U.K. to impose restrictions on Internet pornography

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You'll excuse the crassness of the tweet I wrote yesterday, posted below. But how is one to respond to Prime Minister Cameron's announcement that the British government intends to impose restrictions on Internet pornography?

Look, I'm not defending (all) Internet porn, and I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with porn. But the point should be to crack down on illegal porn -- depicting children, criminal violence, etc. -- not to demand that there be filters that customers must turn off if they want to see any adult content. First, this isn't going to stop anything that ought to be stopped. And second, it's about freedom, and the right of people to consume information/entertainment as they please.

Even if you argue that the purpose here is to go after criminal activity, it's clearly the thin end of a dangerous wedge that could see the government and its corporate partners intrude ever deeper into people's private lives -- a slippery slope, if you will.

Consider the problems: Who decides what is and is not appropriate content, or what in this case will only be able to be accessed by turning off the filter (thereby announcing one's intent to anyone paying attention)? It's one thing to try to block obviously horrific content. But that's just at the extreme. The massive gray area is another matter entirely. Furthermore, who decides what "horrific" search terms to blacklist, as Cameron put it? And what are those search terms? Again, there may be a number of obvious candidates, but there's a massive gray area otherwise.

The government, obviously. But do you really want the government telling you what you can and can't see on the Internet, or on television, or wherever? And do you really want the government telling you what search terms you can't use? This is the sort of thing authoritarian states do to restrict access to information. Coming from a supposed liberal democracy like the United Kingdom, it's just as appalling. Those who have fought for freedom and won should know better than to turn the clocks back.

Cameron is concerned that pornography is "corroding childhood." Look, I don't want my children seeing it either, in any form, but censorship is hardly the answer. Criminal activity should obviously be dealt with under the law. But free people should be able to be free, genuinely free, without the government legislating its own narrow idea of morality. Because there's no telling where it might stop.

Looking forward to XXX porn video featuring character named "David Cameron" into spanking and pegging. Called "Cum Through the Tory Hole."
— Michael Stickings (@mjwstickings) July 23, 2013

Huck Finn, sanitized

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a genuine American classic and one of the greatest works in the history of literature, American or otherwise, is being re-released in a new, cleansed version that takes out the words "nigger," as well as "Injun," the one-word, over-hyped source of controversy that has seen the book, as Publishers Weekly puts it, "disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books."

This, to me, is utterly despicable, a concession to the forces of censorship and oppression. Yes, the book in its new, adulterated version will likely find many new readers, particularly young people, but it won't really be Huck Finn anymore, the timeless masterpiece that Twain wrote, a book written at a certain time and place, including a word or two that justifiably are no longer acceptable, but a book sanitized to appeal to a new time and place, today's America, that apparently is too immature to appreciate the book's, and the author's, context.

No, taking out the word "nigger" certainly doesn't mean that the rest of the book is compromised or worthless. Admittedly, the book even in this version remains a masterpiece, and perhaps the introduction will explain what has been changed.

But it's a slippery slope. Changing an undesirable word here or there, without the author's approval, can lead to more substantive changes that really do undermine the author's intent. This is sort of like what happened in the movie Cinema Paradiso, when sexually-repressive authorities in Italy edited out all the kissing scenes. A kiss is a kiss, sure, not an objectionable word, but the result is still censorship.

The fact is, the word "nigger" used to be used in common parlance, and we don't even have to go back to Twain's time for that. Isn't it better to tell people the truth, and to educate them about its context, than to hide it, to pretend that the realities of the past, including the ugliness, linguistic or otherwise, didn't exist? Are today's children, coming to Huck Finn for the first time, simply to believe, erroneously, that the word was never used? Why not take out references to slavery altogether? Why not turn Huck Finn into a picture book for two-year olds?

It's dangerous to revise the past this way, especially through censorship. It means that we lose touch with the past, that we do not even have the opportunity to understand the past as it was, to read books as they were meant to be read, to be forced to confront that which may not be pleasant, that which may challenge our self-righteous presumptions and biases. In this case, over time, over generations, the very essence of Huck Finn may be lost altogether, all because a single word was changed, all because the censors won.

The battle for true freedom is a battle against this sort of censorship, against efforts to cleanse the past, to cleanse art, to cleanse our culture -- and to cleanse our minds. I am certainly not justifying the use of "nigger" in contemporary speech. It is an ugly word, a word of bigotry. But this is totalitarian manipulation, pure and simple, and we should not accept it.

Gagging the Web

By Capt. Fogg

What's a COICA? Not an anatomical term, but yet another government-sponsored acronym for the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. According to some, it's needed to protect intellectual property, a term which often provokes cynicism regarding the intellectual properties of some intellectual property, but I'll save that for another post.

According to others, like Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, quoted at Raw Story this morning, it's 

almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile. 

As I read it, if any state AG finds something you wrote last year was insufficiently attributed or a thought or picture that belonged to someone else -- you're off the air along with everything else you've written. Is it just me, or does that sound as if it had been designed for misuse? Will any website critical of government or government officials or members of the same party as a state attorney general be sifted for some infraction that can justify it's obliteration or postpone publication indefinitely? Is this bill far too broad to be safe? Were we all born yesterday?

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed this bit of poorly digested legislation yesterday. (There's a metaphor here. Look for it.) It was passed unanimously and yet it won't be hanging over the heads of bloggers like some bloody sword just yet and we owe it to Wyden who used his senatorial option to place holds on pending legislation to force proponents to re-introduce the bill in the next session. I hope that by then the opposition will have made its case and shed enough light on the potential for politically-based government censorship.

Ron Wyden is a Democrat, but Democrats should perhaps avoid crowing about being the defenders of freedom of the press since the bill was co-sponsored by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who described it as a bipartisan effort to protect property rights. Obviously there's no lack of support for putting such things above freedom of speech by Democratic senators.

A group calling itself Demand Progress is circulating a petition it hopes will make a difference, and now that we have a brief reprieve, perhaps it will. Perhaps you will agree.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Internet Freedom Act and Net Neutrality

By Capt. Fogg

No, no, no. The Internet Freedom Act isn't about freedom for you as an internet user and you should know by now that when a Republican uses the word Freedom it's about corporate control over your options. John McCain's "freedom act" appears now, after we've just begun to recover from eight years of the Bush FCC acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of big communications corporations; fudging the science and ignoring its own rules with impunity. Under Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the Commission has stifled, hidden and falsified studies concerning the adverse effects on the public airwaves and even disaster relief services, of using power lines as a conductor for broadband internet and has made censorship of "indecency" a prime directive. It's high time they were prevented from protecting the public interest rather than the power of the telecommunications industry and the religious right.

If McCain's legislation is passed, the Internet Service Providers will have the power to limit your web bandwidth and mine and give preference to - you guessed it - the people they like, the people they own and the people who say what they want said. Have a blog that criticizes Comcast? Back to the days of 300 baud for you old chap! Fox News can blaze along at any speed they like with all the streaming and screaming video and Glennbeckery they can produce and the FCC won't be able to represent you. The freedom of giant corporations and puritanical moralists to censor you -- that's the kind of freedom John McCain thinks is worth fighting for!

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Toronto-area high school takes To Kill a Mockingbird off Grade 10 reading list over language complaint

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's not just in the U.S. that this sort of thing happens:

The classic literary novel To Kill a Mockingbird is being pulled from the Grade 10 English course at a Brampton high school after a parent complained about the use of a racial epithet in the book.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which challenges racial injustice in America's Deep South, will be removed from curriculum at St. Edmund Campion Secondary School following a lone complaint from a parent whose child will be in Grade 10 this September.

"The parent was concerned about some of the language in the book," said Bruce Campbell, spokesman for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

Principal Kevin McGuire made the decision at the end of the school year to resolve the complaint quickly. The book, a fixture on high-school reading lists across the country, will still be available in the library, said Campbell.

"The school administration was aware of the parent's concern and made the decision to use another board-approved resource that teaches the same concept for the coming year," said Campbell.

"It's not a requirement that the novel be used," he said. "It's an option on our list of board-approved resources, and the school can make a decision to use whatever resource (it) would feel best suits them."

"In this case, the principal believed an alternate resource might be better suited for that community," said Campbell.

This is a Catholic school board, not a regular public one -- both are publicly funded in Ontario -- which may partly explain the decision. Still, it seems to me that the community would be better served by having what is widely regarded as one of the great novels of the last century, "bad" language and all, read by its students (in Grade 10 -- it's not like the book was assigned to young kids, after all -- presumably advanced high school students can handle, and appreciate the context of, a broad range of language).

What is the point of shielding students from a great book that just happens to contain language that some find objectionable (in this case, one parent)? Should students -- again, Grade 10 students, not children -- also not read, say, Huck Finn? Or how about Shakespeare, whose work was hardly free of language that at least one person might find objectionable (and that was, for the time, extremely objectionable). Forget that the language used in the book is appropriate to what the book is about, that the language is actually essential to the book. This obviously hyper-sensitive principal is denying his students the education they deserve and require. You'd think he had removed not a great novel like To Kill a Mockingbird from the classroom but, oh, say, Hustler.

Is censorship -- and this, indeed, is a form of it (the book hasn't been banned, but it won't be taught) -- more important to the community than literature? It would seem so.

Is the value of a book determined more by its objectionable language (even as objected to by just one parent) than by its content? Again, it would seem so.

Apparently, what the book teaches about racial injustice is outweighed by the presence of a few "bad" words. Apparently, reading those words would corrupt those oh-so-impressionable students. Apparently, the book is otherwise disposable.

This is truly outrageous, a shameful decision, a cowardly act for which there is no excuse.

Television censorship in Russia

By non sequitur

It's no secret that Russia is not exactly the most robust democracy on earth, but I found this article especially chilling. It details an unofficial "stop list" -- basically a list of opposition politicians and journalists critical of the Kremlin -- used to keep Russian television free of criticism of the ruling party, and of Putin (and now Medvedev) in particular. In some cases, people have been digitally erased from broadcasts for cracking jokes at the expense of the government. But perhaps the most unsettling part of it is the way those who implement the stop list talk around it -- they say that they have no opposition figures on their shows because "they have nothing to say, they are of no interest," and Medvedev himself weighs in to praise Russian television -- for its technological quality. A fairly disturbing look at the political reality of Russia today.

They can't handle the truth

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"ThinkProgress is now banned from the U.S. military network in Baghdad," reports Think Progress, which, like it or not, always tells the truth about the way things are, whether it's Baghdad, Washington, or anywhere else, however unpleasant that truth may be.

Meanwhile, right-wing propaganda machines like Fox News are "still accessible," spewing partisan happy talk to those who are risking their lives on the front lines of a lost war for what was essentially a gross deception.

The U.S. military apparently can't handle the truth any better than the warmongers back home.