Category Archives: Transhuman News

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Its ultimately a programmers job to manage and interpret art. And some pieces of art require more management and interpretation than others. Which brings us to Gone With the Wind. Its one of the most enduringly popular films of all time. But its derogatory slave stereotypes and romantic view of the Antebellum South are uncomfortable. For some, even painful. But to edit or deny access on the basis of that discomfort whitewashes what the film represents as a historical and cultural document.

HBO Maxs removal of Gone With the Wind in June was not an attempt to re-write history. Quite the opposite. Time Warner removed the film with the intention of returning it to its library with added historical context. That context took the shape of a supplementary video recording of a panel discussion moderated by author and historian Donald Bogle and an introductory video, which now plays before the movie starts. The film itself is unaltered because in Time Warners words: To do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

In the intro, linked below, Turner Classic Movies host and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart sets the stage for Gone With the Wind.Stewart describes the films cultural significance and controversies, advocating for the importance of preserving Old Hollywood films for viewing and discussion.

You can watch What to Know When Watching Gone With the Wind here:

This clip comes courtesy of the fine folks at Turner Classic Movies. TCM is a two-time Peabody award-winning network and trusted source for all things Golden Age. You can follow them on their YouTube account here.

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Gone With the Wind and the Difference Between Censorship and Context - Film School Rejects

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TOMS RIVER, NJ After declaring that Toms River Township is not racially diverse enough for her liking, Toms River Councilwoman Laurie Huryk, a Democrat on Tuesday said she had received a threat in the mail. She waved a piece of paper in front of her, but did not read the letter. She did not say whether or not she reported the alleged threatening letter to the Toms River Police Department.

Huryk claimed the threat was in response to social media postings online after she told the township at the last council meeting that Toms River needs to do a better job at making the community more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals. Huryk has yet to explain how her plan to make the community more diverse would work and didnt explain how the current demographics of the community negatively impact the township.

According to census.gov, Toms River is 82% white, 3% black. As compared to the United States on whole which is 60% white and 13% black. New Jersey is 55% white and 15% black, Huryk said. We need to take a look at ourselves to examine what we can do as a community to make Toms River more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals and that of our state and the United States.

Huryk noted that the townships 82% white population is much higher than the state and national average.

Now, she claims she is being threatened and that her statement was twisted and misrepresented.

At our last meeting, I quoted U.S. Census data followed by self reflection inclusion, diversity and unity, Huryks said. My words were twisted and my meaning misrepresented on social media, resulting in escalating hateful and divisive commentary messages, voice mails, culminating in this disgustingly racist, threatening letter sent to my home. Im not going to read it, its extremely offensive and threatening.

Its where I live, with my family. As leaders in the community, it is our responsibility to be part of the solution, to work towards unity and condemn deceitful, divisive and hateful behavior. For the most part, this council and the previous have been shining examples of bi-partisanship, save one, she said, referring to Councilman Daniel Rodrick who has been working overtime to expose political corruption in Toms River government. Weve demonstrated that we can disagree but come to compromise and present civil for the most part.

Rodrick has been a key detractor in the townships plans to turn downtown Toms River into a fledgling city and has been speaking out against political corruption by other members of the council in Toms River.

Huryk said she also fully supports the organization Stop Hate for Profit which has organized a financial advertising boycott against Facebook to financially harm the social media companys business until it increases censorship on Facebook contributing to the dissent against the Black Lives Matter movement.

Whatever weve done is not enough, we must be ever determined in our efforts to stop the seeding and division and continuously work towards equality, inclusion and diversity and unity, Huryk said. Hate for profit has real consequences for real people. It is our job to return our world to civility and to quell the divisiveness and deception all day and every day.

Stop Hate for Profit seeks to remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, antisemitism, violent conspiracies and Holocaust denialism, which is a very noble object.

The group also wants anyone on Facebook who talks about vaccine misinformation or climate denialism to also be banned from the social media platform.

According to the National Review, Huryks plan for forcing an unnatural demographic change in Toms River is part of her Democrat partys national platform to abolish the suburbs.

A story published by the National Review, entitled Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs investigated Democrat Presidential Candidate Joe Bidens housing plan for America that seeks to eliminate single family zoning, as evidenced by the townships plan to build 7 story buildings through the Toms River downtown area.

Biden has embraced Cory Bookers strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call little downtowns in the suburbs, said Stanley Kurtz of the National Review. Combine the Obama-Biden administrations radical AFFH regulation with Bookers new strategy, and I dont see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves.

Kurtz said that the Democrats latest platform attacking the predominantly white suburbs is geared towards winning elections for the party, not a plan for the greater good of the people who already live there.

They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing, Kurtz said. [That], of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

Is Huryk concerned about diversity in Toms River or is she now just towing the Democrat political party line for Joe Biden heading in the 2020 Presidential election?

This week, in Oregon, a politician was caught writing himself a hate letter he claimed was sent to him online.

See the rest here:
Democrat Councilwoman Who Said Toms River Too White, Claims She Received Threats, Calls for Facebook Censorship - Shore News Magazine

SUBSCRIBE TO THE FEDERALIST RADIO HOUR HERE.

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and host of the The Daily Wires podcast The Michael Knowles Show Michael Knowles joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss everything from censorship by big tech to TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party. Sen. Cruz and Knowles co-host the political podcast Verdict With Ted Cruz in which Cruz gives his take on the most important national news. You can watch the trailer in the tweet below.

The senator argued that although media bias has been around forever, its immensely dangerous that a handful of monopolies now control every means of discourse. Similarly to China, the left, who controls all the major institutions in America, doesnt want people to thoughtfully communicate their ideas because they dont work. They must suppress free speech and silence the truth, Sen. Cruz said, because truth prevails if the discourse allows for it.

I think the threat of of big tech censorship is the single greatest threat that democracy faces, that political discourses faces, that free speech faces. Weve got a handful of giant monopolies with massive power, and their arrogance is growing exponentially. And they have demonstrated a repeated willingness to silence, to stifle, to muzzle speech they disagree with, he said.

Listen Here:https://mp3.ricochet.com/2020/07/Fed_200713CruzKnowles_FINAL.mp3

See the article here:
Federalist Radio: Ted Cruz And Michael Knowles On Censorship, TikTok, And The Chinese Communist Party - The Federalist

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.

Forbidden Books.Alexander Mark Rossi

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 galvanized 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 dehumanize 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?

By Stephanie Meek, PhD Candidate in English Literature, University of Reading. Meek receives funding from South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read more from the original source:
How Victorian Writers Navigated Censorship And Suppression Of Free Speech - Science 2.0

Thank you to Billy Bragg (Cancel culture doesnt stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order, 10 July) for a thought-provoking article and for drawing attention to the statue of George Orwell outside the BBC in London. Mr Bragg says that the quotation on the wall next to the statue If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear is a demand for licence, not a defence of liberty, and argues that liberty must be tempered by equality and accountability.

There is no doubt that very many tweet-friendly quotations are taken from Orwells works and used out of context by people from all parts of the political spectrum. However, the statue quotation remains a powerful statement against censorship. The essay it is taken from was titled The Freedom of the Press. As Mr Bragg says, it was written as a preface to Animal Farm. In fact, it was not used at the time and was only published long after Orwells death, in 1972.

Orwell argued for equality and democracy (accountability was not a term much used at the time) to go hand in hand with the liberty he defended. We are delighted that Orwell is the English writer that Mr Bragg admires the most and that he continues to engage in the reasoned debate for which Orwell is renowned.Quentin KoppChair, The Orwell Society

Re Nesrine Maliks piece (The cancel culture war is really about old elites losing power in the social media age, 13 July), what is at issue here is not the right of people to attack the opinions of others on social media, but the tendency to overreaction when someone expresses an opinion that is at variance with that of self-defining justice warriors.

Opinions that are lawfully expressed may well deserve robust criticism; what they do not deserve is for the person expressing them to be no-platformed, hounded out of a position of influence or traduced as some sort of fascist. Years ago, that sort of behaviour was confined to the wilder fringes of the Socialist Workers party. Now it seems to be all too common among people who should know better. Roger Fisken Ashampstead, Berkshire

Join the debate email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

Read more Guardian letters click here to visit gu.com/letters

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Cancel culture, George Orwell and reasoned debate - The Guardian