a rant about ‘censorship’ and content warnings

mass censorship would be censoring the cover art on releases.

blurring the image where somebody might see it when they didn't intend to or weren't prepared to is a form of censorship on a technical level but does not have any sort of political or social point to make; it's merely an act of respect towards a potential audience.

bad censorship is trying to keep people from looking at something. good censorship is letting people decide for themselves when and where to look at something.

 if you don't have the context, the blurred picture is of a monk burning themself alive. i won't get into the political and humanitarian context of the image because that's not what this post is about.

 i grew up around a lot of disabled folks. vets, epileptics, abuse victims, etc. i can't help but want to make things easier for them.

on the other hand, a lot of people, especially conservatives, like to demean people by calling them snowflakes or implying that people are too sensitive. im of the opinion that while in many cases, people certainly can't expect the world to be tamed for them, we still owe it to others to have some basic human decency and use content warnings when available or censor things when they aren't. a lot people have PTSD and other kinds of traumas, and it's already hard enough for them to navigate the internet without finding completely untagged violence or other such things that could cause an episode. as much as the idea of pretending other people's feelings don't matter is empowering to people with the luxury of not being traumatized, it's a fair bit more than selfish to do so. in the same way that you could be rightfully upset if somebody posted some gross fetish art unprompted, others have the right to request warnings or the ability to choose what they see before they see it, at least to an extent both in content and in the spaces the content is contained.

have some fucking decency, whether it's common or not.