censorship

SFWA, Mercedes Lackey, and taboo words 3

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged censorship fandom language science fiction on by

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) named Mercedes Lackey a Grand Master at the Nebula Awards ceremony, then almost immediately turned around and removed her from the Nebula Conference. The stated reason was that she “used a racial slur” while on a panel.

English has long had taboo words. At one time, the strongest ones dealt with religion. Later on, ones relating to bodily functions headed the list. It’s still illegal to tell people on broadcast television what the Supreme Court’s seven dirty words are. How do you avoid breaking the law when you can’t be told what the law forbids?

The Lackey situation is similar. The File 770 article doesn’t tell us what the alleged racial slur was. Readers are likely to imagine the worst words possible (which I won’t mention, since they may lower my search engine visibility). In fact, the word she used was “colored.” If that’s a slur, then the NAACP commits it every time it gives its full name, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Chinese writers get it from both sides

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship China on by

Chinese writers have to reckon not only with their own government but with the US government. This post deals with events from 2020, but they relate to the issues of the upcoming Chengdu Worldcon and its guest of honor.

In 2020, Netflix announced plans for a series based on Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and its sequels. As far as I can tell (my Netflix subscription is currently inactive), it’s still in the works. Earlier, five U.S. senators pressured Netflix to drop it. Their reason was some remarks which the author had made in a New Yorker interview. When asked about the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs, he said, “If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty. If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.”Cover, The Three-Body Problem

The notion of “lifting people out of poverty” by putting them into brutal concentration camps is, of course, outrageous. We have to consider Cixin’s position, though. If he had spoken against the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs, his writing career would have promptly ended, and he might have suffered worse consequences. The Chinese government’s recent threats against anyone who criticizes it at the Olympics have reminded us of that. Also, he’s doubtless been fed steady misinformation by the censored Chinese media.
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Writers threatened with $300K fines

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According to an article by Natylie Baldwin on antiwar.com, the United States Treasury Department has threatened writers with fines of more than $300,000 if they write for the Strategic Culture Foundation, a Russia-based online journal.

The writers, Daniel Lazare and Michael Averko, reportedly got letters from the Treasury Department, delivered by the FBI, claiming they were in violation of sanctions against SCF and could be subject to a “civil monetary penalty of up to the greater of $311,562 or twice the value of the underlying transaction.” They say that other writers have received similar letters.
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Fighting dairy censorship

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It’s a curious and little-known fact that the dairy industry is a leading advocate of censorship. It demands the suppression of words such as “milk” and “butter” for non-dairy products, even where their meaning is clear and their use is well established. If the dairy lobby had its way, you wouldn’t find “peanut butter” or “soy milk” in stores. Its puppets include several members of Congress, and it’s especially powerful in Wisconsin, where it was long illegal to serve yellow margarine.

More surprisingly, the dairy lobby appears to have bought the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The CDFA sent a demand to Miyoko’s Creamery demanding that it stop using terms such as “cultured vegan butter.” Indeed, the government’s demands went far beyond that, saying that Miyoko’s couldn’t call its products “cruelty-free” or show a picture of a woman hugging a cow. The letter’s thinly disguised purpose was to hamper competition with the dairy industry.
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Dr. Seuss becomes “Doctor Sues” (UPDATED: APPARENT FALSE REPORT)

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary News and tagged censorship liberty satire on by

Update: It now appears that the alleged legal threat by Dr. Seuss Enterprises was a forgery. A tweet by Seth Dillon claiming receipt of the legal notice is “no longer available.” A Daily Wire post which reported the supposed threat now has the following added at the top:

Seuss Enterprises told The Daily Wire that the legal threat is fake and that Seuss Enterprises never demanded the retraction.

“The purported legal notice is a fake. It did not come from Dr. Seuss Enterprises or anyone associated with the organization,” Seuss Enterprises told The Daily Wire.

This morning (April 20), I can’t find anything on Dillon’s Twitter feed either reaffirming or retracting the statement that they received a notice from the Seuss organization. We can all make mistakes (as the original version of this post shows), but we need to correct them, especially when they make someone look bad.

Sorry about conveying erroneous information. Now I have to go back to all the places where I posted links to this article and post updates.

Original post follows…

In March, I wrote that Dr. Seuss Enterprises faced a difficult situation. It now seems I was wrong. They’re just nuts. They discovered a satirical Babylon Bee article and are now threatening to sue.
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The Seuss affair 4

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged books censorship copyright on by

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has announced it will discontinue publication of six Dr. Seuss books. Its stated reason is that they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Whatever you think of this decision, you need to remember what every writer knows and many on the right forget: Publishers have no obligation to publish, except when they’re bound by a contract. The villain of the piece isn’t Dr. Seuss Enterprises, but absurdly long copyright terms. Theodore Geisel died in 1991. And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street was published in 1937. It won’t enter the public domain until, I think, 2033.
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Book meta-discussion: Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy 1

This entry was posted in Book discussion Censorship and tagged Antifa books bookstores censorship on by

This will be the last of my regular Monday book posts for a while. In preparation for moving, I’ve put a lot of my books in boxes, and it’s getting harder to find the books that I want to reread and discuss. Naturally, this isn’t stopping me from acquiring even more books. This post is about an upcoming book by Andy Ngo, called Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Or rather, it’s about Antifa’s attempt to suppress the book. I have it on pre-order from Water Street Bookstore but haven’t read it yet.

There’s a lot of misinformation about Antifa. On the one hand, mainstream media articles keep claiming it’s an “anti-fascist” organization. It’s anti-fascist in the same sense that the Capitol riot was “patriotic”: not at all, but the people involved find it handy to appropriate a term which they don’t deserve. On the other hand, some people on the right have built it into a ten-foot-tall organization which is behind everything. It’s even supposed to have been the real people who invaded the Capitol. What it mostly does is disrupt speaking events it doesn’t like. It’s basically a gang of thugs who hate freedom and aren’t hugely important.
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Book discussion: Fahrenheit 451 1

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“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”

Those are the opening words of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They could also have been the words of whoever torched Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore in Minneapolis. (The crowdfunding campaign to restore it is still active.)

The arsonist might have gone on, as the protagonist’s thoughts do: “You weren’t burning anyone, you were burning things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper … there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up.” The goons who write in defense of looting and burning regularly say there’s nothing wrong with destroying mere property.
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A banned book you may never see 3

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“Banned Books Week” has become a joke. I call it “bland books week.” Its definition of “banned” includes being deemed inappropriate for elementary school libraries. This is at best deceptive, and it’s an excuse for not talking about books that face actual efforts to ban them. The list also includes “challenged” books; that means simply that somebody asked a library not to carry a book. Talking about real banned books would require entering real controversies.

Unless you think school libraries should carry everything down to and including hard porn, “banning” in that sense is justified in some cases. “Challenging” hardly deserves notice at all, unless it results in serious consideration of excluding a book. Whether a school library carries Captain Underpants or not isn’t an issue of freedom of the press. Whether a book can be published at all is. There are books which have actually been banned in recent US history.
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