More on LJ deletions

[briarwood]

They just posted that fandom and fiction LJs that were deleted will be restored. Good news!

On the other hand, innocence_jihad collected a list of deleted journals and comms in this post. A quick glance down the list shows the freaking huge number of unnecessary deletions (they're the ones with no strikethrough).

Oh, boy, did they screw this one up!

Comments

[slipperieslope.livejournal.com]

I just do not understand how much of this happened. The most popular genre in mainstream publishing is murder mysteries. Murder is illegal, but it is universally understood that reading and writing mysteries does not make you a murderer. How was this different?

[morgan32.livejournal.com]

How was this different?

If you really want an answer, read Folk Devils and Moral Panics by Stanley Cohen. It's an old book, about the Punk movement in the 1970's, but basically it describes the way society picks something to demonise and then totally overreacts to it. Once you see the pattern, you'll see it happening over and over again.

Right now, it's all about "protecting the children", and because it's children any dissenting voice (like mine) is automatically labelled evil. But even normally reasonable folks miss the point that nearly all child abuse happens at home, within the family. The occasional cases of child abduction hit the headlines because they are rare. Does that make them less horrible - no, of course not. But denying thousands of people the right to even think about it does nothing to protect a kid from her daddy or uncle or grandfather, who no one will report to the cops because the rest of the family will hate you for it.

Silence is what endangers the children. Not letting people talk, discuss and yeah, even fantasise.

This witch-hunt is no different from our political leaders slaughtering 65,000 innocent Iraqi civilians (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/) in revenge for something planned by 30 men at most.

Yes, we should punish people who have harmed children, and we should prevent those who actively intend to do harm from getting to do it. But we shouldn't persecute people who have done no harm only because we don't understand them. Whether we like it or not, they are human and therefore entitled to human rights.

< / soapbox >