Emergent Morality : Thou Shalt Not Censor

Well here it is, the dawn of a new day, a new era and Barclays (god bless them) still haven’t managed to figure out that THE best way of getting publicity for something is to ban it.

So… Some leaked documents that fell into the hands of The Guardian hinting at some impropriety on behalf of Barclays in respect to Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue were promptly barred from publication… but don’t worry, because they’re freely available on the internet… someone linked to them on Twitter… so I re-tweeted…

… and wouldn’t you know it, my tweet has been deleted (by someone other than me). To be fair, 2 other somewhat innocuous tweets have also been deleted – I know this because I keep an RSS feed of my own tweets. Never mind… you can get hold of the offending documents over at Wikileaks, who’s kudos has risen sharply on the news that the Australian Government is trying to ban them.

Barclays must be panicking for some reason… my guess would be that they’re engaged in fraud… and that it’s a fair bet that all the other big banks have also engaged in fraud, and that to do so, they’d have needed the complicity of the Big Four Accountancy firms, who are also responsible for auditing against such behaviour.

So. I’ve had a look at these documents and I can’t make head or tail of them. Fortunately The Guardian appears not to be barred from publishing interpretations.

Listen thou would-be censors: We are the internet, and we most vigorously disapprove of censorship on specifically and explicitly moral grounds.

Moralities are sets of behaviours designed to protect the social group from individual self-interest. Blocking the flow of information is against the interests, the morality and the innocence of The Universal Mind.

The reason why so many religious morals are now so ugly and mean is that they were designed to protect the types of social groupings that were common back in the Bronze Age… This is why small town America tends to vote Red while the cities tend to vote Blue – it’s why the Red camp in the last election attempted to make out that “small town America” was (morally) the “real” America.

Well, censors, we now have a brand new social structure… and it’s bigger and it’s stronger than you are.

We are here.