Subject: Re: Welcome
Rules? Moral symmetry? Non-circular referencing? What kind of Asylum is this?

It is a political asylum, which means you can publish political material that ordinarily woupd *not be able* to be published.

The guidelines - which are far from being rules - are ideas to encourage researching and presenting political insights that are generally out of bounds. Far more is out of bounds that we are generally even conscious, and so the guidelines assist this with some broad brush strokes.

In the introductory chapter to Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote about the censorship culture in Britain which is still alive and well:

“Any fair‐minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome … The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn't do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness”

I cannot imagine a better example of irony in that this very introduction was censored by the British publisher, so no-one reads it when purchasing Animal Farm, the introduction simply out of sight, out of mind.

- Manlobbi