Q&A: What Are the Criteria for Censorship?
What Are the Criteria for Censorship?
Question
Hello and blessings,
What are the criteria for censorship?
Best regards, Benjamin “the Censored” Gurlin
Answer
Questions that are really statements, where it is clear they are not meant to ask but to vent anger, are deleted. Questions that contain insults are deleted. Irrelevant questions are deleted. Especially when there is a clear and ongoing background with the questioner, that adds weight on the stringent side (including one case that is probably very familiar to you personally).
At first I thought of deleting this question too, since I already explained this in the past (I think also to you), and I don’t have a more precise description of the criteria. But because you get deleted quite a bit, I thought it was appropriate to give you an answer about it.
Just to clarify, almost none of this has happened since the site was founded. The deleted questions that were not yours were truly very few (fewer than five, in my estimation). Yours will continue to be deleted energetically as long as their character warrants it.
Discussion on Answer
By the way, as far as I remember, there really were almost no cases of censorship here. That’s not the norm. Even when we used to “drive him crazy” because the discussions were just being ground to dust endlessly and there didn’t seem to be any understanding at all between the two sides. Usually in those cases there was something like “I’ve exhausted this,” which depending on the period was pulled out more or less quickly to stop that annoying argument.
I think the reason he censors more now is that some people’s questions here are just endless grumbling with mockery and scorn toward religious people, but not in one-time discussions that, fine, you could leave up… rather these are discussions that just keep coming back. And don’t stop. And they’re so stupid and just get more and more horrifying and idiotic.
In short, I totally get him.
By the way, it’s an interesting sign for the Rabbi: on the one hand people see him as a figure through whom they can vent their feelings of betrayal by existence as a whole, and on the other hand maybe it’s a bad sign, that he is perceived as an “outsider” you can joke with about our own community, which they wouldn’t do with a rabbi in their own community… but he’s enough on the inside that it takes the form of questions and answers, and not just answers without questions.
K,
This is about censoring a question (fewer than five), not a comment in a thread.
I’ll repeat again that I do not censor at all, and I don’t think there has been any increase recently. Aside from Benjamin’s “questions.” As for the point at which I pull the “I’ve exhausted this” card, there perhaps there has been some increase, because there are many questions that come up again and again and have already been discussed. And sometimes it is literally happening in parallel (to the point that there are cases where I mix up the threads and think I already answered here what I wrote there). The longer the site exists, the more discussions there are that have already been exhausted, so in my opinion it is only natural that exhaustion is reached earlier.
Benjamin — you already got an answer here:
So maybe it’s time to improve the site’s search engine. It would save a lot of “I’ve exhausted this.”
The very “I’ve exhausted this” itself improves the motivation of questioners to search the site.
It also improves the motivation not to use the site. If you don’t tell the Rabbi something new, he ignores you. Didn’t like that. A person is talking to you, answer him. What is this double standard?
SSSS etc… “I’ve exhausted this” is not ignoring you, it’s an answer — it just means there is nothing to add beyond what has already been said.
Also, usually the Rabbi sends a link to the place where the topic was already thrashed out in the past.
Nice that you look at it that way. By the way, you’re from Har Nof, right? How did you get such severe burns from Haredism in such an American and “open” neighborhood?
There used to be a forum here, and then it was closed because of lack of activity. I think it would be worth bringing the forums back, and one of the sections could have the title “A place to vent your personal grievances about the public and the great rabbis, about life and the Torah” — in cathartic writing…
By the way, what’s with writing something related to the Nazis every other second?
Regardless of the criteria, your method of asking 50 questions that lead to one question has always seemed strange to me.
For example, from your last 2–3 questions about the Zohar it’s pretty clear that what you actually mean to ask is whether Rabbi Michi believes that the Zohar was written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai / came from divine inspiration, and to point out contradictions you find in it… You could simply have asked that directly once and that’s it.
(All the repeated combinations of questions about Haredim and the great rabbis of the generation also point to one basic underlying difficulty you have with their way of thinking.) And by the way, on these two issues — both the attitude toward “Haredim” and the divine inspiration that rested upon the authors of the Book of the Zohar — Michi’s views are quite clear, so I don’t understand why you keep pressing him with these questions. That is, do you perhaps simply have some need to get “confirmation” after you found a rabbi who is similar to you in certain ways of thinking?
Bothering him*
[The term censorship is too broad. There is censorship of correct information because it is correct and people do not want it published. And there is simple “censorship” just because this is not the place, and the censored person is invited to look for other platforms for himself, just as Nature would not publish a Trump election speech.]