This post is a signal boost for Ada Palmer’s very interesting John Nuveen Lecture on censorship at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A lot of you reading this blog may know her better from her songs and the group Sassafrass, but she’s amazingly knowledgeable about a lot of things.
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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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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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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.
Liberty Fund is running a month-long series of articles in honor of Banned Books Week. One of my contributions is now online, on “Beaumarchais and The Barber of Seville.”
My article on The Marriage of Figaro should show up later this month.
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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Having a federated system like Mastodon guarantees that no voices can be completely suppressed. Intolerant people can still try to silence others within their sphere, though, and some have wider influence than others. There are blocklists that many Mastodon sites use, and certainly some sites deserve to be blocked. They spew intentional falsehoods, advocate violence, or dump pornography on those who don’t want it. But once the lists get acceptance, their managers can start adding sites which they simply don’t like.
My personal Mastodon account is on Liberdon, a libertarian-oriented server. Its policy says:
Liberdon’s community adopts a “good neighbor” policy, as one of our goals is outreach to the other communities. As such, “ostracizable” (non-tolerated) behavior includes spamming, scamming, nudity* / pornographic / sexual / graphic / NSFW content, advocacy of the initiation of violence, ethnic/racial/homophobic slurs, harassment, or other content/activity that could get this site shut down by state agents with guns. Offending content will need to be removed by the user, and repeat offenders will be banned from the community.
Even with these limits, much of what is posted on Liberdon (including my own posts) will outrage many on both the right and the left. That’s why I like it. However, some people express their outrage in blocklists. At some point, Liberdon got put on a “Tier 0 blocklist” which seems to be widely used. As I’m typing this, it includes 417 servers. There’s no explanation of why they’re listed, only a claim that the list is “a combined blocklist of only the worst actors, and it exists to provide one blocklist to which surely no one can object as a baseline for others.”
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The other day I found a report by PEN America called “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing.” There’s no visible date on it, but there are references to 2023, so it’s either recent or recently revised. It goes into detail about how American movie makers bend to the Chinese government’s will. It’s not the threat of arrest or property seizure that impels them, but economic and social pressure. “The Chinese Communist Party, in fact, holds major sway over whether a Hollywood movie will be profitable or not — and studio executives know it.”
Well-known actors can be affected even by what they say and do outside movies.
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The Davis school district in Utah has reversed an earlier decision removing the Bible from middle and elementary schools. Few people thought it should be banned; the challenge to it was supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of the policies that led to the removal of other books. Unfortunately, the appeal committee and the district officials missed the point. They said that “the Bible has significant, serious value for minors which outweighs the violent or vulgar content it contains.” Of course it does. The point is, so do many other books. Violence and vulgarity, even outright immorality, aren’t a sufficient reason to exclude books from school libraries.
The Bible is a horrible book. The Old Testament presents a sadistic, murderous God who drowns nearly the entire world population, firebombs cities, orders the extermination of every man, woman, and child in other cities, and decrees death penalties for many kinds of actions. In the New Testament, this sadist comes to us, not to beg for forgiveness for his crimes, but to say that he’ll forgive us, on the condition that we believe he turned himself into a human in order to be executed. People who don’t believe that claim will be tortured forever.
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The Weeks Memorial Library in Lancaster, a small town in northern New Hampshire, was going to put on a “drag queen story hour,” then it cancelled the event because of alleged threats of violence. A WMUR news article says,
Linda Hutchins, board chair of Weeks Memorial Library, said the library has a non-discrimination policy when it comes to renting out their room, but when they started receiving violent threats and word of multiple protests, safety became a top priority.
However, an NHPR news article makes it doubtful whether these threats were real:
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