Episode: 2210
Title: HPR2210: On Freedom of Speech and Censorship
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2210/hpr2210.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:46:17

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This is HBR episode 2,210 entitled on Freedom on Speech and censorship.
It is hosted by M1RR0R5H4D35 and in about 22 minutes long and carrying an explicit flag.
The summary is reflection on Freedom on Speech.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
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If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Hello world, you're listening to Hacker Public Radio, I'm Mirror Shades and today we're talking about Freedom of Speech and censorship.
I don't think I really have to tell you what these two things are, they're obviously different but they are related.
Recently, by the time you're hearing this it was probably several weeks ago, there was an episode of HBR that caused a little bit of controversy.
And that's okay.
It's not a good thing, not a bad thing, whatever.
It did inspire me to create this episode.
I want to make this really clear, this is not any sort of rebuttal or response to that episode in any way.
The episode got me thinking about things I hadn't really thought about in a long time, not that I never thought about them, but they haven't been an issue in a long time.
Freedom of speech and censorship is one of those things that the internet has kind of eliminated in some respects.
I know there's a lot of areas there, the Great Firewall of China and what all, but for me personally, I get on the internet sometimes and people constantly just jump on and start ranting and you see this all over the place.
It's one of those things that I just don't think about anymore.
It used to be a bigger deal, particularly when I was younger in 1990, I entered my teen years and at that time there was much ado in the media about freedom of speech and censorship.
For example, well actually in the 1980s there were a lot of heavy metal bands being brought on trial and that kind of continued because in the late 80s and early 90s some of the glam rock, hair bands, whatever you want to call them, as well as some of the better known, like Aussie, twisted sister, there was a couple others that were brought on trial with all kinds of ridiculous accusations.
But in the early 1990s, late 80s, early 90s, there were new genres of metal coming out and heavy metal being my first love when it came to music.
There was bands coming out of the woodwork playing, you know, stuff like death metal, there were black metal bands coming out of Norway and Sweden.
And that stuff was all new and that caused some controversy.
Video games had gotten a little more edgier mortal combat came out in the early 90s and that caused a big uproar because it was violent because there was blood in the game because they were finishing moves.
If you're outside the US, I don't know if you will remember there was a show here in the US aired on MTV called Beavison Butthead about the misadventures of two idiot slackers.
And the show was kind of stupid, it was just, you know, belly laughs, it was just funny and stupid.
But it really wasn't meant for kids, but there was an incident where a kid who had been allowed to watch Beavison Butthead burned his home down and it killed his sibling and when the authorities arrived, he was standing out front laughing like Beavison Butthead.
And even back then as a young kid, that struck me not as the content creator is not at fault there, you know, that's not Mike Judges fault, that's not the fault of the show Beavison Butthead, that's not MTV's fault, that's bad parenting.
Plain and simple, that is bad parenting, why did you let your 9 or 10 year old kid or whatever was watched a show like Beavison Butthead for hours on end because you're bad parent.
And in a lot of these cases, that's exactly what it was, even today this is a relevant argument because people are complaining about video games all the time.
You know, there's a reason why these ratings came out of all that, if a game says it's mature, you know, you don't buy it for your 9 year old kid.
If you're taking your 9 or 10 year old kid to the store and buying them the latest version of Grand Theft Auto, that's your bad parent, I'm sorry.
You know, if you're okay with that, that's fine, it's none of my business, but you know, when stuff like this happens, you have no one to blame but yourself.
You can't blame the video game, you can't blame the creators of the video game or the show or whatever, it's on you.
And that whole redirection of responsibility always bothered me and it's something I carried with me even today.
And I want to talk specifically, there was a band that started in, I want to say it was the late 80s, I think their first album came out in like 87 or 88.
And the name of this band is Cannibal Corps. And as you can imagine, that was very controversial at the time, they're still around by the way.
I don't know how many original members are left, but they are still around.
But the name of the band was controversial, the names of their songs were controversial, their song lyrics were controversial, and the album covers were controversial.
There was no one aspect of this band that wasn't in some way, shape or form, a complete affront to censorship in some way, shape or form.
But this creates an issue and there's a reason why I'm very specific reason why I'm bringing this up.
So, you know, the record company decided to sign them, print the album covers, press the CDs, the record companies decided to sell it to carry it because there was a demand for it fans, there were fans of the band, they wanted to be able to go buy their CD and take it home and whatever.
But it creates a logistical problem. It creates a logistical problem and I'm going to call it the Grand Mod Jones condition.
And what the Grand Mod Jones condition is, is when Grand Mod Jones takes her seven-year-old granddaughter to the record store to buy whatever the hill of Teletubbies sing along or some such.
She has as much right to be able to take her granddaughter to the record store and buy, you know, some ridiculous kitty CD without having Cannibal Corps album cover shoved in her face.
She has as much right to do that as the fans of Cannibal Corps have to go to the record store and buy the Cannibal Corps album without being harassed or harrained about their choice of music.
So to get around this problem because I couldn't just set, you know, these albums out on the shelves without offending potentially other paying customers, other patrons of the store, some stores put like little baggies over the disc, some stores will have them in the back and you have to ask for them.
But I know for a while they shipped them with a type of cell phone. It was the regular cell phone that CDs are wrapped in, but the front of it was blacked out.
Now the CD itself was completely uncensored. Once you bought it, you could take the cell phone off and the CD was the same, you know, all the gory artwork was there, all the track titles were there that none of the CD was completely uncensored.
But it allowed doing that allowed other people to shop in the store without having to be offended.
And it also allowed people who were fans of the band to still be able to buy the uncensored album.
Now, excuse me, the reason why I bring this up is because
I want to use that particular show. Again, this is not any sort of reaction to the show. It's just a convenient example.
But in that show, one of the issues that came up with that particular show, it was a show by Space Man. I forget the title of it, but I should have really looked that up and had the episode number ready, but I don't.
But most of you will probably know which one it is anyway. But one of the issues was the show title and show notes themselves were not cleaned.
And I want to make a point of that because when Ken asks us, and I mean us as in anyone who is contributing a show to HPR, to keep those clean, that does not constitute censorship.
Specifically, censorship would have taken place if parts of the episode had been redacted, if they had been bleaped out or cut up, or if the show itself had simply been pulled and not allowed to go out.
None of these things were the case. Obviously, the episode was allowed to go out. There was some controversy.
And that's okay. That's totally fine. But it creates a situation where when other people are now perusing the back catalog of old episodes of HPR looking for episodes, they're going to have the exploitive shoved in their face whether they wanted or not.
So what I'm saying is that the episode can be flagged as being explicit or vulgar or whatever word you want to use, potentially offending.
And people can have warning and decide, well, I don't want to listen to that. And I'm making a point of this because in the rebuttal episode,
spacemen specifically mentioned, if you don't like my episode, when you see spacemen, don't listen to it. And I 100% agree with it. Actually, I agreed with a lot of the points he made in his rebuttal.
It just doesn't apply here because with this situation, what you've created is a situation where now people who may choose to find that offensive no longer have a choice. It's shoved in their face.
In other words, grandma Jones is having cannibal corpse albums shoved in her face or the flip side of that coin, the cannibal corpse fans are having, you know, whatever him, him, no CD shoved in their face.
And either one of those things is right, you've created the grandma Jones condition and that is not good. So that does not necessarily constitute censorship, censorship is a bad thing.
I totally agree with that. I also want to make it clear, I'm not offended. You know, if I'm, I actually don't use a pod catcher anymore because I don't have time to listen to podcasts like I used to.
But occasionally, when I do find I have a little extra time on my hands, I will peruse the old episodes because I don't get to keep up with them like I used to.
And, you know, when I see something like, you know, a show title with the F bomb and it doesn't bother me, I might even click on it just to see what it's about.
But I also understand that there are going to be other people who do not share that point of view.
We are adults and we have to be responsible adults and respect that freedom of speech isn't, you can't play the freedom of speech card because it's not card.
It's more, it's a door that swings two ways, okay, or if you prefer the other metaphor, it's a two way street, whatever metaphor you like better.
It's, when, if I were to create an episode and a bunch of people commented negatively on it, I'd be totally okay with that. It might bum me out, but I'd be okay with it because I have a right to exercise my freedom of speech and so do they.
Freedom of speech is a thing that has to be, if we are all to agree that it is a common human right, then it has to apply to everyone.
If it doesn't apply to everyone, it's no longer a right, it becomes a privilege of an elite few and that is morally reprehensible.
Voltaire wrote, think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so.
So, the only, I guess the only thing about that episode in particular that I took issue with, and I'm going to make this clear, I'm not offended, it doesn't bother me.
In many respects, I could almost care less, but in that episode there's one specific thing, actually there's kind of two specific things that I would take issue with.
And the first is, HPR is a platform for individuals to exchange knowledge. That's come up a bunch of times and people probably talk this one to death and chat rooms and whatever, but that didn't really happen here.
What we got was essentially sort of an angsty teenage diatribe, it's, you know, HPR is not a platform for us to get up on our soap box and bitch about things we don't like.
Because it's one thing to bitch about a problem, it's another to do something about it and what I mean by that is the effort could have been better spent actually educating people about the difference.
Now, the episode, it was kind of about the difference between the terms Linux and GNU Linux. And first of all, this is an old argument. I don't know why did you know anybody would pull that one out of the attic and dust it off and bring that, I mean this has been going on nearly 20 years.
It's an old argument. And I think most people have actually just gotten to the point where we don't give a shit anymore. I mean, if you really want to be honest about it, most people don't give a shit anymore.
The people who have an issue with it will say GNU Linux, the people who don't care will say Linux. And you know, that's just sort of the way it's been for a decade, decade and a half, something like that.
I mean, really that, but that aside, that aside, you could have made an episode that delivered at least some information and that would still be useful. I mean, we have new people come into the world of Linux or GNU Linux or whatever the hell you want to call it today.
And who don't know, there's a lot of people out there who are completely unaware of the difference between saying Linux and saying GNU Linux.
And you could have really used that effort to maybe educate them about the difference, but that didn't happen.
And really the crux of the problem is when you essentially say that if, and this is kind of like the TLDR of the situation, is when you say, if you don't agree with my point of view.
In other words, people who say Linux instead of GNU Linux or vice versa, when you don't agree with my opinion, when you don't see things the way I see, then you're a fuck bag. I believe is a term that was used.
That is tantamount to bigotry. It's really no different than denigrating people for having a different religious view from yourself, putting people down for having different clothes or different color of skin.
It really doesn't have any place in a modern enlightened society. It was just sort of a bunch of noise. And it didn't have to be that way.
And I want to say, I actually like some of Space Man's other episodes. And I kind of, again, I don't think that was really his intention.
I really, I think it was just a poor choice of words, but just the same, you know, when you are putting content out there for the whole world here, you really need to be cognizant of the words that are coming out of your mouth.
You can't just blurt out whatever thing comes to mind at that moment, because there are people who may take it out of context.
There are people who may be offended. And you don't, I want to say you don't want to offend people. Sometimes offensive language has been really useful.
One of my favorite all-time favorite stand-up comedians is George Carletting. He used profane language all the time, but he did so in a very intelligent way.
There was no point in me. There was no knowledge being transferred there, and there could have been.
So I think the only real sad part is that it was sort of a missed opportunity. But with that being said, you know, it is what it is. I'm not offended. It didn't like, it didn't ruin my day.
The world keeps turning. And before I go, I want to leave you with one last quote from Oscar Wilde.
I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death you're right to make an answer to yourself. And that is absolutely true.
We all have a right to our opinion. We all have a right to express that opinion. But if we're responsible enough to bear the yoke of that responsibility, we have to accept that we live in a world full of people who also have that right.
We all have to agree with our views and have a right not to agree with our views and have a right to voice their opinion. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that.
That's just being an adult. That's living in the world. That's what it's about. I want to thank you guys for listening, and I'll get out of here.
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