> Do they also complain about censorship and shout at the manager of a shoe store for not selling books?
No. Censorship is the suppression of speech.
If you don't sell a book because you don't think it fits your store, or you don't think it's profitable, that's not censorship.
But if you refuse to carry a book SPECIFICALLY because you don't like the message, then that IS censorship.
Some forms of censorship are illegal, and some forms are legally required. But that doesn't mean that it's not censorship just because you agree with that's being censored.
I really don't know if a HN thread is the place for like an abstract take, but I really dislike these "absolutist" definitions. You take a high-impact, emotionally charged word with a well defined meaning in its cultural context, rip it out of that context, apply the naive detached dictionary definition, and then end run around and shove it back into that high-impact context to your rhetorical benefit, where it would never be used naturally, because it "follows" from the naive definition.
In this case, sure, "censorship" is literally the suppression of speech but it's a much bigger idea than that. It's this huge institutional power dynamic. And so if you want to define it as something smaller where say white people getting in trouble for saying the n word is censorship then that's fine but then the word loses all the impact because if that's what you consider censorship then almost everyone is going to be in favor of it to some degree. It's not this inherently evil dystopian thing anymore. But then rhetorically you rely that fact that impact is "sticky" so when you say "well this thing I don't like is censorship oOoOoOooO and my line of reasoning supports that" you're kind of betting that the reader doesn't take notice that in the universe you've constructed censorship is pretty benign.
Taken broadly always was the commonly used definition of censorship, and progressives understood that until they got the power to censor what they don’t like through their economic power.
Then they redefined censorship to be only if the government does it. Thats having your cake and eating it too.
That just dilutes the definition to the point of being meaningless. You will find very few bookstores with a section devoted to extremist treatises and manifestos. That is not censorship in any conventional sense of the word.
If I owned I book store, I would not sell “The Turner Diaries” (unless maybe if I knew that the person who wanted to buy it was a researcher studying racist literature). Even if it were profitable, I wouldn’t want to make money from helping spread that garbage.
If you consider that censorship, then you’ve gone a long way toward convincing me that your definition of censorship is an OK thing to do.
No. Censorship is the suppression of speech.
If you don't sell a book because you don't think it fits your store, or you don't think it's profitable, that's not censorship.
But if you refuse to carry a book SPECIFICALLY because you don't like the message, then that IS censorship.
Some forms of censorship are illegal, and some forms are legally required. But that doesn't mean that it's not censorship just because you agree with that's being censored.