Because who dictates what’s good? If I’m dictating what’s good then ok. If my enemies are then not
That's moral relativism. "Good" and "bad" exist as clear concepts, like the aforementioned monkey torture stuff. It's a victimless crime since monkeys have no human rights, but it's a disgusting act committed and enjoyed by depraved individuals. Or even child porn--while there is a victim in its creation, can we really say anyone is harmed by someone privately looking at CP someone else produced? If we acknowledge that good and evil exists, we can say that looking at monkey torture or CP is an evil act. But if we think free speech is an absolute value, then we think looking at monkey torture or CP is a human right i.e. we're in libertarian land.
Likewise, we can restrict or forbid literature advocating "bad" ideologies like communism or transgenderism on that basis. The literature is intended to facilitate and promote evil, if not convert people to its cause. Same thing with pretty much any pornography not depicting healthy, normal sex acts, since that sort of porn has verifiably encouraged people to copy demeaning and perverse sex acts like BDSM and "eating ass" (and all the disease and injury consequences) and is a gateway drug into all sorts of even more disgusting fetish porn and transgenderism.
Emphasis on "tried" to, there is no none time travelling scenario where the European powers pull of an invasion of Japan during the Sengoku Period, none, nevermind the practicality concerns (the anglos gave up on it for a reason) we may as well be considering Prester John unironically and non-Ethiopianly.
Japan was richer and more populous than Cambodia (bigger market to sell goods) and already had powerful pro-European feudal lords (just like Mexico and the Tlaxcalans!). There's no "practicality concern" when it's something well within their capability. We can also observe that forbidding Christianity helped ensure internal peace because there were no repeats of the Shimabara rebellion or Christian daimyo conspiring against the Shogunate. The Tokugawa Shogunate enjoyed almost 250 years of internal peace and no serious conflicts which is downright astonishing, especially in premodern times--surely that's a positive virtue of censorship when the Shogun can stop subversive ideologies be it Christianity or some other ideology that might encourage rebellions.
The Mongols are a great example because they're one of the few times an external power has tried to interfere in Japanese territorial integrity and show the direct result of that; unity. Because Japan at the time despite appearances was a nation with a civilisation and that's what those things do when confronted with hostile external force, all coming back to my original point about it being a politics things and therefore gay and not a "higher power" belief in rights issue.
It's all about "unity" until some general realizes they're getting screwed over by the government and decides to join the invader. Just like what happened in Persia, Russia, China (both Chinese states), Vietnam (even though they lost in the end), and all the way back to Genghis Khan beating up some other tribe. That's what people do when confronted by a hostile external force
who is winning, just like how there's been videos for months of Ukrainian soldiers and even low-ranking officers switching allegiance to Russia.
attempting to censor in this environment just draws attention to the stuff you're trying to censor. china has an entire state apparatus attempting to control the flow of information and it fails pretty miserably, for example. which i think they're starting to understand. much easier to just lock up dissidents for their speech than attempt to stop them from speaking.
How has it failed? It's worked perfectly because there is no actual opposition to the CCP. Most Chinese have no idea what the Tiananmen Square massacre was other than it was "just a protest against the government where people on both sides made mistakes." Actual opposition to the CCP within China barely exists.
If China isn't doing censorship right, it's that they don't just let wrongthinkers shout into the void like pre-Elon Twitter did via shadowbans and algorithm deboosts. I find the Western censorship apparatus deployed during the scamdemic probably the single best in history.
Could you elaborate on this point? Only 25 years of serious political significance with a congruent 12 years of official rule is awfully short for a new government. Why did everything fall apart so quickly and why is that an example of censorship succeeding?
The point is that LGBTBBQ and especially troon ideology vanished from Germany for decades. To this day there are leftists online regretting what the Nazis did to Magnus Hirschfeld, an advocate of homosexuality, transgenderism, and pedophilia who was right up there with the worst Nazi doctors in terms of the disgusting "studies" he performed.
Other Nazi programs against degenerate art and smoking or raising the birthrate succeeded as well during those 12 years, but were a lot easier to get reversed under the pretext of "the Nazis supported it therefore it's bad." That argument was not accepted regarding LGBTBBQ stuff, with the sole exception of communists legalizing sodomy in East Germany in the 1950s (it was not legal in West Germany until 1969 when like everywhere else, communist subversion made them legalize it). And that was it--no gay marriage in East Germany, no troon ideology in East Germany, and East Germany didn't even promote homosexuality like the modern West since communist regimes mostly regarded homosexuality as something abherrant and not to be promoted.
