Daily Archives: February 26, 2015

A real Life Diary of Art Thursday 26 February 2015
Let there be peace without hate, with respect to mankind, free speech and a free society More information about the art of Johan van der Dong http://www.johanvanderdong.nl About Johan van der...

By: Art Channel Johan van der Dong

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A real Life Diary of Art Thursday 26 February 2015 - Video

Vivian James Free Speech (Speed Drawing)
A couple of day ago my boyfriend #39;s channel was taken down as an attempt to censor him. Two of his Gamergate videos were tagged as inappropriate unfairly. Fortunately youtube reviewed his channel.

By: ilenca

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Vivian James Free Speech (Speed Drawing) - Video

A Washington Redskins helmet sits on the turf during the NFL football teams training camp in Richmond, Va., Saturday, July 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) | ASSOCIATED PRESS

McLEAN, Va. (AP) A federal government decision to cancel the Washington Redskins' trademark because it may be disparaging infringes on free-speech rights and unfairly singles the team out, lawyers argued in court papers filed Monday.

The team wants to overturn a decision last year by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the Redskins' trademark on the grounds that it may be offensive to Native Americans. But the team's attorneys say the law barring registration of disparaging trademarks is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

The trademark board's decision unfairly singles out the Redskins "for disfavored treatment based solely on the content of its protected speech, interfering with the ongoing public discourse over the Redskins' name by choosing sides and cutting off the debate. This the U.S. Constitution does not tolerate," the lawyers write in their brief.

The lawyers argue that the government has no business deciding that a name such as Redskins is disparaging and undeserving of trademark protection while deeming other names such as Braves to be content-neutral and allowable for trademarks.

The team still disputes that Redskins is a disparaging term and has asked the judge to rule in the team's favor based on that argument. But the court papers filed Monday focus on the constitutionality of the law that bans registration of disparaging trademarks.

The government has intervened in the civil lawsuit to defend the law's constitutionality. In similar cases, government lawyers have argued that the law doesn't ban disparaging speech; it just denies the protection of a federal trademark to those words. For instance, the Redskins would not be prohibited from calling themselves the Redskins just because they lose the trademark case they would just lose some of the legal protections that go along with a registered trademark.

The team says free-speech protections should be understood more broadly. The team says the First Amendment can be violated by government restrictions that burden speech even if they don't ban it outright. The team argues that canceling a trademark represents such a burden, especially for a football club that has used the name since 1933.

A lawyer for the group of Native Americans that sought cancellation of the trademark did not return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

The team also argues that canceling the trademark after decades of lawful registration amounts due a denial of due process because of the difficulty in trying to defend itself so many years after the fact.

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Redskins Pull The 'Free Speech' Card Over Canceled Trademark

Lina Ejeilat helped found the Jordanian online magazine 7iber (pronounced 'Hebber'). While the government encourages free expression in principle, many strict regulations remain, as noted by the satirical chart next to her. Art Silverman/NPR hide caption

Lina Ejeilat helped found the Jordanian online magazine 7iber (pronounced 'Hebber'). While the government encourages free expression in principle, many strict regulations remain, as noted by the satirical chart next to her.

Earlier this month, Jordan's Information Minister Mohammad Al-Momani told a conference that freedom of expression can contribute to stopping radicalization.

On the very same day, a military court in the capital Amman sentenced a man to 18 months in prison for a Facebook post that was seen as insulting a friendly country, the United Arab Emirates.

Momani spent years studying at Rice University in Houston, so he knows what Americans think of as free expression. But he sees it a little differently.

"We think to have an open space for opinion and counter-opinion, this will strengthen the value of the society," he says in an interview. "This will make the society stronger in resisting and in being immune from these terrorist and extremist ideologies. That's why we are actually keen on protecting that space and making sure there is freedom of expression, there's freedom of opinion allowed, of course, under the umbrella of the law."

The Jordanian man jailed for his Facebook post wrote, among other things, that the United Arab Emirates had a "pro-Zionist" foreign policy. The information minister defended the court's decision to jail him.

"Our laws clearly say you cannot insult a country that we have a good relationship with," he says. "His statement could have been said in a different way without insulting another country. So what he said is bad-mouthing another country that could have affected the well-being of almost a quarter of a million Jordanians working there" in the United Arab Emirates.

National Interest Trumps Free Speech

In Jordan, free expression is conditional on national interest. And the country's national interests can clash with reporters' interests on several counts.

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Jordan's Fuzzy Definition Of Free Speech

Is a discussion of free speech potentially traumatic? A recent panel for Smith College alumnae elicited this ominous warning when a transcript appeared in the campus newspaper: Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs ... .

No one on this panel, in which I participated, trafficked in slurs. So what prompted the warning?

Smith President Kathleen McCartney had joked, We're just wild and crazy, aren't we? In the transcript, crazy was replaced by (ableist slur).

One panelist mentioned the State Department had for a time banned jihad, Islamist and caliphate which the transcript flagged as anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language.

Discussing the teaching of Huckleberry Finn, I questioned the use of euphemisms such as the n-word and, in doing so, uttered that forbidden word. I described the difference between quoting a word in the context of discussing literature or prejudice and hurling it as an epithet.

On campus, I was branded a racist. McCartney apologized that some students and faculty were hurt and made to feel unsafe by my remarks.

Unsafe? These days, when students talk about threats to their safety, they're often talking about the threat of unwelcome speech and demanding protection from the emotional disturbances sparked by unsettling ideas. It's not just rape that some women on campus fear: It's discussions of rape. At Brown University, a scheduled debate between two feminists about rape culture was criticized for, as the Brown Daily Herald put it, undermining the University's mission to create a safe and supportive environment for survivors.

How did we get here? You can credit or blame progressives for this embrace of censorship.

In the 1980s, law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin framed pornography as an assault on women. They defined pornography as a violation of women's civil rights and championed an anti-porn ordinance that would authorize civil actions by any woman aggrieved by pornography. MacKinnon and Dworkin lost that battle, but their successors are winning the war. Their view of allegedly offensive speech as a civil rights violation has helped shape campus speech codes and nurtured progressive hostility toward free speech.

The '80s and early '90s recovery movement adopted a similarly dire view of unwelcome speech. Words wound, anti-porn feminists and recovering co-dependents agreed. Self-appointed recovery experts, such as author John Bradshaw, promoted the belief that most of us are victims of abuse. They broadened the definition of abuse to include common, normal childhood experiences. From this perspective, we are all fragile and damaged by presumptively hurtful speech, and censorship looks like a moral necessity.

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Liberal ideals are stunting speech on college campuses