Re: Censorship

[Tomasz Rola]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sun, 28 Jul 2002, DervishD wrote:

[...]
> >I just try to avoid having it immortalized on the web somewhere.
> 
>     Yes, let's have a 'clean web' through censorship. This is an
> advance. And, oh, well, let's forbid too politically incorrect
> language, and, why not? language that is pain for our ears (that is,
> opinions against the 'mass'). Censorship is *never* well.

Now, since we have a weekend, it's time for an opposite opinion. Let's
have some fun and thinking.

Censorship is great. It improves creativity. You may say "a bitch is a
forbidden word". And I would say "You son of a woffom" (WOman Fucking FOr
Money). Or we could make our dirty words more politically correct, by
using a word "huffom" (yes, that's HUman Fucking FOr Money). You see,
censorship is really wonderfull (wonder-full) and I love it so much.

In my country (Poland), censorship never worked as expected. People always
knew better what was going on (in most cases, I think). Besides, after
1989 everything is allowed and the quality of books and films here is
really bad - just ask anybody from Poland if s/he likes films created
during censorship or newer ones. All right, even if not everybody, I
myself think that newer ones are simply stupid. It (the quality) only
started to improve slightly a year or two ago. It was better with
censorship.

And besides if one wants to say something, censorship won't stop this.
Thus I think that censorship is not for imprisonment of mind but rather a
tool for improving artistic production. If it was created for
imprisonment or preventing the truth, than I suspect it was a product of
some idiot (bureauidiocy? - perhaps).

Instead of "fucking" just say "hasing". And voila - language firewall is
neutralised. I would even risk to say, that trying to stop an
inteligent man with... ehm, balls is a futile effort of some poor tioffups
(Webster: the illegitimate offspring of unmarried parents), who think that
hiding a problem is the same as solving it. As long as they (those
tioffups) lack inteligence and balls, their efforts can't be successful.

So, it's not the barrier that counts but the spirit that wants to pass
through it. If one has no spirit, than even gods won't help him (well,
Thor wouldn't waste his time to help a spiritless doormat, I'm pretty sure 
about this).

As of dirty words, I don't think they are good but the fact is, that they
are. And they are to stay. Instead of throwing money into the mud, some
people should think more about things like "where are the dirty words
coming from" and "why do we need them". This could solve the problem. If
this is a problem, that is. I like using those words from time to time.
They are like spice to the language. Without them, our speech would be
tasteless. With too many of them, our speech is nasty. Using a spice
requires both a sense of taste and some thinking behind it. In a bad
hands, however, this is just a "weakling demonstrating it's weakness"
(and emptiness), as someone before me have already written. Here in
Poland, bad language is a common way to avoid showing lack of one's own
language skills. Sad story. Once again, some stupid tioffups were/are
trying to stop this with powers of gov ("bla bla, those words are
forbidden: bla bla bla ... and now we have this problem off of our heads")
instead of just improving readership.

By the way, there are many other spices to the language as well as natural
tastes (no spice at all). To say something without colorizing it with a
spice is a watermark of a real artist (if it is still tasty of course).

So I don't care about the censorship at all. If there is any such thing in
the future I would recommend evolving the language so fast, that the
tioffups stop understanding what we are talking about. It may be a problem
for untrained people but not for someone who hacks all day long.
OPS, I've used a forbidden word - I meant 'twoses', "to work on
something". Just another language exercise. And what fun.

The idea of creating a new language is not mine - I have read about it in
Andrzej Zajdel books - Polish s-f writer, now dead but his books are
still in my head. In a book titled "Paradyzja" (don't know how to
translate, perhaps "Paradisia" is ok), society is totally invigilated but
some people invented a slang and use it for digging holes. There are many
variations of this concept. For example, one can use common words with
totally different meaning - alchemists are said to create such encrypted
books, so that the meaning is hidden well under what seems to be totally
stupid babbling.

Now, back to twosing. See you. I ave to twos into those Fivegon
pasokons. You know. Or do you? :-). All right, actually I will first twos
my own pasokon. Then I will see. Wish me happy twosing.

bye
T.

- --
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:[e-mail]             **

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 5.0i for non-commercial use
Charset: noconv

iQA/AwUBPUQKsxETUsyL9vbiEQKDVgCeNSVVtkvmcTTizmO9o5fRYCt5of0An1j3
3MxfH018IEujfLjbboeE7RWc
=TKKd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----