The damage caused by censorship isn't limited to restricting freedom of speech or supression of ideas not necessarily flattering to a given group or government, as illustrated in this article in Japan Today:
More firms withdraw from Tokyo anime fair in ordinance protest › Japan News and Discussion
Most who know me know I am more than a little irritated when I run across the use of censorship, but this isn't typically the reason. However, it does illustrate that the harm caused by strictly limiting the expression of concepts goes quite a ways beyond impairing the freedom of thought and expression so important to most arts. Most of the time the discussion of censorship and its effects doesn't include a mention of financial harm, even considering that burning books could be considered a waste of the money spent on the books, but today it's possible to put a monetary figure on the damage censorship causes.
Please do post your comments--I would love to hear what you all think on this one.
1 comments:
That's an intersting dilemma. On the one hand, I agree about freedom of expression. On the other hand, as a Christian, I'm not opposed to restricting access to sexually explicit material. I guess my position on this one is that it is well within the rights of a local government to restrict access to material such as this as long as their not banning it outright. Also, it's well within the rights of the publisher to boycott the event.
At the end of the day, I think Bobbi Fleckman said it best: Money talks and bullshit walks. We'll see who loses the most money and that will probably decide the issue.
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