- My friend PH Lee’s short story Just Enough Rain has been nominated for a Nebula Award! Congrats, Lee!
- Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024
Disturbing. Not surprising, but disturbing. - Transgender Teens and Their Families Prepare to Flee Texas – Mother Jones
“But even if families manage to avoid a knock on the door from child protective services, many worry that the governor’s directive could fuel anti-transgender sentiment and harassment in their communities or discourage doctors from prescribing medically necessary treatments.” - Idaho legislation infringes on transgender youth, families | Idaho Statesman
“If you want to live in a state that controls you, that removes your choice, that tells you how to raise your children, a state that inserts itself into your family’s private medical decisions, then maybe you should support HB 675, a bill that criminalizes medical experts for providing care to my transgender child. This bill puts politics over the health and well-being of my family and turns my beautiful and thriving daughter into a political prop.” - Telltale Signs of Democratic Backsliding
“So how can we tell whether a country is likely to experience, or already is experiencing, democratic backsliding? Fortunately, enough research has been done to help us identify key telltale signs…” - Hamilton Flays the Filibuster (and Slams the Senate) | The New Yorker
Mainly quotes from Federalist no 22. See also. - The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence
The revolution wasn’t only an effort to establish independence from the British—it was also a push to preserve slavery and suppress Native American resistance. - ‘I Lost Everything’: More Than 160 Former Hertz Customers Are Suing Company Over Claims It Falsified Stolen Car Reports, Landing Some Drivers In Jail
Hat tip to Gay and Tonic. - What would artificial wombs mean for humans?
Includes a list of “Ten things that were basic, regular, near-universal experiences for most people in the world’s most technologically advanced societies just four decades ago, all of which are either rare or almost unimaginable today.” And that list could be a lot longer, of course. - In Higher Education, New Educational Gag Orders Would Exert Unprecedented Control Over College Teaching – PEN America
- “I loathe these people”: Rick and Morty creator’s backlash against TV’s bad fans | Television | The Guardian
- What are words worth? Thoughts on the pardoning of witches – language: a feminist guide
I think I disagree with one premise of the article – I don’t think that a “pardon” carries with it an assumption of guilt, since legally people can be pardoned because they are innocent. (For example). But it’s an interesting article that covers a lot more ground than my nit-pick with one premise. (Thanks to Mandolin). - All the King’s Women: the Fats – Fantasy Magazine
“Stephen King hates fat people.” - #MeToo: Eric Schneiderman Says He’s Changed. Is It Enough?
Medium-long, frustrating article about Schneiderman’s post-#MeToo life, including his ongoing conversations with a friend, herself a survivor of sexual violence, who has been trying to make him understand the harms he caused. - The Strangely Tangled Legal Battle Over a Series of Shark Sculptures Near the Antepavillion in London
The video is very entertaining. I am on the shark’s side. - Men experience body image issues, too — and this actor says it’s time to talk about it | CBC Radio
The article begins with the actor, but wanders away and is actually about male body image, especially for older men. “But research shows that men now receive more cultural messages than they have in the past about retaining lean, muscular physiques as they grow older, she said. However, because men are also socially conditioned to be stoic and not emotionally expressive, they don’t talk about body image much…” - Biden’s economic message doesn’t really matter | by Katelyn Burns | Feb, 2022 | Medium
“…it’s laughably absurd to believe that rural Republicans are storming school board meetings, and vandalizing their liberal neighbors’ property because of ‘defund the police.'” - Two Teenagers Were Fighting. Only the Black One Was Handcuffed. – The New York Times (And an alternate link).
The video is very clear. By the time the cops arrived, the bigger, white boy was on top; they put the white boy on a sofa while they tackled and handcuffed the black boy. - Rikers Guards Are Punishing Inmates Who Speak Out
There’s probably no group in the US whose free speech is as routinely smashed as prisoners. For every story like this that gets reported, there’s no way of knowing how many prisoners were more successfully silenced. - “He Died Like an Animal”: Some Police Departments Hogtie People Despite Knowing The Risks | The Marshall Project
- No, the war in Ukraine wasn’t because of pronouns | by Katelyn Burns | Feb, 2022 | Medium
“So if an obsession with pronouns makes a group of people weak, the evidence here is that the far right is the weakest among us, and it’s not even close.” - Florida House passes ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill
“This bill goes way beyond the text on its page. It sends a terrible message to our youth that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom instruction.” … “…in less than two months this year, conservative state legislators have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills.” - EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn’t hurt sales | Engadget
It’s a 2017 article, but it was news to me, so… - Wyoming Senate Votes to Defund Gender and Women’s Studies
It still has to get through the Wyoming House, however. In the past a law like this would be unequivocally unconstitutional; I honestly don’t know if the current Supreme Court would agree, if it comes to that. - Opinion | War in Ukraine Threatens World Food Supplies – The New York Times (And an alternative link).
- In Missouri, Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman proposes abortion law to stop women from accessing abortions out of state – The Washington Post
It’s a variation on Texas’ new anti-abortion law; it gives Missouri residents the ability to sue people in other states if they in any way assist someone from Missouri’s abortion. - The Short, Strange, Very Predictable Story of Caroline Calloway’s Snake Oil
She sounds like someone who’s found a niche that is simultaneously perfect for and incredibly unhealthy for her. There’s something very funny about people angry because they paid for a product called “Snake Oil” and were scammed. - A Vast Web of Vengeance – The New York Times (Alternate link.)
A sixty-year-old Canadian women uses the internet to get revenge on dozens of innocent people, many of whom she’s never met, and she’s surprisingly and horribly effective at it. - The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism | The New Republic
“Slippery slope thinking, fallacious to most, is the reactionary liberal’s primary means of understanding the world around them, and their tendency to catastrophize produces a state of alarm about the spread of dangerous ideas as constant and hysterical as the stereotypical liberal arts student’s. Thus, White Fragility, the widely criticized and lampooned book by social justice educator Robin DiAngelo, can be characterized by Matt Taibbi as not merely counterproductive, misguided, or even harmful but actually “Hitlerian.”” - Opinion | Who Should Be Allowed to Transition? – The New York Times
“Far from accidental, this stereotyping was one of the early aims of the gatekeeping model: to ensure that only people who could “pass” would be allowed to transition. … Conventional attractiveness — and gender conformity — became a proxy for successful transition, a bias that still shows up today.” - The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters | The New Yorker
“Gonzalez is part of a new transitory workforce, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild.” - The photos accompanying this link farm are by Steven Weeks and Semyon Borisov on Unsplash
Re #9, I’m just going to leave this link right here.
With regards to #24 it seems to me that there’s a difference between free speech and paid speech. Were a legislative body attempt to regulate what professors at a publicly funded university said outside the classroom it would clearly be (at least to me) a First Amendment violation. But it also seems to me that a legislature funding a university has a perfect right to determine what courses will be taught there and what the curricula should be – that’s speech that is being paid for. An employer, even a public one, gets to define the duties and structure of an employee’s job. How can someone working for the public be able to act within that job independent of the public’s definition (as expressed by their representatives) of what their job is and how they should do it? That makes no sense to me.
It’s always fascinating to watch self proclaimed free speech advocates show their real position as they justify censorship of speech that they don’t like, isn’t it?
Are you talking about me, Jacqueline?
Care to address the substance of my post? How do free speech principles apply to someone’s speech when what they are saying is their work product?
Wouldn’t you prefer to be able to claim people refuse to debate you because we can’t deal with how your powerful, relentless logic shatters our cultural marxist idiocy?
Not clear if I’ve ever made that claim. In fact, not clear if I’ve ever accused anyone of being a Marxist. I don’t even know how to define what Marxist political and social theories are.
It’s one thing to hold that banning or promoting a particular curricula itself is good or bad. But Jaqueline’s comment (and if I’m wrong please correct me) holds that an act by the legislature to do so in a State-supported school is a violation of the principles of free speech. I’m curious to explore the concepts that the representatives of the taxpayers have no right to determine what will and will not be taught at a State-supported school, and that doing so should be considered a violation of free speech principles as expressed in the First Amendment. This seems odd to me and I’d like to hear both the legal and rational explanations.
“I’m curious to explore the concepts that the representatives of the taxpayers have no right to determine what will and will not be taught at a State-supported school”
Well, good luck satisfying your curiosity!
” I don’t even know how to define what Marxist political and social theories are.”
You know take it with a grain of salt, since I know you don’t consider my opinions worth much, but I hear reading Marx is a good way to understand Marxism.
So the banning “Huckleberry Finn” by school boards isn’t censorship. Good to know.
I mean, the government – elected school boards, for example deciding what legal material can and cant’ be said or read in public schools not being part of your definition of censorship is… idiosyncratic.
Your definition runs counter to that of a large majority of US citizens as shown in recent polls about Tennessee banning “Maus.” But, sure. Okay. It just means that discussion with you is pointless because you discard the commonly understood definitions of terms and so I’ll leave you to, as I said above, watch you defend censorship of speech you don’t like. It’s not terribly interesting, but I feel like it’s important to witness.
The last time I checked a Tennessee school board banned Maus from being used in an 8th grade curriculum because the members thought that vulgarity and nudity in it were inappropriate for that age level. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know what level of nudity and vulgarity there are in it. On that basis I have no judgement of my own of its content and thus have no opinion on the school board’s judgement. But it certainly seems to me that it’s entirely appropriate for a school board to decide that a book with a certain amount of vulgarity and nudity is inappropriate for grade school children and to override a teacher or the school administration.
Do you think that school administrators or teachers should be able to use a book with any level of nudity and vulgarity in it that they feel is appropriate regardless of the opinions of the school board or the parents?
As far as Huckleberry Finn goes, I think it should be required reading in the schools – unexpurgated. Probably somewhere around 6th to 8th grade.
Please quote my definition of censorship.
It’s really disrespectul to spout off on a piece that you clearly haven’t even read. The whole linked piece was about how this particular piece of legislation violates First Amendment Free speech protections. A few highlights:
And, they are not merely seeing what they want to see. They acknowledge that these protections do not apply to K-12 education, and that these bans are only unconstitutional for higher education.
Interestingly, that the first amendment protects academic freedom for professors and others was determined largely by a line of cases about McCarthyism. Is it a violation of a teacher’s constitutional rights to require them to sign a loyalty oath, or swear they’re not a communist, as a condition of their employment?
I’m obviously oversimplifying, but, in essence, the Supreme Court said “no, it’s not a violation of constitutional rights” in one case, but later on changed their mind and said “it does violate their constitutional rights” in a bunch of later cases.
You might wonder what that has to do with if the legislature can outlaw teaching women’s studies. The reason is that, because of those McCarthyism cases, the Supreme Court set a general precedent that professors have a right to free speech, and indeed their speech and academic freedom is especially protected. The big case here is Keyishian v. Bd. of Regents (1967). Here’s a relevant quote from Justice Brennan (writing for the majority):
Many later cases built on these precedents – including a decision that a state cannot ban the teaching of evolution in public schools. (To be fair, that one was decided mainly based on freedom from imposed religion by the state).
Separately, that the first amendment forbids the state from engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination is well established. That is, even in areas where the government might be well with its rights to regulate speech – for instance, laws regulating how large billboards along public highways can be – the government cannot regulate based on viewpoint – for instance, a law banning pro-life slogans on billboards.
So although the exact details of this law have never been brought before the Supreme Court (afaik), past rulings have made it clear both that professors still have free speech rights in their classroom, that academic freedom is especially important to preserve, and that viewpoint-based bans on speech are unconstitutional.
And as Kate pointed out, this bill would also target things like funding of student clubs – another area the Supreme Court has ruled on more than once.
I honestly don’t know if it violates the 1st amendment for a school board to take a book off a curriculum because it uses words like “cuss” and “god damn” and has a panel showing someone who committed suicide in a bathtub (and is thus nude). Those are stupid, stupid reasons to take Maus off the curriculum.
It seems pretty clear that school boards do have a place in setting curriculum, and setting curriculums inevitably requires deciding which books to include and which not to. If anyone knows of a good article about why it should or shouldn’t be unconstitutional, I’d appreciate being pointed at it.
The Maus ban is especially worrisome because it comes at the same time as a trend of right-wing book-bannings, which seems to be gaining momentum.
To back up JOS’s point, Ron is the same person who objected to people silently holding signs to protest a talk by John Yoo, with some protestors calling for him to be fired because of his views on torture*. The Wisconson law is more comparable to a blanket ban on teaching originalism, a legal theory John Yoo advocates for. Ron, would you be o.k. with the state of Massachusettes (for example) issuing a blanket ban on the teaching of orignialism in state schools?
*IMHO, Yoo’s views on torture are reprehensible, and in a decent society would be out of the bounds of mainstream discourse. Having a debate on the University level about whether he should continue to hold a particular academic position is totally appropriate. But I would STILL be horrified if the California Legistalture stepped in to force him out.
Forty years ago I did a bunch of salvage logging out of the blast zone of the volcano; one of the last things I saw hiking out the last day was a couple of baby marmots poking their heads up out of a butt-cut. Looked a lot like that.
Belladonna was the first to come back …
Great moments in weak endings: Amp offers a series of tweets about how concerns over censorship and “cancel culture” are exaggerated. And he ends with “End of rant. Idea swiped from Parker Malloy, but PM’s account is gone so I can’t link.”
Hmmmm….
NR @16 – Since I know very little about Parker Malloy, I am curious – who are they, and how do you know why their account is gone?
My hypothesis is that it wasn’t either “cancel culture” or censorship, but rather the fact that Parker Malloy was a misspelling of Parker Molloy, who wrote a series of Medium posts recently about the same topic as Amp’s tweets, and whose Medium posts, as well as her twitter account, are both alive and well.
So perhaps your post, with its eagerness to imply “cancel culture” and censorship are to blame without actually looking into the situation might indeed help to strengthen Amp’s point rather than weaken it. Or maybe not, after all, I don’t know for certain that Parker Malloy and Parker Molloy are one and the same, and maybe you have evidence here I don’t know, so I’d encourage you to share it with us all so that I can eat crow.
I was just making a joke.
As to whether “Parker Malloy” refers to Parker Molloy or not, you’d have to ask Amp.
Ha! Bit of egg on my face there.
Just read PH Lee’s story Just Enough Rain and it was wonderful. The relationships were so well done, and it was so gently humorous. Thanks for linking it!