Banning Books Are Bad - Tumblr Posts

Banning stuff is a slippery slope, and if you first allow some things to be banned, the people doing the banning will ask for more, and more, and more. They are not doing it "for the children". They are doing it to control what other people have access to, and rely on manipulating your feelings to get you to go along with it. And once you have gone along with it once, it easier to persuade you to go along with it again, and again, even when it reaches the point where you are no longer sure why the thing they want to ban is bad. You have already given them the power to decide for you, so you have to keep trusting that they know best, right? After all, you did agree that the first things were bad, so surely these things have to be bad somehow as well? And once they get to things you like, you might even be gaslit to feel guilty because you liked it. After all, if they want to ban it, it must be bad, right? Wrong. Don't fall for this. Even stuff you don't like can have value in ways you cannot understand or predict. (If for nothing else than to serve as a buffer to protect the things you do like.) The only way to gain proper insight into a subject is to step outside your echo chamber, and read things you might not agree with. You might still disagree with it after reading it, but your opinion holds more weight because it is now more informed. Don't let other people do your thinking for you.

Hi! RE: your journal about the right for lolicon fiction to exist even if you disapprove of it, would you say it can also exist for titillation purposes, or do you stand by it for artistic reasons, or for the purpose of exploring dark themes only? I always thought you were saying the former, but I just wanted to ask. It's chill if you don't wanna answer this. Have a good day!

Here we are, 15 years on from that blog entry, and I still haven't read any lolicon, I'm afraid, so I have no idea about its themes. The context was whether you should be sent to prison for owning lolicon. What I said back then was,

In this case you obviously have read lolicon, and I haven't. I don't know whether you're writing from personal experience here, and whether you have personally been incited to rape children or give inappropriate hugs by reading it. (I assume you haven't. I assume that Chris Handley, with his huge manga collection, wasn't either. I've read books that claimed that exposure to porn causes rape, but have seen no statistical evidence that porn causes rape -- and indeed have seen claims that the declining number of US rapes may be due to the wider availability of porn. Honestly, I think it's a red herring in First Amendment matters, and I'll leave it for other people to argue about.) Still, you seem to want lolicon banned, and people prosecuted for owning it, and I don't. You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.