To the moderators and admins at Wikipedia
I’d like to ask you a question. That’s not quite true, I’d like you to ask yourselves a few questions.
This requires a bit of context, which I’ll establish as quickly as I can.You’ve just comprehensively re-written wikipedia’s entry on Men’s Rights. The page, formerly provided a reasonable summary of issues of concern with a movement called “the men’s rights movement.”
Now, after a thorough rewrite, the wikipedia entry under the heading “Men’s Rights,” characterizes the phrase to refer to collective privilege afforded to men throughout history. Essentially you’ve provided the definition of “male privilege” as it is presented in the context of Patriarchy Theory (PT).
PT, by the way, is one of the ideological tenets of Radical Feminism, thus the Men’s Rights wikipedia page, formerly addressing a movement called “the mens rights movement” is now a reference page for an item of mainstream feminist doctrine. The rewrite was skillful, certainly – and appears to have taken considerable work. Just look at all those links to feminist advocate research.
Here’s my question. or yours, actually. If you find yourself rewriting reference material to obscure and minimize the topic of that reference material; in fact censoring that topic, to create a public impression that it does not exist – do you recognize your own action as censorship? Taking that question further – do you recognize that the urge to silence opinions other than your own is a totalitarian urge?
Your own sandbox – Wikipedia – has a definition of censorship, albeit a rather poor definition. Like your revised mens rights article, the wikipedia definition of censorship obscures the essence of the topic. I have furnished you a cleaner and more concise definition.
It is this:
Censorship is the suppression of speech or other communication by an individual, a government or other controlling body.
I left motive out of the corrected definition, as censors including motive generally end up saying “for the greater good.” This, by the way, is the same reason given when nation states begin exterminating members of an “undesirable” demographic. So, do you recognize that you are censors, and do you realize what that means about your ideological motivation?
This isn’t an isolated incident. There was briefly an article on wikipedia on a man named Thomas James Ball. This man, after 15 years of being brutalized and abused by the family courts, shared his outrage and pain with the world by going to the steps of the Keene County, New Hampshire courthouse, dousing himself in gasoline, and igniting himself.
He then walked back and forth for about a minute, brushing off two other men’s attempts to use their coats to smother the flames. He did this in silence as the fuel burned his skin away and clouded his eyes. He would have been blind after about 30 seconds. Body fat dripped onto the pavement as the flames melted it from his torso as he walked. I’ve seen photos of the stained pavement. Towards the end, he walked over to where there was some grass and collapsed to his hands and knees, then died.
Political protest by self immolation is arguably the most profound and extreme act of political speech possible by a human being. In fact, it is iconic of protest against totalitarian rule. And you deleted the wikipedia entry for Mr Ball on the grounds that it was irrelevant. You did your level best to silence him.
So, again, do you recognize that you are censors? Do you recognize that your urge to, and in fact your continued practice of silencing opinion disagreeing with your own is fundamentally totalitarian? Do you?
One last question for you to chew on. If unpopular opinion is effectively silenced, what do you imagine will happen next?
