15

In Saudi Arabia it is the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices, who censor materials, who we colloquially referred to in English as the Religious Police. And such people in various Arabic countries are casually called Mutaween, which literally means "volunteers" in the sense of someone who is a volunteer in religious service.

16

Coincidentally, I was just musing on this.

Today on Twitter I read:

"As an artist, I’m against censorship… But this is an important market" -James Cameron.

Help yourself to a coconut if you can guess correctly which country his is talking about.

Now, I couldn't help thinking that strictly speaking he's almost certainly not against limiting the dissemination of certain extreme material.

This is the kind of semantic argument that Chinese state media love. "Foreign countries censor child pornography from the internet so they have no right to criticise our political censorship." The (specious) argument goes.

I can't help thinking that it would be convenient to split the word into two. So there could be one type of censorship that is the removal or limiting of material that is unacceptable to the majority of the population and another type that is an authority removing information because they don't like it. Inevitable, the Chinese Communist regime would claim their censorship is in fact benign "It's for your own good, and that of social harmony".

Another example is the word "stereotype". There are stereotypes that are true and others that are not. The fact that there's one word for both phenomena causes Internet People an absolutely enormous amount of confusion.

17

And to answer your question (eventually). In China they call it "harmonising".

Netizens unaffectionately call it "river-crabbing" because both "harmony" and "river crab" are pronounced hexie.

18

If it's cesnoring by removing or blacking out bits, you can call it "redacting".

19

Editing is back.

Edited by: chriskean1

20

While it's nice to be able to edit, I'm somewhat curious how this fits their scheme.

For example, can I write this as a squeaky clean post, and then come back and edit some objectionable statements into it? Will every post be re-reviewed upon every edit?

21

Isn't editing very limited in time? (I was never able to determine how long, but definitely not very long or there are quite a few more posts that I would have edited.)

22

Kerouac2, I think it's unlimited provided no one has posted after the post you want to edit.

Shilgia, your initial question at #20 is testable.

23

Stefo, I have a problem with this. To me, it sounds as if the worthy are the ones doing it (the chiefs), not the ones having it done to them (the indians).


I love it.

Edited to add: Because I can. Edit that is.

24

I'm not sure I get you. In your example Virtue is not doing the promotion, but is being promoted, just as the worthy in my (admittedly otherwise not very good) suggestion. If I wanted to say that the worthy are doing the promotion, I would use "by" rather than of.

25

The Russian author and translator Boris Akunin, né Grigoriy Chkhartashvili, gave the annual Sebald lecture on literary translation a couple of weeks ago.. The text is here; a slightly abbreviated version is in the TLS of 15 February.

He mentions that in the Soviet Union, there wan't political censorship of translated works because before the work had been assigned to for translation, it would have been cleared. But there was so-called "moral-ethical editing". That's a term that shilgia might find useful.


The piece is well worth reading.

Edited by: Cato Censorius