Monthly Archives: February 2021

And Then: Looking for Light in the Long Shadow of Caste – jewishboston.com

Posted: February 25, 2021 at 2:10 am

The focus of Isabel Wilkersons new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is deceptively simple: Wilkerson rejects the notion that race and caste are synonymous. As she writes, the terms can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. She continues: Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.

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Sit with that as I tell you a bit about Wilkerson. She is a former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work covering the Midwest. In 2010, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration, an award-winning book on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North during the 20th century.

The word epic stands out to me as I consider Wilkersons work on the history of race and caste in our country and beyond. While she synthesizes the work of previous historians and sociologists in Caste, she also offers fresh analysis on the subject. Make no mistake: Caste is a big book and comes in for a hard landing in the readers psyche. As I read through its 400 pages, I couldnt help defaulting to superlatives and predicting that it will become an American classic.

Wilkerson writes that caste is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning. Take in that excellent explanation of caste with this image: As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.

In America, the implementation of caste has a solid start date going back 400 years to the time the first ship of the transatlantic slave trade set anchor in America in 1619. As Wilkerson points out, until that point, people of various nationalitiesincluding the Irish, Germans, Poles and, of course, the Britishnever thought of themselves as white. That construct came to life when they came together to create a new country and a new culture. The common denominator among them was their white skin, a prerequisite of belonging to the dominant caste. Black people, trapped in brutal enslavement, were on the bottom of this rigid, merciless construct.

Wilkerson elucidates the concept of caste as she examines two distinctive cultures. Indias centuries-old treatment of Dalitsa word that means downtrodden and has replaced the term untouchablesis an obvious comparison. Despite explicit protections in Indias constitution, to this day Dalits are regarded as subhuman; contact with the upper castes is tacitly forbidden. This ingrained expression of inferiority makes it nearly impossible for Dalits to move about in Indian society. One Dalit, a scholar who has studied in the United States, seemingly breaking out of the castes social strictures, told Wilkerson he wore shoes that didnt fit because he was too intimidated to ask a clerk for the right size.

Wilkerson shows that India is a natural template of a deeply rooted caste system when she writes about Martin Luther Kings visit to the country in 1959. The civil rights leader was visiting a school in Kerala for outcast children, where the principal introduced King as a fellow untouchable from the United States of America. Wilkerson observes that it was a moment of reckoning for King, who realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system, not unlike the caste system of India. During Wilkersons research trip to India in 2018, as an African American woman she similarly discovered that caste in America was as entrenched as it was in India when Dalitsgravitated toward me like long-lost relatives.

The third braid of Wilkersons narrative brings in Nazi Germany and how its ideas of aryan superiority owed a debt to the American eugenics movement, which emerged in the late 19th century. German eugenicists consulted their American counterparts and widely read the movements literature in the years leading up to the Holocaust. German researchers also came to America to study Jim Crow laws. The American enforcement of racial disparities and the ongoing caste system influenced the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws.

In an interview with NPR, Wilkerson said that her intention in bringing Germany into her calculus of caste was to show how Germans have confronted their Nazi past through education and public memorials. For example, stolpersteines, or the Stumbling Stone Project, which a German artist began in 1996consists of brass plaques embedded in sidewalks in front of Nazi victims homes across Germany. The plaques form a decentralized, interactive monument. To qualify to place a plaque in front of their house, the occupants must research the history of the people who lived there before the war. People have to secure permission from the city and pay 120 euros to sponsor a stolpersteine.

Wilkerson also visits Germanys Holocaust Memorial, which sits at the seam of a reunified Berlin. The monuments location makes it impossible to ignore the countrys Nazi past. In New Orleans, Wilkerson reports on the 2017 demolition of a monument to the confederate general and slave owner Robert E. Lee. The mostly African American demolition crew was forced to complete the job under cover of night while fending off death threats.

In an interview published last year in The New Yorker, the philosopher Susan Neiman, an American Jew who has lived in Berlin since 1982, says that Americans have a lot to learn from Germany about confronting our painful history of slavery, racism and, I would add, caste. She notes that there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Germany, Israel and Poland combined. On the other hand, there are almost no museums dedicated to slavery in America. It took more than two decades to establish the National Museum of African American History and Culture after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993 on the National Mall. Neiman says that the American preoccupation with the Holocaust is a form of displacement for what we dont want to know about our national crimes.

The Germans have a dedicated word for grappling with their national history, which loosely translates as working off the past. Americans have yet to begin the reflective and difficult process of addressing our racist past and continuing caste system. Imagine, says Neiman, a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor. I have no doubt that Wilkerson would say those memorials represent the crucial first steps toward dismantling the American caste system.

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Atheists and believers have different moral compasses – Livescience.com

Posted: at 2:08 am

The moral compasses of atheists and believers are different in a few key ways, a new study finds.

In some aspects, the moral compass was incredibly alike between the two groups; they both highly rated fairness and protecting the well-being of vulnerable people, for instance, and both highly endorsed liberty but not oppression. However, the groups diverged when it came to matters of group cohesion, such as valuing loyalty and respecting authority, the study found.

This research shows that, contrary to public perception, atheists do have a moral compass, but compared with believers, "their compass is differently calibrated," possibly due to factors such as how they were raised and whether they are highly analytical thinkers, the study's researcher Tomas Sthl, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Live Science.

Related: Saint or spiritual slacker? Test your religious knowledge

It's a common question, including among fellow atheists, whether disbelievers even have a moral compass. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 44% of Americans (compared with 26% of Canadians) think that a belief in God is needed to be moral. A 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology even found "that the distrust of atheists was comparable to the distrust of rapists," he said.

To investigate whether atheists have a moral compass, and to see how it compares with the compass of believers, Sthl did four surveys: The first two included a total of 429 Americans on Amazon's online Mechanical Turk platform, while the second two surveys included a total of 4,193 people from the U.S. (a relatively religious country) and Sweden (a largely irreligious country).

The participants answered myriad questions about their personal histories, religious beliefs, political orientations and moral views. One part of the survey called the Moral Foundations Questionnaire was especially useful, as it asks about five central moral values. Questions on two of the values caring and fairness rated people's attitudes toward protecting vulnerable individuals and treating people fairly.

"Virtually everyone," atheists and believers alike, scored high on these two values, showing that they valued protecting the vulnerable and being fair toward others; and they saw these values as moral issues, Sthl said. However, he found differences between believers and disbelievers on the other three values: authority (respecting authority figures, such as police, parents and teachers), loyalty (being loyal to one's group, such as a country not burning a country's flag, for instance) and sanctity (not doing anything perceived as degrading, usually in a sexual sense, such as being promiscuous).

"Those three values are thought to be serving group cohesion, keeping the group together," Sthl explained. "When it comes to the binding values, there's a dramatic difference [between the groups]. Religious people score much higher on those they view [them] as much more relevant for being moral compared to the disbelievers."

In contrast, "atheists don't really think of [these three values] as relevant for morality to the same degree," he said.

The finding held even when Sthl controlled for political orientation, he noted.

These findings are consistent with prior research, said Kimberly Rios, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio University, who was not involved in the study. The new and earlier research, some of which was carried about by Rios, shows that the stereotypes that atheists don't have a moral compass are overgeneralizations; however, it also showed these stereotypes "are not substantiated by the actual differences between religious believers and non-believers," Rios told Live Science in an email. "Although non-believers place less importance on group-based moral values than do believers, there is no evidence based on the measures used in these studies that non-believers are more amoral than believers."

Related: 8 ways religion impacts your life

For instance, the two groups scored low on amorality, disagreeing with statements such as "I am willing to be unethical if I believe it will help me succeed." (The survey didn't address whether these groups actually differed in their unethical behaviors.)

Believers' and disbelievers' moral compasses were alike and different in a few other ways, the new surveys showed. For example, both groups highly endorsed liberty over oppression, agreeing with statements such as "Society works best when it lets individuals take responsibility for their own lives without telling them what to do." Both groups said they saw rational thinking believing in evidence-based claims and being skeptical of claims lacking evidence as a moral issue, Sthl said.

This finding is "intriguing," Rios said. There's a notion in many Western societies that religious belief and rational, scientific thought are incompatible, she said. "Yet, the finding that religious believers don't see rational thinking as any less of a moral issue than do non-believers suggests this notion of conflict may be overstated," Rios said.

Of note, some religions encourage aspects of rational thinking. For example, the Catholic church has argued that logic and rationality can be useful, for instance when Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote proofs, known as The Five Ways, that argued for God's existence; in the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers began embracing the rational thought process of Greek's classical philosophers, and they applied it when analyzing religious texts.

In a difference, Sthl found that atheists were more likely than believers to base their judgments about what is or isn't moral based on the consequences of their actions. For example, in the hypothetical trolley problem, a person has to decide whether to let a runaway trolley kill five people stuck on the track ahead of it, or whether to pull a switch to divert the train, but kill one person stuck on the alternate track.

"In that situation, the disbelievers are more inclined to say 'flip [the] switch and kill the one person rather than five,' because they are assessing the relative harm," Sthl told Live Science. "Whereas believers are more icky about that because they feel like they're actively killing someone, and they shouldn't kill. So, they are less comfortable with those calculations."

Studies have yet to sufficiently show why atheists and theists have differently calibrated moral compasses, but Sthl found a few correlations (although correlation does not equal causation). In the survey, he asked participants whether they were raised religiously and observed important people in their community engage in religious activities (meaning that it would be costly to their lives to think that their religious beliefs were false); whether they viewed the world as a dangerous place (and likely found God to be a protective force); and whether they were analytical thinkers, a trait found more often in atheists than believers.

"We find that, as expected, those things are related to whether you're a believer or not," Sthl said. "We also find that these variables predict your moral values." So, for instance, if you don't grow up surrounded by religious people and related activities, you're less likely to endorse matters of group cohesion. Similarly, perceiving the world to be less dangerous and being an analytical thinker also predict atheism.

The findings were replicated in all four surveys, both in the United States and Sweden. Going forward, both Sthl and Rios said future research should examine whether these patterns hold up in non-Western countries, for example in China, a largely irreligious but very group-oriented country, and in predominantly Muslim countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, where atheism is officially forbidden.

The study was published online Wednesday (Feb. 24) in the journal PLOS One.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Oklahoma bill that aims to stop censorship on social media sites headed to Senate – KFOR Oklahoma City

Posted: at 2:06 am

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) A bill that would provide Oklahomans legal recourse if a social media platform unfairly targets them over their political or religious speech has passed a Senate committee.

State Senator Rob Standridge (R-Norman), who filed Senate Bill 383, said the bills aim is to ensure the fair treatment of political and religious speech.

Ive had constituents tell me theyve had their social media posts censored for reasons that are strictly political, aimed at shutting down conservative views, Standridge said. I think when thats the case, those citizens should be able to take action against those companies.

If the bill passes, Oklahomans can sue the owner or operator of a social media website if the website purposefully deletes or censors a users political or religious speech, or uses an algorithm to suppress such speech.

Users would be able to seek damages of a minimum of $75,000 per intentional deletion or censoring of that users speech, along with actual damages and punitive damages if aggravating factors are present. The prevailing party may also be awarded costs and reasonable attorney fees, the news release states.

The bill does not apply to posts that call for immediate acts of violence or entice criminal conduct, as well as posts that were the result of operational error.

The legislation would also exempt posts that come from an inauthentic source or involved false impersonation or involved minors bullying minors.

The bill states that a website would not be considered liable for an individual users censoring of another users speech.

Weve seen what appears to be selective censoring of opinion on social media. The legislation clearly states violent or other unacceptable content can and should be censored and violators removed if necessary, but any censorship should be applied equally to all, Standridge said. I believe in free speech, and the protection of free political speech is vital to the preservation of our democracy.

On Tuesday, Senate Bill 383 was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill now heads to the Senate floor.

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The Experts Cited by the New Censors – The Wall Street Journal

Posted: at 2:06 am

Two House Democrats from California, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, launched a frontal assault on the First Amendment this week with a letter to the CEOs of communications companies demanding to know what they are doing to police unwelcome speech.

A Journal editorial notes that the letter is a demand for more ideological censorship. The two legislators write: Our countrys public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies.

But its clear that they only want to discipline one side. The Democrats claim, Experts have noted that the right-wing media ecosystem is much more susceptible...to disinformation, lies, and half-truths.

The experts quoted are three Harvard academics, and the lead author is law professor Yochai Benkler. His take on right-wing media is perhaps not surprising given that according to the OpenSecrets website he donates exclusively to left-wing politicians, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.).

In any case, Mr. Benkler has assembled an interdisciplinary team at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and purports to have discovered data showing that conservative media is bad.

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China Censors the Internet. So Why Doesnt Russia? – The New York Times

Posted: at 2:06 am

MOSCOW Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Kremlin-controlled RT television network, recently called on the government to block access to Western social media.

She wrote: Foreign platforms in Russia must be shut down.

Her choice of social network for sending that message: Twitter.

While the Kremlin fears an open internet shaped by American companies, it just cant quit it.

Russias winter of discontent, waves of nationwide protests set off by the return of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, has been enabled by the countrys free and open internet. The state controls the television airwaves, but online Mr. Navalnys dramatic arrest upon arrival in Moscow, his investigation into President Vladimir V. Putins purported secret palace and his supporters calls for protest were all broadcast to an audience of many millions.

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to clamp down on freedom of speech online, leading to frequent predictions that the country could be heading toward internet censorship akin to Chinas great firewall.

But even as Mr. Putin faced the biggest protests in years last month, his government appeared unwilling and, to some degree, unable to block websites or take other drastic measures to limit the spread of digital dissent.

The hesitation has underscored the challenge Mr. Putin faces as he tries to blunt the political implications of cheap high-speed internet access reaching into the remote corners of the vast country while avoiding angering a populace that has fallen in love with Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

Theyre afraid, Dmitri Galushko, a Moscow telecommunications consultant, said of why the Kremlin hasnt clamped down harder. Theyve got all these weapons, but they dont know how to use them.

More broadly, the question of how to deal with the internet lays bare a dilemma for Mr. Putins Russia: whether to raise state repression to new heights and risk a public backlash or continue trying to manage public discontent by maintaining some semblance of an open society.

In China, government control went hand in hand with the internets early development. But in Russia, home to a Soviet legacy of an enormous pool of engineering talent, digital entrepreneurship bloomed freely for two decades, until Mr. Putin started trying to restrain online speech after the antigovernment protests of 2011 and 2012.

At that point, the open internet was so entrenched in business and society and its architecture so decentralized that it was too late to radically change course. But efforts to censor the web, as well as requirements that internet providers install equipment for government surveillance and control, gained pace in bill after bill passed by Parliament. At the same time, internet access continues to expand, thanks in part to government support.

Russian officials now say that they have the technology in place to allow for a sovereign RuNet a network that would continue to give Russians access to Russian websites even if the country were cut off from the World Wide Web. The official line is that this expensive infrastructure offers protection in case nefarious Western forces try to cut Russias communications links. But activists say it is actually meant to give the Kremlin the option to cut some or all of Russia off from the world.

In principle, it will be possible to restore or enable the autonomous functioning of the Russian segment of the web, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putins Security Council and a former prime minister, told reporters recently. Technologically, everything is ready for this.

Amid this years domestic unrest, Russias saber-rattling directed at Silicon Valley has reached a new intensity. Mr. Navalny has made expert use of Googles YouTube, Facebooks Instagram and Twitter to reach tens of millions of Russians with his meme-ready depictions of official corruption, down to the $850 toilet brush he claimed to have identified at a property used by Mr. Putin.

At the same time, Russia has appeared powerless trying to stop those companies from blocking pro-Kremlin accounts or forcing them to take down pro-Navalny content. (Mr. Navalnys voice is resonating on social media even with him behind bars: On Saturday, a court upheld his prison sentence of more than two years.)

Russias telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has taken to publicly berating American internet companies, sometimes multiple times a day. On Wednesday, the regulator said that the voice-chat social network Clubhouse had violated the rights of citizens to access information and to distribute it freely by suspending the account of a prominent state television host, Vladimir Solovyov. On Jan. 29, it claimed that Google was blocking YouTube videos containing the Russian national anthem, calling it flagrant and unacceptable rudeness directed at all citizens of our country.

Clubhouse apparently blocked Mr. Solovyovs account because of user complaints, while Google said some videos containing the Russian anthem had been blocked in error because of a content rights issue. Clubhouse did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition, as calls for nationwide protest proliferated after Mr. Navalnys arrest last month, Roskomnadzor said that social networks were encouraging minors to take part in illegal activity.

The Russian social network VKontakte and the Chinese-owned app TikTok partly complied with Roskomnadzors order to block access to protest-related content. But Facebook refused, stating, This content doesnt violate our community standards.

For all its criticism of American social media companies, the Kremlin has used them extensively to spread its message around the world. It was Facebook that served as a primary tool in Russias effort to sway the 2016 United States presidential election. On YouTube, the state-controlled network RT has a combined 14 million subscribers for its English, Spanish and Arabic-language channels.

Ms. Simonyan, the editor of RT, says she will continue to use American social media platforms as long as they are not banned.

To quit using these platforms while everyone else is using them is to capitulate to the adversary, she said in a statement to The New York Times. To ban them for everyone is to vanquish said adversary.

A law signed by Mr. Putin in December gives his government new powers to block or restrict access to social networks, but it has yet to use them. When regulators tried to block access to the messaging app Telegram starting in 2018, the two-year effort ended in failure after Telegram found ways around the restrictions.

Instead, officials are trying to lure Russians onto social networks like VKontakte that are closely tied to the government. Gazprom Media, a subsidiary of the state-owned natural gas giant, has promised to turn its long-moribund video platform RuTube into a competitor to YouTube. And in December it said it had bought an app modeled on TikTok called Ya Molodets Russian for Im great for sharing short smartphone videos.

Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has co-written a book on the Kremlins efforts to control the internet, says the strategy of persuading people to use Russian platforms is a way to keep dissent from going viral at moments of crisis. As of April 1, all smartphones sold in Russia will be required to come pre-loaded with 16 Russian-made apps, including three social networks and an answer to Apples Siri voice assistant that is called Marusya.

The goal is for the typical Russian user to live in a bubble of Russian apps, Mr. Soldatov said. Potentially, it could be rather effective.

Even more effective, some activists say, is the acceleration of Mr. Putins machine of selective repression. A new law makes online libel punishable by up to five years in prison, and the editor of a popular news website served 15 days in jail for retweeting a joke that included a reference to a January pro-Navalny protest.

In a widely circulated video this month, a SWAT team in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok can be seen interrogating Gennady Shulga, a local video blogger who covered the protests. An officer in a helmet, goggles and combat fatigues presses Mr. Shulga shirtless to a tile floor next to two pet-food bowls.

The Kremlin is very much losing the information race, said Sarkis Darbinyan, an internet freedom activist. Self-censorship and fear thats what were heading toward.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

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China revealing extent of its censorship with BBC ban: Gordon Chang – Fox News

Posted: at 2:06 am

China's recent announcement thatBBC World Newsis banned from broadcasting in the country is another troubling example of Beijingclosing itself off and makes clearthe extent of the Communist Party's censorship regime, author Gordon Chang says.

The authoritariangovernment'sNational Radio and Television Administration announced its restriction of theBritish broadcaster on Feb. 11,claiming the BBChad harmed Chinese "unity" with its reporting on the country's atrocities against ethnic minorities.

"China under Xi Jinping has been shutting out the rest of the world. Its basically a closing of the Chinese mind because Xi does not like foreign influences," Chang told Fox News."As China cuts itself off from the rest of the world, its not going to get the benefit of communicating with other people. Everyone benefits from talking with others, and societies that cut themselves off end up usually strangling themselves."

China was formally accused by the U.S. last monthof perpetrating a genocide against Uighurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang regionthrough a system of torture, internment, rape, and ethnic cleansing.

CHINA BANS BBC AFTER HARROWING REPORT ON ATROCITIES AGAINST UIGHURS

The BBC's Feb. 2 report on these atrocities, as well as U.K.media regulator Ofcom revokingthe license of the Communist Party-aligned China Global Television Network earlier this month, triggered China's decision to fully ban the BBC. It was already heavily censored there, although it could be viewed in hotels and some residential homes.

Chinais already facing global scrutiny over the origins of the deadly coronavirus pandemic and suppressing critical reporting about the disease at the beginning of the outbreak.It has since spread conspiracy theories through state media about COVID-19's origins.

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"People around the world are going to start to think about how much censorship there is in China," Chang said. "Xi Jinping has gotten away with this for quite some time... This could very well be a tipping point where people really start to understand how strict censorship is."

The BBC said it was "disappointed that the Chinese authorities have decided to take this course of action. The BBC is the world's most trusted international news broadcaster and reports on stories from around the world fairly, impartially and without fear or favour."

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Iowa’s proposed ‘1619 Project’ ban is a censorship of thought – The Gazette

Posted: at 2:06 am

Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. But if they are made poorly, both are bad for you.

An Iowa House member has introduced a bill that would penalize school districts if they teach history using any information from something called the 1619 Project. That curriculum was developed to re-examine slavery in the United States, and it contains some harsh realities not otherwise taught.

For example, were you taught that, The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province shall serve durante vita, hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment. By 1729, Maryland law authorized punishments of enslaved people including to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county.?

This is true, but if a teacher uses this information from the project, House File 222 would cut their schools funding. The bill also applies to any similarly developed curriculum. In other words, Even if I havent seen it, its bad.

Beyond the obvious Constitutional problems with the bill, it is unenforceable. Who decides if particular information came from the 1619 Project; who decides if a curriculum is similar? This is nothing but censorship of thought.

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew said, Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought, and Alan Dershowitz who represented President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial has said freedom of speech means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.

If you disagree with speech, you dont ban it; you present opposing views. The Iowa Constitution says plainly that, No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech ...

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More than 40 groups have officially objected to the bill, and during a subcommittee hearing on Feb. 9 there were many thoughtful statements in opposition. The representative brushed those comments aside, spent 10 of the hearings 60 minutes reading a statement with his thoughts on the politics of the 1619 Project, and never engaged in a meaningful discussion of the pros and cons of the bill.

What was most telling was the fact he never mentioned one constituent, one Iowan who had raised concerns about the project.

Instead, he relied on national opponents of the project who had their views published in places such as the World Socialist website.

Its a good bet that if you were in the Sioux Center Fareway the night before a big blizzard, you could throw a stone and not hit anyone who had ever even heard of the 1619 Project before it became this legislators pet project.

He also has a bill that would make Black market sales of handguns legal. Now, if a drug dealer sells a handgun to another drug dealer who doesnt have a gun permit, thats a felony for both of them. His bill eliminates that crime.

And then theres his attempt to pass a law about how many toilets a bar has to have. Theres more, but thats enough.

Someone needs to take this representative aside and say Look, you dont have to present a bill just because you can. You dont have to be a bully just because you have a bully pulpit.

Small minds make bad laws ... and bad laws get in the way of good ones.

The legislature has only two more months to finish its work.

In the month its been in session, it has passed only a handful of bills and resolutions, including to give Coast Guard members the same rights given other military members, modify the disorderly conduct statute dealing with loud and raucous noise, allow more consumer accounts to be billed for service charges, deal with remote education, and propose a constitutional amendment dealing with firearms.

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Meanwhile, the Legislative Services Agency had to draft HF 222, opponents of the bill had to respond to the bill, and there was a one-hour hearing all wasted on an unconstitutional, unenforceable bill because someone thinks they are better qualified to decide what to teach than trained educators and the Department of Education.

We dont watch sausage being made because we trust the sausage-maker to do their job right and to give us a good and safe product. We should be able to expect the same from the Iowa Legislature.

Bob Teig was a career federal prosecutor in Cedar Rapids for 32 years before he retired in 2011.

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Letter: Censorship | Letters to the Editor | tillamookheadlightherald.com – Tillamook Headlight-Herald

Posted: at 2:05 am

In response to several letters about censorship, lying is perfectly legal under the constitutionally protected free speech amendment. If it werent, all the corporate news stations would be in trouble. As far as censorship goes, a private company can make any laws it wants for persons who choose to use their services. (except for exclusions of race and sexual orientation) I personally have chosen to avoid all online sites that censor (I censor them) because I know that free speech is heavily censored in communist countries, dictatorships and other tyrannical governments and has no place in this country. Censorship of free speech should not be based on clothing a person wears, including hats, color of skin, sexual identification and etc. No book burning, no byt burning!

Once upon a time we were a great country because of our constitutionally protected civil rights, and free speech amendment. Democracy is messy, but the human soul cries for freedom. In the present we are actually threatened with loosing our constitutional rights, and freedoms. Hate speech? Just call everything you dont want to hear hate speech. This country has done just fine for several hundred years without a definition of hate speech. I think we should leave it alone. It is a question of manners and intelligence.

As a newspaper, the Headlight Herald can put anything they want in their newspaper. If I thought they were censoring the communities ( all of us) views, I wouldnt subscribe to their newspaper.

Our present government is becoming more censoring, threatening those who do not agree with them, or their ideas, by labeling just about everything "hate speech" It is a sobering realization.

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Techno-censorship: The slippery slope from censoring disinformation to silencing truth – Overton County News

Posted: at 2:05 am

Speak Truth to Power by John Whitehead

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it. In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Martin Niemllers warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.

In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called hate speech, and few spoke out because they were not extremists and didnt want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting disinformation about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out because they were not extremists and didnt want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.

By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists. Still, few spoke out.

Eventually, we the people will be the ones in the crosshairs.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes extremism, we the people might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.

Whatever we tolerate now whatever we turn a blind eye to whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, David Icke, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are censored, silenced, and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

The question is not whether the content of their speech was legitimate.

The concern is what happens after such prominent targets are muzzled. What happens once the corporate techno-censors turn their sights on the rest of us?

Its a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We are on a fast-moving trajectory.

Already, there are calls for the Biden administration to appoint a reality czar in order to tackle disinformation, domestic extremism and the nations so-called reality crisis.

Knowing what we know about the governments tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Heres the point: you dont have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously nave.

As Matt Welch, writing for Reason, rightly points out, Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation.

In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths both corporate and governmental working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but its a dubious distinction at best. Certainly, Facebook and Twitter have become the modern-day equivalents of public squares, traditional free speech forums, with the internet itself serving as a public utility.

But what does that mean for free speech online: should it be protected or regulated?

When given a choice, the government always goes for the option that expands its powers at the expense of the citizenrys. Moreover, when it comes to free speech activities, regulation is just another word for censorship.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwells 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist, and obedient to Big Brother.

Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept: Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations. But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overlords and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. Theyre laying the groundwork to preempt any dangerous ideas that might challenge the power elites stranglehold over our lives.

Therefore, it is important to recognize the thought prison that is being built around us for what it is: a prison with only one route of escape free thinking and free speaking in the face of tyranny.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

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Censorship of Student Journalists Persists Despite their Essential Role Reporting on COVID, Protests, Racial Justice and Elections, New White Paper…

Posted: at 2:05 am

Contact:Hadar Harris, Executive DirectorStudent Press Law Center(202) 549-6316 /hharris@splc.org

Student Journalists Celebrate 3rd Annual Student Press Freedom Day on Feb. 26

Washington, D.C. In anticipation of the 3rd annualStudent Press Freedom DayonFriday, Feb. 26th, the Student Press Law Center released a white paper today detailing a continuing pattern of censorship of student journalists by school officials across the country.Student Journalists in 2020: Journalism Against the Odds notes that, despite incredible challenges students faced, they produced top-quality reporting on the most important safety, health and political issues of our day.

Examples detailed in the white paper include:

Student journalists, like professional journalists, provide an essential, constitutionally-protected service to their communities and should be recognized and fully supported for the service they provide in gathering and delivering vital information on issues of concern to the public, said Hadar Harris, executive director of the Student Press Law Center.The troubling trends we observed over the past year reinforce the need to ensure legal protections for student journalists in all 50 states.

The theme for Student Press Freedom Day 2021 isJournalism Against the Odds,in acknowledgment of the important news coverage student journalists have produced, despite being faced with incredible challenges. In addition to outright censorship, student journalists worked against odds that included prior review, lack of access to critical data, suppression of or discipline for unflattering or controversial photos or other news coverage, assault and harassment during public gatherings, budget cuts, and an abrupt shift to an all-virtual newsroom and all-online business model. Furthermore, they faced the continuing scourge of a legal system that, following the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decisionHazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, has created an exemption for student free speech rights as it relates to student journalists, allowing overzealous school administrators to assert their power to censor broadly.

As the only reporters with a front row seat to the challenge of safe schooling in 2020, student journalists like me had a unique perspective on the experience of the nearly 73 million students who were forced to move suddenly to remote learning in spring 2020 and the impact this had on our families and communities, said Neha Madhira, sophomore at the University of Texas, Austin and reporter at theDaily Texan. Beyond our COVID-19 reporting, we have helped curate an important discussion about racial justice and systemic racism on our campuses and communities, and we took physical risks to cover protests in our communities, often being targeted by law enforcement because of our role as journalists. We student journalists must be allowed to do our jobs without undue interference.

As part of Student Press Freedom Day, SPLC has curated21 examples of impactful, important student journalism, focused on reporting on the impact of COVID-19, reckoning with racial justice, overcoming censorship and more. The stories represent work by both high school and college journalists with diverse backgrounds and from geographically diverse schools. These stories represent some of the very best in student journalism.

A critical part of Student Press Freedom Day is students sharing their stories with mainstream media outlets, lawmakers, and their peers about the incredible odds they have faced in the past year to carry out their work. More than 100 student journalists took part this month in anop-ed writing boot camp with veteran CNN & New York Times Journalist Steven A. Holmesabout how to craft and place an op-ed, and nearly half of the participants are working with a professional coach to support their efforts.

In addition, with legislative sessions underway, students are advocating withNew Voices chaptersin their states and testifying before education and judiciary committees for proposedchanges to state law that will protect student press freedom. They are creating and sharing video testimonials on social media about the challenges they face as student journalists and spreading the word using the hashtag#StudentPressFreedom. They are participating in astudent-moderated town hall forumabout how to strengthen student press freedom moving forward. They are hostinggroup screenings and discussions ofRaise Your Voice, a documentary about how the student journalists at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL navigated their school mass shooting as both survivors and journalists.

Student Press Freedom Day is co-sponsored by more than 15 organizations, including the Journalism Education Association, the College Media Association, The Associated Collegiate Press, the National Scholastic Press Association, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and more.

In the past year, readership of student newspapers significantly increased in many places, underscoring the important role student media plays in the community in times of crisis and moments of historic significance, said Hadar Harris. As student press freedom faced unparalleled challenges in 2020, the movement to support it continues to grow.

About Student Press Freedom Day

The Student Press Law Center launched Student Press Freedom Day in 2019 to raise awareness of the vital work and impact of student journalists, highlight the censorship and prior review challenges student journalists face, and underscore the importance of journalism education. It is a national day of action which activates and empowers student journalists to assert their right to student press freedom.

About the Student Press Law Center

The Student Press Law Center (SPLC.org,@splc) is an independent, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit working at the intersection of law, journalism and education to support, promote and defend the rights of student journalists and their advisers at the high school and college levels. SPLC has the nations only free legal hotline for student journalists. Based in Washington, D.C., the Student Press Law Center provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to student journalists and the educators who work with them

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