censorship

To kill a student’s mind

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

A teacher who wants to limit students’ minds and close off their horizons is a vile person. To Kill a Mockingbird is a powerful, moving novel about racial injustice in the South. It presents a world that’s different from today’s America and presents the suffering and hope of the people who suffered and tried to correct its injustices. A man defends the target of a false criminal accusation at great personal cost. For this reason, four progressive teachers in the state of Washington wanted to keep their students from reading it. A Washington Post article tells the tale.

In their formal challenge to the book in the Mukilteo School District, the teachers claimed, “To Kill A Mockingbird centers on whiteness. … It presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature and should be removed.” Three of the four are white, just by the way. Claiming that the novel “centers on whiteness” shows either gross ignorance of the book or gross dishonesty. In normal use, the Civil Rights Era began in the 1950s, and the novel is set during the Depression. It’s true that it doesn’t celebrate what it was like to be black in Alabama in those days.
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Book review: The Canceling of the American Mind

This entry was posted in Book discussion and tagged books censorship education liberty on by

Cancel culture is a prominent, ugly feature of public discourse today, yet many claim it doesn’t exist. They say there are only “consequences,” which amounts to saying that if you’re subjected to abuse because you said something controversial, what else did you expect?

Gangs of goons shout speakers down and claim that doing so is part of the right of “free speech.” By their logic, DDoS attacks on websites and jamming of radio communications are free speech. They shout “Shame! Shame!” as if anyone besides themselves were acting shamefully. They have only one standard: their authority to command others and demand silence from anyone who doesn’t think as they do.

It wasn’t always this way. Threats and demands for punishment of heretics have always been around, and some periods in American history have been full of open violence against opposing views, but the present levels of hostility are the worst in decades. In The Cnceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukanioff and Rikki Schlott document how frequently people on both the right and the left have come to regard anyone who disagrees as an inherently evil person, an enemy to be brought down.
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Beaumarchais’s banned plays

This entry was posted in My writing and tagged censorship France history liberty on by

Two articles which I wrote for Liberty Fund are up in their Banned Books Week series, which runs all through October. My articles are on Caron de Beaumarchais’s two well-known “Figaro” plays, both of which got him in trouble with the censors.

Take a look at the rest of the articles if you have time; there’s a lot of interesting material.

Kafka’s Mastodon

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

I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.

The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)

As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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