Blogger Becomes Blocker

I read an awful lot online. I still probably invest significantly more time with physical books than in frequenting websites, but the weekly averages spent on each activity are a lot closer these days than five years ago, and getting closer still. Books are better for long-term perspectives on the world around us. The internet has the advantage of being current, and of telling us what other people like us (and not like us) are thinking and doing.

My book collection (not my ebooks, sadly) has this advantage over digital text, online or in other forms: Amazon and/or other interested parties cannot make it disappear. Even when they try really, really hard.

Too Hot to Handle: Coalition of the Unwilling

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The Gospel Coalition is an evangelical colossus, with close to 8,000 affiliated congregations across the U.S., 65 million annual website pageviews, regular live events, a full slate of in-house blogs and other media promoting its theological checklist.

Tom: But one very slightly unsettling feature of TGC’s ministry, Immanuel Can, is that they seem to have little interest in engaging in the exchange of ideas, as this Jonathan Merritt article very effectively documents.

You’re quite familiar with TGC. What do they stand for?

Too Hot to Handle: Coalition of the Unwilling

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Disappearing Platform

There’s something wonderful about finding like-minded souls with whom to share our beliefs and concerns.

Totalitarian regimes grasp this, so they make it difficult for their citizens to exchange ideas, however trivial those ideas may appear to be. Censorship in Nazi Germany was extreme and strictly enforced. Stalin sent fellow Russians to the gulags for up to 25 years simply for telling jokes about Communist Party officials. None of this was original to Hitler or Stalin: the second century Romans had their own secret police equivalent called the Frumentarii that not only covertly gathered military intelligence throughout the empire but even spied on the members of the emperor’s household.

If people can’t freely and comfortably exchange ideas, they can’t form effective political opposition, or so goes the thinking.

The Cost of Doing Business

Aids to a very effective
ancient form of censorship.

Internet censorship is coming, and it’s coming fast. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.

Numerous media sources reported last week that Facebook, Twitter and Google have all agreed to cooperate with the German government in removing hate speech from the internet. Special teams in each company will determine whether content violates German laws and remove it within 24 hours.

Under German law, “hate speech” is speech that “incites or instigates harmful action”. So a mechanism is now in place where quite literally anything may be censored provided it can be said to potentially cause “harm”, as defined by German lawmakers.

Today, that means anti-immigration sentiment. Tomorrow, it could mean anything perceived as homophobic, misogynist or religious. Effectively for Germans it means an end to whatever level of free speech they may have previously enjoyed.