I Know Censorship When I See It

freespeech, politics, rhetoric 1 Comment

Proposed R.I. bill would charge $20 to view pornography online (mynbc5.com) Washington state passes net neutrality law as states push back against the FCC (NBCNews.com) Among the many problems with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous “definition” of obscenity — you know, “I know it when I see it” and all that — is that it’s lazy. Defining words and terms is a very difficult process, especially when languages have to keep evolving so they can provide the tools we need to explain new developments…

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Indoctrination Into Silence

politics, rhetoric, teaching Leave a comment

Students Get Mixed Messages On Whether Protesting Will Get Them In Trouble (NPR.org) School Bans Students After Gun Violence Protest (Newsweek via msn.com) It certainly made for a good media spectacle. Shortly after being sworn in as the first Democratic mayor of New York City in twenty years, Bill de Blasio indicated that he would move quickly to stem the tidal wave of support for charter schools in the Big Apple that his predecessors, particularly Michael Bloomberg, had rammed down New Yorkers’ throats for over…

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Laughing at the Grieving

cyberbullying, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Internet Denounces Dinesh D’Souza Over Vile Tweets On Florida Shooting Survivors (International Business Times via msn.com) The most effective social experiment in the form of a browser add-on I’ve seen is the one that changes the phrase “political correctness” to “treating people with respect.” I find these kinds of things too annoying to use myself, but whenever one of these add-ons becomes popular, I always peruse the screenshots that accompany any news stories that get written up, just so I can see examples of the…

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Let’s Talk About Sex Work

politics, rhetoric, sex Leave a comment

Conner Habib thread on Maggie Jones’ New York Times Magazine article and other recent threats to erotica (twitter.com) Do Trump’s alleged affairs even matter? (Washington Post) For all that I understand the appeal of this whole Stormy Daniels thing to a lot of people — salacious “sex scandals” will always attract eyes and ears, even more so when they can be juxtaposed against a political group that still ties itself so closely to what it calls “family values” — I’m not comfortable with how much attention…

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If They Won’t, We Will

glbt, politics, rhetoric, transgender Leave a comment

DeVos’s Education Dept. Officially Abandons Trans Students (The Advocate) When Americans venerate the founding of our country, the story of how we got our three branches of federal government tends to be pretty high up on the list. Instead of agreeing to become the first monarch of post-revolutionary America, George Washington instead pushed for a system of governance with co-equal branches — the executive, the legislative and the judicial — that would hold checks over one another, in order to prevent the kinds of tyranny…

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