Episode 76: BANHAMMER

"Compliance/we just need your compliance/you will feel no pain anymore/no more defiance/just give us your compliance."

                                                       -Muse, "Compliance"

   To paraphrase the old quote from Lord Acton, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

  Giving someone power over someone else can make them lash out and exert their power when they don't really need to, and to be more forceful and punishing just because they can. Power is something that should only be given to level-headed, fair people. 

   Some people with power use the power they have just to hurt people they don't like. It's been seen with world leaders, like Adolf Hitler with the Holocaust, slavery as a whole, or Andrew Jackson with the Trail of Tears. Of course, it's easy to know that these things happen with leaders and politicians. But the purpose of this episode is to talk about it being in smaller hands.

    The internet is a rotten place to be subjected to people who have power in it. Moderators of social media, especially places like Reddit and Discord, get egotistical about their status and go crazy with their ability to enforce rules and ban people. Voice an opinion they don't like? Boom. You're out. Be a part of a different community that they don't like? Boom. You're out. Say something even slightly negative about the moderators themselves? Boom you're out.

   BANHAMMER.

   The banhammer is a too powerful, too widespread weapon. Internet moderators love the feel of the handle and the banging sound it makes when they kick someone out because they said a no-no word or something.

    But it also goes along, quite seriously, with media. Books especially are things that get banned because of the content in them. Nazi Germany banned books and other art because they didn't like the content, whether that be from some minority or just stuff that disagreed with their agenda, and now our own government in the US is banning books left and right. Now, I'm not saying our government is like that of Nazi Germany, it's just alarming that they're doing something they also did, especially when that thing is the suppression of free speech and expression.

    I'm kinda guessing the plot based on what I know, but Assassination Classroom is a manga/anime series where an alien who wants to destroy the world because a teacher. Throughout the class, the alien's students take turns trying to kill him, the point being that if one of them succeeds in taking him out, the world is saved.

    Copies of this manga series have been banned in at least one school, and others are considering banning it as well. They site that they're banning it because it encourages students killing their teacher. Which absolutely isn't true. You may as well say that history class encourages students to be racist or that science class encourages students to cook meth.

    Assassination Classroom is just one of many examples. Many other books and other forms of media are being banned from certain spaces, even some classic works. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia had to pull some of their episodes off of Hulu because they featured blackface (and brownface), which are bad things, sure, but the whole point of the blackface and brownface being in those episodes was to make fun of it. To show how ridiculous it was. The whole point of the show is how absurd the main characters are. The whole point is laughing at them, not with them. 

    I just think that people with the power to restrict content and the people that make it should be more careful with it, and that we should only give power in the first place to people who we know will be fair with it.

Anyway, see you next week!