I can’t decide between this image that was broadcast on Fox News to illustrate a story about Clinton wanting some Lincoln-Douglas debates with Obama:

Or Chris Muir’s idea about where those crazy ladies keep their Glocks so they’ll be easily accessible:

I actually wedge mine between my anti-gravity titties, with holster embedded via a quick outpatient surgery.

Help me, Pandagonians—which is funnier?

Whoops, I guess Alison Bechdel’s marvelous book Fun Home caused some people to accidentally feel sympathetic towards queer people, and realize they are human beings, deserving of equality like everyone else. That’s why they had to flip out and label it “pornography” in an attempt to get the book out of university classes.

Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.

Thomas Alvord, with the group “No More Pornography,” says, “The issue is exposing people to pornography.”

The issue is with “Fun Home,” a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of “Fun Home,” it’s told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father’s homosexuality.

Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo.

This sort of bullshit will pretty much permanently fuck up any attempt of feminists to start a reasonable discussion about why so many men are attracted to a flavor of pornography that is as much, if not more, about humiliating and hating women as it is about getting men off. Which is not even all porn, but certainly doesn’t encapsulate novels like this. Hell, we’re stuck in definitional hell, with the right wingers defining porn as “any material that portrays sexuality in a way that I don’t approve of”, and most everyone else in liberal land defining it as, “sexually explicit materials designed to sexually arouse the reader/viewer”, and radical feminists defining it as “photos and videos where the humiliation and pain of the woman is considered an essential part of the erotic experience for the viewer”. Which is, to be fair to radical feminists, the majority of the material available through your internet channels or “Girls Gone Wild” videos. I’m not getting into the discussion of censorship from feminists, since it’s a red herring, since the number of feminists willing to talk censorship is a minority of a minority.

What I will say is that I suspect the events portrayed in this book are much more dangerous to the right wing worldview than actual porn. Below the fold is one of the offending illustrations, posted by Bechdel.

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Disco Ball bless Jane Fonda for saying “cunt” on TV.

Ah, I love moments like this. Grown adults scrambling around, getting completely offended over something that’s got no logical reason to offend you. If you’ve seen the play, you know the piece she’s talking about, and the whole point of it is to make the audience face up to the irrational fear caused by the sound of the word and realize how silly they’re being.

Something so simple and yet so hard for so many people to understand: A word’s meaning derives from its context. So many people want so badly for the sound of words to have this magical power, like there’s something inherent about the sound [kuhnt] that should give offense. Do we blanch to hear someone say “country”, even though that sound is in there? No. It’s hard for me to respect taboos about words.

Calling someone a cunt is pretty offensive, but again, that’s based on context. This was about the least offensive use of the word imaginable. I can’t help but think that the fact that irrationality so easily wins this round is just a symptom of a greater sickness of our society (maybe all societies, to be fair)—this epidemic of having rules that are inexplicable but must be followed, leading people to base their morality more on T-crossing and I-dotting rather than actually developing a philosophy that makes sense. Which then leads people to think rules are less about right and wrong than about getting caught or not. If you think about it, a lot of social problems can be traced back to this conundrum.

Dammit, I was going to avoid blogging this whole “Ahmadinejad speaks at Columbia” brouhaha because other bloggers are handling the manufactured controversy so beautifully, but now I feel I must. There are only three reasons that I can think of, after really putting some thought to it, why you might genuinely fear an act of political speech.*

1. It’s inciting.
2. It’s convincing.
3. It’s so boring it could cause everyone to pass out and start drooling on themselves.

I’m not talking legitimate fears necessarily (they might or might not be) or making excuses for censorship. And well, the last one was something of a joke. Sort of. But I’m talking about real reasons that you might have a fear of an act of speech. For instance, I can find anti-choice speech scary for being convincing—it might not convince me, but it’s frightening to think it might convince enough to swing an election or something like that. I might find a KKK rally inciting, and that’s frightening. I don’t think in either case there’s a legitimate reason to deprive people making these kinds of speech their freedom of speech, especially when they’ve been invited somewhere. I do think there’s small, controlled situations where you might want to limit the kinds of speech (like in a blog comments) because it’s inciting and unproductive. But I’d never say that people who leave the “Faggots die!” comments that I’d delete here should be deprived of a right to leave those comments on blogs where they’re welcome or blogs where the moderator feels that the value of mocking those assholes outweighs the value of limiting trolling.

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Can’t you hear the longing from this fuckwit whining that his kid gets to read the word “fuck” in a Dave Eggers book, but he can’t call black people names?

He claimed students no longer read American classics such as “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” because of the “N-word.” He asked the school board: “Is the N-word worse than the F-word?”

It turns out that the school district that racist-and-professed-Christian Richard Jones does in fact teach “Huckleberry Finn”, but no matter. The point stands—Jones feels seriously deprived of the word “nigger” and will be damned if other people get to use the word “fuck” while he’s suffering such deprivation. (Hat tip.)

On the subject of books: One book club is done, another begins. It was requested that we mix in some more fiction, and everyone keeps telling me that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke is a grown-up Harry Potter, and we all know how well Harry Potter goes over here. So that’s the next selection, and the discussion date will be October 1st.

In politics, manuevers like this one are generally known as “handing your opponent a loaded weapon to shoot you with”:

The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.

The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.

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Quick question: When you read the title of the post, did you pronounce the word “motherfucking” in your mind? If you were to read it aloud, would you just go ahead and say “motherfucking”? Odds are yes, which gets straight to the heart of why the “seven words you can’t say on TV” is such a silly concept. The taboo against certain sounds pronounced in order is top of the list of hard to defend, because you have to argue that such syllables pronounced in that order create a harm so great that the First Amendment to the Constitution needs to be flouted to protect people. In lieu of that, you have to point in various directions, invoke unsubtle arguments against lower class people, and generally make an a$$ of yourself, as Bill Murchinson does in this incoherent article about why the FCC needs to waste taxpayer money keeping the f-word off the TV.

The good news is he reveals the agenda behind promoting taboo words right off the bat.

A federal appeals court panel in New York used President Bush and Vice President Cheney — if you can believe it — as a lever to pry open a little wider the passage to free speech of the no-holds-barred variety. When I say no holds barred, I mean every *$!!#$% word of it — as we used to write in quainter times.

The court told the Federal Communications Commission it couldn’t punish broadcast television for letting fly the same kind of language our leaders use now and then in unguarded moments. One such moment came when Cheney growled to one of the less clubby Senate Democrats, Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that Leahy would do well to … oh, well.

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Rikes! Rits Ra Raria Reep!

As the Daily Mail and Michelle Malkin would have it, there is a nationwide rash of adopting Shari’a law in Britain, including not teaching the Holocaust. (Lisa, in comments to this post, points out that I missed the fact that the Mail article does claim that the Holocaust drops were to avoid “offending” Muslims - before it claims otherwise.)

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In the TNT version, the swords were replaced with pillows, making the scene much more comfortable for the relevant viewers.

If you ever want a quick lesson in the priorities of censoring prigs, I highly recommend watching just a few minutes of Kill Bill on TNT. We flipped it on and watched a few minutes of the movie, the scene where the Bride wakes up and kills the guy who was fixing to rape her and the orderly-cum-pimp. Needless to say, a lot was cut. The vast majority of the orderly’s speech about the rules when raping the coma victim Bride was mostly cut, leaving in the information that she was about to be raped while minimizing the violent implications of that. The rapist clambers on top of her, she bites his lip and then they cut the rest of the scene where she kills him. Then when the orderly comes back and she flashes on a memory of him saying, “I’m Buck and I like to fuck,” they changed the word “fuck” to “party”. They even went so far as to change his keychain to read “Party Wagon” instead of “Pussy Wagon”. At this point, it became clear that the movie was rendered unwatchable, so we flipped it off, wondering why you even bother to put Kill Bill on TV. I guess it’s because the movie isn’t actually a very sexualized one in most ways, but just relentless violence, so perfect for TV.

Still, the effects of the censorship left the viewer with a distinct impression as to what censors find offensive. The idea of raping a coma victim? Fine. Letting the audience in on the fact that rapists sometimes beat the crap out of their victims for the thrill of it? Unacceptable. Gruesome revenge from a victim to her rapist? Unacceptable. The word “fuck” or “pussy”? Unacceptable, and moreover, replaced with the word “party”, which took some of the threatening edge off the character. Say what you will about Kill Bill, but this scene in the uncensored version did not play around. The idea that this orderly had been collecting money allowing men to rape the Bride was deemed worthy of a gruesome revenge, nor was the men’s sleaziness downplayed. The censored version made it seem like she was mostly just trying to escape and really downplayed the horror of the rapes.

I was thinking of this while reading Brent Bozell’s whine that the NC-17 rating meant that a movie is “pornography”. Granted, Bozell’s one of the members of the Catholic League’s board of advisors, so this is as much about getting rid of the “secular” influences in Hollywood* as anything. That or he has no idea what pornography is. Actually, this being a both/and blog, I’m going to say these two things are probably both true.

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I hear that in the taboo play, women just get up on stage and walk around like they have a right! Scandalous.

A lot of us more sophisticated, citified feminist types act a little disdainful towards “The Vagina Monologues”. “That play is so last decade,” we say to each other. “Nothing against Eve Ensler, but the shine of novelty has faded. We get it already. If I loved my vagina any more, I’d have to buy her a Lexus.”

Well, while it’s great and all to reach the mastery level of feminism, it’s always good to remind yourself that the reason that conservatives fear and loathe this play so much is that it still has a lot of power as a feminist teaching tool for much younger women. It’s the Sassy magazine for the early 21st century. If nothing else, the reaction young women get lately when they try to embrace the play and its message that everything you’ve learned about what a terrible person you are because of your genitals is wrong, they are going to get the smackdown from people that just wish the vagina would disappear and take away all its power to soften our fascist phallic spirit.

Ensler’s stroke of genius in realizing that speaking the organ’s name out loud alone would scare people, as if you were saying “Bloody Mary” into a mirror (another invocation of demonic vaginal power?), continues to reveal itself today. First a theatre in Atlantic Beach, FL changed a billboard to read “The Hoohah Monologues” after some people complained about the scary word “vagina”. (Realizing how they were utterly defeating the point of even hosting the play, they changed it back.) And now some high school girls in Westchester County, NY are getting suspended over uttering the dread organ’s name aloud while performing “The Vagina Monologues” after they were told not to.

It seems that three female high school juniors received permission to read part of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” during a public open mic session. But they were told to avoid using the word “vagina,” which is mentioned in the excerpt, because young children would be in the audience and it would be taped for local cable TV. (The students have countered that the youngest audience member was in ninth grade.)

The girls decided, correctly in my opinion, that this was crap and read the piece as it was written. Then again, being a bit of a literature person, I tend to think that keeping the spirit of a piece you’re performing inviolable is more important than penetrating the resistance of those who fear the word “vagina”.

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Some of my more egregious writings, for vetting purposes. If you ask for context you are probably a dirty feminist pinko hippie foulmouth.

…the number of terrible, violent ideas that have come out of the text of the bible must rival if not outnumber those that have come out of the Qu’ran…

—-

The 9/11 hijackers were pursuing their happiness…

—-

I’m on the Hugo Chavez Marching Orders Yahoo! Group…

—-

[Malkin is] fascist scum and an apologist for anti-Constitutional activity.

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…Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan: Oh, cry me a river.

—-

[Bush is] good! He sent the troops to save the people who were getting shot by the bad guys.

Okay, fine. If you really have to have context, it’s after the jump. But promise you’re not Bill Donohue. Swear! Okay.

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I remember reading a book awhile ago by a big wig in the FBI who was talking about training investigators. When trying to discourage investigators from doing illegal and immoral things like fix evidence, he approached them by pointing out that he doesn’t think that the urge to fix evidence always comes from a place of evil, where you want to set someone up for a crime that is innocent. Usually, cops who fix evidence actually mean well. (He said, and I’m going with it for now because in this case I think he was right.) But they are shooting themselves in the foot. The example he uses is the O.J. Simpson case. What’s most likely true in that case is both that Simpson is guilty as hell of killing his ex-wife and her friend and that the cops planted evidence against him. Why plant evidence if they knew he was guilty? Well, obviously to make sure that he was found guilty. But it backfired, because they got caught planting evidence, which gave the defense their opportunity to make the case that Simpson was being railroaded.

Moral of the story: Frustrating as it can be sometimes to see people get away with certain atrocities, if you break the rules to stop them, you’re only going to fuck it up.

I thought about this while reading about the student council at Carleton University crossing over a certain important line and barring an anti-choice group from having access to student funds or student spaces. Now, don’t get me wrong; I think anti-choice protestors are the scum of the earth. However, this is an area to tread lightly and err on the side of freedom of speech, even if you do think—and I do—that they are simply trussed up hate groups against women. Now, I do think that anti-choice organizing at actual clinics is something that one can seek reasonable legal remedies against, but not in terms of speech. In fact, the biggest feminist victories against these asswipes were achieved not by attempting to censor them but carefully documenting in court how the temptation to cross the line into harassment and intimidation was crossed over and over again until it was indisputable that Operation Rescue was a bona fide criminal organization engaging in racketeering.

The best remedy for hate speech is not to try to censor it. You only end up shooting yourself in the foot and allowing the hate group to play like they’re the victims of the PC Squad. This is especially likely to happen if the hate group isn’t recognized as such by the larger society, which is true of anti-choice groups at the moment. Now, this doesn’t go for hate speech directed at specific individuals. Universities are well within the bounds of reason if they punish someone for haranguing a certain person for her private medical choices. (Same with clinic protests—anti-choice groups simply cannot bring themselves to refrain from individual harassment of patients and so they have to stay X number of feet back so that they can’t single anyone out for such harassment.) But when it comes to political speech, err on the side of free speech. That means they are disabled from playing the victim role and, more importantly, gives you a chance to push back without fear of censorship.

Honestly, letting people play the fools often works really well. Living in a blue city in a red state, I get routine opportunities to see the wingnuts from everything from the KKK to the anti-choicers to the groups who think everyone’s going to hell show up and have their hateful little protests. Half the time, you don’t even need to bother to organize a counter-demonstration since the crowds around them provide unorganized mockery aplenty to make it very clear to the haters they don’t share the communities’ values. Pointing and laughing exposes them to the light. If they’re censored, the organize underground, thinking they’re speaking the “true” voice of the community that They are just afraid to hear. And that’s a lot more dangerous.

Now there are common sense rules for keeping expressing your opinion from turning into harassment, which is why I think in the real world having specific spaces are good—like having the cops hang out between the hate group and the counter protestors. And in the virtual world, things like comment moderation can be used to act as a virtual police barrier or agreed-upon standing 100 feet apart or whatever other methods are used to keep people in expression mode instead of brawling mode. But in this case, I think the student council at Carleton would have done much better to allow the group to have their share of funds and then have the pro-choicers set up counter protests nearby for all the anti-choice protests. I’ve seen similiar set-ups all the time and, believe me, the pro-choicers come off much better for it, since they tend to be the ones with fact-stuffed brochures while the anti-choicers are shoving bloody fetus pictures in your face even if you ask them a few questions about some of the issues with their viewpoints.

Monkey existentialism by Yawp Barbarian.

Thoughts on the genuinely troubling taboo issue here. Now for the fun part, which is mocking people who go out of their way to preserve extremely stupid taboos that reinforce ignorance. D at Lawyers, Guns and Money points to a professor at the University of Idaho that is asking his students to sign a waiver before starting his course on film to indicate that they understand that some films have “potentially offensive or repugnant content”. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that his students are largely coming from conservative homes and are having knee-jerk reactions based on being spoonfed wingnuttery their whole lives until now.

“I guess I started to get more freshmen who would come to me and say, ‘Well gee, I can’t look at any film that has violence in it or nudity. So I developed a statement of understanding so people know ahead of time certain issues will be intellectually examined in some of these films, such as poverty, slavery, sexual themes, punishment and murder,�? said West.

“Film is an extraordinarily powerful medium,�? continued West, who counts among his visual texts Night and Fog, a documentary on the Holocaust that depicts the liberation of a concentration camp, and A Clockwork Orange, which features a rape sequence choreographed to “Singin’ in the Rain.�?

“If you can’t bear to look at footage of the opening up of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp that shows bulldozers pushing human corpses, then maybe this course is not for you.�?

Mostly he’s referencing some powerfully upsetting stuff, at least in theory. I think there’s not many of us who can see the footage of Bergen-Belsen without being powerfully affected, but I will admit this upfront, I have never understood why the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange is so often held up as one of the most upsetting things ever filmed. I get sucked into movies and can be easily disturbed by a scene, at least in the moment, but that is one scene that didn’t freak me out very much. Go figure. But his reference to showing films with poverty and slavery on top of sex and violence made my wingnut meter go off. I suspect that West has a real problem with having sheltered, religious, conservative kids in his class lose their shit when presented not just with nudity and violence, but with materials the undermine sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy. Holocaust footage also has a very disturbing effect that I almost hesitate to mention, except that I know from experience that in some more rural parts of the country, people can still have a very abstract negative attitude towards Jews due to a combination of not knowing any and being told in church that the Jews killed Jesus. Witnessing in a very blunt manner what evils those teachings can lead to might be quite the shock to the system.

Regardless of specific political issues, the truth of the matter is—and god knows this is a cliched observation, but it’s still true—the rote conservative injunctions against violence and especially nudity serve mainly to reinforce power structures. In a very basic way, the existence of censorship is about who gets to see what—censors get to see everything and so the rest of us are just wee nobodies. With the adult-child hierarchy, this power structure makes sense, because it’s one power structure that by definition is meant to change and so doesn’t have the veneer of abuse it does when, for instance, certain words and jokes and images are considered suitable for men and not for women. It gets ridiculous, like an incident in high school where the teacher was showing the 60s film version of “Romeo and Juliet” and forgetting that there was a bit of nude male butt in it, lept up and covered the TV with a folder when the butt was shown, in front of an audience of teenagers who were all Romeo’s age or older.

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This is a small thing but, taken alongside all the other problems in the country at present time, it’s ominous.

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — A woman who was ticketed for having an obscene anti-Bush bumper sticker filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday against a county in the state of Georgia and its officials.

Denise Grier, 47, of Athens, Georgia, got a $100 ticket in March after a DeKalb County police officer spotted the bumper sticker, which read “I’m Tired Of All The BUSH**.”

A DeKalb judge threw out the ticket in April because the state’s lewd decal law that formed the basis for the ticket was ruled unconstitutional in 1990.

The ACLU is also filing a suit with Grier to have her bumper sticker officially declared constitutionally protected speech. As it should be, since there’s pretty much no way you can pretend that this incident was anything but an attempt to shut down political dissent. The “obscene” word wasn’t even on the bumper sticker, but merely implied. (Which goes to show how silly the idea of censoring “obscene” words is, because the euphemism brings the word to mind, which means you might as well have said it, but that’s another post for another time.)

As Aspazia notes, there’s a lot more offensive things that you can slap on a bumper sticker that won’t get censored because they are cruel to the people who aren’t powerful (her example being women who’ve had to terminate pregnancies in their past). What really makes me sad about this is that some cop got it in his head to do a little freelance punishment of someone who has the temerity to insult the cop’s beloved dictator. No doubt that cop would call himself a patriot, even though he doesn’t even respect this country enough to respect our basic principles like free speech.

Uploaded by the Newport Public Library.

Last night I speculated that the reason people ban or challenge books in schools has little to do with genuine concern for The Children* and everything to do with their own issues. This post by Atrios only confirmed my suspicions even more. With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to chart out the stated reasons vs. the real reasons people try to get this book or that book banned. Because I love writing out tables in HTML.**

I got the books and the histories of why they were banned or challenged from here. Chart below the fold.

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Redneck Mother reminds me that it’s Banned Books Week. And she has an interesting point about the problem of censorship beyond 1st Amendment issues, which is that it’s not good for kids to have their reading material so tightly controlled.

No book was off-limits to me as a kid. We had a huge home library, and Mom and Dad never pushed me to read or avoid certain books. I grew up understanding that the life of the mind is private and personal. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I went through a big Stephen King phase and had several paperbacks sitting around. My dad asked if he could borrow my copy of Christine when I was done with it. I cringed inwardly, thinking I was going to get chewed out for reading something with too much sex and violence in it, but he read it and returned it to me without comment. Which is, I think, the way reading should be for every kid. My parents could tell me where I could go and what time I had to be home, but they couldn’t tell me what to read or what to think.

Thinking about this, I realized that my parents didn’t bother to censor my access to books, either. They figured if I was old enough to read it, then I had the right. And I think the bonus for them is it gave them a way to deal with the hard questions—discussing the content of books is a way to navigate some of the scarier territory.

All that aside, Redneck Mother’s post reminds us that the urge to ban books says more about the censors than the people they’re trying to keep the books from.

I must also give a shout-out and an eyeroll to the people who’ve made the Captain Underpants series one of the most challenged of the 21st century to date. Please. Crude potty humor is the lifeblood of seven-year-old boys. They’re gonna work it anyway. Why not have them reading at the same time?

Would-be censors don’t know the difference between stuff that makes them uncomfortable and stuff that is bona fide problematic for others. Is potty humor actually damaging? Some of us would argue that cultivating a healthy sense of humor about our less dignified bodily functions is probably a good thing in general, but then again, some of us also think we should be able to lunch with a former President without slicing our breasts off beforehand. KCB also points out that the Harry Potter books are frequently targeted as somehow anti-Christian, which is ridiculous, because the kids celebrate all Christian holidays in the book. Again, I think this bespeaks a certain adult unwillingness to admit that a lot of their religiosity isn’t significantly different from a bunch of made-up magical stories and they don’t like those magical stories to be an unpleasant reminder of this.

The list of most challenged books is available here. The unsurprising inclusion of Forever by Judy Blume is further evidence of my pet theory that book challenges are more about adult discomfort than a genuine concern for children. For its audience, that book is extremely informative and relieves a lot of psychological tension caused by the mysteries of impending adolescence. For kids, it’s a good thing. For adults, however, it’s a book about teenage sex and a lot of really awkward stuff we’d really just rather forget. Causes uneasiness in adults but comforts children? It’s bad for kids! Ban it. Same idea with books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Of Mice and Men—for the kids reading them, they are educational tools, but for adults, they are discomforting reminders of how we’ve failed and all the oppressions we’ve upheld.

Oh man, I don’t want to keep blogging this Hugo Chavez thing, but it’s like taking a long, satisfying fart that clears a roomful of people you hate anyway.* Naturallly, the Democrats are clamoring to be the first to lick Bush’s butthole. Dees Diversion found the worst of it.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), in response to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s comments about President Bush Wednesday, said he is personally offended…..

But Rangel said neither Chavez nor any other president can come to the United States “and think because we have a problem with our president” that they can denigrate the president and Americans will not be offended.

“You don’t come into my country, you don’t come into my congressional district, and you don’t condemn my president. If there’s any criticism of President Bush, it should be restricted to Americans - whether we voted for him or not,” Rangel said.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also condemned Chavez’s comments at a press conference Thursday.

“Hugo Chavez fancies himself a modern day Simon Bolivar but all he is an everyday thug,” said Pelosi, referring to Bolivar, who led the fight for independence against Spanish rule in several South American countries during the early century.

Hugo Chavez abused the privilege that he had, speaking at the United Nations,” said Pelosi, adding that Chavez “demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela.”

I’m trying to imagine a single fucking Republican clamoring to defend President Clinton by making remarks about how other world leaders shouldn’t enjoy the freedom to criticize him. I’m drawing a blank, because it wouldn’t fucking happen. It wouldn’t happen because the Republicans know that the only reason they get votes despite their insane social policies, their wrecking ball economic policies, and their murderous, insane foreign policy ideas is that voters look at them and think, “Well, they got a spine at least.”

So that’s what it takes. A spine. Apparently reasonable policy ideas is below “a spine” on the list of things people look for in politicians. But if you have a spine and so do the Republicans, maybe that will free people up to actually look at your ideas. It’s a thought, you know? Certainly better than just making crazy claims that freedom of speech somehow doesn’t apply to furriners speaking at the UN.

*Not that I’ve done this, but I’ve thought about it. Fantasy is not a bad thing.

Uploaded by Nad.

I meant to write about this earlier, but ACL got me a bit behind. Anyway, on Friday Echidne posted on a story that should alarm anyone of any political stripe who still thinks that facts and the free flow of information matter—the FCC has been smoked out for destroying the draft of a study that had inconvienent results. To make the censorship issues even worse, the study demonstrated that media consolidation creates another form of censorship.

The report, written by two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. The broadcasts were obtained from Danilo Yanich, a professor and researcher at the University of Delaware, and were originally gathered by the Pew Foundation’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The analysis showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of “on-location” news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. It was part of a broader decision liberalizing ownership rules.

Local ownership means, on average, that the audience is getting troubling high amounts of actual news, which is good for democracy and bad for BushCo. So the study had to go. And by this, I mean it had to go—not just be shelved, but be destroyed.

Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed. “The whole project was just stopped - end of discussion,” he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.

Luckily, the draft was leaked by a concerned FCC staff member to Senator Barbara Boxer, so it’s been saved, despite the best efforts of the leadership at the FCC. The PDF of the study is available here. Reading the study, the thing that strikes me as so comical about it is that Michael Powell and the rest of the BushCo-appointed leadership of the FCC must have earnestly thought that there was no chance that the researchers would produce solid evidence of what should be ridiculously obvious, that local ownership of media outlets is going to influence whether or not the outlet is properly concerned with the local news.

The good news is that government censorship probably occurs with a shredder now, not a lighter. Which means less carbon emissions and it’s highly likely the destroyed report was recycled.

From TBogg, I see that the court ruled in favor of the movie studios on their case against a Utah company that re-edits films to take all the “objectionable” material out. This is creating internal chaos in the opinion generators of my brain. On one hand, I have the love of watching wingnuts lose. On the other, well there’s a certain bad habit of mine I don’t want to give up.

As you can see, I’m a big fan of fair use laws to protect people who borrow heavily from other works for political or artistic uses. Now this company is stretching the definition of fair use, of course. Not because of their odious politics and lack of taste (though that does make it worse), but because they aren’t making the specific sort of statements you’d be looking for when determining if the borrowing is in service of protected speech. There’s a specificity to the “borrowing” that fair use protects—you are creating an entirely separate piece when you do it. That said, I think there’s a solid argument to be made that they could qualify for fair use protection. Each “piece” made after their re-edits may not qualify in and of itself as a statement, but the entire project most certainly does, even if it’s a weird artistic statement.

I’d say they’re conducting a bit of film criticism, actually. That their school of criticism—the Pollyanna School that posits that movies should exist only for the purpose of promoting their fantasy of what the world should look like—is very stupid, but “stupid” doesn’t disqualify speech from protection. Of course, the size of the industry and the amount of money they’re making pushes it over into the “good ruling” territory, but still I’m hesistant to praise the ruling because I think fair use should be liberally defined.

From Lying Media Bastards, I see that the propaganda arm of the Republican party, otherwise know as Fox News, has commentators openly calling for the government to open an Office of Censorship. That 8% drop in their ratings must be hitting them in the pocketbook.

I’ll admit, the recent uptick in conservatives squawking about using government force to silence government critics has sort of thrown me for a loop. What’s particularly weird is the phony claims that the NY Times was doing anything hostile at all to Rumsfeld by running a puff piece on his vacation home. This isn’t even the sort of thing the much-wished for Office of Censorship would address—after all, even your more fascist, paranoid governments have been known to allow ass-kissy articles about the leaders being “normal” vacation-having people.

Speaking of, the pictures at that link are really bizarre in retrospect. Like this:

When Nazis show a better handle on reality than you, it’s time to reassess.

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Jennifer Pozner in Bitch magazine has a half-page article on the nomination/performance of the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from the movie Hustle & Flow, in which she suggests that the Academy is somehow soft on misogyny. It’s definitely true that devoid of all context, the performances of the Best Song nominees usually come off as misplaced during the awards ceremony and it’s especially hard to argue for the message that man who exploits women for a living deserves sympathy. All that said, Pozner’s piece left me with a bad taste in my mouth because I’m uneasy with the idea that when judging something’s artistic merit, the politics of the piece should be a factor at all, much less the deciding one. (I realize that’s an ideal, and that politics will always be a factor, but it’s still an ideal to strive for.) As such, I felt that it wasn’t so much that the Academy is pro-misogyny as that they are against taking the first step down the long road to outright censorship. Or the flip side of it, which is propaganda–think about all the right wingers making demands both that Hollywood start churning out war propaganda movies and that they dump a bunch of awards on them, in order to maintain support for our failure in Iraq.

Pozner backs up her accusation that the Academy is overly tolerant of misogyny in this paragraph:

Four words: Oscar winner Roman Polanski. In 2003, the Academy bestowed Best Director honors on convicted pedophile Polanski, who couldn’t accept his golden idol for The Pianist in person because he’s still wanted in Los Angeles for the rape of a minor, having fled to France to evade sentencing in 1977. Yet the glitterati erupted into a standing ovation when Polanski’s name was announced as winner–and barely a critical whimper was heard in the media.

First of all, it’s a stretch to compare rewarding a piece of work that’s misogynist and rewarding a piece of work that’s not misogynist, even though the person who made it is no doubt a nasty guy. All this proves to me is that the glitterati are determined to judge a body of work by its merits, not by the personal evils of the person who made it. I resent the notion that I can’t be a fan of Polanski’s work because the man who makes it is a broken mess of a human being and a sexual predator. To make the argument that the Academy is soft on misogyny instead of stubborn in favor of judging someone’s work on its own, you’d have to point to another situation where the glitterati didn’t turn out this kind of support for someone else who had a Polanski-level reputation but had politics that were offensive to them.*

One immediately sprang to my mind–when Elia Kazan received the lifetime achievement Oscar, a lot of people refused to applaud him. The reason they refused is because Kazan was a snitch and turned over names to HUAC of supposed Communists who were then blacklisted. Certainly, you could argue that this was an instance of Hollywood types refusing to pay tribute to someone’s body of work to punish him for personal behavior.

But I’ll admit I resist even this as a counterexample to the accolades for Polanski because what’s offensive about Kazan is not that he helped HUAC or was anti-Communist, it’s that he was actively involved in shutting down other artists. In other words, he was a de facto censor. If Kazan was involved in turning over names of supposed Communists in a situation where the people involved weren’t in an artistic industry, I suspect no one would have cared either way.

It’s tempting to say that the reason people were offended at the Kazan award and not the Polanski award was that they took the former as a personal swipe, but I really do think there’s more to it. Engaging in censorship of others can be read as part of your artistic body of work as an artist’s comment on his own work compared to others–it’s making the statement that while you think your stuff passes some sort of freedom test, other people’s work does not. One could make the argument that Kazan’s body of work as a whole is permanently scarred by this statement. (I’d disagree, actually, but I think it’s a fair argument.)

I’d say that while it’s imperfect, the Academy’s main focus really is rewarding people’s work. They’re brainlessly status quo–pro-capitalism, pro-racism, pro-sexism, you name it. And as the status quo changes, they’ll change with it. But it’s a bit of a stretch to say there’s any attempts to push for misogyny or even sexual abuse, just more that they feel, rightly, that sort of thing is out of their purview.

*Of course, Rosemary’s Baby is one of my favorite movies of all time, a snapshot of my obsessions, and I’ll be damned if I have to pretend to hate it because Polanski is a rapist.

I read this article at Alternet with quite a bit of interest, because it’s about the evolving nature of censorship. One big question from the article is what’s the difference between censorship and discretion? In light of the recent debate about the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy, this is a subject that needs lots of revisiting, because I think confusion abounds.

The interviewee Robert Atkins classifies social pressure to self-censor as a form of censorship in and of itself, and strictly speaking, he’s probably right.

If you think back to communist East Germany, and the famous Stasi, the secret police that had people spying on their neighbors. When you make everybody a spy, then you, the government, don’t really have to worry about this. You engrain the standards of appropriateness in people already. We see that here with the Christian right — how quickly standards have changed about a reasonable interest in sex and sexuality.

Both these examples are pretty much designed to make those of us the left flinch, but he invokes elsewhere examples of liberals trying to drum up social disapproval in order to shame someone out of expressing offensive opinions, like when liberals (myself included) criticized the Danish newspaper that ran a series of cartoons mocking Mohammed, because they were mostly motivated by wanting to cause unnecessary problems.

That’s a pretty gray example, though, but the social disapproval method of censorship is pretty uncontroversial when it comes to things like arguing with people that make racist jokes. Most of us who do this are quite aware we’re not going to change the racist’s mind, at least not immediately, but the hope is by clarifying that these sentiments are socially unacceptable, we can change minds over the long term, or barring that, make their opinions so unacceptable they don’t have the power to woo other people.

There’s basically no way to get around the social pressure form of censorship–at all points in time, we’re expressing ourselves and that conveys to others what is appropriate and what is not, so in a weird way all people are helping censor others in all social interactions.

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Indecency complaints to the FCC are down. My goodness, what could have changed? Has TV quit selling sex and violence and even worse, the absolutely true suggestion that most Americans are not Bible-thumping misogynist sex-phobes? Beats me, I don’t have a TV. But according to this article, the answer is no, it’s something else.

Indecency complaints, while still at the top of the list in terms of complaints logged by consumers against radio and television each month, have dipped sharply since the fourth quarter of 2004 when election year politics and write-in and email campaigns were at a perceived all-time high.

But, but, but that doesn’t make any sense. Indecency on TV and the Presidential election had nothing to do with each other! It’s not like the President promised to scrub smut or non-Christians off TV or something. And even if he did, it’s not like writing letters to the FCC would have any bearing on whether he got re-elected or not. In fact, FCC letter-writing campaigns and elections have so little to do with each other that one might almost think that the whole point of groups like the AFA rallying people around the cause of bitching about some joke on “The Simpsons” or the hint of sex on other TV programs just might have been a way to distract people from some other issue that might actually be an important part of a Presidential campaign. But what could it be? Wasn’t there a war that we’re losing? Or some terrorist we didn’t catch? Weren’t our rights being chipped away or something? No wait, could it be that this country is in grave danger of an economic breakdown?

Nah, it couldn’t be those things, because that would mean that “family values” organizations are fronts for the Republican party that are using their followers like chumps and that’s just such a nasty, rude, porn liberal thing to say.

Through DED Space, a story about how some people in this country really aren’t grasping that even though their own personal savior is the Shrub doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to give up our 1st Amendment right to dissent.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,�? she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.�?

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

You read that right–the kid was given an assignment to do a project about one of his constitutional rights, and he chose a thumbs down photo. I’m nearly speechless at the layers of stupid that went into this. First and foremost, that a Wal-Mart employee summoned the police when he/she saw that the student didn’t like the President demonstrates that these sort of lessons in high school are critical. Perhaps if the Wal-Mart employee understood that it’s not only not a crime to deride the President, even if he is a Republican, it’s actually a protected right, he/she may have refrained from calling the authorities to stop the cherished right from being used. And maybe if the police realized that it’s legal to say that you dislike the President, they would have known better than to summon the Secret Service. And if the Secret Service had realized this kid was protected by the 1st Amendment, maybe they wouldn’t have hassled him and his teacher.

Frankly, I think everyone involved needs to take this woman’s class and maybe next time around, they’ll know better.

I have my pet theories as to why one of the enduring activities of the Wingnutteria is trying to ban books. Oh sure, there’s all the usual reasons–they’re anti-intellectual, they know that their worldview is so delicate it can’t withstand even the tiniest bit of challenge, their leadership is illiterate and is lashing out, whatever. (The last theory is actually my theory as to why Max was always either trying to knock books out of my hands or sit on them while I was reading–he’s jealous I can read and he can’t.) But I think there’s a deeper, more sinister reason that the Wingnutteria has it out for books–books are erotic.

Admit it, fellow nerds! Books turn you on. How many of us learned quite a bit about Eros while using the privacy afforded you behind the stacks at libraries? I’ve even had boyfriends who weren’t really readers who nonetheless caught onto this potential while accompany me to the library or bookstore–a grab here, a kiss there, no one can see anyway behind a pile of books. Every bibliophile I know likes the smell of books, and the reason isn’t just because the smell takes you back to that first time you laughed at loud to Jane Austen. ‘fess up. It’s not just the written word that gets your motor running, but just the idea of books.

Alright, alright. There’s other reasons that books are a subversive pleasure in the shiny new soulless wingnut America. For one thing, they are a private pleasure in a lot of ways. Or sure, we like to talk about books endlessly, but reading them is a pretty private activity. And wingnutttery is first and foremost about making sure you don’t have any privacy but that your life is lived for the perusal of others. Also, even as the price of books has gone up, it’s still a relatively cheap entertainment. A fat paperback novel costs the same as a movie tickets and you probably have to spend 4-5 times the amount of time with it to finish it, if you’re a fast reader. That there is anti-capitalist, and that’s not even getting into the commie practices of having public libraries, schools, and used book stores. And all that before even touching the stereotype of writers as a drinking, smoking, screwing, often atheistic lot of people, a stereotype that often has a touch of truth to it, at least with some of the more fun ones.

Oh yeah, there was a point to all this, which is this is the ALA’s Banned Books Week. According to Roxanne, book challenges were up 16% from last year, which I think we can safely assume has pretty much everything to do with the Amerian Taliban’s bizarre notion that because President Bush won in a squeaker that is characterized by all sorts of sleazy campaign tactics, they get to rule the world now. Here’s the list of the 100 most challenged books of the last decade. My guess is this decade is going to show even more books challenged for being “occultist” or other surefire signs that the person challenging the book has a very loose grip on reality.

Now that I’ve got myself all worked up about how much I love to read, which I haven’t being doing enough of lately, I think I’ll be heading over to the library and grabbing me some. Books, that is, you perverts. And if it wasn’t like 100 degrees every day this week, making tweed an impossibility, I’d be sporting the “sexy librarian” look in honor of the ALA.

Fact-esque has a really good post on some of the underlying issues with BushCo’s new enthusiasm for going after “obscenity”. She latches onto what I would say is going to make any pornography witchhunts a tad more problematic in the 21st century than in the 20th, by pointing out this sentence buried in the WaPo article about it.

Explicit sexual entertainment is a profit center for companies including General Motors Corp. and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (the two major owners of DirecTV), Time Warner Inc. and the Sheraton, Hilton, Marriott and Hyatt hotel chains.

Wonder if the Hilton hotel chain has gone into in-house production yet. Kidding, kidding. Anyway, how much do you want to bet that the above corporations are most definitely not on the short list of targets the FBI wants to go after? Beyond just the problem with government censorship, attacking the porn industry should be problematic for all us good liberals because it’s going to turn into another case of the the little guys being scapegoated.

On “Morning Sedition” today, one of the people on pointed out that there’s a political reason besides kissing the ass of the religious right to divert FBI resources to the all-important task of making spank videos possibly more expensive but probably not. This is a political stunt to make it look like BushCo harbors a competent person or two working for them. Basically, arrest some famous porn star, get all over the news, and argue that BushCo set out to do something–arrest a porn actress to make a statement–and they actually accomplished it. Voila! The massive failure to capture Osama bin Laden, all wiped out. At least in the minds of the Wingnutteria.

Granted, it’ll backfire because the majority of Americans, particularly those inclined who maybe spend a lot of time between pro-war blog posts beating off to downloaded porn videos, don’t really have a big huge problem with porn. Then again, Republicans have made an art of hypocrisy, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up too high.

Our site was down for a bit, but fear not - Pandagon has overcome the forces of evil, and rides again!

“Evil”, you say, perhaps questioningly? Yes, evil. I have it on good authority from a source in the liberal media that our site’s down time was a result of a joint assault by Fox News/al-Qaeda-trained mercenaries. They want to stand in the way of the truth, which we put out on a daily basis, despite the efforts of the radical right worldwide. It’s endemic of the hatred and inferiority of the conservative movement - they targeted this site, an important nexus in the fight against the MSM-terrorism connection, precisely because we’re on the cusp of something important, something brilliant.

As you may have also seen, during my struggle, I adopted a new name. No longer refer to me as “Jesse”, but instead as “Master Chief”. No, it’s not military - I just like Halo. I’ll put my army up against Captain Ed’s any day.

Alternet has an article on a company that sells DVD players that will edit movies for you, taking out scenes you find objectionable. Or should I say, not you, dear readers, since I’m sure this largely intelligent and liberal audience is in the habit of avoiding movies simply because they portray behavior or language you may not think is right with Jeebus. No, these DVD players exist so that wingnuts can remake movies in their own home to portray the world as they wish it were–no sex, no cursing, and maybe some righteous violence with no blood. And people are objecting, saying that these devices interfere with the director’s vision and the intregrity of the work. After long and careful thought, my opinion on this, at least today, is, “So what?”

I’m a big fan of remixed, mash-up, collage, whatever you want to call it kind of art, and I think fair use laws should be intrepreted very leniently, so that pretty much any artist has a right to swipe something from someone else and remake it as a commentary on the original art, its politics, whatever. And even though I think the political comment this company and its customers are making by reimagining these films is ludicrious–their political stance being that art should always lull, and never challenge–I can’t say that it isn’t political commentary that should be protected under fair use.

The article quotes a spokesperson who is against the reedited films.

Well, good. There are a number of parodies floating around of The Passion that reedit it to make a dramatically different political point than Gibson intended, usually to mock Gibson’s politics. I saw one that was gross and disturbing of the beatings interspersed with a porn film, but it was hysterical as well and got the point across very, very well about the religious right’s embrace of violence and disdain for sexual pleasure and how the two are related.

Sometimes the best way to comment on the politics of a certain artwork is to sample the art and remake it for yourself. There are people who make good points doing this and there are people that are artful when they do it. This company’s politics are repulsive and obviously there’s really not much art to the way they slice and dice, but they are still making a statement. I can’t but regard this as a freedom of speech issue and support their right to do it.

I sympathize mightily with the students from the Bakersfield high school district in California, since I too had to suffer from a principal who put the kibosh on anything I wanted to print in our high school paper other than “Cheerleading Rulz!” They wanted to run a feature on the lives of out gay and lesbian students, which the principal censored, citing “safety concerns”. (”Safety concerns” is the new meaningless phrase school officials use instead of “we prefer to hide our students away”.) Instead of acquiesing to censorship and needless shame, the students called the ACLU.

The principal claims that he’s only thinking of the safety of the gay students, whose parents have agreed to let them participate in the stories, and I call bullshit. These students want to put themselves out there so that other students can get to know them and their stories with the specific goal of reducing the sort of homophobia that creates gay-bashing. I’m reminded of Matt Ygelsias asking if it’s true that many people don’t even know any out gays or lesbians, and the answer sadly is yes. And it’s because of bullshit like this–shoving people into the closet and slamming the door on them. Most straight people know plenty of gays and lesbians, they just don’t know that they do and in that black hole of ignorance, a lot of hate is festering.

Not that all homophobes will lose the hate if they realize that they are already friends and neighbors with gays and lesbians, but I do think that it helps tremendously. Just as importantly, it stiffens the resolve of straights who think that discrimination against gays and lesbians is wrong if they know exactly how many people in their lives suffer from it. Stories like this that provide to homophobes and people teetering on the edge proof that gays and lesbians own pets, have friends, want jobs, want love, and are not blood-sucking monsters are a potent weapon in the fight against homophobia, especially now that we are under an onslaught of dehumanizing propaganda from the religious right.

Those of us who truly want to keep students and all people safe from gay-bashing know that the most important step is dismantling the social beliefs that encourage it, just like any other hate crime–the problem of lynching was addressed by fighting racism, after all, and rape can only be addressed by fighting the sexism at the heart of it. Anyone who sincerely wants to fight gay-bashing should be fighting homophobia, not aiding and abetting it.

The Constitution forbids a religious test, but one has to wonder if it would be okay to require a test in basic knowledge of what’s in the Constitution before someone was allowed to take office. Alabama Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus, for instance, should be informed that as much as he doesn’t like it, people have a right to criticize government policy. Yes, even Bill Maher retains the right.

Applying the muzzle to people who inform the public that the military is falling short of recruiting goals and that may just have a profound effect on the War on Terra would be politically convienent for Republicans, true, but it would be bad for the nation and for democracy, which (duh) requires an informed populace. How far into the wilderness have you wandered if you think that keeping the public informed so they can make better decisions is treason, but keeping them ignorant so as best run our country and our military into the ground on behalf of oil interests is the height of patriotism?

Via DED Space.