Category Archives: Transhuman News

The task that appears most urgent today is the destruction of the authoritarian right. Not because the authoritarian right is more malicious than the authoritarian left, but because it holds power across the west. Liberal-minded people making an informed calculation must surely decide to avoid distractions and concentrate their fire on the enemy that matters. Or so a seductive argument goes.

If you are an American voter, your sole priority should be the removal of Donald Trump. If you are British, you must concentrate on building a viable opposition to a Conservative party whose neglect and stupidity have wrecked the economy and killed tens of thousands. The slogan no enemies to the left is never more appealing than when it can be dressed in language that appeals to those who pose as tough-minded.

But it wont wash, and not just because the motives of those who scour the web to find evidence of the sins of others are those of the inquisitor and stool pigeon. In the world of practical politics, refusing to confront leftish authoritarianism leaves you with two options. You will either lose and deserve to lose, for you should have known that every time the far left has taken on the authoritarian right in the west it has lost. Or, and this may be worse, you will win and repent your failure to check that your new bosses were worthy of your trust.

According to the supposedly tough-minded view, signing a letter to Harpers protesting at the stifling of debate can only weaken our side. A defence of the signatories should begin by noting that they were telling the truth when they complained that writers, artists, and journalists fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. Note the precision. The signatories were not saying it is wrong for people to lay into others: freedom of speech is the freedom to criticise or it is nothing. Their point was that many live in fear of campaigns to destroy them if they dont mouth the right opinions.

Im surprised such a statement of the obvious could be controversial. No honest observer can deny that the dominant factions in the modern progressive movement reject freedom of speech. They punish opinions they disagree with when they have power; and the more power they have, the more they will punish. You may think the censorship justified, but to deny its existence is absurd. Tellingly, few bother to deny it now. Occasionally, you can see them raise the exhausted excuse from the grave that only the state can censor. On this reading, Islamists killing cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, or CEOs firing whistleblowers, are not censoring because they are not civil servants. More popular in the past week has been the claim that writers with the reach of Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling and Salman Rushdie cannot take a moral stand because no one can suppress their thought even though their critics give every impression of wanting to do just that.

Panic at the fear of denunciation and bad faith posing as rectitude can be found across the west

Leave aside their belief that ad hominem and ad feminam attacks can refute an argument, and consider that the worst of the old elite directed its attention to silencing the marginalised because it knew that their voice was often the only weapon the latter possessed. Then look around. Now as then, people without access to lawyers and influential friends suffer the most.

To take an example of that encapsulates the cowardice of our times: the Washington Post, a newspaper I admire and have written for, went to enormous lengths to destroy the life of one Sue Schafer, a middle-aged woman who made a mistake. She turned up to a Halloween party at the home of one of its cartoonists in blackface. She did not mean to insult African Americans but had come dressed as a ghoul in the guise of a conservative morning show host who had defended whites blacking up. The joke didnt work, as several guests forcefully told her. Because the words Washington Post and blackface could be said in the same sentence, and because several guests looked as if they might go public two years later, the paper gave 3,000 words to the story the amount of space normally reserved for a terrorist attack or declaration of war. Her employer, a government contractor, fired her. Everyones back was covered except Schafers and, frankly, she was a woman of no importance.

Panic at the fear of denunciation and bad faith posing as rectitude can be found across the west. A comparison with the right shows how deep the decay has reached. Conservatives know there are thoughts they cannot whisper Brexit is a mistake comparable to Munich and Suez, anti-black and anti-Muslim racism are tangible evils, poverty makes a nonsense of equality of opportunity. Likewise on the liberal left, the canny careerist takes care to avoid being caught on the wrong side of arguments about trans and womens rights, leftwing antisemitism, and bigotry in ethnic minorities. The canniest decide the best course is to say nothing at all.

The British ought to know the dangers of thinking there are no enemies to the left. Because Labour members failed to confront the crankery and racism of the Corbyn movement, they drove millions into Boris Johnsons clammy embrace. I doubt the same will happen in the US. Joe Biden has his faults, but he is no ones idea of a commissar. That is not to say there wont be a heavy price to pay. The nationalist right is determined to police opinion. In Hungary and Poland, the media are becoming its propaganda organs. Trump incites hatred of reporters who tell the truth about his administration. Johnson threatens the independence of the BBC and Channel 4. Yet they can pose as the champions of free expression because the loudest strain in progressivism has embraced censorship. The practical danger in giving up on freedom of speech is that the day will come when you find you are lost for words just when you need them most.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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The spectre of censorship and intolerance stalks todays left - The Guardian

Bari Weiss, one of the most polarizing journalists in the country, has resigned from the opinion section of The New York Times, citing a "hostile work environment" and an institutional yielding to an increasingly extreme ideological "orthodoxy."

"The truth is that intellectual curiositylet alone risk-takingis now a liability at The Times," Weiss wrote in a scorching resignation letter self-published Tuesday morning. "Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm."

This is the latest development in a remarkably turbulent and potentially far-reaching eight-week period within America's leading liberal institutions. Beginning with the videotaped police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, then the subsequent protests, riots and crackdowns, the country's newspapers and universities and cultural organizations have experienced social media-fueled waves of internal revolts and leadership changes, frequently though not solely over questions of race.

One main fault-line, illustrated most starkly in the opposing open letters published last week about free speech and cancel culture (the first of which, in Harper's Magazine, was signed by Weiss and 152 others, including 15 Reason contributors), is the divide between those journalists and academics who feel like they are defending the very foundations of liberalism, and those who feel like they are chipping away at the institutions of systemic prejudice. To witness the two sides talking angrily past one another, open up your Twitter feed.

In Weiss's telling, the Times is retreating from the ethic of journalistic open inquiry and pluralistic debate, replacing it with a pre-baked notion of what readers ought to think.

"The lessons that ought to have followed the [2016 presidential] electionlessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic societyhave not been learned," she charged. "Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.[T]he paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

That last sentence in particular is surely a reference to the paper's controversial 1619 Project, helmed by Pulitzer-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, that seeks "to reframe American history, making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built." Hannah-Jones, who spearheaded the intentionally publicized internal revolt last month that resulted in the resignation of Opinion Editor James Bennett, has been a longtime public critic of Weiss.

"My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views," Weiss wrote, at the beginning of a three-paragraph section that carries the distinct whiff of both drama and potential legal action. "They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I'm 'writing about the Jews again.' Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly 'inclusive' one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are."

It is both easy and appropriate to be mostly irritated by the overhyped internal personnel battles of elite coastal institutionsincluding at New York magazine, which today lost star columnist Andrew Sullivan a few weeks after having spiked one of his pieces. In a country beset by an 11.1 percent unemployment rate, 139,000 coronavirus deaths, massive economic uncertainty, and the mental degradations of extended familial quarantine, it's hard to get exercised about a well-paid writer/editor noisily walking away from her job.

I have zero doubt that Bari Weiss (who is a friend), will not just land on her feet, but probably find herself at or near the center of a new media grouping of some kind. "As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles," she wrote, almost teasingly, "Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere."

But even if you don't care about the ongoing nervous breakdown of the media, that doesn't mean the breakdown doesn't care about you. The New York Times, for better and worse, has been the go-to model for the country's other newspapers for at least the past half-century; what happens on 8th Avenue definitely does not stay on 8th Avenue. Basic media literacy suggests paying attention when an entire industry that contributes to the way we interpret the world announces loudly that it is rethinking its basic orientation.

More immediately, the name-and-shame defenestrations of the past two months have long since jumped the banks from media/academia to the more prosaic corners of the economy. "Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper," Weiss observed, "should not require bravery." Nor should it at a restaurant or software company, but there we might well be going.

Bonus links: In January 2018, Weiss came on The Fifth Column podcast to talk about, among other things, how she left The Wall Street Journal editorial page after it became too pro-Trump. And in July of that year, Nick Gillespie interviewed her for the Reason Podcast.

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Bari Weiss Resigns From The New York Times, Alleging That 'Self-Censorship Has Become the Norm' - Reason

In an open letter published in Harpers Magazine, 152 writers, including JK Rowling and Margaret Atwood, claim that a climate of censoriousness is pervading liberal culture, the latest contribution to an ongoing debate about freedom of speech online.

As we grapple with this issue in a society where social media allows us all to share extreme views, the Victorian writers offer a precedent for thinking differently about language and how we use it to get our point across. How limits of acceptability and literary censorship, for the Victorians, inspired creative ways of writing that foregrounded sensitivity and demanded thoughtfulness.

There are very few cases of books being banned in the Victorian era. But books were censored or refused because of moral prudishness, and publishers often objected to attacks on the upper classes - their book-buying audience. Writer and poet Thomas Hardys first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was never published because the publisher Alexander Macmillan felt that his portrayal of the upper classes was wholly dark not a ray of light visible to relieve the darkness.

However, more common than publishers turning down books was the refusal of circulating libraries to distribute them. These institutions were an integral part of literary consumerism during the Victorian period as the main means of distributing books.

Most influential of these was Charles Mudies Select Library, established in 1842. Mudies library was select because he would only circulate books that were suitable for middle-class parents to read aloud to their daughters without causing embarrassment.

This shaped how publishers commissioned and what writers could get away with. Victorian literary censorship, while limiting, managed to inspire writers to develop more creative and progressive ways to get their points across.

George Eliots publisher, John Blackwood, criticised her work for showing people as they really were rather than giving an idealistic picture. He was particularly uncomfortable when Eliot focused on the difficulties of working-class life.

In Mr Gilfils Love Story(1857), Eliots description of the orphan girl, Caterina, being subjected to soap-and-water raised Blackwoods censorious hackles:

I do not recollect of any passage that moved my critical censorship unless it might be the allusion to dirt in common with your heroine.

As well as dirt, alcohol consumption was also seen as an unwanted reminder of working class problems. Again in Mr Gifils Love Story, Eliot describes how the eponymous clergyman enjoys an occasional sip of gin-and-water.

However, knowing Blackwoods views and anticipating she may cause offence galvanised Eliot to state her case directly to the reader within the text itself. She qualifies her unromantic depiction of Mr Gilfil with an address to her lady readers:

Here I am aware that I have run the risk of alienating all my refined lady readers, and utterly annihilating any curiosity they may have felt to know the details of Mr Gilfils love-story let me assure you that Mr Gilfils potations of gin-and-water were quite moderate. His nose was not rubicund; on the contrary, his white hair hung around a pale and venerable face. He drank it chiefly, I believe, because it was cheap; and here I find myself alighting on another of the Vicars weaknesses, which, if I cared to paint a flattering portrait rather than a faithful one, I might have chosen to suppress.

Here, literary censorship enriches Eliots writing. Eliots refusal to suppress her work becomes part of the story and reinforces her agenda to portray Mr Gilfil as he really is, a vicar who mixes gin with water because he is poor.

As well as inspiring narrative additions, censorship was also powerful because of what was left out of a text.

One of Hardys most loved books, Tess of the DUrbervilles, highlights the crimes of sexual harassment in the workplace and of rape. Because Hardy had to be careful about the way that he presented the sexual abuse of Tess, his descriptions were very subtle. This is how he portrays the scene where Tess is sexually assaulted by her employer, Alec DUrberville:

The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. DUrberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt, and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

The influence of censorship meant that Hardy could not describe this scene in graphic detail. Instead, his depiction is more sensitive and thoughtful. Hardy does not dehumanise Tess by depicting her as a sexual object to entertain the reader.

By focusing on Tesss gentle regular breathing and the poignant image of her tear-stained eyelashes, Hardy avoids gratuitous depictions of violence while at the same time making us painfully aware of the injustice she has suffered. This makes his portrayal of Tess more powerful and poignant. It can be argued that this was achieved because of the limits placed on his writing, not in spite of them.

In these instances, we can see how literary censorship influenced writers to tread more carefully upon difficult territory. It made them think about whether including violence or socially controversial depictions were necessary or gratuitous to their narratives.

For Hardy and Eliot, censorship and its limits inspired creativity, sensitivity and thoughtfulness. These examples can provide food for thought in the debate today about free speech and censorship. As Hardy and Eliot wrestled with as they wrote, can things be said differently and, in some cases, do they need to be said at all?

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How literary censorship inspired creativity in Victorian writers - The Conversation UK

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TunnelBear has today partnered with four Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) to campaign against censorship threats which have impacted communities and activists across the world since the COVID-19 pandemic and global protests. In total, twenty thousand free VPN accounts have been distributed to these organizations which include Access Now, Frontline Defenders, Internews, and one other undisclosed participant.

This unique and timely program aims to empower individuals and organizations with the tools they need to browse a safe and open internet environment, regardless of where they live. The VPN provider is encouraging other NGOs or media organizations across the world to reach out if they too are in need of support.

At TunnelBear, we strongly believe in an open and uncensored internet. Whenever we can use our technology to help people towards that end, we will, said TunnelBear Cofounder Ryan Dochuk.

He continued, We also understand that the protests happening all over the world mean that safe digital spaces are now more important than ever. We are happy to provide these accounts to human rights defenders at no cost to them.

TunnelBear encrypts its users internet traffic to enable a private and censor-free browsing experience.

"Access Now's Helpline provides incident response assistance and direct technical support on digital safety to at-risk users from civil society across the globe. We always advise our constituents to think critically about their security, and to pick the tools and services that best respond to their specific needs. When it comes to VPNs, trust is key. TunnelBear's approach to securityincluding annual security audits, easy to read privacy policy and regular transparency reportsprovides a solid foundation to cultivate trust," said a Spokesperson for Access Now.

"By undergoing and releasing independent audits of their systems, adopting open source tools, and collaborating with the open source community, TunnelBear has proven itself to be an industry leader in the VPN space and a valuable private sector partner within the internet freedom movement. Internews is happy to support TunnelBear in extending its VPN service to the media organizations, journalists, activists, and human rights defenders around the globe who can benefit from it," said Jon Camfield, Director of Global Technology Strategy at Internews.

TunnelBear has so far given away a total of 20,000 accounts, and is open to requests from organizations who can help their networks with free secure internet. Visit this webpage for more information and to submit a request for support.

This program marks the beginning of a company-wide initiative to combat online censorship, stay tuned for whats next.

TunnelBear is a very simple virtual private network (VPN) that allows users to browse the web privately and securely. It makes sure that browsing is safe from hackers, ISPs, and anyone that is monitoring the network. TunnelBear believes you should have access to an open and uncensored internet, wherever you are.

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TunnelBear Kicks Off Anti-Censorship Initiative With Free Accounts for Activists - Business Wire

In the past two weeks, Hong Kong publisher Raymond Yeung has hastily made changes to a draft paper copy of a book entitled To Freedom (), replacing the word revolution with protests, tweaking a banned slogan and cutting passages that advocate independence for the Chinese territory.

The changes were hard to make, he said, but impossible to avoid since China passed a National Security Law on June 30, making the broadly defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison.

This is really painful, Yeung said, as he flipped through pages of the collection of essays by 50 protesters, lawyers, social workers and other participants in the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Hong Kong last year.

This is history. This is the truth, he said, holding up the book with blue sticky flags on many pages to mark changes made because of the new law.

Just as demand for political books was surging in Hong Kong after a year of protests, the territorys once unbridled and prolific independent publishers are now censoring themselves in the face of the new law.

Hong Kong authorities say freedom of speech remains intact, but in the past two weeks public libraries have taken some books off the shelves, shops have removed protest-related decorations and the slogan Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times has been declared illegal.

To Freedom is the first political book Yeung has taken on as a part-time publisher.

After Beijing introduced the security law, the books original printer bailed, and two other printers declined, he said.

Another printer agreed to take it anonymously, but wants to get a better sense of how the law is implemented first.

The Hong Kong Trade Development Council, which organizes the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, told exhibitors not to display what it called unlawful books at this weeks planned fair.

The council postponed the fair at the last minute on Monday due to a recent spike in COVID-19 cases. It did not specify a new date for the event.

Three non-governmental pro-Beijing groups had teamed up to urge people to report stalls at the fair selling material promoting Hong Kong independence, a subject that is anathema to the Chinese government.

Every citizen has a duty to report crime, said Innes Tang (), chairman of PolitiHK Social Strategic, one group behind the campaign. We are not the police. We are not the ones to say where the red line is.

Jimmy Pang (), a veteran local publisher who has participated in every fair since it began in 1990, called this year the most terrifying year because of the security law and the economic downturn that was already hurting publishers.

He said the law has prompted publishing houses and writers to halt projects while printers, distributors and bookstores have turned down sensitive books.

For example, Breakazine, a local Christian publication, said it suspended the distribution of its mid-July issue called Dangerous Reading while seeking legal advice for navigating the security law.

Everyone is avoiding risks by suffering in silence, said Pang, a spokesman for 50 exhibitors at the fair.

Last year, a unit of Pangs Sub-Culture Ltd published Chan Yun-chis () 6430 () a book of interviews with surviving pro-democracy protesters in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, a subject heavily censored on the mainland.

In the future, there will be no sensitive books related to politics, he said.

Bao Pu (), the son of Bao Tong (), the most senior Chinese Communist Party official jailed for sympathizing with Tiananmen protesters, founded New Century Press in 2005 in Hong Kong to publish books based on memoirs and government documents and other sources that often differ from the official versions of events in China and could not be published on the mainland.

His customers were mostly mainland visitors, a lucrative niche in Hong Kong until China began to tighten border controls a decade ago, making it harder to bring back books to the mainland.

Given the drop off in demand, Bao Pu said he no longer plans to publish such books in Hong Kong. However, he urged other publishers to avoid self-censorship.

If everybody does that, then the law would have much more impact on freedom of speech, he said.

Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.

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Self-censorship on the rise in HK -

Progressive intellectuals Try to Stop the Censorship Monster They Created (EFE).

Spanish In an open letter, 153 prominent academics, writers, and intellectuals, mostly from the left, called for an end to the radicalization of censorship promoted by activists for social justice causes. They warn that the freedom to write, to express an opinion, is in danger.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted, the letter states, warning of an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other, it continues. As writers, we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk-taking, and even mistakes, the letter adds.

Black Lives Matter has succeeded in creating a climate of intersectionality. The founders of the movement converge trans-feminism and racial justice. Intersectional movements have achieved everything from removing books to firing writers, and they have also conducted massive cancellation campaigns.

And it is not limited to the mockery of right-wing figures who question the collectivist ideology and identity politics; it also affects progressives, leftists, and even feminists.

For example, J. K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, has been accused of transphobia for saying that people who menstruate used to be called women.

In 2020, saying something so obvious and biologically demonstrable is tantamount to a hate crime and the outright accusation of transphobia. Reducing femininity to biology is seen as an attack on transsexual, transvestite, and transgender people who identify as women.

The need for a message of self-criticism from progressive intellectuals is exposed by the fact that one of the signatories of the letter has already had to apologize. Trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan highlighted the presence of socialist intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and feminists Gloria Steinem and Margaret Atwood. But she regretted that she was not aware of the presence of other signatories. Among them is the transphobic J. K. Rowling.

I did not know who else had signed that letter. I thought I was endorsing a well meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company.

The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan) July 7, 2020

A video by John Stossel for the libertarian platform Reason TV explained the extent of cancel culture and the restrictions on debate by far-left activists.

Campaigns by activists calling for the dismissal of professionals, censorship as the norm, and even the mass removal of books can be described as internet mobs.

Leftists incapable of living by neutral principles. The digital mob led by NYT columnist Paul Krugman arrived at the Univ of Chicago pressuring to remove Professor Harald Uhlig as editor of Journal of Political Economy, after criticizing Black Lives Matter https://t.co/x8GkbjdVk4

Fernando Amandi Sr. (@FernandoAmandi) June 12, 2020

His crime? He said that the Black Lives Matter campaign was making a mistake by joining the campaign to defund the police.

There was nothing racist or discriminatory in how he said it, says Reason magazines senior editor, Robby Soave, who is covering the recent protests. But because he has some different views from the protesters, he must be a racist, he says.

Soave points out that the most worrisome aspect of these activists actions is that they advocate an ideology where different opinions are assumed to be dangerous to the extent that they justify censorship as an act of self-defense.

They even highlight how professionals have been fired because of the actions of their relatives, such as the case of a footballer who was fired because of what his wife said something against Black Lives Matter on Instagram.

Therefore, more than a hundred intellectuals, particularly writers, joined the call. Most of them are left-wing, progressives, including Mexican historian Enrique Krauze.

But they dont have the backing of their co-conspirators. The New York Times published an article titled Artists and Writers Warn of an Intolerant Climate. The reaction was quick. The NYT article compiled criticism of the authors, including accusations that they are afraid of losing their relevance.

The letter makes it very clear that it does not seek to delegitimize the actions of Black Lives Matter or any civil protest. They simply fear the persecutory nature it has taken.

Being progressives, the letters signatories warn how the radicalization of the left benefits the right, particularly the U.S. president.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, they exclaim. And they invite their co-conspirators to avoid letting their resistance become its own kind of dogma or coercion, which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides, they say.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty, the letter adds.

The letter issued by these intellectuals takes us back to the poem by Niemller, a religious Lutheran persecuted by Nazism in its final stage. The letter highlights how he remained silent when others were being persecuted and stresses the importance of calling out ideological persecution before it knocks on your door.

Otherwise, your own story will end like the poem: When they came for me, it was already too late.

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Progressive intellectuals Try to Stop Censorship Monster They Created - PanAm Post

In recent years, there has been a marked and disquieting increase in the willingness of a raft of actors left, center, and right, both in government and in civil society, to engage in a practice and attitude of censorship and to abandon due process, presumption of innocence, and other core civil liberties.

There have been some attempts from different quarters at a pushback against this, but the most recent such effort at a course correction is an open letter decrying the phenomenon appearing in Harpers magazine. The letter, signed by some 150 public intellectuals, writers, and academics including figures like Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, has provoked a polarizing response.

Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, for example, argues that all this is a right-wing myth, slander against the Left, that those perpetrating the alleged acts of censorship are in fact relatively powerless, and that when incidents of alleged cancel-culture censorship are investigated, one finds that the targets are doing just fine after all.

Because the Harpers letter was fairly anodyne and declined to mention any specific incidents, Robinson cherry-picks a small sample of occurrences that he imagines must be what the signatories are talking about and tries to demonstrate that these incidents were really nothing-burgers of no consequence, distracting us from real issues.

What is true is that to limit this discussion to the acts of the extremely online mob, to, say, British author Jon Ronsons concerns about Twitter public shaming, or to the ill-defined term cancel culture, entirely misses the far wider atmosphere of an aggressive and accelerating threat to civil liberties.

It is understandable that a brief open letter would not offer a catalog of episodes, but this is nevertheless unfortunate, as it allows Robinson and others to maintain a nothing to see here, please move along stance.

When we do in fact consider such a catalog, we find that to deny that this is happening, or to diminish it as inconsequential is untenable. There are simply too many examples.

Consider efforts to ban Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists, other opponents of the current Israeli government, and critics of Zionism tout court from campuses. Since 2016, the Ontario legislature has been the site of multiple efforts to condemn or criminalize BDS activity and pressing campus administrations to cancel Israeli Apartheid Weeks.

In 2014, the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign withdrew an offer of employment to English professor Steven Salaita after some faculty, students, and donors asserted that his tweets critical of the Netanyahu administration during the Gaza war were antisemitic. Due to the controversy, hes been driven out of academic employment and now works as a bus driver. Political scientist Norman Finkelstein, another critic of the Israeli occupation, was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 after a successful campaign by the Anti-Defamation League and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He likewise has difficulty finding employment and says he struggles to pay the rent.

When appeals to academic freedom and due process are raised in all these cases, the response from the pro-Likudnik right has echoed the no platform rhetoric from the Left, arguing that criticism of the Israeli government is hate speech and thus should not be protected (and indeed, in Canada, unlike in the United States, hate speech is not constitutionally protected). They also copy the liberal-lefts demand for stay in your lane identitarian deference (in which only the oppressed group concerned may speak to an issue), asserting that non-Jews cannot comprehend Jewish suffering and so must shut up and listen.

Despite his cancellation, Salaita does not support the Harpers letter. This is perhaps understandable given that English professor Cary Nelson is a signatory but was also among those who led the charge against hiring Salaita. It must be equally galling to him that New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss, another Harpers signatory, spent her Columbia University days campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors for alleged intimidation of Jewish students under the Orwellian guise of Columbians for Academic Freedom.

But while Nelson and Weiss may be guilty of egregious hypocrisy, hypocrisy does not undermine the letters argument for freedom of speech. Despite Finkelsteins cancellation, or indeed precisely because he knows his cancellation to be a breach of academic freedom, he remains an adamant defender of freedom of speech. He knows that the solution to his own censorship comes not from censorship of those who censor him, but from an end to censorship entirely.

The upturning of lives and livelihoods comes not just in the arena of the Israel-Palestine conflict with respect to Salaita and Finkelstein. In some cases, the religious rights efforts to de-platform is actively defended by the Left, such as when Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie was shouted down in 2015 by Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths University and the universitys feminist society defended their use of the hecklers veto.

There are those who deny that the current chilly climate amounts to censorship, as censorship is only something that can be imposed by the state. Some concede that it is also something that elites can impose. But both positions deny that censorship is something that the crowd can impose. Yet there are many cases that involve independent schools, so this plainly cannot be the action of a state, even as this is quite clearly censorship. And the Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths could in no way be described as elites. So to suggest that ordinary people cannot participate in censorship or inculcation of an illiberal environment is to be blind to the ways that such attitudes can operate at multiple levels in society.

Campuses are in any case far from the only sites of struggle. Over the past two decades, conservative governments such as those of George W. Bush, Canadas Stephen Harper, Australias Tony Abbott, and now Donald Trump have repeatedly muzzled climate scientists and other earth science and conservation biology researchers.

Conservatives who historically tended to oppose free speech and held the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as chief in its pantheon of villains have suddenly rebranded themselves as free expressions greatest defenders. But while they were happy to defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopouloss right to express xenophobic and misogynist comments, when he began talking about the messy complications of the age of consent among gay men, they threw him under the bus.

Donald Trump has worked to clamp down on trade unions salting workplaces, that is, the century-old practice of getting a trade-union-friendly person hired at a workplace that is targeted for unionization. And perhaps most notoriously, the same man who at Mount Rushmore denounced a far-left fascist [sic] cultural revolution, calling for free and open debate instead, only weeks before used the National Guard to teargas and clear nonviolent protesters from the streets of Washington for the sake of a cheap photo-op.

One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources departmentorganized and employer-supervised sensitivity training industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.

How this enhancement of the semifeudal powers of bosses to deliver 24/7 monitoring of workers speech is going to advance the trade union movement is a mystery. Instead, they should join efforts to organize unions both as the greatest bulwark against workplace censorship and the greatest weapon we have in delivering sexual, racial, and economic equality, and, if anything, pushing for the extension of First Amendment protection to the workplace.

Authoritarian governments such as the Islamic conservative administration of Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoan have demanded that comedians who make fun of them be censored by other governments. Germany acceded to the request for prosecution. In a similar fashion, China has convinced tech giants and even the NBA to censor discussion of human rights domestically and overseas. Hollywood is no less acquiescent, deleting from movies anything that Beijing objects to, from references to torture by Chinese police to appearances of Winnie-the-Pooh (a symbol of democratic opposition).

Meanwhile, too many on the liberal-left, like turkeys voting for Christmas, urge ever-greater de-platforming of hate speech from these tech companies, only to discover how easily their own expression gets categorized as hate speech and taken down (as when various left-wing groups were kicked off Reddit along with pro-Trump ones).

Liberal governments have been little better. Former president Barack Obama may have given a salutary address criticizing cancel culture, but he also used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden than all previous administrations combined.

Secularists in France and Quebec have produced a raft of laws banning burkas or the veil in various forms, thus engaging in the same practice of telling women what they can and cannot wear as those who elsewhere force women to wear burkas or the veil.

Similarly, the French government of center-left President Franois Hollande marched alongside millions in the streets in defense of free speech after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but then proceeded to prosecute school students for expressing their sympathy for the attackers.

Libertarian groups, to their credit, have criticized much of this, but when it comes to censorship by the likes of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit, there is a sudden quiescence. Despite such social media platforms becoming a de facto public square, these are private companies, note libertarians. This is simply the workings of the market. Their stance is simply, If you dont like what they are doing, then dont sign their Terms of Service agreements.

The galloping advance of censorship and restriction of civil liberties is not restricted to high politics and Silicon Valley. Local conservative politicians in some two-thirds of European Union member state Poland have declared their regions LGBT-free zones and tried to ban Pride parades as far-right thugs violently attack them. In the UK there have been regular efforts by municipalities of every political flavor, police, and private security firms to restrict leafleting by NGOs, campaigners, arts groups, and businesses, as well as ever stricter constraints on busking, homeless people begging, ball games, inappropriate dress, and other annoyances under such vehicles as Public Space Protection Orders and antisocial behavior laws. And whenever there are major international meetings, cities now regularly restrict protests to designated free speech zones.

And as any journalists rights organization such as Reporters Sans Frontires or the Committee to Protect Journalists will tell you, there has been a radical change in the terrain of war in the last couple of decades where both state and non-state actors increasingly view journalists as legitimate targets, from Western bombing of TV stations in Iraq through Turkish imprisonment of reporters to Russian arrest of those exposing Kremlin autocracy to Mexican cartels silencing news crews investigating missing women. Trump meanwhile takes every opportunity to attack the media as an enemy of the people, even encouraging physical assaults on reporters by his supporters. Some activists on our side seem to be of a similar opinion that the media are fair game, too.

In short, there is an epidemic of censorship and a retreat from an ethos of civil liberties across the board, in almost every country, by those of almost every political persuasion, and at all levels of society. And if the liberal-left denies that illiberalism is occurring when we are the ones perpetrating it, as Robinson does, then we have no leg to stand on when it comes to all these other, innumerable examples. Civil liberties are for everyone, and above all for those we oppose.

Some of these examples are plainly worse than others, but we do not win or lose our right to free speech at the advent of the most extreme and obvious cases of censorship. It is already lost with the smallest of infringements, at the edge cases, and the ones where all reasonable people would agree that the speech is indeed hateful.

David Goldberger, the Jewish ACLU lawyer so committed to free speech that he represented a group of Chicago Nazis in court in 1977 to defend their right to march through Skokie, Illinois, recognized that it was even or rather precisely in these sort of cases where the struggle for liberty is won or lost.

It is a particular shame when it comes to the Left, historically the first champion of civil liberties. Many progressives today are not aware that the struggle for free speech was a central project of the Left and something that was historically resisted by the Right. We know of Thomas Paines and John Stuart Mills pioneering articulation of these freedoms, but Karl Marxs entire philosophy grew in part out of his fury at Prussian official press censorship as a young man; Frederick Douglass recognized that there could be no struggle for abolition without a defense of freedom of speech, and that abridgment of that freedom is a double wrong, for it violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker; Eugene Debs was tried and convicted for sedition, and his trial and those of his comrades would set in play the crystallization of American free speech legal protections that are the envy of the world entire; and the New Left and counterculture of the Sixties that in many ways gave birth to the current left began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 under the leadership of giants like Mario Savio.

As a result, too many modern progressives, particularly younger ones, have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression.

This is a historic disaster. Throughout the twentieth century, from Stalins purges to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it was precisely when the Left abandoned civil liberties and embraced groupthink supposedly in the service of some greater good, that those who claimed the mantle of emancipation perpetrated their greatest evils.

Robinson decries such comparisons to Maoism or what Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi has critiqued as Twitter Robespierres, saying that it requires guns and concentration camps for something to count as totalitarianism. Yet if you read the heartrending personal accounts of those such as Victor Serge who experienced the purges and the show trials, or Gao Yuan who participated in the struggle sessions of the Red Guards, or Dith Pran who experienced the collective indoctrination of the Khmer Rouge, you notice a pattern of pathological interpersonal relations that repeats itself over and over: a fear of speaking out, peer pressure, status-seeking through denunciation, a rush to denounce before one can be denounced oneself, self-criticism, public humiliation, a hunt for heretics, ostentatious displays of piety, and assertions that certain identities (petty bourgeois, kulaks, those who wear glasses, etc.) are inherently epistemically untrustworthy. These terrors of the past of course required material, economic conditions for them to emerge, but they were also built upon a foundation of morbid intragroup psychological dynamics.

The executions, torture, and imprisonment of these events were not simply the product of an external, alien force imposed upon its victims as in the case of an invasion by a foreign army or a coup, but perhaps even more terrifyingly, they were also a horizontal process that involved a breakdown of trust between friends, old comrades, coworkers, students and teachers, husbands and wives, even between parents and children.

Of course, intragroup illiberalism is something common to all humans rather than unique to the Left. We also see similar group dynamics when we explore historical events not directed by our political camp. The witch hunts of sixteenth-century Salem was another notorious instance of intragroup terror, the dynamics of which were famously dramatized by Arthur Miller as an allegory for McCarthyism and the associated blacklist. Here again we might note, contra the arguments that non-state actors cannot engage in censorship or illiberalism, that neither Hollywood studios that fired or no longer hired left-wing actors, screenwriters, and directors, nor the trade union bureaucracy that purged alleged Communists as part of that process, were agents of the state.

Yet because the Left is the cradle of civil liberties, we have a special responsibility to guard against illiberalism. After the experiences of the twentieth century, we will forever have a solemn task to constantly be on our guard against any recurrence of the morbid group dynamics that helped give rise to them, and within our own movements before anywhere else.

There is a need to let progressives who support free speech know that they are not alone and to give them confidence to speak out against censorship and illiberalism on their campuses, in their organizations, in their communities, or wherever someone imposes it, whether this comes from the right, center, or left, from the state or civil society.

But beyond the need for the Left to recognize that freedom of speech and civil liberties are the prerequisite for our own ability to organize, we cannot leave the discussion at the level of liberal principle.

As necessary as liberal freedoms are, socialists have always known that they cannot be fully realized within a class society. Liberalism contradicted itself by insisting on free markets and the right to own property, which undermine the equal exercise of all other liberal freedoms. Neither a poor man nor a rich man in liberal society have any legal restriction on the ownership of a printing press, but only one of these men materially has the ability, the freedom, to make use of that press. There is no true equality before the law so long as there remains class inequality outside the law.

In Karl Marxs first printed article, published in 1842, a report on the debates on freedom of the press in the Rhenish Diet, he attacks censorship of the press and then also the defenders of the bourgeois conception of freedom of the press as suffering from pseudo-liberalism and half-liberalism:

The French press is not too free; it is not free enough. It is not under an intellectual censorship, to be sure, but it is under a material censorship Therefore the French press is concentrated in a few places; and if material power concentrated in few places has a diabolical effect, how can it be otherwise with intellectual power?

That is, as mid-twentieth century democratic socialist and Berkeley Free Speech Movement militant Hal Draper explains in his 1977 exposition of what pushed Marx to go beyond the radical liberal conceptions of his youth: Tying the exercise of a freedom, then, to possession of enough money to operate it is a form of censorship too, and not to be borne.

Put another way, civil liberties may be the necessary condition for the Left to be able to argue for and to organize the building of an egalitarian society, but the building of an egalitarian society is the necessary condition for the realization of civil liberties.

Thus the limitations of the Harpers letter are certainly not that it decries censorship, or that it is anodyne liberal centrism, but that it does not take its professed values seriously enough. In the fight for civil liberties, Marx was right: neither censorship nor half-liberalism will do.

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The Threat to Civil Liberties Goes Way Beyond Cancel Culture - Jacobin magazine

The 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past was recently added onto Disney+ and was left completely uncensored. Now, Hugh Jackman is commenting on one particular scene that shows his behind in full view.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the first PG-13 film to be left completely uncensored on the family-friendly streaming service.

Since its launch, Disney+ has remained relatively conservative with its censorship. This is in efforts to keep the streaming platform family-friendly for all its viewers.

The platform made headlines after the Lizzie McGuire reboot was put on hold over beliefs that the series wouldnt be appropriate for Disney+s target audience. As well, the Love, Simon reboot Love, Victor moved to Hulu after Disney felt the shows content wasnt age-appropriate. The censorship controversies have caused many other programs to look elsewhere for a streaming platform.

Most recently, Disney+ used CGI to cover up Daryl Hannahs behind in the 1984 film Splash which stars Tom Hanks. The latest cover-up for the PG-rated film further shows the lengths Disney+ will go to make sure it maintains its family-friendly content.

Now, X-Men: Days of Future Past has arrived on the streaming service and is completely uncensored. It is officially the first PG-13 movie to arrive uncensored on Disney+.

Along with the films rating, it includes adult content such as the f-word and a scene which shows Jackmans naked behind in full view.

Jackman took to social media this week to share the news about the film being added to Disney+. He also includes the infamous nudity scene with an emoji covering his behind.

Days Of Future Past becomes the first movie to air on Disney+ uncensored. That was my future but lets be honest its more like my past, Jackman says.

Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds also jokingly commented on Jackmans post saying that he hopes Disney+ will leave Deadpool uncensored, too.

Excited for them to do the same for Deadpool, Reynolds says. Its time children knew.

What are your thoughts on X-Men: Days of Future Past being left uncensored on Disney+? Let us know in the comments below.

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Hugh Jackman made it past Disney+'s censorship with this 'X-Men' scene - Alternative Press