More Censorship? No Thanks!
After the conviction of the monster for the Southport massacre, there was and continues to be much talk by especially Labour politicians, including those in the Government, about the terrible videos he was watching on-line and some of the literature he was reading, including an Al-Qaeda manual.
There are several of these on the Internet Archive along with a CIA assassination manual! There has also been talk about restricting the sale of knives with one idiot radio presenter attempting to blame Amazon for stocking them along with Jeff Bezos himself and by some twist of perverted logic, Elon Musk!
We’ve heard all this before, of course, usually it was the Christian right and a certain type of feminist who claimed that watching violent pornography would somehow lead to especially teenage boys and young men torturing women and worse.
The actor and anti-censorship activist David Webb used to ridicule such arguments and felt so strongly about especially sexual censorship that he founded a pressure group to combat this kind of moral Puritanism.
There is a simple refutation of this argument. If extreme pornography or films that inspire terrorists are to be banned, should we not also ban the novels of Agatha Christie? How about war films? How about documentaries about animals being tortured, people being tortured, being executed, or even murdered? One of the most famous films ever made features the assassination of a President; there are many uploads of the Zapruder film on YouTube.
It isn’t necessary to frame this as a conspiracy, there are plenty of people outside Government, outside the Labour Party, who would like to dictate to you everything you are allowed to read and see. They use many arguments including we must protect the children and we must protect the public from misinformation. Their ranks include people who support abortion on demand up to the ninth month, the surgical mutilation of the young (so-called gender-affirming care) and those who have lied to us about everything from the extent of illegal immigration in the United States to the Hunter Biden laptop and the truth about covid-19.
What they want is age verification for all websites, which will lead eventually to identity verification for all, and tracking everything you view on-line. They can do most of the latter already, at least the NSA can and does, but with the world and his dog moving on-line, these control freaks want to control you totally. If we give them half the chance, they will. Tyranny may not always begin with censorship, but it goes hand in hand with it. We already have far too much in Britain already. If the police and other agencies spent less time surfing Facebook and Twitter on the look out for people saying something some imbecile somewhere finds offensive, they would have more time to prevent real crime and bring real offenders to book. If they had done so in 2019 when this teenage monster first expressed a desire to actually commit mass murder, the Southport massacre might never have happened.