Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The books deemed too dangerous to read" video.

  1. The current state of things in New Zealand is that books only get looked at by the part of the government that does official censorship if someone complains about them. (there are restrictions on the sale of publications containing pornographic images, but not on texts) In the event that there are credible complaints, the censors go over it and impose whatever restrictions they think reasonable to deal with said complaints. This only rarely happens and it's rarer still that it amounts to anything. Still, there was one book banned in recent times. It was considered objectionable due to advocating various things including holocost denial, but the thing that actually saw it censored (flat out banned, I believe) wasn;t the views expressed in it directly, but the likelyhood that not doing so would lead to riots, one way or another. At the same time, the author was doing some sort of speaking tour... he was refused entry into the country on the grounds that the resources required to prevent someone from murdering him or his presence from causing a riot wasn't justified when they could just not let him into the country in the first place, particularly given that the police weren't actually confident they'd be Successful at those tasks (more effort may have been put into finding alternative means if his views were more palitable, mind you, but at the same time the problem would have also been less serious to begin with in that case too.) On a more amusing note, a particular Shirt was also banned in New Zealand by the censor's office. Again, they don't even Look at anything that's not video games or tv/movies unless there are complaints (or it's a very edge case thing and the creator submits it for review themselves just to make sure there's not going to be an issue, I suppose). Basically, the standards for getting them to even look at such a thing are pretty high, and the bar for them going 'nah, it's fine' is Very low. In this case, the shirt was banned. But the reason it was banned was interesting. It wasn't that it was offensive, but that it was Only offensive. It's purpose was deemed to be 'to shock and offend, and nothing else'. Turns out, if it had actually been making a joke, or some sort of statement, or even just arranged in a meaningfully artistic fashion to make some sort of picture, or really Anything to give it a reason to exist other than to upset random people for no good reason, it would have been Fine... but it was just a bunch of swearwords (and maybe some slurs, can't quite recall) printed on a shirt that enough people took offense to to warrent the censors office making a ruling on the matter, and so it was banned.
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