Ruimu wrote:
Well, erh... It's not my imagination. I listed
those few topics (I may
have missed a couple more) that are actually under legal censorship in
France. (The law against negationism is, imho, a very awful law, one of the
worst in this country, but a necessary one in the context.) Censorship means
here that it is forbidden to publish a book that will be an apology of
suicide, paedophilia, or denying the reality of some crimes against humanity
(without having to prove anything). If you write a book stating that "Mr XY
raped Z...", you may face a libel suit, and have to prove your allegations.
(That's very different, as you can see.)
I understand you're likely not a lawyer, but do you (or anyone else)
know to what extent this requires *you* to be presenting the arguments,
vs. reporting on others? For example, we *do* have articles on
Holocaust deniers, summarizing their arguments (including that infamous
"there were no Nazi gas chambers" report a few years back), and we *do*
have information on the arguments of philosophers who wrote in favor of
suicide. We're not personally promoting these viewpoints, but to be a
reasonable encyclopedia we do have to give them a fair summary. In the
Holocaust denier case we can fairly easily point to a lot of other
evidence that the Holocaust actually did exist, and conclude that
historians generally disagree with them, which probably covers us. But
with suicide, we can't really reasonably conclude "these philosophers
were wrong, and suicide is bad and you shouldn't do it", since there is
no accepted consensus answer to "is suicide always bad, sometimes bad,
or never bad?"
So I guess my question is: can we still get in trouble for publishing a
neutral description of pro- and anti-suicide arguments (and those in
between), without concluding in favor of either?
-Mark