Online Free Speech Campaign!
Noam Chomsky.
Le Monde, 1 Sept. 1998
quoted here
"(The first newspaper in the American British colonies was published) on September 25, 1690, in Boston, when Benjamin Harris printed the first edition of a three-page paper he called Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. ... The second issue of Publick Occurrences never appeared. The Governor and Council suppressed it, complaining that Harris had printed "reflections of a very high nature", by which they meant that they had no intention of admitting any impediments to whatever villainy they wished to pursue."
Amusing Ourselves to Death :
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman, page 36
(my parenthesis -- ed.)
Very highly recommended!
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right . . and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
John Adams
here
"As Chomsky comments, Orwell was fascinated 'by the ability of totalitarian systems to instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts about the world around us'."
Chomsky's Politics by Milan Rai, page65
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."
Essays on Education
by Alfred Whitney Griswold
quoted here
"Basic to a free city was the right to speak back to the state, to criticize its actions in the assembly, the courts, the theater, or conversation. If the state suddenly interfered with that right, it was breaking its part of the contract. It was becoming a tyranny.
Socrates could have argued -- and most of his judges, I believe, would have agreed -- that if the Laws broke the contract by preventing free speech, they released the citizen from the obligation to obey them. When he lost the right to persuade, he won the right to resist."
The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone, page 225
Voltaire, quoted as the epigraph of
Voltaire : Selections, Paul Edwards, Editor
The Reagan Doctrine
(or here)
by Isaac Asimov
from The Austin American-Statesman, May 10, 1981
Folks, it looks like the implications of the CBDTPA are going beyond annoying to actually scary. This thing will make communication illegal. Can you say Stalinism?
UPDATE: Cancelled in that incarnation. Stay tuned for further developments.
"Books are dangerous.
They make you think...feel...wonder
They make you ask questions."
"The essential issue raised by the project is the failure of the mass media to provide the people with all the information they need to make informed decisions concerning their own lives and in the voting booth."
These events might change your life.
These events might change the world.
You didn't hear about them.
Censored? Really? How?
The #1 censored story of 1998:
"SECRET INTERNATIONAL TRADE AGREEMENT
-- the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI) --
UNDERMINES THE SOVEREIGNTY OF NATIONS"
"I will never forget an exchange that Senator Gary Hart had one evening on a TV magazine show shortly after his unsuccessful run for President in the '84 primaries. ...After the break, Senator Hart asked how come most of the network coverage of his remarks during the '84 campaign concentrated on his replies to reporters concerning the horse race rather than on his statements from the stump concerning the critical issues of the day. I will never forget, and I may never forgive, David Broder's response. He replied (and to paraphrase the comedian Anna Russell's remark on Wagner's Ring cycle, "I'm not making this up, you know") that the presidential campaign was not the proper place for coverage of the issues of the day!"
(Emphasis in original.)
" We are a group of women who feel passionately about women's issues, and we decided to put up a site that would reflect the unique view of women's issues and feminism in the generation of women who came of age in the 80's."Great site!
"Mainstream journalists get particularly hot under the collar about his " propaganda model" of the workings of the US media, according to which television networks and the press slavishly defer to the government line on every contentious foreign policy question. It's far more complex than that, say the journalists. Chomsky will have none of it. Every piece of research he and Edward Herman have conducted on media coverage of Nicaragua in the 1980s shows "a degree of conformity to power that would rarely be attained in a totalitarian state", he says."
"The consequences of subscription to PICS are two-fold. Firstly, it fosters the notion that ideas and images are potentially harmful in and of themselves and that we cannot cope with those we do not like.
Thus we are best shielded from ideas that we find offensive "for our own protection".
Secondly, subscription to PICS means you surrender your capacity to judge images and ideas for yourself, and instead allow them to be judged by ratings authorities or originators on your behalf. Unlike the banning of Crash or Lady Chatterley's Lover you may never know that screened material even existed."
Oh come on, it can't be as bad as all that, can it?
Well,
maybe.
"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that."
"This year was supposed to be one of celebration for Pacifica as the network marked its fiftieth anniversary, but its listeners and employees have spent far less time in a state of giddy self-congratulation than they have wailing and gnashing their teeth. ...A radio network founded on the ideals of pacifism, free speech and clear-minded dissent seemed to devolve overnight into gunshots, gag rules and hysteria. So much for champagne and birthday cake. "
Just Kidding: The Power of Words
by Peter Berg
![[The NO CARP logo from Doc Searls. Support Internet Freedom!]](http://members.tripod.com/~doggo/NOCARP.gif)