors inside one's head. It's often applied to self-censorship meant to pre-empt actual censorship, too.

[Rolepgeek]

Possibly unrelated, but I feel like encouraging women to become police officers would solve a lot of issues. Police brutality would likely become less common if majority of police force were women, since they don't have testosterone PUMPING LIKE THE BURNING FUEL OF HEPHAESTUS THROUGH MY VEINS AAHAHAHA THE POWER IS MINE ONCE MORE, and cuz' they don't exactly need massive amounts of brute force to subdue criminals, vast majority of the time. That's why you a. have a partner, b. have a gun, c. have physicals/training, and d. SO MUCH OF IT IS PAPERWORK_{from what I understand}.

Just saying. Play to people's strengths, if you can.

[Willfor]

I'm all for more women in the police forces, but the problem isn't that it's just men. It's the culture inside the police forces that is contributing to the issue.

[sluissa]

Possibly unrelated, but I feel like encouraging women to become police officers would solve a lot of issues. Police brutality would likely become less common if majority of police force were women, since they don't have testosterone PUMPING LIKE THE BURNING FUEL OF HEPHAESTUS THROUGH MY VEINS AAHAHAHA THE POWER IS MINE ONCE MORE, and cuz' they don't exactly need massive amounts of brute force to subdue criminals, vast majority of the time. That's why you a. have a partner, b. have a gun, c. have physicals/training, and d. SO MUCH OF IT IS PAPERWORK_{from what I understand}.

Just saying. Play to people's strengths, if you can.

Have a look at the stuff that came out about the people (including women) working in the Iraqi military prisons/camps and their treatment of POWs. Or accounts of women civilian prison guards. Abuse of power isnt a gender issue. It applies to everyone.

[wobbly]

Yeah I don't know which strange world you live in where only men abuse power. Think about any female managers you've had to work for, you get a bad one they're just as horrible, just as aggressive. Honestly I suspect a cop's more likely to shoot someone out of panic, poor training, stress or poor culture/attitudes then testosterone. Both genders are just as vulnerable to these things.

[Graknorke]

American police are indeed fucking terrified of the general populace, compared to a lot of other places I've been. What's up with that?

[Baffler]

American police are indeed fucking terrified of the general populace, compared to a lot of other places I've been. What's up with that?

Because they're widely and increasingly reviled as a class of people for things that they themselves likely don't even do, and the general populace is unpredictable at the best of times. We also have lots of guns. They also spend most of their time interacting with the worst in society, and it colors their perspective of the whole. It's not surprising in the least that some of them feel like they have targets on their backs.

[Sheb]

Yeah, I'd need to dig up the data, but US policemen are much more likely to kill AND get killed than in other countries.

[JoshuaFH]

And it sure doesn't help that us 'Muricans have a nationwide obsession with guns, notoriety, and entitlement, while also having near-zero sense of social responsibility. And it certainly doesn't help that our prison system is set up to harshly punish, and not to prevent or curb criminal behavior, so an incredible culture of disrespect towards enforcement has grown over the course of decades now.

[Bauglir]

while also having near-zero sense of social responsibility

we have a great sense of social responsibility

by which i mean, society is responsible for all of our problems

edit: probably because we keep doing things like letting the women vote, in case it wasn't clear that this post is entirely sarcastic outside of this clause

[TempAcc]

American police are indeed fucking terrified of the general populace, compared to a lot of other places I've been. What's up with that?

Because they're widely and increasingly reviled as a class of people for things that they themselves likely don't even do, and the general populace is unpredictable at the best of times. We also have lots of guns. They also spend most of their time interacting with the worst in society, and it colors their perspective of the whole. It's not surprising in the least that some of them feel like they have targets on their backs.

Its like this in most big nations with a diverse, melting pot society, altough there does seem to be something specially awful in regards to society's relationship with cops in amurica. Its still quite sad and hilarious how many young people forget that cops are just guys with a dangerous job that often makes them a target, and that they have families to take care of, as well. Hell, I've seen kids who have never had actual contact with any policeman and go on making tumblr posts about hating cops. Hating cops in some parts of the US has basically become the new hip and cool thing to do.