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“Censor”: When a Word Means Everything, it Means Nothing

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Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871. Public Domain.
Illustration of Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel, 1871. Public Domain.

Some words carry emotional force such that using them creates an immediate negative reaction on the part of the listener or reader. That makes such words useful — until they get over-used and misused so much that they cease to have the effect.

Lately, the trending “creep people out to get them on my side” word of choice is “censor” or “censorship.” Most of us support free speech. None of us want to be censored ourselves, and most of us don’t want others censored either.

But what do those words mean?

To censor (verb), according to Oxford Dictionaries, is to “examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it.”

A censor (noun) is “[a]n official who examines material … and suppresses any parts that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”

Implicit in both those definitions is that censorship is an act of the state, backed by force of law and if necessary the physical force of government agents.

I’ve often explained censorship this way:

If I tell you that you may not sing “Auld Lang Syne” or I will send police to break up the performance and haul you off to jail, I am censoring (or at least attempting to censor) you.

If I tell you that you may not sing “Auld Lang Syne” on my front porch at 3am and by the way get off my porch, it’s 3 in the morning, I am not censoring you. You’re still free to sing the song anywhere else and any other time, just not on my property while I’m trying to sleep.

Which maps neatly, I think, to Twitter and Facebook deciding who gets to post what on their platforms. They can’t stop you from using other platforms to say whatever it is they don’t want you to say.

It maps less neatly to Apple, Google, and Amazon colluding to destroy one of those other platforms (Parler), seemingly on behalf of government officials who think it’s their business who says what and where. Thankfully Parler survived and returned, but we’ve definitely got some “edge cases” going that certainly at least resemble censorship, and that I was admittedly somewhat asleep at the switch on until that wake-up call.

Recently, I’ve had to add a third example to my explanation, though. Some friends of mine — very libertarian friends, in fact — recently held that Dr. Seuss Enterprises is “censoring” books it chooses not to publish. So, explanation of censorship, part three:

If I choose not to sing “Auld Lang Syne” myself, I’m not “censoring” the song.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

There seems to be a lot of Humpty Dumpty usage of the word “censorship” lately. If we’re not careful, abusing it to mean “anything I don’t like” may drain it of its rightful argumentative power and leave us in the grip of the real thing.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Daylight Saving Time Kills

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Brown and Green Grass Field during Sunset. Photo by Jonathan Petersson
Brown and Green Grass Field during Sunset. Photo by Jonathan Petersson.

March 14 marked the beginning of National Tired and Grouchy Week in much of the United States as we participated in the annual gimmick of “springing forward” to Daylight Saving Time.

Tired and grouchy people don’t drive as well. According to a 2016 study by University of Miami economics professor Austin Smith, “springing forward” results in an average of 30 excess auto accident deaths, at a “social cost” of $275 million, each year.

So, why do we do it? Well, because the government says we should.

Why does the government say we should? In theory, we owe the practice to things like a need for farmers to have more daylight during their waking hours, or to energy savings from not needing as much artificial lighting during working hours in town.

If those sound to you like concerns from a century ago, when society and commerce didn’t run 24/7, when automotive lighting was unreliable and roads weren’t very good, etc., bingo. The US adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1918.

The whole thing was a silly idea even then — instead of everyone changing their clocks, people who really felt a need for more daylight during their waking or business hours could have just changed those hours.

I once read a mention — I don’t know if it was true or not — of a  tower built on the cliffs of Dover in the early 19th century, staffed with eagle-eyed watchmen whose job was to warn of any impending seaborne invasion of England by Napoleon. As the story had it, the British government finally got around to decommissioning the facility 150 years later, long after the invention of radio and radar (not to mention the death of Napoleon) had made it superfluous.

Daylight Saving Time is even dumber than that watchtower. It’s never served any truly compelling function. These days, its only beneficiaries are probably computer programmers who get a little extra work coding for automatic transitions to and from it, and funeral directors who get a few extra burial fees out of it each year.

It makes a certain amount of sense that my clock and my neighbor’s clock should be in sync with each other.

It makes no sense at all that both clocks, and all others, should “spring forward” by an hour in March and “fall back” by an hour in November.

If state legislatures are going to prescribe time settings, each legislature should prescribe one setting, applicable year-round.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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The Stimulus Bill’s Anti-Socialist Poison Pill

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On March 8, the Biden administration endorsed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act of 2021, which would allegedly “strengthen the Federal laws that protect workers’ right to organize a union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.”

The bill, however, isn’t just about making it easier for employees to unionize. It would also require independent workers and the businesses they work with to pretend that the former are “employees.”

That measure is aimed “gig economy” workers — for example,  independent cab drivers who contract with services like Uber or Lyft to send riders their way.

There’s another good name for the “gig economy”:   “Socialism.” Not the state-substitutist variety in which the political class flaps its lips about the workers while screwing them with their pants on, but the real thing.

“Gig economy” workers own the means of production (in the rideshare example, their cars). They work when they want. They work where they want. They work longer or shorter shifts as it suits them. They don’t answer to bosses. They ARE the bosses. They can walk away from Uber or Lyft or Postmates or DoorDash or Grubhub any time,  taking the means of production with them and putting that means to whatever use they choose.

So why do Joe Biden — a supposedly “pro-labor” moderate — and America’s growing herd of self-proclaimed “democratic socialists” want so badly to drive independent workers back onto the capitalist wage labor plantation?

There are several reasons, starting with pleasing what passes for “organized labor” these days (FDR, big business, and AFL-CIO “leaders” got together and put a stake through the heart of the labor movement with the National Labor Relations Act).

But a new explanation just made its appearance — in, of all places, the $1.9 trillion federal “stimulus” package. As the old truism goes, if you have to ask why, the answer is usually “money.”

“Buried in the latest stimulus measure,” Lydia O’Neal reports at Bloomberg, “is a provision intended to help gig economy workers correctly pay their taxes and keep the IRS from losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.”

Yep, good ol’ Joe is just trying to “help” independent workers, by making sure they get different forms from the companies they work with each tax year, forms which might result in them sending more of their hard-earned money to him via his friends at the IRS.

It seems like a small thing, and it probably is. Its main effect will apparently be to make record-keeping more expensive for businesses, incentivizing them to return to the bad old days of what socialists used to call “wage slavery” before they sold out to The Man. But it certainly explains a lot.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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