It’s the digital age, banning something isn’t the same as it was 100 years ago. A ban won’t remove something from the internet but it will stop people freely sharing that crap around.
There is a non trivial portion of the population that will resist informational control attempts at all costs.
Information is power, and it isn't always pleasant. The greatest failing of our time is the power we've built up to engage in institutional perception management.
To deal with this sort of radicalization, hiding it in the dark is the single worst thing you can do. You end up lending it moral credibility through the Streisand effect, and amplify the "unjustness" in that person's manifesto from whatever craziness it was, and add on top of it "Oh, wow. The government is willing to black hole you as a citizen."
I appreciate the logic behind contagion theory, but I reject the conclusion it leads to. Memes, like viruses can only be countered through a sufficient and omnipresent enough psycho-societal immune response. That means everyone needs exposure, everyone needs to process it, and if there are quote "vulnerable" populations, it's up to their immediate social circles to take care of business in terms of either A) rehabilitating them, or as a last resort B) informing authorities before anyone gets hurt.
The hardware/software for institutional perception management has no place in a civilized society. The policies that encourage it should be met with outrage and scorn.
You lift up your society when you can hold up the deeds of it's worst members and state "They chose this. They felt X way. How they lived led them and those around them to a grisly end. We will continue. We will thrive. We will not break. We will learn. We will care, and we will adapt."
We live in a time filled with radicalism and distrust; the only way to get past it is to air it all from the rooftops, and rely on each other to come to terms with it's impact, and be able to discuss what it means while building a common worldview in the process.
Change only happens when we can admit there is a problem. Covering our eyes doesn't do that. I understand a lot of people feel that by breaking such a taboo as resorting to violence should be treated with immediate erasure from the public eye, but the having to resort to violence is a message in and of itself, and will be a constant threat in a free society. Note that the free society should always be more important than the absence of threat, because safety only truly exists on the good will of a free people.
Vigilance is justified. Denial and petty acts of revenge are not.
I like this term, I think it conceptualizes some of my looser thoughts about how we ought to respond to influences in life.
The thought process I see acted out by our institutions often looks like this: Declaring Foo is a bad influence that causes Bar, therefore we should engage in social engineering and propaganda against foo and/or bar.
Forget that the causal relationship between foo and bar can be tenuous, or that bar's badness is often motivated reasoning. The entire process just leaves people worse off to navigate the influences in their life.
Sorta related anecdote: When I was a child we had an anti-drug program at school. They taught us some of the ways "bad guys" would pressure us into doing drugs or drinking. I wasn't the only one to notice it was the exact same way parents, teachers and the media tell us to do the "good" things. ..... That put a resentful streak in my life that still exists to this day.
