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#man was talking about free speech and censorship on the internet

90363462 · 1 year

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Elon Musk Now Owns Twitter and 6 Other Weird Facts – Is He The IRL Tony Stark?

Amy LamareOctober 28, 2022

*This article was updated on October 28, 2022.

It’s true. The unthinkable has happened:Elon Musk officially owns Twitter. Welcome to the wild, wild west of social media. The internet is exploding with the news and what will happen to one of the most popular social media platforms.

Elon Musk is everywhere lately. Twitter owner after a very drawn out, public, and complicated deal, SpaceX’s most recent rocket is in orbit, and he recently welcomed twins with an executive at one of his companies, just weeks after he welcomed a second child with his ex-girlfriend Grimes.

That’s a lot in one lifetime, but this is only a few months in the life of the Tesla co-founder.

RELATED: Elon Musk: The Life Story of the Boy Who Changed the Future

Even Musk’s dad made headlines for secretly fathering a second child with his stepdaughter (whom he raised from when she was four). Suffice it to say, it’s impossible to escape Elon Musk or the Musk name. Musk certainly knows how to make news and has a legion of devoted fans to prove it.

Musk has often been called the real-life Tony Stark. Love him, hate him, or even if you’re ambivalent towards him, he’s built an impressive resume during his 51 years as co-founder of PayPal, founder of space exploration company SpaceX, the head of luxury electric car company Tesla Motors, and now Twitter owner. He is a fascinating man who is unapologetically himself.

Elon Musk Buys Twitter

The Life of Elon Musk | Life Stories by Goalcast

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Musk’s first tweet after the purchase was, “The bird is freed!”

Musk, a free speech enthusiast has been vocal against what he considers “censorship that goes far beyond the law” and Twitter’s “left-wing bias.” Previously Twitter regulated tweets and banned users that were considered spreading hate speech or disinformation.

Other goals to “improve Twitter” include getting rid of bots and making the algorithm for how Twitter shows news available to everyone. No word yet on how these goals will be implemented.

Get ready for some changes, they are happening fast! In Musk’s first few hours as owner, he has fired Twitter’s company’s chief executive, Parag Agarwal; chief financial officer Ned Segal; general counsel Sean Edgett; and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust, and safety.

Elon Musk joined Twitter as @elonmusk in 2009 and is an active member of the social media platform. He’s at times amusing, at other times enigmatic, and at still other times, controversial. He frequently posts memes, trolls other users, promotes his various business endeavors, and comments on pop culture and politics. Musk’s Twitter bio reads: Mars & Cars, Chips & Dip. He has more than 100 million followers as of this writing.

The $44 billion dollar acquisition was a long time in the making. Musk talked about buying Twitter as early as 2017. He got serious about that plan in January 2022, when he started buying up shares of Twitter’s stock, amassing a 5% stake in the company in March. By the following month, he had a 9.13% share in the company, which made him the company’s largest shareholder. It looked like he might attempt a takeover of the company. When he revealed his position as Twitter’s largest shareholder, the company’s stock surged to the largest amount in one day since its IPO in 2013.

Musk began publicly debating Twitter’s freedom of speech (or in Musk’s eyes, lack thereof). He mused that he might start a rival site. By this time, he owned 7.5% of the company. Then on April 13, 2022, Musk offered $44 billion and launched a takeover bid to try and buy all of Twitter’s stock.

Twitter retaliated by putting a shareholder’s rights plan in place to make it harder for any one individual to own more than 15% of the company without approval from its board of directors. Musk offered $46.5 billion for Twitter. Immediately following that news, Tesla’s stock sank by more than $125 billion, causing Musk to lose $30 billion of his net worth.

RELATED: Elon Musk Says This One Habit Is the Secret to Becoming Successful

About a month after he made his intentions to take over Twitter clear, he put the deal on hold, claiming that too many of the site’s daily active users were spam accounts. This caused Twitter’s share price to fall by more than 10%.

In July 2022, Musk sent a notice of his termination of the deal to purchase Twitter. The company’s board of directors remain committed to holding Musk to his deal as of this writing and have filed a lawsuit against Musk in Delaware, citing his breach of a legally binding agreement to buy Twitter

Elon Musk’s Family and Education

Elon Reeve Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971 during the era of apartheid. His mother, Maye Musk, is a Canadian-born model. His father, Errol Musk, is an entrepreneur who, among other endeavors, was half-owner of a diamond mine in Zambia. Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, a sister, Tosca, as well as a stepsister, half-sister, and half-brother on his father’s side. His parents divorced in 1980, and after living with his father for a few years in his teens, became estranged from him.

Musk became interested in computers and video games as a kid. When he was 12, he created a videogame called Blastar and sold the code (he wrote it in BASIC) for $500. After high school, he applied to emigrate to his mother’s native Canada. While he waited, he enrolled at the University of Pretoria for a semester so that he could avoid mandatory service in the South African military.

RELATED: Elon Musk Says This Surprising Thing Helped Him Become A Billionaire, Offers Unusual Parenting Lesson In The Process

Musk moved to Canada in 1989 to attend Queen’s University in Ontario for two years. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a BA in physics and a BS in economics.

During the summer before his senior year, he worked two internships in California’s Silicon Valley. One was at a startup called Pinnacle Research Institute which was in the field of energy storage, and one was at Rocket Science Games. After graduating from Penn, he enrolled in Stanford University’s Ph.D. program in materials science. He dropped out after two days and decided he’d be better off taking advantage of this new thing called the internet and launching a startup.

Elon Musk’s Early Career

Elon Musk borrowed money from his father and founded Zip2, a software company, with his brother and friend Greg Kouri in 1995. Zip2 put together and sold an internet city guide for the newspaper industry, including yellow pages, maps, and directions. At this point in his life, Elon was broke and slept on the couch in his offices and showered at the local YMCA rather than renting an apartment, Vanity Fair reported.

RELATED: 3 Incredible Times Elon Musk Failed and Still Came out on Top

In 1999, the company Musk co-founded sold to Compaq for $307 million in cash. Musk owned seven percent of Zip2’s stock which was equal to $22 million. He was on his way to becoming the richest person in the world, and he was 28 years old.

Elon Musk’s Involvement With the PayPal Mafia

After the sale of Zip2 in 1999, Elon Musk immediately co-founded an online financial service and payment by email company called X.com. The company was one of the first online banks to be federally insured. In 2000, X.com merged with another online bank called Confinity to reduce competition.

Confinity was founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and had its own money-transfer service, called PayPal and Musk was the CEO. However, by September 2000, the board of directors replaced Musk with Thiel as CEO.

RELATED: How to be Successful: 16 Habits to Help You Succeed in Life

In September 2001 the company was renamed PayPal. eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock in 2002. Musk was once again the largest shareholder and his 11.72% of shares in PayPal were worth $175.8 million. Musk, Levchin, and Thiel are commonly referred to as the PayPal Mafia as all three went on to further and even greater successes.

How Did Elon Musk Get So Rich With SpaceX?

Elon Musk is a serial entrepreneur who is not only brilliant but also had the fortune of being in the right place at the right time (several times). Musk was fresh out of college when the first dot-com boom took place and Zip2 and PayPal were part of that.

After PayPal sold to eBay, Musk’s net worth was nearly $200 million. From there, he dove into his interest in space exploration and founded SpaceX in 2003. He identified and took advantage of the opportunities his life and career put him in the path of, including Tesla Motors.

The company was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Musk joined the company not long after, investing $6.5 million of his own money into the company, which made him the majority shareholder. As a result, Elon Musk was made the Chairman of the board of directors.

RELATED: What Is ‘BDE’ and What Are the Signs You Have It?

Musk is also the founder of several other companies including the neurotechnology startup company Neuralink, which aims to artificial intelligence chips that can be embedded in human brains to make it easier for people to merge with machines. He also founded The Boring Company, in 2017 to construct tunnels to improve heavy vehicular traffic.

We cannot talk about the facts about Elon Musk without mentioning his incredible $198 billion net worth. According to Celebrity Net Worth, this makes Elon Musk the richest person in the world. Musk owns 48% of SpaceX, valued at $46 billion, and 22% of Tesla, and in 2020 his net worth skyrocketed, increasing $142 billion that year.

Elon Musk Joins Tesla Motors

When Elon Musk was first Chairman of Tesla’s board of directors, he was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. However, conflicts between Martin Eberhard and the board of directors, coupled with the 2008 financial crisis, led to Eberhard being fired from the company he co-founded.

RELATED: Why Being Financially Organized Can Help Your Motivation and Emotional Well-Being

Musk was made the CEO in 2008. As Tesla CEO he oversaw the development of the Tesla model called the Roadster, an all-electric sports car in 2008. In 2017, the mass market sedan, the Model 2 was released and became the best-selling plug-in electric car in the world. Elon Musk is the longest-tenured CEO of a car company in the world.

Tesla made its IPO in 2010 and by 2020, was the most valuable carmaker in the world. In October 2021, Tesla had a market cap of $1 trillion, becoming just the sixth US-based company to reach that milestone. At Tesla Musk is changing the way the world perceives electric cars.

Elon Musk’s Relationships and Children

No look at facts about Elon Musk would be complete without a look at his relationships, marriages, and children. Musk met his first wife, Justine Musk (nee Wilson) while studying at Queen’s University in Canada. They married in 2002. Elon and Justine had six children. Their first child died at 10 weeks old of sudden infant death syndrome. In 2004 they had twins and in 2006 triplets via IVF. Elon and Justine divorced in 2008.

That same year, Elon began dating actress Talulah Riley. They married in 2010. In 2012, they divorced. The following year, in 2013, they remarried each other. In December 2014 he filed for divorce a second time, but that request was removed. Elon and Talulah divorced for the second and final time in 2016. He moved on to actress Amber Heard, whom he dated for a few months in 2017.

RELATED: Elon Musk Has a New Girlfriend, and the Quirky Way They Met Shows He’s a True Sapiosexual

In 2018, Musk revealed that he’d been dating musician Grimes. The couple’s first son, a son they named X AEA-XII, was born in 2020. In December 2021, the couple had a daughter named Exa Dark Sidrael via surrogate. Grimes and Musk broke up a few months before their daughter was born. Then, in July 2022, Insider published legal documents that revealed Musk and Neuralink executive, Shivon Zils, had twins together.

As of this writing, Elon Musk has nine children with three different women.

Lessons We Can Learn From Elon Musk’s Success

Elon Musk is incredibly successful. He knows his strength, what his value and interests are, and relentlessly pursues projects that he can dive into, grow the value of, and sell at a huge profit. Some people say he marches to the beat of his own drum, but that’s true of any truly successful person, especially creative ones. Musk may be an engineer at heart, but he’s also highly creative in the way he applies his strengths to his endeavors.

KEEP READING:

Elon Musk Shared the Most Refreshing, No-BS Productivity Tips with Tesla Employees

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mewtonian-physics · 2 years

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I know somewhat of what you think of armstrongs ideals, but what are your thoughts on JDs end speech? (If this takes a while to answer I understand msjad)

i mean it ranges from kind of reasonable to completely fucking insane

it actually starts insane, talking about having evolved over the last 200 years like it wasn't an ai conceptualized within the last fifty years. and acting like it's tied to the very existence of america rather than, again, an ai system that can easily be destroyed. the ai has what i'd almost call a god complex. very self-inflated ego, which is not what you'd expect from an ai

but i assume you were asking about the general ideals. a lot of it is hard to take in because it's so bizarre but i'll try to give my thoughts on what i can

the way it talks about how humans pass on information and culture in a similar way to genetics is actually really interesting. it's not something i ever thought of from that perspective, but it's not wrong. whether by human choice or random chance, only specific things have been passed on, the rest lost to time. but now, with things like the internet, it's that much easier for information to be kept preserved. it's no longer as important to focus on what should be passed on and what shouldn't be, because so much more can be kept (though even that is somewhat fragile, as anyone who's ever been the victim of ransomware can tell you). this allows for the preservation of small things like friends joking around or the random thoughts of all sorts of people, but it also makes it much easier to perpetuate truly dangerous lines of thought, which the ai points out. it's not wrong that a lot of harmful information is being preserved without any real hindrance, and it's not wrong that the misinformation and echo chambers ('convenient truths' as it says, 'everyone withdraws into their own small gated community') created as a result of how incredibly easy it is to share such information these days are causing horrific effects on society. also, it makes points about weird juxtapositions of morality ('billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans.' 'be nice to other people--' 'but beat out the competition.' telling people they're special and they can succeed if they believe in themselves when in reality it's just not that simple at all.)

so honestly it points out a lot of real problems--but its way of fixing that is censorship. um, i mean, 'creating context'. which is to say, choosing what is important and what should be discarded. worse than that, though, is the idea of taking what's decided to be important and then deciding how everyone should interpret--essentially using an ai to control human thought. in fact, that's outright stated, when raiden asks 'you want to control human thought? human behavior?' and the ai simply responds with 'of course. anything can be quantified nowadays.' they used raiden as a test subject to see if it was possible. that is their solution to all problems--simply take away free will. make humanity into machines being told what to think without any opposing ideas, and as such, doing exactly what the ai wants. it's pretty consistent with a surprising amount of metal gear antagonists, especially in raiden's character arc--they point out genuine issues, but their ideas on how to fix them are horrifying and packed full of human rights violations.

tl;dr you made some good points but man are you bad at problem solving

#ask #anon

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thefogoflife · 3 years

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I think a big friction point of the debate over the banning of Trump from Twitter boils down to one question: is social media considered a public good?

Because, here's the thing. Obviously, and this is from someone in the middle that tends to lean right, the majority of the nation and world has wished that he was banned. Regardless of whether or not you support Trump's policies, I think the majority of human beings can agree that he was petulant, unprofessional, and outright dishonest in his social media presence.

He shared dishonest and unreputable/extremist news sources (again, this is from someone that consumes conservative media, and I will say that Qanon, Breitbart, etc, is not acceptable for the leader of the free world, or generally most people, to post to the masses, especially as proof alongside actual journalistic sources), legitimizing them by being promoted by the president, giving them a mouthpiece to spread other dishonest or radical rhetoric.

He used his presence to interfere in the economy, by telling people not to buy from certain stores (the case I'm talking about is because Ivanka had a deal that fell through with the company, I forget which, and he was trying to influence it), which the president is not supposed to do.

He also conducted smear campaigns and constant barrages of insults at opponents of all kinds. Not thoughtful, heated debate, but just insults, which normalized it for both sides of the aisle and further destroyed bipartisan discourse.

Even if you only agree with me on one of these points being valid (even though all of them are true and documented), a president should do none of these things, as they're supposed to set the supreme example for not just the US, but for the free world to follow. Again, I'm not talking about policy, I'm talking about personal conduct.

So I think it's fairly established that most people think he deserves to be deplatformed, or even if they don't think he deserves it/is entitled to his rights, it's safe to assume they wish he would shut up, or tone it down and act more professionally. Essentially, if this man was acting this way on the internet and wasn't the president/representative of a party that includes half the nation, he would be an internet villain/pariah.

However, even if the majority of people wish he would shut up, or would love for him to be deplatformed, the reason this is being decried is because of the implications of the action. The president has been censored, and does that set a precedent that political censorship is now going to become commonplace? Political social media bans have almost exclusively been of conservatives, despite both sides committing egregious misconduct and unprofessionalism. I would chalk this up to the fact that social media users, as well as most founders, lean left, and therefore have a bias that makes the conduct seem unbalanced.

But I digress.

I personally am concerned about the precedent this sets as well, but simultaneously I've wanted that oaf to shut up for half a decade now (a big part of my candidate choice is how the conduct and carry themselves, as I care greatly for geopolitics and grand strategy, and professionalism is a vital component).

But the arguing about it isn't going to help solve anything. The argument we need to have is: is social media a public good? Or should it be run as a private company providing a service? If so, that means that censorship, even of the politically biased variety, is justified, as it is at the companies' discretion.

This, technically speaking, should be the free market/libertarian/libright perspective, as it promotes limited government and independent action of actors in a free market.

However, many conservatives seem to be abandoning this small government perspective because the precedent and implication for a dystopian censorship of only conservative entities (or maybe just strict censorship in general), is terrifying. The only way to mitigate this that I see would be to consider social media a public good, as then the companies would have to be held accountable in preserving constitutional rights. However, this could lead to a nationalization/federalization of social media, and then the state controls the flow of information, and we're right back at dystopia.

A further layer on this is, if social media is not a public good, is the internet? And if that answer is yes, then do these companies have obligation to preserve constitutional rights because they are dispensing their service via a public good?

I think these are the true questions, and important ones at that. I think that this discourse can be civil, as it has opportunity for the left to understand advocating free market/limited government policies to better society (letting social media companies act independently in order to be able to ban people at their discretion), and the right to understand advocating for government oversight/regulation to preserve freedoms (considering social media as a public good to hold companies accountable for the preservation of free speech).

It's a very weird, mirror world, inverted beliefs kind of scenario, but I think it is a really good starting point for civil discourse and the depolarization of politics, if the debate catches on.

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awed-frog · 3 years

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Do you think maybe banning that stuff from AO3 could be a good thing?

I don’t know. I don’t like censorship, and I think it’s very hard to know which stuff one should censor in the first place. I do wish some people would not share what they share, that’s for sure. I think maybe there should be a system that recognizes how long you’ve had a page open - sometimes people will open a fic with weird tags in a kind of Dead Dove moment then close it, but the result is that some truly upsetting works have a very high number of hits, which pushes them at the top of any search. And I also think that stuff that’s just porn shouldn’t be in the same place as other stuff. I know the distinction is problematic, but again - writers should be more honest about what they’re writing. A lot of things you find on AO3 are one-chapter PWPs or ‘one kink per chapter’ fics, and imo those don’t belong in the same category as a long fic with two explicit sex scenes in it. And also: maybe some tags should show up only if you’re specifically looking for them. Like, if a fic is tagged ‘castration’, then it only shows up in your search if you’re typing in “enemies-to-lovers, castration” so that if you type “enemies-to-lovers” you don’t get pretty weird porn you never asked for.

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I think people often underestimate the damages porn can do, and while movies are worse for lots of reasons (chief among them, the presence of real human performers who’re often abused on screen, or whose work is shown and sold without their permission), fiction is not great either. It can still normalize stuff that shouldn’t be normalized, and desensitize us to stuff we should find unusual, unacceptable or shocking.

And while fanfiction is not the whole problem here (published books are doing what they can to close the gap), I think it is still part of the problem.

(Anyway: I say porn, but there is a lot of other stuff that’s harder to catch but a lot more dangerous - mostly the way some ‘romances’ are written.)

Most of all, I wish that people would stop spreading these ideas:

1) It’s okay because it’s not real. Yeah, no. Fiction matters, it shapes how we see the world and how we respond to it. Obviously this is more complicated than *sees Se7en, becomes serial killer*, but fiction is central in our life as humans and that should not be taken lightly.

2) It’s okay because trauma. As far as I know, there is zero research into who writes and reads the most extreme stuff out there, and even if those were all trauma survivors working through their stuff and not, say, people who get off on child porn or whatever else, there is still no reason to put that stuff out there.

3) It’s okay because Nabokov. A sex scene in a book (or long fic) is very different from a PWP, or a story built around porn. I’m not a prude, and I don’t think all porn is necessarily bad, but comparing some of the filth that’s out there to the Decameron is a bit much.

4) It’s okay because libraries. This is what irritates me the most. Libraries don’t keep everything, and they don’t keep everything for a reason. If you ask for white supremacy propaganda, for instance, you’re likely not to find anything unless it’s a university library, in which case it will be a heavily annotated edition and not simply a random ‘Jews are bad’ pamphlet. And another thing: a librarian won’t say, ‘Since you enjoyed If This Is A Man, try Mein Kampf.’ People recognize the two works are different even if they can both be tagged as ‘history, memoir, WW2, holocaust’. AO3 doesn’t do this (and as far as I understand it, it’s a deliberate choice). If you enjoy Coffeeshop AUs, it will happily offer you a fic that’s 90% about bestiality set in a Starbucks. And I know the argument - readers should search better - but the thing is, 1) I won’t necessarily know what I don’t want to read and 2) some stuff is just tagged the same when it comes to the main tags, but obviously it doesn’t mean the two stories are similar in any way.

5) It’s okay because free speech. Well: free speech has limits. We regulate some of it, as there are laws against hate speech, genocide deniers, Neo-Nazis, threats, bullying, harassment, and a lot of other things. So free speech doesn’t mean you get to regurgitate whatever bs into the world.

6) Children are old enough to protect themselves. Literally no, they are not. Any sane person should recognize a child is not an adult and that there are certain choices about his life he shouldn’t get to make (for instance, you wouldn’t allow a child of 12 to join the army no matter how much he begged you). Now the internet has become a central tool for education and lots of stuff of everyday life, it’s absurd that we ask children to do the right thing and that’s it. I mean, you wouldn’t have a bakery near a school sell meth by the croissants and then be like ‘It’s labelled as meth! I asked this kid if he truly wanted it and he said yes, it’s not my job as a random adult to decide stuff for him!’. Like - what the fuck? In a way, yes, it is your job. Children are raised by the entire community. We should do what we can to make sure they have more good choices than bad, and in my opinion that includes not having stuff that’s objectively awful freely available and sitting right next the cuddly and fluffy stuff.

(A stupid example from real life: this school I taught at had a convenience store next to it, and some kids would sneak in there during breaks to buy energy drinks. While that’s legal, and it was also allowed for them to leave the school grounds, energy drinks still have a lot of caffeine and are not healthy for 13-yo kids. After this happened regularly with the same kids for about a month, the owner refused to sell them anymore of the stuff and went to talk to the teachers instead. The school started a whole project - on the one hand, they had kids doing science experiments and learning why energy drinks are bad, and on the other, they offered support and free breakfast to anyone who needed it - and specifically to those who normally skipped a meal because their families had to leave for work very early - and the gorging on energy drinks and chips at 10am stopped.)

I don’t know. I’m very conflicted about this. I wrote fanfiction and though my style is pretty consistent, I know my own stuff has issues. There are days I reconsider even having it out there, tbh, especially when I got yelled out for forgetting to tag something or I see a particularly callously libertarian pro-AO3 post, but rn I don’t have the time or energy to make a decision about that.

I just wish we would all think of each other a bit more, that’s all.

#ask #discourse #untagged #i already know people don't agree #so i'm not looking to start arguments

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hidetothink · 3 years

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twitter. com/ALLIANCELGB/status/1375840337650933767 They literally posted this article that says even LGB conversion therapy should stay legal

Christ, from the author alone they should have known better than to link that. Murray doesn't seem like someone concerned with LGB interests in the slightest. The man is a self-identified neoconservative, I'm not surprised that he has a apathetic-at-best view on conversion therapy

On one hand, I can understand the logic of an LGB person in the UK supporting this criticism of a conversion therapy ban. Understand, but deeply disagree

For one, the arguement that "people will just do it anyway" is weak. I dont agree when it's about gun safety, men in women's restrooms, or here. Any law could be critiqued with "people will do it anyway!" We still ban and punish murder because the importance of a law is not reduced by the inevitable breaking of it, IMO at least

The more complex issue is comments about an affirmation model. I dont support the current affirmation model around gender identity and dysphoria as described by the detransitioned/desisting women I've listened to. So, I can understand someone turning that around on ME with an example of a het-married man considering if he's gay and whether I would be supportive of an affirmation only model THEN

1). There are some very black and white perspectives here? I would not consider it conversion therapy for a psychiatrist to speak with an anxious, het-married man about his sexuality with an open mind that this man really could be homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. It doesn't have to be a choice between "anyone who thinks they're gay IS GAY" VS. "We can NEVER ban ANY psychiatric discussion of homosexuality, no matter how steeped in homophobic thinking"

Maybe I'm just ignorant of the legal complications, but a balance feels possible and necessary. I myself don't FULLY support a "you think you're gay you are" mindset either. I already critique that among heterosexuals and bisexuals claiming homosexuality erroneously. There's a difference between "gay is good (so if you are gay, you're a-okay" and "if you suspect you're gay I will say this must be true, affirmation only." That reality doesn't seem to be coming across here

2). The situation described above, a het-married man wanting to discuss possible same-sex attraction, isn't what proponents of a conversion therapy ban are talking about. There's a huge difference between a therapist agreeing to talk with someone about their sexuality (with intentional neutrality that combats societal homophobia and heterosexism), and a therapist specifically working with a client to change or suppress attraction to the same sex

This logic sounds like someone who would call conversion therapy ANY attempt to alter sexuality, as though there's some legion of heterosexuals desperate to become homosexual so God can love them

3). The way conversion therapy entered my life was not through accredited therapy, religious camps, or other methods that could be...feasibly(?) shut down by a conversion therapy ban. Preventing what happened to me would require entirely blacklisting the topic across the internet, publishing, and public speaking. That's...a big fish. Censorship at that level, even for an objectively good cause, sets a scary precedent. Not wrong, but heavy

Having my gender-critical views silenced so completely across the internet, or made into a justification to ruin my career, has impacted my views on free speech. I'd have to make an entire post just to tackle that beast

I digress

In all, I'm incredibly disappointed in LGBA's choice to give this man a mic, and I disagree with the logic behind the arguement, while understanding WHY some LGB people support it

I'm definitely not interested in defending this tweet or whatever reasoning went into it, not with past trauma involving conversion therapy. Thank you messaging! I still support my reasoning for why gay people would be concerned about banning "conversion therapy" around gender dysphoria, i.e. preventing criticism of the current affirmation model that's hurting LGB men and women. However, that's not what's happening in this tweet, not enough for me at least

#sorry for the long post #cant add a read more from mobile for some reason #writing between chaos at work

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creepingsharia · 3 years

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Congresswoman Dingell (D-MI) urges Facebook to pro-actively eradicate ‘100% of anti-Muslim content before it is even seen'

In other words, the pro-active enforcement of Islamic sharia law.

Facebook already bans the majority of content that exposes jihad and sharia and FB recently hired a member of the Muslim Brotherhood to its oversight board.

Congresswoman Dingell to Facebook: Eradicate Anti-Muslim Content On Your Platform

WASHINGTON, D.C. December 15, 2020 – Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI) today urged immediate action from Facebook to eradicate anti-Muslim bigotry from the platform and demanded Mark Zuckerberg implement six measures to combat bigoted content. In a letter signed by 29 colleagues, Dingell cited instances of anti-Muslim content on Facebook and recent reports showing the role of the platform in inciting violence against the Muslim community.

In her letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Dingell asked for Facebook to implement the following measures:

Form a working group comprised of senior staff focused on anti-Muslim bigotry issues and responsible for coordinating work within the company to address hate groups, tropes, bigoted content, and anti-discrimination training.

Enforce your hate content and hate group policies in a way that ensures militias and white supremacists cannot use your event and group pages to terrorize targeted communities.

Committing to an independent third-party review of the company’s role in enabling anti-Muslim violence, genocide and internment.

Strive towards and commit to a 100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content and all other forms of hate before it is even seen.

Commit to regular anti-discrimination training for your entire staff world-wide

Training key staff on civil rights issues and common words, phrases, tropes or visuals used by hate actors to dehumanize and demonize Muslims.

“We thank Congresswoman Dingell and her colleagues for holding Facebook accountable for the harm it has inflicted on American Muslims here and Muslims abroad,” said Scott Simpson, Public Advocacy Director of Muslim Advocates. “Just last week, we learned that not only did the Christchurch shooter use Facebook to livestream his slaughter, he also was a member of multiple anti-Muslim hate groups on the platform. Anti-Muslim hate has consequences and Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg must finally take action to stop it from proliferating on their platform.”

Dingell’s letter was signed by Debbie Dingell, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson. Carolyn B. Maloney, Ilhan Omar, Jahana Hayes, Max Rose, Barbara Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Bobby L. Rush, Daniel T. Kildee, Jared Huffman, Kathy Castor, Gwen S. Moore, Lauren Underwood, Jan Schakowsky, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Pocan, Grace Meng, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Darren Soto, Donald S. Beyer Jr., James P. McGovern, Peter Welch, Jamie Raskin, Pramila Jayapal, Yvette D. Clarke, Raúl M. Grijalva, Earl Blumenauer, and Nydia M. Velázquez. Additionally, her letter has received the support of the following organizations: CODEPINK, Common Defense, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Networks Group, Jetpac, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, Justice for Muslims Collective, MomsRising, National Iranian American Council, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Project South, ReThinking Foreign Policy, and National Network for Arab American Communities.

To read the full letter, please click here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Daniel Greenfield provides some context:

30 House Democrats go to war against the First Amendment

Considering the letter’s call for, "100 percent proactive detection and removal of anti-Muslim content", the safe assumption would be that they want to ban everything critical of Islam.

That's a disturbing attack on the First Amendment coming from 30 House members.

Democrats have repeatedly pressured Facebook and other social media companies to remove speech they politically disapprove of, whether by President Trump or other conservatives, eroding the thin line between private companies acting on their own initiative and government officials conspiring to violate the First Amendment by banning certain kinds of political speech.

After multiple hearings, legal proposals, and legislative threats, it’s no longer possible to view Facebook’s censorship of political speech as anything other than government censorship. When enough pressure by government officials has been applied to a company to censor certain kinds of speech, the company’s decision to censor speech becomes government censorship.

30 House members would now like Facebook to censor criticism of Islam and political protests against Islamic terrorism. One of the few examples of anti-Muslim content in the House letter was a political protest against the Islamic Society of North America’s 2019 conference.

That was the conference which included an appearance by two Democrat presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Julian Castro, whose forum was moderated by Salam Al-Marayati, the head of MPAC, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah. Also participating in a round table at the conference was Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing, who has defended the Islamic mandate to kill gay people.

This is the sort of information that AOC, Omar, and 28 other House Democrats, want banned.

House Democrats trying to shut down protests targeting their own candidates is a blatant violation of the First Amendment which was meant to prevent exactly that kind of thing.

And the party of social justice wants to stop Americans from protesting against an Imam who says things like, ”Brothers and sisters, you know what the punishment is, if a man is found with another man? The Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one to whom it is done to, kill them both.” What happens when ‘anti-Muslim content’ meets anti-gay content?

The 30 House Democrats don’t want to talk about any of this which is why their letter doesn’t.

...

And if that's not enough, there's an independent third-party review of Facebook’s compliance.

CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups would be brought in to define what “anti-Muslim content” is and then senior staff, approved of by CAIR and its allies, would set moderation policies to suppress “tropes” used by “hate actors” like Jihad, Sharia, Taqiyya, and terrorism.

...

The more Democrat officials lay out the kind of censorship they would like internet platforms to perform, the more the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech becomes a dead letter. And this letter, signed by 30 House Democrats, is a new threat to our freedom of speech.

America does not have blasphemy laws. And politicians are not allowed to ban speech they don’t like. The letter to Facebook makes it more urgent than ever that our elected officials find ways to protect the marketplace of ideas from political censorship by Democrats and Facebook.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Spencer concludes:

Rep. Debbie Dingell Demands Facebook Remove Criticism of Islam

...Dingell and her henchmen are demanding that Facebook implement policies that will institutionalize and universalize such fascist hysteria. Even worse, the political climate is so rancid today that

Dingell will pay no political price either for her association with Hamas-linked CAIR or for her open opposition to the freedom of speech

. If she doesn’t know that Hamas-linked CAIR and its allies have for years been demonizing and stigmatizing honest discussion of the motivating ideology behind jihad terrorism as “anti-Muslim,” and that her demands will also likely result in the silencing of such discussion, she should know it.

Dingell is actively aiding an endeavor to silence all criticism of Islam, which is all smeared in the same way, and enabling the tacit acceptance of Sharia blasphemy law, which forbids such criticism. She is, in short, the very definition of a useful idiot.

------------------------

Or a traitor failing to uphold her oath to the U.S. Constitution.

#Islam #Muslim #Sharia #Legal #Law #News #Media #Terror #1A #FreeSpeech #Politics #Religion #Immigration #Life

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charliejrogers · 4 years

Text

Gone With the Wind (Or, Why are we still talking about this?)

Beyond the second Godfather, Titanic, Avengers: Endgame, The Irishman, and Tarantino at his most indulgent (The Hateful 8) my experience with films over the 180-min mark is rather paltry. I haven’t seen many of those epic “classics” of days past, not because of disinterest, just lack of time. I’ll get to you yet, Doctor Zhivago! But that’s not the case for Gone With the Wind: I just never had any interest. Though I love Titanic, I never had interest in watching a four-hour love story from the 1930s. And for all it’s praise, I never knew anyone who had seen it, nor did I hear a lot of praise about it on online forums/websites. Perhaps because the internet tends to dominated by male voices who would rather tout gangster films than the passionate drama I was led to believe this film was. In sum, I just sort of took it for granted that Gone With the Wind was some all-time classic, but one which I would just never get around to seeing, and I was ok with that.

That changed in 2018, when Spike Lee used a scene from the film to start his own movie BlacKkKlansmen. Before this, I had never known there was ever any controversy surrounding a move that was supposedly as good if not better than Casablanca. Lee used the scene from Gone With the Wind (in addition to a scene from The Birth of a Nation) to criticize the way Hollywood has long served as a bastion for white supremacy, giving voice and platform to hateful speech and thoughts. In the case of Gone With the Wind, that means a work which embodies those hateful thoughts, and yet has been celebrated and praised despite doing so ad nauseum for 80+ years. At that point, I lost even more interest in the film, now not wanting to watch a racist movie.

Fast-forward to 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (among many other Black people killed by police recently and throughout American history) when HBO is under severe controversy for first putting Gone With the Wind on its streaming service, and then subsequently under more controversy for taking it down. A debate took place about censorship, free speech, and the other bullshit conservatives use to sustain their own beliefs while hypocritically arguing against when things don’t go their way. Regardless, for myself, in order to enter into the debate informed I felt like I wanted to know what the hubbub was all about. Frankly, I was curious to see why a movie that was so obviously racist was so adored.

Three hours and forty-five minutes later, I’m not really that sure. On the one hand, putting myself in the shoes of an audience member in 1939, the first half would have blown me away, with the drama taking place in Georgia at the very start of the Civil War up through its grand destruction under General Sherman. The colors and cinematography capturing the landscape of Georgia are just downright beautiful , unlike anything that had been in films prior. Yes, it’s not the first movie to be shot in color (nor was the Wizard of Oz which came out just 4 months prior), but I can’t imagine films before this were as devastatingly beautiful. Everything from the colors of the women’s dresses to the multiple picture-perfect sunsets pops out and catches your eye, and not in the fairytale, bubblegum way of Wizard of Oz. Gone With the Wind captures the natural beauty and colors of our world, and put it on display in a grand way. The cinematography really deserves every praise it gets.

The recurrent motif of characters’ shadows being casted onto the wall behind them during key emotional scenes was one I never tired of. Not only are the shadows beautifully captured by the camera, but, especially in a movie where every character seems to have a secret passion they refuse to express, the shadows strip away all our external beauties (make-up, facial features, dresses, and all the stuff this film has in spades), leaving us with figures that are still obviously human and whose feelings are immediately understood. All that is needed to convey grief is to see two shadows with the heads hung low.

The other positives of this film? Clark Gable is a handsome fucking man. He walks the fine line of confidence and smug so well that few others than, say, Brad Pitt could have ever performed the role of Rhett Butler so well. I particularly loved how he portrayed his relationship with his daughter, and the genuine love he showers upon her. Yes, he obviously spoils the child, but he’s so charming and so sincere that rarely have I seen such devoting love from father to daughter on screen, even 80 years later. As one character says, “there must be a great deal of good in a man who would love a child so much.”

But Rhett’s also kind of a despicable human being. He’s a brutish MAN, who loves his daughter because she is someone he can finally “completely own,” (an interesting choice of words said by a Southerner just after the Civil War) which is indicative of his philosophy towards love. Yes, love should be reciprocal, but his idea that his wife should exist in strict subservient, obedient love to him is ridiculous, yet he pursues it like it’s his right. He is otherwise prone to petty jealousy and drunkenness, and he is emotionally abuse toward his wife, Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). It’s uncomfortable today to watch these scenes of abuse, like where he threatens to crush her skull to get the thoughts of another man out of her head, or where, after O’Hara makes abundantly clear that she never wants sex with Butler again, he in a drunken fit picks her up in order to carry her to bed, saying essentially “I know you said you didn’t want to but I’m going to fuck you.” After such deplorable behavior in a movie today, there would at least be ambiguity about Butler’s character or morality. Nope, not here. We see O’Hara the next morning essentially elated by the burst of passion that just a few hours earlier she was dreading and resisting. Throughout everything, Butler is held up as one of the film’s main heroes, growing from the film’s start as a noble rapscallion who values money too much and gradually evolves into a war hero who earns his people’s respect by protecting his people (and we’ll for argument’s sake just ignore that “protecting his people” means protecting men accused of doling out vigilante, lynch-mob justice which we can only assume implies the KKK). In sum, he’s a complex and charismatic character played wonderfully by Gable, but a character nevertheless that is problematic and would have been better served by a film as willing to highlight these problems as they are willing to highlight them in the film’s protagonist Scarlett O’Hara.

Yes, I’m a thousand words in, and I haven’t even started talking about the actual main character. The movie, for as much as it is discussed as being a love story between O’Hara and Butler or an ode to the Old South, is more a coming-of-age tale (in its first half) and a character study (in its second) focused on O’Hara. She starts the film out a vain, self-indulgent belle of the ball, but faced with the horrors of war and subsequent poverty, she becomes an embodiment of the rotten side of the American Dream: greedy, self-indulgent, and out-of-touch with the world she came from. I suppose that at the end of the film, abandoned by her husband, having lost both of her children, as well as her best friend, O’Hara’s revelation that she should return home to her family’s plantation is supposed to be suggest that she will seek redemption and give up her excesses. That’s fine with me, but I’m not sure the film deserves to just end it there and not allow us to see if she actually earns that redemption. I’m not saying I want MORE Gone With the Wind, just that the story feels incomplete in telling O’Hara’s full story arc.

Still, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching O’Hara’s tale unfold. It is always somewhat refreshing to watch film from decades’ past that refuse to present stories that are morally simple (not that I think people in the 30’s were incapable of complex morality, just that movies at the time tend to reflect more simple black-and-white values). To that extent, O’Hara is not a simple character, and is actually quite fascinating. She’s a ruthless capitalist and opportunist, much in the vain of her male counterpart, Butler. I’m curious to know how, for a country just starting to crawl its way out of the Depression and which in just a few short years would see the rise of Rosie the Riveter women, how O’Hara’s devotion to never be in poverty ever again (even if she has to “lie, steal, cheat, or kill”!) was perceived by audiences. Specifically, released at a time when gender norms were all but fixed, I wonder how men thought of her taking advantage of, and almost weaponizing, her femininity for her advantage, marrying three times not out of love but to better herself and survive. Yet, hypocritically she clings to the ideals of femininity of the past. Her use of her femininity to survive she accepts, yet she abhors the film’s stereotypical heart-of-gold prostitute for her moral licentiousness despite her good nature.

Throughout the film, especially in the later half, it was unclear to me how much we as the audience were supposed to like or dislike O’Hara. Yes, she’s hard-working, resilient, and acts heroically multiple times in the film. But she’s also kind of a child til the very end, obscenely jealous, while also cold and calculating, counting down the days til her best friend dies so that she can sleep with her husband. I liked that ambiguity. It made her feel like a real person. To some degree Leigh’s performance as O’Hara is undercut by histrionics and bouts of “hysteria” that were more common in film performances from that time, but which seem a little annoying and grating today. But damn if it isn’t a great performance, display the full emotional range in this film, from buoyantly bright and cheery, to desperate and despaired.

So yeah, I guess I do get why it’s considered a classic, or at least why it made such a splash in 1939. There was nothing like it! The cinematography is great, its characters are fascinating, complex, and engrossing, and the performances (by Gable in particular) are wonderful. But the elephant in the room, then but especially now, is that… damn… this movie is racist, like in its DNA. They double down on this at the VERY START! The fourth shot of the movie (FOURTH!), after first showing a sign announcing the studio who produced the film, then a look at the plantation-like building bearing the studio’s name, and finally some clouds at daybreak, is of slaves tending to crops. The image is set to a triumphant score while the overlaying text tells us that the movie will be based on Margaret Mitchell’s “Story of the Old South.” This is not done ironically. With the beautiful landscape and music, we as audience are to think, “Wow, what a great time this was.” At the end of the opening credits, the prologue text tells us that the antebellum South was the last in a long line of great lands. It’s the last time “gallantry” would exist, and “the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, or Master and of Slave.” Holy Shit. As if “Master and Slave” is something to celebrate?! “Those damn Yankees would destroy such a beautiful world!” the film argues. Again… not presented ironically. It’s pretty jarring.

That said, I do want to say that to a minimal degree that film is right when it just presents War (with a capital W) in general as a destructive force that either destroys lives outright, or destroys enough property to send lives to ruin. That’s a truth propagated by media as far back as the Iliad, and is sometimes shown effectively here, such as the oft-discussed slow-pan show of the countless Confederate bodies lying dead on the ground mid-way through the film. It’s a depressing sight on an apolitical human level. But, at the same time, the movie’s inability and refusal to address the reason those bodies are there in the first place (racist need to continue slavery), and instead obliquely suggest that the Antebellum South was without any suffering until those damn Yankees brought them ruin is, frankly, insulting and disgusting. It outright ignores the suffering of Black people in favor of highlighting the suffering of whites. A tale unfortunately told ab aeterno in America.

I know others can, have, and will say more about the treatment of Black characters within the film and how they serve only to reinforce negative stereotypes. Mammy, despite being wonderfully acted by Hattie McDaniel, and other house slaves are presented as being eternally grateful to have been enslaved to their white masters, so much so that even after the war they continue to serve them --- because why would they ever want to do differently?! (the film seemingly asks and answers). After the war, Scarlett is more than willing to accept that her lumber mill should be worked by convicts who will be paid less than other workers and suffer harsh treatment, arguing that it is no different than slavery and that has always been ok. WHAT?! And Prissy, the slave who reassures Scarlett that she knows everything about birthing babies, up until the point where her knowledge is needed and she turns out to be nothing more than an airheaded twit, has to be one of the ugliest depictions of a slave I have seen. Particularly, she serves little more than really bad comic relief… with the joke seemingly just being “wow look at how stupid and annoying slaves were.”

This is more than I intended to write, so I won’t go on, but I think everything I had to say has been said. It’s a beautifully shot film, with rich, deep, and complex characters that would be even better served in a movie more willing to dive into the moral ambiguity of their characters, and for Butler in particular not bend over backwards to make him look like a good guy. And I get why it made such an impact 80 years ago, especially in that first half where there’s all the excitement of war and some notable action set-pieces. But even taking out the significant problems the movie has with race, it’s hard for me to understand anyone considers this essential viewing for anyone today besides those with an interest in cinematography, film history, or interested in how race is presented on screen. Its proto-feminist Scarlett O’Hara and her role within an evolving economy and evolving societal ideas of what “love” is are interesting, but they certainly not things that are worth the average viewer’s nearly four hours’ worth of time. It’s a museum piece, one that captured the spirit of a time (and the decades beyond it) where Hollywood felt it was completely OK to romanticize life under slavery, and bemoan its destruction by Yankees. If you want to see this museum piece, go ahead, but don’t let anyone convince you it’s one of the all-time greats.

***/ (Three and a half out of four stars)

Capsule Review: Long movie with great performances and beautiful cinematography... also racist to its core.

#gone with the wind #clark gable #vivien leigh #this movie is racist

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isslibrary · 4 years

Text

New Library Material December 2019 - April 2020

Bibliography

Sorted by Call Number / Author.

155.9 T

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the screen : identity in the age of the Internet. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, c. 1995. Introduction : identity in the age of the Internet -- pt. 1. The seductions of the interface -- A tale of two aesthetics -- The triumph of tinkering -- pt. 2. Of dreams and beasts -- Making a pass at a robot -- Taking things at interface value -- The quality of emergence -- Artificial life as the new frontier -- pt. 3. On the Internet -- Aspects of the self -- TinySex and gender trouble -- Virtuality and its discontents -- Identity crisis.

230 L

Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author. The C.S. Lewis signature classics. First Harpercollins Paperback Edition published 2001. Set contains 8 vols: 1)Mere Christianity; 2)The Screwtape Letters; 3)Miracles; 4)A Grief Observed; 5)The Great Divorce; 6)The Problem of Pain; 7)The Abolition of Man; 8)The Four Loves.

302 G

Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963- author. Talking to strangers : what we should know about the people we don't know. First edition. Introduction : "Step out of the car!" -- Part I. Spies and diplomats : two puzzles. Fidel Castro's revenge ; Getting to know der Führer -- Part II. Default to truth. The queen of Cuba ; The holy fool ; Case study : The boy in the shower -- Part III. Transparency. The Friends fallacy ; A (short) explanation of the Amanda Knox case ; Case study : The fraternity party -- Part IV. Lessons. KSM : what happens when the stranger is a terrorist? -- Part V. Coupling. Sylvia Plath ; Case study : The Kansas City experiments ; Sandra Bland. In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, New Yorker writer Gladwell (The Tipping Point) aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers-to "analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence.

305.42 G

Gates, Melinda, 1964- author. The moment of lift : how empowering women changes the world. Introduction -- The lift of a great idea -- Empowering mothers: maternal and newborn health -- Every good thing: family planning -- Lifting their eyes: girls in schools -- The silent inequality: unpaid work -- When a girl has no voice: child marriage -- Seeing gender bias: women in agriculture -- Creating a new culture: women in the workplace -- Let your heart break: the lift of coming together -- Epilogue.

306.3 A

Anderson, S. E. (Sam E.). The Black holocaust for beginners. Reprint ed. Danbury, CT : For Beginners LLC, c1995.

306.36 H

Hurston, Zora Neale, author. Barracoon : the story of the last "black cargo" First edition. Foreword : Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief: reading Barracoon: the story of the last "black cargo" / by Alice Walker -- Introduction -- Barracoon : Preface -- Introduction -- The king arrives -- Barracoon -- Slavery -- Freedom -- Marriage -- Kossula learns about law -- Alone -- Appendix : Takkoi or Attako: children's game ; Stories Kossula told me ; The monkey and the camel ; Story of de Jonah ; Now disa Abraham fadda de faitful ; The lion woman -- Afterword and additional materials / edited by Deborah G. Plant -- Founders and original residents of Africatown -- Glossary. "In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture."--Publisher's website.

342.73 C

The Founding Fathers & Paul B. Skousen. The Constitution & The Declaration of Independence. Salt Lake City, UT : Izzardink, 2016; 2017.

342.73 P

The Know your Bill of Rights book. First edition. United States : Oculus Publishers, Inc, 2013.

364.1 H

Hate crimes. 1. Hate as part of society : -- Defining hate -- What we investigate -- FBI releases 2018 hate crime statistics -- Learn more about hate crimes -- The U.S. finally made lynching a Federal crime -- Hate-crime violence its 16-year high, FBI reports -- Mail bombs, hate crimes, and he meaning of terrorism -- 2. Causes and responses : -- Entering an era of rising hate crimes -- Trump and racism: what do the data say? -- American Islamophobia in the age of Trump: the global war on terror, continued? -- Steve Scalise: don't blame Trump for mass shootings -- Did counties hosting a Trump rally in 2016 see a 226% spike in hate crimes? -- "We need to evolve": police get help to improve hate crime tracking -- The FBI's new approach to combating domestic terrorism: straight talk -- Congressman Serrano and Senator Casey introduce the Stop Hate Act to address the rise in hate crimes through social media -- 3. Hate laws and the Constitution : -- The limits of Free Speech -- Is the cure of censorship better than the disease of hate speech? -- The limits of Free Speech for White Supremacists marching at the Unite the Right 2, explained -- Hate speech and hate crime -- the El Paso shooting revived the Free Speech debate. Europe has limits -- Portland considers Antimask Law aimed at Antifa violence -- Free Speech can be messy, but we need it -- Should we treat domestic terrorists the way we treat ISIS? -- 4. Prevention, outreach, and training : -- Schools as safe places for learning -- Hate crime in America policy summit -- Hate in schools: an in-depth look -- Political correctness and anti-Jewish bias mar first draft of California's Ethnic Studies curriculum -- Justice Department commemorates 10th anniversary of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- 5. The role of the media and big tech : -- The connected society -- How Journalists cover mass shootings: research to consider -- In Congressional hearing on hate, the haters got their way -- A campus murder tests Facebook clicks as evidence of hate -- The media botched the Covington Catholic story -- Hate speech on social media: global comparisons -- How Big Tech can fight White Supremacist terrorism: it has the tools- it just needs to use them.

364.15 K

Kantor, Jodi, 1975- author. She said : breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a movement. The first phone call -- Hollywood secrets -- How to silence a victim -- "Positive reputation management" -- A company's complicity -- "Who else is on the record?" -- "There will be a movement" -- The beachside dilemma -- "I can't guarantee I'll go to DC" -- Epilogue: The gathering. For many years, reporters had tried to get to the truth about Harvey Weinstein's treatment of women. Rumors of wrongdoing had long circulated. But in 2017, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey began their investigation into the prominent Hollywood producer for the New York Times, his name was still synonymous with power. During months of confidential interviews with top actresses, former Weinstein employees, and other sources, many disturbing and long-buried allegations were unearthed, and a web of onerous secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements was revealed. These shadowy settlements had long been used to hide sexual harassment and abuse, but with a breakthrough reporting technique Kantor and Twohey helped to expose it. But Weinstein had evaded scrutiny in the past, and he was not going down without a fight. He employed a team of high-profile lawyers, private investigators, and other allies to thwart the investigation. When Kantor and Twohey were finally able to convince some sources to go on the record, a dramatic final showdown between Weinstein and the New York Times was set in motion. Nothing could have prepared Kantor and Twohey for what followed the publication of their initial Weinstein story on October 5, 2017. Within days, a veritable Pandora's box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened. Women all over the world came forward with their own traumatic stories. Over the next twelve months, hundreds of men from every walk of life and industry were outed following allegations of wrongdoing. But did too much change -- or not enough? Those questions hung in the air months later as Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, and Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify that he had assaulted her decades earlier. Kantor and Twohey, who had unique access to Ford and her team, bring to light the odyssey that led her to come forward, the overwhelming forces that came to bear on her, and what happened after she shared her allegation with the world.

512 A

Lead authors: John A. Carter, Ph.D., Gilbert J. Cuevas,Ph.D., Roger Day, Ph.D., NBCT, Carol Malloy, Ph.D.; Program Authors: Dr. Berchie Holliday, Ed.D., Ruth Casey, Dinah Zike, Jay McTighe; Lead Consultant: Viken Hovsepian. Algebra 2. Glencoe/McGraw-Hill Education, 2012. Columbus, OH : McGraw-Hill Companies, c. 2012.

612 B

Bryson, Bill, author. The body : a guide for occupants. First U.S. edition. How to build a human -- The outside: skin and hair -- Microbial you -- The brain -- The head -- Down the hatch: the mouth and throat -- The heart and blood -- The chemistry department -- In the dissecting room: the skeleton -- On the move: bipedalism and exercise -- Equilibrium -- The immune system -- Deep breath: the lungs and breathing -- Food, glorious food -- The guts -- Sleep -- Into the nether regions -- In the beginning: conception and birth -- Nerves and pain -- When things go wrong: diseases -- Then things go very wrong: cancer -- Medicine good and bad -- The end. "Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody. Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body--how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, "We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted." The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information"--. "From the bestselling author of A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body"--.

801.95092

Barish, Evelyn, 1935-. The double life of Paul de Man. First Edition.

812.54 K

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America : Part One and Two. 2007. London : Nick Hern Books, 2007. Reprinted 2015. pt. 1. Millennium approaches -- pt. 2. Perestroika.

812.54 W

Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983. The glass menagerie. New Directions Book. New York, NY : New Directions Publishing, 1999. The embattled Wingfield family: Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife, dominating mother, who hopes to match her daughter with an eligible "gentleman caller;" Laura, a lame and painfully shy, she evades her mother's schemes and reality by retreating to a world of make-believe; Tom's sole support of the family, he eventually leaves home to become a writer but is forever haunted by the memory of Laura. The only single edition now available of this American classic about a mother obsessed with her disabled daughter.

812.6 B

Barron, Clare, author. Baby screams miracle. A freak storm knocks down all the trees in town and brings a prodigal daughter rushing home. But has she come for reconciliation? Or as an angel of vengeance? A comic new play about love, forgiveness and family struggling to operate in a relentlessly chaotic and violent world.

812.6 D

DeLappe, Sarah, author. The wolves : a play. 1st ed. "The Wolves follows nine teenage girls as they warm up for their indoor soccer games. From the safety of their suburban stretch circle, the team navigates big questions and wages tiny battles with all the vim and vigor of a pack of adolescent warriors. As the teammates warm up in sync, a symphony of overlapping dialogue spills out their concerns. By season's and play's end, amidst the wins and losses, rivalries and tragedies, they are tested and ready--they are The Wolves." -- Back cover.

822.914 B

Butterworth, Jez, author. The ferryman. Revised edition. Rural County Armagh, Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor.

940.54 L

Larson, Erik, 1954- author. The splendid and the vile. First edition. Bleak Expectations -- The Rising Threat -- A Certain Eventuality -- Dread -- Blood and Dust -- The Americans -- Love Amid the Flames -- One Year to the Day -- Epilogue. "The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally-and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports-some released only recently-Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the cadre of close advisers who comprised Churchill's "Secret Circle," including his lovestruck private secretary, John Colville; newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; and the Rasputin-like Frederick Lindemann. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when-in the face of unrelenting horror-Churchill's eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together."--.

940.54 P

Purnell, Sonia, author. A woman of no importance : the untold story of the American spy who helped win World War II. The dream -- Cometh the hour -- My tart friends -- Good-bye to Dindy -- Twelve minutes, twelve men -- Honeycomb of spies -- Cruel mountain -- Agent most wanted -- Scores to settle -- Madonna of the mountains -- From the skies above -- The CIA years. "The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command across France: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France. Virginia Hall was one of the greatest spies in American history, yet her story remains untold. Just as she did in Clementine, Sonia Purnell uncovers the captivating story of a powerful, influential, yet shockingly overlooked heroine of the Second World War. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Virginia Hall came to be known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," coordinating a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped with her life in a grueling hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates all imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had "more lives to save," she dove back in as soon as she could, organizing forces to sabotage enemy lines and back up Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. Told with Purnell's signature insight and novelistic panache, A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war"--.

943.086 B

Bergen, Doris L., author. War and genocide : a concise history of the Holocaust. Barnes & Noble, 2007. Preconditions : antisemitism, racism, and common prejudices in early-twentieth century Europe -- Leadership and will : Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and Nazi ideology -- From revolution to routine : Nazi Germany, 1933-1938 -- Open aggression : in search of war, 1938-1939 -- Experiments in brutality, 1939-1940 : war against Poland and the so-called euthanasia program -- Expansion and systemization : exporting war and terror, 1940-1941 -- The peak years of killing: 1942 and 1943 -- Death throes and killing frenzies, 1944-1945.

946.9 H

Hatton, Barry, 1963- author. Queen of the sea : a history of Lisbon. "Lisbon was almost somewhere else. Portuguese officials considered moving the city after it was devastated by what is believed to be the strongest earthquake ever to strike modern Europe, in 1755, followed by a tidal wave as high as a double-decker bus and a six-day inferno that turned sand into glass. Lisbon's charm is legendary, but its rich, 2,000-year history is not widely known. This single-volume history provides an unrivaled and intimate portrait of the city and an entertaining account of its colourful past. It reveals that in Roman times the city was more important than initially thought, possessing a large theatre and hippodrome. The 1147 Siege of Lisbon was a dramatic medieval battle that was a key part of the Iberian reconquista. As Portugal built an empire spanning four continents, its capital became a wealthy international bazaar. The Portuguese king's cort©·ge was led by a rhinoceros which was followed by five elephants in gold brocade, an Arabian horse and a jaguar. The Portuguese were the world's biggest slavers, and by the mid-16th century around 10 percent of the Lisbon's population was black, imbuing the city with an African flavour it has retained. Invasion by Napoleon's armies, and the assassination of a king and the establishment of a republic, also left their marks. The city's two bridges over the River Tagus illustrate the legacy of a 20th-century dictator and Portugal's new era in Europe."--Publisher's description.

955.05 I

Iran. Detroit : Greenhaven Press, 2006. Presents all sides to several issues concerning Iran, including debates about global security, human rights, and nuclear weapons.

973.092

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. Prologue: The Oldest Revolutionary War Widow -- The Castaways -- Hurricane -- The Collegian -- The Pen and the Sword -- The Little Lion -- A Frenzy of Valor -- The Lovesick Colonel -- Glory -- Raging Billows -- A Grave, Silent, Strange Sort of Animal -- Ghosts -- August and Respectable Assembly -- Publius -- Putting the Machine in Motion -- Villainous Business -- Dr. Pangloss -- The First Town in America -- Of Avarice and Enterprise -- City of the Future -- Corrupt Squadrons -- Exposure -- Stabbed in the Dark -- Citizen Genet -- A Disagreeable Trade -- Seas of Blood -- The Wicked Insurgents of the West -- Sugar Plums and Toys -- Spare Cassius -- The Man in the Glass Bubble -- Flying Too Near the Sun -- An Instrument of Hell -- Reign of Witches -- Works Godly and Ungodly -- In an Evil Hour -- Gusts of Passion -- In a Very Belligerent Humor -- Deadlock -- A World Full of Folly -- Pamphlet Wars -- The Price of Truth -- A Despicable Opinion -- Fatal Errand -- The Melting Scene -- Epilogue: Eliza. Ron Chernow tells the story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow's biography argues that the political and economic greatness of today's America is the result of Hamilton's countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. Chernow here recounts Hamilton's turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington's aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States. Historians have long told the story of America's birth as the triumph of Jefferson's democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we've encountered before -- from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton's famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

973.921 W

Wicker, Tom. Dwight D. Eisenhower. First edition. New York : Times Books, 2002. An American hero at the close of World War II, General Dwight Eisenhower rode an enormous wave of popularity into the Oval Office seven years later. Though we may view the Eisenhower years through a hazy lens of 1950s nostalgia, historians consider his presidency one of the least successful. At home there was civil rights unrest, McCarthyism, and a deteriorating economy; internationally, the Cold War was deepening. But despite his tendency toward "brinksmanship," Ike would later be revered for "keeping the peace." Still, his actions and policies at the onset of his career, covered by Tom Wicker, would haunt Americans of future generations.

976.1 K

Kennedy, Peggy Wallace, author. The broken road. The bridge -- In the beginning -- Romance in the air -- Coming home -- The race -- Into the darkness -- The broken road -- You got what you wanted -- The victory is ours -- 1963 -- Picture perfect -- A storm's a-comin' -- Success is to succeed -- Dynasty -- For you -- Stand up -- Things just change -- Buckle my shoes -- The book of lamentations -- 'Til death do us part -- In tents -- Testify, brother Wallace! -- Stepping down -- Benched -- The end of an era -- Doors -- Letters from Baghdad -- Back to the bridge. "From the daughter of one of America's most virulent segregationists, a memoir that reckons with her father George Wallace's legacy of hate -- and illuminates her journey towards redemption. Peggy Wallace Kennedy has been widely hailed as the 'symbol of racial reconciliation' (Washington Post). In the summer of 1963, though, she was just a young girl watching her father stand in a schoolhouse door as he tried to block two African-American students from entering the University of Alabama. This man, former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace, was notorious for his hateful rhetoric and his political stunts. But he was also a larger-than-life father to young Peggy, who was taught to smile, sit straight, and not speak up as her father took to the political stage. At the end of his life, Wallace came to renounce his views, although he could never attempt to fully repair the damage he caused. But Peggy, after her own political awakening, dedicated her life to spreading the new Wallace message -- one of peace, penance, and compassion. In this powerful new memoir, Peggy looks back on the politics of her youth and attempts to reconcile her adored father with the man who coined the phrase 'Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.' Timely and timeless, The Broken Road speaks to change, atonement, activism, and racial reconciliation"--.

977 McC

McCullough, David G., author. The pioneers : the heroic story of the settlers who brought the American ideal west. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. The Ohio country -- Forth to the wilderness -- Difficult times -- Havoc -- A new era commences -- The Burr conspiracy -- Adversities aplenty -- The cause of learning -- The travelers -- Journey's end. "Best-selling author David McCullough tells the story of the settlers who began America's migration west, overcoming almost-unimaginable hardships to build in the Ohio wilderness a town and a government that incorporated America's highest ideals"--.

92 O'Connor

Thomas, Evan, 1951- author. First : Sandra Day O'Connor. Prologue -- Lazy B -- Stanford -- The golden couple -- Majority leader -- Arizona judge -- The President calls -- Inside the Marble Palace -- Scrutiny -- FWOTSC -- Cancer -- A woman's role -- Civil religion -- Bush v. Gore -- Affirmative action -- End game -- Labor of love. "Based on exclusive interviews and access to the Supreme Court archives, this is the intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of America's first female Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor--by New York Times bestselling author Evan Thomas. She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her class at law school in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O'Connor's story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings--doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first-ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the Supreme Court, appointed by Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer's, O'Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men today will be inspired by how to be first in your own life, how to know when to fight and when to walk away, through O'Connor's example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family and believed in serving her country, who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for the women who followed her"--. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, Sandra Day O'Connor set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her class at law school in 1952, no firm would even interview her. She became the first-ever female majority leader of a state senate, a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals, and arrived at the Supreme Court in 1981 to begin a quarter-century tenure on the court. Thomas provides a vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, believed in serving her country, and built a bridge forward for the women who followed her. -- adapted from jacket.

ACT Manual

Stern, David Alan. Acting with an accent : a step-by-step approach to learning dialects. Lyndonville, VT : Dialect Accent Specialists, c1979-1987. [v. 1.] Standard British -- [v. 2.] Cockney -- [v. 3.] New York City -- [v. 4.] American Southern -- [v. 5.] Irish -- [v. 6.] Scottish -- [v. 7.] Spanish -- [v. 8.] Italian -- [v. 9.] French -- [v. 10.] German -- [v. 11.] Russian -- [v. 12.] Yiddish -- [v. 13.] Texas -- [v. 14.] Boston -- [v. 15.] Down east New England -- 16. Upper class Massachusetts or "Kennedy-esque" -- [v. 17.] Chicago -- 18. Mid-west farm/ranch -- 19. Polish -- [v. 20.] Arabic -- [v. 21.] Farsi (Persian) -- [v. 22.] Norwegian & Swedish -- [v. 23.] West Indian & Black African -- [v. 24.] British north country -- [v. 25.] Australian. Step-by-step instruction and practice in learning to speak English in various domestic and foreign dialects.

DVD For

Forbidden Hollywood collection. Turner Classic Movies Archives. Burbank, CA : Turner Entertainment Company and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc. Disc 1: Other Men's Women; The Purchase Price. Disc 2: Frisco Jenny; Midnight Mary. Disc 3: Heroes for Sale; Wild Boys of the Road. Disc 4: Wild Bil: Hollywood Maverick; The Men Who Made the Movies: William A. Wellman. Other men's women: Grant Withers, Regis Toomey, Mary Astor, J. Farrell MacDonald. The purchase price: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Lyle Talbot. Frisco Jenny: Ruth Chatterton, Louis Calhern. Midnight Mary: Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez, Franchot Tone, Andy Devine. Heroes for sale: Richard Barthelmess, Aline MacMahon, Loretta Young, Gordon Westcott. Wild boys of the road: Frankie Darro, Dorothy Coonan, Rochelle Hudson, Edwin Phillips. Wild Bill: Hollywood maverick - narrator, Alec Baldwin. Disc 1: Other men's women: Bill and Jack are railroad men. When Bill comes to stay with Jack and his wife, Bill and Lily fall in love. Jack confronts Bill about his suspicions and the two fight, leaving Jack seriously injured. The purchase price: Joan Gordon is a singer tiring of her relationship with Eddie. She flees to North Dakota to become a mail-order bride. Happiness is threatened by her stubborn husband, a lecherous neighbor and the appearance of Eddie. Disc 2: Frisco Jenny: Jenny was orphaned by the 1906 earthquake and fire and has gone on to become the madame of a prosperous bawdy house. After putting her son up for adoption, he becomes a district attorney dedicated to closing down such houses. She kills an underling who wants her son dead and is now facing execution. Midnight Mary: A mistaken arrest, a prison term, and lack of employment leads to a young woman's involvement with gangsters. In a brothel she meets a wealthy lawyer who falls in love with her. He helps her turn her life around, but her past catches up with her. Now she is on trial for murder. Disc 3: Heroes for sale: A man stands up during a WWI battle and becomes a hero, but he doesn't get the credit. He becomes injuried and soon gets hooked on morphine, causing him to fall apart when he returns home. He eventually marries, but soon the Depression hits. Wild boys of the road: Tom and Ed are high school students whose parents, thanks to the Depression, have lost their jobs. Wanting to help make money, they set off on the rails looking for work. They finally end up in New York and Ed thinks he might have foud a job. Disc 4: Wild Bill: Explores the life and directorial times of William A. Wellman. The men who made the movies: Wellman shares many stories and speaks bluntly of the producers with who he has worked and describes his remarkable star-making and star-spotting abilities. He was responsible for helping actors win Oscars and discovered such notable actors as James Cagney and Gary Cooper.

DVD Gra

The grapes of wrath. [DVD version includes: commentary by Joseph McBride and Susan Shillinglaw; prologue from British version; Biography. Darryl F. Zanuck : twentieth century filmmaker; 3 drought reports from 1934 Movietone news newsreels; outtakes; still gallery; featurette entitled Roosevelt lauds motion pictures at Academy fete; restoration comparison; English and Spanish tracks and subtitles]. Henry Fonda (Tom Joad); Jane Darwell (Ma Joad); John Carradine (Casy); Charley Grapewin (grandpa); Dorris Bowdon (Rosasharn); Russell Simpson (Pa Joad); O.Z. Whitehead (Al); John Qualen (Muley); Eddie Quillan (Connie); Zeffie Tilbury (grandma); Frank Sully (Noah); Frank Darien (Uncle John); Darryl Hickman (Winfield); Shirley Mills (Ruth Joad); Roger Imhof (Thomas); Grant Mitchell (caretaker); Charles D. Brown (Wilkie); John Arledge (Davis); Ward Bond (policeman); Harry Tyler (Bert); William Pawley (Bill); Charles Tannen (Joe); Selmar Jackson (inspection officer); Charles Middleton (leader); Eddie Waller (proprietor); Paul Guilfoyle (Floyd); David Hughes (Frank); Cliff Clark (city man); Joseph Sawyer (bookkeeper); Frank Faylen (Tim); Adrian Morris (agent); Hollis Jewell (Muley's son); Robert Homans (Spencer); Irving Bacon (Roy); Kitty McHugh (Mae); Arthur Aylesworth (father); Norman Willis, Lee Shumway, Frank O'Connor, Tom Tyler, Harry Cording, Ralph Dunn, Paul Sutton, Pat Flaherty, Dick Rich (deputies); Mae Marsh (Muley's wife); Herbert Heywood (gas station man); Harry Strang (Fred); Walter Miller (border guard); Gaylord Pendleton, Ben Hall, Robert Shaw (gas station attendants); George O'Hara (clerk); Thornton Edwards (motor cop); Russ Clark, James Flavin, Philip Morris, Max Wagner (guards); Trevor Bardette (Jule); Jack Pennick (committee man); Walter McGrail (leader of gang); William Haade (deputy driver); Ted Oliver (state policeman); Gloria Roy (waitress); George Breakstone, Wally Albright (boys); John Wallace (migrant); Erville Alderson, Louis Mason, Shirley Coates, Peggy Ryan, Georgia Simmons, Harry Holden, Hal Budlong, John Binns, Harry Wallace, L.F. O'Connor, Cliff Herbert, Joe Bordeaux, Tyler Gibson, Leon Brace, Harry Matthews, Frank Newberg, Jack Walters, Bill Wolfe, Delmar Costello, Bill Worth, Frank Atkinson, James Welch, Charles Thurston, Jules Michaelson, Waclaw Rekwart, Sidney Hayes, E.J. Kaspar, D.H. Turner, David Kirkland, C.B. Steele, Frank Watson, Al Stewart, Henry Barhe, Scotty Brown, Charles West, Dean hall, Walton Pindon, Charles W. Hertzinger, W.H. Davis, Scotty Mattraw, Chauncey Pyle, Walter Perry, Billy Elmer, Buster Brodie, Barney Gilmore, Cal Cohen, Nora Bush, Jane Crowley, Eleanor Vogel, Lillian Drew, Cecil Cook, Helen Dean, Pearl Varvell, hazel Lollier, Emily Gerdes, Rose Plummer, Mrs. Gladys Rehfeld, Edna Hall, Josephine Allen.

DVD It

It happened one night. Full screen. [Culver City, Calif.] : Columbia Pictures ;, c2008. Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Jameson Thomas, Alan Hale, Arhtur Hoyt. When her father threatens to annul her marriage to a fortune-hunting playboy, spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews hops a cross-country bus to New York, where she plans to live happily ever after with her handsome new hubby. Romantic complications soon arise, however, when she's befriended by fellow passenger Peter Warne, a brash and breezy reporter who offers his help in exchange for her exclusive story.

DVD Mar

The Marx brothers collection. Warner Brothers Home Video. Set includes: 1) A Night at the Opera; 2) A Day at the Races; 3) A night in Casablanca; 4) Room Service; 5) At the Circus; 6) Go West; 7) The Big Store.

DVD Sca

Scarface. Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley, Osgood Pergkins, C. Henry Gordon, George Raft, Vince Barnett, Boris Karloff, Purnell Pratt. "An exciting story of organized crime's brutal control over Chicago during the prohibition era. This compelling tale of ambition, betrayal and revenge is a groundbreaking masterpiece that influenced all gangster films to follow."--Container.

DVD Swi

Swing time. DVD special edition. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore, Helen Broderick, Eric Blore, Betty Furness, Georges Metaxa. "In this irresistible musical, the legendary dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are at the pinnacle of their art as a feckless gambler and the shrewd dancing instructor in whom he more than meets his match. Director George Stevens laces their romance with humor and clears the floor for the movie's showstopping dance scenes, in which Astaire and Rogers take seemingly effortless flight in a virtuosic fusion of ballroom and tap styles. Buoyed by beloved songs by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern--including the Oscar-winning classic 'The Way You Look Tonight'--Swing Time is an exuberant celebration of its stars' chemistry, grace, and sheer joy in the act of performance"--Container.

DVD Wil

Wild boys of the road. Warner Bros., Home Video, 1950s. In the depths of the Depression, two teenage boys strike out on their own in order to help their struggling parents and find life on the road tougher than expected.

EQUIP

Digital Voice Recorder : Multi-function stereo recorder. Olympus Model WS-852. Tokyo: : Olympus Corporation; Olympus America, Inc., PA, 2015.

F Cum

Cummins, Jeanine, author. American dirt. First U.S. edition. "También de este lado hay sueños. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy-two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia's husband's tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same. Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia-trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier's reach doesn't extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to? American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed when they finish reading it. A page-turner filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page, it is a literary achievement."--.

F Fre

Freudenberger, Nell. The dissident. 1st ed. New York : ECCO, c2006.

F Fre

Freudenberger, Nell, author. Lost and wanted. First Edition. "Told from the perspective of a female physicist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a story that explores the nature of friendship, romantic love, and motherhood"--.

F Gla

Gladstone, Max, author. Full fathom five. First Trade paperback edition. "On the island of Kavekana, Kai builds gods to order, then hands them to others to maintain. Her creations aren't conscious and lack their own wills and voices, but they accept sacrifices, and protect their worshippers from other gods--perfect vehicles for Craftsmen and Craftswomen operating in the divinely controlled Old World. When Kai sees one of her creations dying and tries to save her, she's grievously injured--then sidelined from the business entirely, her near-suicidal rescue attempt offered up as proof of her instability. But when Kai gets tired of hearing her boss, her coworkers, and her ex-boyfriend call her crazy, and starts digging into the reasons her creations die, she uncovers a conspiracy of silence and fear--which will crush her, if Kai can't stop it first"--.

F Gla

Gladstone, Max, author. Last first snow. First Trade paperback edition. "Forty years after the God Wars, Dresediel Lex bears the scars of liberation--especially in the Skittersill, a poor district still bound by the fallen gods' decaying edicts. As long as the gods' wards last, they strangle development; when they fail, demons will be loosed upon the city. The King in Red hires Elayne Kevarian of the Craft firm Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao to fix the wards, but the Skittersill's people have their own ideas. A protest rises against Elayne's work, led by Temoc, a warrior-priest turned community organizer who wants to build a peaceful future for his city, his wife, and his young son. As Elayne drags Temoc and the King in Red to the bargaining table, old wounds reopen, old gods stir in their graves, civil blood breaks to new mutiny, and profiteers circle in the desert sky. Elayne and Temoc must fight conspiracy, dark magic, and their own demons to save the peace--or failing that, to save as many people as they can"--.

F Gla

Gladstone, Max, author. Three parts dead. First Trade Paperback Edition. "A god has died, and it's up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis' steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara's job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help: Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead god, who's having an understandable crisis of faith. When the dou discovers that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb's courts--and their quest for the truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and Alt Coulumb's slim hope of survival."--from publisher's description.

F Gla

Gladstone, Max, author. Two serpents rise. First Trade paperback edition. "Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc--casual gambler and professional risk manager--to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him. But Caleb has more than the demon infestation, Mal, or job security to worry about when he discovers that his father--the last priest of the old gods and leader of the True Quechal terrorists--has broken into his home and is wanted in connection to the attacks on the water supply. From the beginning, Caleb and Mal are bound by lust, Craft, and chance, as both play a dangerous game where gods and people are pawns. They sleep on water, they dance in fire ... and all the while the Twin Serpents slumbering beneath the earth are stirring, and they are hungry."--.

F Gla

Ruin of angels. First edition, 2017. New York, NY : Tor, c.2017. "The God Wars destroyed the city of Alikand. Now, a century and a half and a great many construction contracts later, Agdel Lex rises in its place. Dead deities litter the surrounding desert, streets shift when people aren't looking, a squidlike tower dominates the skyline, and the foreign Iskari Rectification Authority keeps strict order in this once-independent city--while treasure seekers, criminals, combat librarians, nightmare artists, angels, demons, dispossessed knights, grad students, and other fools gather in its ever-changing alleys, hungry for the next big score. Priestess/investment banker Kai Pohala (last seen in Full Fathom Five) hits town to corner Agdel Lex's burgeoning nightmare startup scene, and to visit her estranged sister Lei. But Kai finds Lei desperate at the center of a shadowy, and rapidly unravelling, business deal. When Lei ends up on the run, wanted for a crime she most definitely committed, Kai races to track her sister down before the Authority finds her first. But Lei has her own plans, involving her ex-girlfriend, a daring heist into the god-haunted desert, and, perhaps, freedom for an occupied city. Because Alikand might not be completely dead--and some people want to finish the job."--Amazon.com.

F Gri

Grisham, John, author. The guardians. First edition. In a small Florida town, a young lawyer, Keith Russo, is shot to death as he works late. A young black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but Cullen Post, the Episcopal minister in charge, gets more than he bargained for. Powerful people murdered Russo-- they do not want Miller exonerated, and will kill again without a second thought. -- adapted from info provided and jacket info.

F Hil

Hilderbrand, Elin, author. Summer of '69. First edition. Welcome to the most tumultuous summer of the twentieth century. It's 1969, and for the Levin family, the times they are a-changing. Every year the children have looked forward to spending the summer at their grandmother's historic home in downtown Nantucket. But like so much else in America, nothing is the same: Blair, the oldest sister, is marooned in Boston, pregnant with twins and unable to travel. Middle sister Kirby, caught up in the thrilling vortex of civil rights protests and, determined to be independent, takes a summer job on Martha's Vineyard. Only-son Tiger is an infantry soldier, recently deployed to Vietnam. Thirteen-year-old Jessie suddenly feels like an only child, marooned in the house with her out-of-touch grandmother and her worried mother, each of them hiding a troubling secret. As the summer heats up, Ted Kennedy sinks a car in Chappaquiddick, man flies to the moon, and Jessie and her family experience their own dramatic upheavals along with the rest of the country.

F Jen

Jenoff, Pam, author. The lost girls of Paris. Library Exclusive Edition. "From the author of the runaway bestseller The Orphan's Tale comes a remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.1946, Manhattan. One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs--each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal. Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances"--Publisher's description.

F Jen

Jenoff, Pam, author. The orphan's tale. Sixteen-year-old Noa, forced to give up her baby fathered by a Nazi soldier, snatches a child from a boxcar containing Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp and takes refuge with a traveling circus, where Astrid, a Jewish aerialist, becomes her mentor.

F Maa

Sharon Maas. The Girl from the Sugar Plantation. 23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN, United Kingdom : Bookouture.

F Maa

Sharon Maas. The Violin Maker's Daughter. Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ : Bookouture, 2019.

F Maas

Sharon Maas. The Lost Daughter of India. 23 Sussex Road, Ickenham, UB10 8PN United Kingdom : Bookouture.

F Mak

Makkai, Rebecca, author. The great believers. "A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris, by the acclaimed and award-winning author Rebecca Makkai. In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster"--.

F McC

A Peirogon : a novel. First Edition. New York, NY : Random House, 2020.

F Mic

Michaelides, Alex, 1977- author. The silent patient. First International Edition. Alicia Berenson's life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London's most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia's refusal to talk or give any kind of explanation turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the spotlight of the tabloids at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His search for the truth leads him down a terrifying path and threatens to consume him.

F Ng

Ng, Celeste, author. Little fires everywhere.

F Old

Older, Daniel José, author. The Book of Lost Saints. First edition. "The spirit of Marisol, who vanished during the Cuban Revolution, visits her nephew, Ramon, in modern-day New Jersey, and her presence prompts him to investigate the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search"--.

F Rem

Remarque, Erich Maria, 1898-1970. The road back. Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2013. New York, NY : Random House Publishing, 2013.

F Ser

Rebecca Serle. The Dinner List. First U.S. Edition, September 2018. New York, NY : Flatiron Books, 2018.

F Ser

Serle, Rebecca, author. In five years : a novel. First Atria Books hardcover edition. "A striking, powerful, and moving love story following an ambitious lawyer who experiences an astonishing vision that could change her life forever"--. "When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend's marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan. But when she wakes up, she's suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It's the same night -December 15 -but 2025, five years in the future. After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can't shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn't the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind. That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision."--Publisher website.

F Van

Vanderah, Glendy, author. Where the forest meets the stars. First edition. A mysterious child teaches two strangers how to love and trust again. After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. When a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin, barefoot and covered in bruises, Joanna enlists the help of her reclusive neighbor, Gabriel Nash, to solve the mystery of the charming child. But the more time they spend together, the more questions they have. How does a young girl not only read but understand Shakespeare? Why do good things keep happening in her presence? And why aren't Jo and Gabe checking the missing children's website anymore? Though the three have formed an incredible bond, they know difficult choices must be made.

F Vuo

Vuong, Ocean, 1988- author. On earth we're briefly gorgeous : a novel. "Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity"--.

F Whi

Whitehead, Colson, 1969- author. The nickel boys : a novel. First edition.

[Fic]

Gladstone, Max, author. Four roads cross. First edition. "The great city of Alt Coulumb is in crisis. The moon goddess Seril, long thought dead, is back--and the people of Alt Coulumb aren't happy. Protests rock the city, and Kos Everburning's creditors attempt a hostile takeover of the fire god's church. Tara Abernathy, the god's in-house Craftswoman, must defend the church against the world's fiercest necromantic firm--and against her old classmate, a rising star in the Craftwork world. As if that weren't enough, Cat and Raz, supporting characters from Three Parts Dead , are back too, fighting monster pirates; skeleton kings drink frozen cocktails, defying several principles of anatomy; jails, hospitals, and temples are broken into and out of; choirs of flame sing over Alt Coulumb; demons pose significant problems; a farmers' market proves more important to world affairs than seems likely; doctors of theology strike back; Monk-Technician Abelard performs several miracles; The Rats! play Walsh's Place; and dragons give almost-helpful counsel."--Syndetics.

R 943.086

The Holocaust chronicle. Lincolnwood, Ill. : Publications International, Ltd, 2009; 2017. The Holocaust Chronicle, written and fact-checked by top scholars, recounts the long, complex, anguishing story of the most terrible crime of the 20th century. A massive, oversized hardcover of more than 750 pages, this book features more than 2000 photographs, many of which are in full color and most are published in book form for the first time. The 3000-item timeline of Holocaust-related events is unprecedented in its scope and ambition and detailed caption-text is rich with facts and human interest.

SC Rus

Russell, Karen, 1981- author. Orange world : and other stories. First edition. The prospectors -- The bad graft -- Bog girl: a romance -- Madame Bovary's greyhound -- The tornado auction -- Black Corfu -- The Gondoliers -- Orange world. "From the Pulitzer finalist and universally beloved author of the New York Times best sellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a stunning new collection of short fiction that showcases her extraordinary gifts of language and imagination"--.

SC Rus

Russell, Karen, 1981-. Vampires in the lemon grove : stories. 1st ed. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

SC S

Smith, Zadie, author. Grand union : stories. The dialectic -- Sentimental education -- The lazy river -- Words and music -- Just right -- Parents' morning epiphany -- Downtown -- Miss Adele amidst the corsets -- Mood -- Escape from New York -- Big week -- Meet the President! -- Two men arrive in a village -- Kelso deconstructed -- Blocked -- The canker -- For the King -- Now more than ever -- Grand union. "A dazzling collection of short fiction, more than half of which have never been published before, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and Swing Time Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically-respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. With ten extraordinary new stories complemented by a selection of her most lauded pieces for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, GRAND UNION explores a wide range of subjects, from first loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience. In captivating prose, she contends with race, class, relationships, and gender roles in a world that feels increasingly divided. Nothing is off limits, and everything--when captured by Smith's brilliant gaze--feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced, and utterly original, GRAND UNION highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do"--. In her first short story collection, Smith combines her power of observation and inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. She explores a wide range of subjects, from first loves to cultural despair, as well as the desire to be the subject of your own experience. In the stories Smith contends with race, class, relationships, and gender roles in a world that feels increasingly divided. -- adapted from jacket.

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realtalk-princeton · 5 years

Note

why are people in our generation so sensitive

Response from Opal:

I am not 100% sure as to what you mean by “sensitive,” but generally, when people ascribe that word to a demographic as sweeping as “our generation,” they are alluding to a perceived trend of overzealous “political correctness” or something adjacent to that. Therefore, I will assume that you are doing the same. Why is our generation so sensitive? I will be upfront with you and say that I have personally had my fill of people telling me, on the Internet or at lecture events or across the dinner table, that something is wrong with the youth of America today who are so keen to fuss, agitate, and voice their discontent about the state of the world. “Sensitive” is actually a pretty spot-on descriptor for us, but it does not mean, as those same people often imply, that we get upset all the time over nothing of actual import and cannot tolerate being exposed to different ideas. Rather, it means that we are more attuned to what is unjust and what helps perpetuate that injustice, and that we are actually in a position to speak up and do something about it sometimes. We have always lived in a society bounded by structural oppression, and we have always had people who recognized this, fighting to liberate their minds and their bodies from the systems that give certain individuals indisputable and unethical power over others. There is nothing unique about the malcontent of our generation in that sense; we are simply able to build upon the work done in the past to expand our current understandings of what is wrong and what we must change. Just because some of those things are personally not relatable to people from older generations or in power does not mean that they are not real, creating real repercussions on the real lives of real human beings. Those who get the short end of the stick in an unjust society are the ones who are most knowledgeable about the various ways in which it manifests injustice in the first place, and we are doing nothing more than continuing to unlearn harmful internalizations and protect each other by listening to what those important, historically marginalized voices have to say. I am afraid that this whole spiel may be getting a little convoluted, so I apologize and will just leave you with this: Systemic oppression is powerful and pervasive enough to permeate all aspects of our lives, our social institutions, and our interactions with each other, and it is so multitudinous that we are a long ways away from knowing all there is to know about identifying, resisting, and undoing it. Progress, by definition, is made whenever we take another step away from a status quo that does not allow all of us to live freely, but these acts of disobedience will always appear obnoxious, irritating, and uncalled-for, because society as a whole is so conditioned to buy into the narratives of power, and because wherever there is inequality, those who benefit from it will feel threatened by calls for change. I hope our generation stays sensitive. I hope we keep getting better at uplifting each other by refusing to accept subjugation and all its tools - large and small, institutional and interpersonal, conscious and unconscious, obvious and subtle.

Response by Alito:

re: Opal. 71% of Americans believe “political correctness is a problem in America today.” Things have definitely gone overboard from the eyes of an average American (maybe not a Princeton student considering demographics).

Americans ideals have drastically shifted as a result of generational change. In my theory, Millennials and subsequently our generation wants to “minimize hurt feelings.” While Gen X prides itself in resilience and grit, Millennials and proceeding generations took “tolerance and inclusiveness” and ran w/ it (cough participation trophies cough), making it a “centerpiece” of their “progressive” ideology. Whether that’s now too extreme or not is for you do decide.

This from my viewpoint has led to extremely “progressive” views being pushed while other narratives that don’t conform 100% to the PC progressive narrative be demonized and deemed “hateful,” when they could potentially be valid. It’s led to a closed-minded/“you versus me” mentality where when one’s view is challenged, he or she personally takes offense (and assumes the incorrectness of the opposing party) rather than trying to debate why one believes his or her view is valid. It’s led to the rise of dangerous authoritarian ideals, like censoring speech. To be specific, censoring any speech not conforming to the “progressive” political viewpoint. It has led to the loss of respect for the rule of law in the name of “feelings” and “progressivism.” Personally, the avoidance (voluntary or forced) of challenging ideas for the sake of “feelings” is indefensible. The Vatican has the Devil’s Advocate for a reason.

When I first arrived at Princeton, I was quite shocked to see Princeton students call for the death of free speech and anything that is mildly against the Progressive narrative. I have heard students advocating for the hijacking/weaponization an entire academic department for pushing their own political views. This is horrific considering the purpose of academia is original research to discover new things, not confirm preexisting biases. The disinvitation of Amy Wax from a Whig-Clio event on the freedom of speech, followed by the hosting of comedian Chelsea Handler to discuss “wokeness and white privilege” (along with a slew of other spotlighted events covering everything from Marxism to reparations for the black community), is just one of the examples I’ve encountered regarding this phenomenon here.

Sorry, I’m v tired rn and my words might not make much sense. I’ll follow up later and maybe extend this response, but this is what I have for now.

Response from Opal:

re: Alito. There is a lot going on here! I will not respond to all of it, because I have no desire to turn this particular post into a massive debate, but I do think it is important to note that criticizing, protesting, and reacting negatively to certain individuals or viewpoints, both on this campus and anywhere else, does not constitute censorship. We are all entitled to say what we want, but we are not entitled to other people accepting, engaging with, or even listening to us, and that is not to be confused with “the death of free speech.” The disinvitation of a speaker for a campus event, while perhaps a breach of decorum, does not inhibit that speaker’s actual ability to maintain and express their beliefs - especially not Amy Wax, who has multiple publications and a professorship to her name. The Constitutional right to freedom of speech is not a right to an audience, and it is therefore a non sequitur to label all ideological backlash and avoidance as morally wrong because they are violations of free speech.

It is more pertinent to examine the kinds of ideas that you observe to be either drawing fire or largely ignored. To this, I will say that the sensitivity of our generation is much less about “minimizing hurt feelings” than it is about resisting ideas, narratives, and beliefs that threaten the humanity or existence of entire demographics of people. As a queer woman of color, I believe that my right to move freely through the world, fully as myself, supersedes the rights of others to tell me that my identities make me inferior, subordinate, undeserving, or wrong WHILE expecting that I will not raise a stink about it. Such words are inextricably linked to literal violence and oppression, and listening to them creates pain and fear that go far beyond “hurt feelings.” Say that my poetry is bad, my nose is too wide, or my love for ABBA is embarrassing if you want to hurt my feelings. Say that I am less of a human being than you are, and the Vatican will not even need to supply an advocate for the devil because he just spoke to me directly. Screw “tolerance and inclusivity” - I demand respect and reciprocity. We all do. And I am tired of rhetoric that delegitimizes my demands.

Response from Alito:

re: Opal.

“I have no desire to turn this particular post into a massive debate”

Likewise

“criticizing, protesting, and reacting negatively to certain individuals or viewpoints, both on this campus and anywhere else, does not constitute censorship.”

Of course! However, I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the issue at hand. The problem with the Whig-Clio incident is that individuals with a degree of authority disinviting speakers cannot be simply accepted as a “protest or criticism,” it’s the literal depravation of a forum for public debate and criticism. We never knew what Amy Wax would have said about free speech. Whig-Clio’s actions were even denounced by Eisgruber I believe. We are depriving her of her voice and her ability to express her opinions as a result of her previous statements. This has nothing to do with audiences, and that is a grave misrepresentation/straw man.

Also, for speech to be speech, wouldn’t we need an audience? If we don’t have one, it would literally be talking to ourselves… I think that’s what the Founding Fathers meant as speech.

Let me just say I find students here particularly hypocritical how and to the extent they decide free speech is applied depending on political ideology and opinions taken (the specific issue I would mention is like a nuclear bomb rn, so I won’t). Let me just say a lot of conservative/libertarian ideals and censored and shunned when they could merit DEBATE and value

I won’t respond to your proceeding argument because I don’t wish to start a flamewar, but we shouldn’t ignore 71% of Americans and how they think.

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frommountainstolonestars · 5 years

Text

Tumblr

So, I know I’m late to the game with this, but let’s talk about Tumblr’s new policies. As of yesterday, their community guidelines changed to eliminate all “adult content” from their website. Included in their adult content is anything depicting “female-presenting nipples” with some supposed okays like mastectomies or art.

Let’s talk about Tumblr’s setup really quick. Before creating your Tumblr blog, you must agree to their terms of service and community guidelines. In years past, the guidelines were lax in regards to adult content. Tumblr was meant as a place to express yourself. After Tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo, guidelines began to change.

The terms of service are still basically the same. Some key points include:

“Subscribers retain ownership and/or other applicable rights in subscriber content, and Tumblr and/or third parties retain ownership and/or other applicable rights in all content OTHER than subscriber content.”

and:

“The rights you grant in this license are for limited purposes of allowing Tumblr to operate the services in accordance with their functionality, improve, and promote the services, and develop new services.”

and:

“You agree that you won’t violate Tumblr’s community guidelines.”

My key understanding of this, is that our content that we create is ours, and Tumblr can’t really chose what we can and cannot post as long as it follows the community guidelines.

In 2018, the guidelines changed to read this:

“If you regularly post sexually explicit material, we ask that you mark your Tumblr as explicit.”

and:

“Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female presenting-nipples and any content-- including photos, videos, GIFs, and illustrations-- that depict sex acts.”

Also pertinent is this guideline:

“Hate speech. Don’t encourage violence or hatred. Don’t post content for the purpose of promoting or inciting the hatred or dehumanizing individuals or groups based on race, ethnic or national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, disability, or disease.”

This hate speech is a big point of contention because as Tumblr’s automatic process has started flagging ANY exposed skin, it leaves Nazi, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist/nationalist blogs to flourish despite the fact that their guidelines condemn hate speech.

But the Nazis are not the key point of this post. The key issue is the amount of websites limiting “adult content” out of fear that companies like Apple will ban them from their app stores or label them as 18+ only and thus restrict their user base.

One of the man reasons we are seeing websites like Craigslist, Reddit, and Tumblr crackdown on “adult content” is mainly due to Congress passing the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act which essentially condemns any website that has adult content or sex of any kind.

Someone said of this act, “... by making internet platforms legally liable for the things uses post on them, the law encourages sites to crackdown indiscriminantly on all sorts of sexual discussions-- including, ironically, online spaces where sex workers share information that helps them protect themselves against abuse.”

Of important note is that Tumblr’s new adult content guidelines went into affect on National Protect/Support Sex Worker’s Day.

Now, Tumblr and other websites are privately owned. But, the CDA section 230 says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

My understanding of this is that websites are protected, so it shouldn’t matter what their users post.

CNN said it best, “If private platforms outright ban certain types of protected speech, it sets an uncomfortable precedent for the values of free speech.”

Another person said, “Efforts to filter the Internet, no matter how noble they may seem, will always be incompatible with the principles of free expression.”

Websites are essentially limiting materials to the American public which should have their access to their First Amendment rights of free speech and expression.

In fact, the Supreme Court has seen cases on censorship (which is basically what Tumblr and other websites are doing) and said in Reno vs ACLU, “... That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statue was enacted to serve... It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the government interest in protecting children form harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults.”

I suppose the main issue here is that Tumblr and other such websites are private companies and do not have to follow the Amendments in the same way the government does.

However, I have two thoughts on this. 1) Citizens United gave corporations the right to freedom of speech, so shouldn’t that mean they also HAVE to follow amendments in the same way the public does. 2) If a government act, such as the one passed by Congress, is influencing your company, your actions aren’t fair to your users.

I’m not advocating for children to have access to porn, but outright banning adult content forces people to find seedier and seedier places. Additionally, it TRULY limits the LGBT+ community because finding porn for them/us to consume becomes more and more difficult.

My last point on this: we live in a society that condemns sex. “Female-presenting nipples” are INHERENTLY adult content. LGBT+ community is INHERENTLY adult content. That’s what these websites banning this content tells us. We don’t teach sexual education in America. We don’t teach SAFE sex in American. We don’t teach CONSENT in America. We condemn sex workers and now we limit where people can find their adult content which will send those consumers to dangerous sites or expose people further to adult content.

This is purely Puritanical... and it’s FUCKING ridiculous. Sex and porn are not inherently evil. Maybe if we taught teenagers and young adults about these things earlier, we wouldn’t be so against anything sexual. These things are not evil, so why treat them that way?

#tumblr #tumblr ban #FUCK TUMBLR

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scifimagpie · 5 years

Text

The Free Speech Fallacy

In the wake of the sudden and catastrophic announcement of Tumblr's new policy, I found myself startled by the collapse of something long-assumed in discussions of free speech. "Female-presenting nipples," "sex acts," and "depictions of genitalia" between consenting adults or adult characters are among those being banned, but erotica is still okay to write. Ostensibly, the purpose of all this is to protect the internet from child pornography - but as usual, the cure is almost worse than the crime. Plenty of artistic photos are getting annihilated in the purge.

Obviously, child pornography is Bad, but banning all depictions of sexuality has sent Tumblr's stock plummeting and already devastated the community. But is it even working?

Predictably, since an automated ban system is being used, both hilarious and troubling results have been reported - on my dash, a building with three windows, a lumpy slime shape, and pictures of black men smiling were all flagged as containing "sensitive content." Obviously, this is ridiculous, but more nefarious and concerning is that posts about activism and LGBTQ+ issues were also immediately flagged.

As we speak, the exodus from Tumblr to Newgrounds, which does protect NSFW content, has already begun. So have the floods of sarcastic (but very funny) memes. The rest of the users are panicking or trying not to panic, and often staggering between the two emotions haphazardly.

I'll have more honest and cutting thoughts about this below, but for the time being, here's a visual pun about free speech.

Yes, I did create this silly, mediocre art just for the blog post. Learning to make art is hard.

Censorship - like, actually

Hate speech and sexy speech - and art - are often thrown together, as if they were one and the same or shared the same traits. Anyone who wants to support pornographic or artistic works for their own sake - such as myself - is often forced to accept their nastier cousins, hate speech and violent speech, as part and parcel of the ban list.

There's been some caterwauling about liability in lawsuits, revenge porn, and other such things, but the answer to that is not blanket banning. It's lazy, ineffective, and tars consensual and voluntary work with the same brush as harmful acts. If it's hard to understand why that's a problem, please watch this video about consent.

youtube

Lessons from the Exodus

However, this event shows that all forms of controversial speech are not, in fact, created equal. This has long been an argument, but - given that hate speech is surviving this purge easily enough and that nipples, of all the ridiculous things, are not - we can now officially divorce the two. The one is being attacked without any impact on the other. As much as they have often been companions in the penalty box, they are not the same issue, and we ought to be more honest about this, rather than letting Nazis take shelter behind our protection of sex workers and sexy content.

Hate speech, which I personally do not believe should be protected, is visual, verbal, and written expressions encouraging violence towards and harm of marginalised groups. The impact of hate speech and discrimination is directly dependent on how much harm they cause towards people. So for instance, a Muslim woman is subjected to far more prejudice than a white man on a regular basis, so she might be more in need of protection than the white guy. BUT - that does not mean that the white man doesn't need protection from individual acts of violence, such as a mugging or domestic assault (because men are abused, too, and our lack of men's shelters is criminal).

However, advocating for acts of hate using coded language, such as the ((( ))) technique used by alt-righters to distinguish Jewish people, or references to the Fourteen Words and that sort of thing, can be harder to pick up on. Do we silence those too?

On one hand, people should be allowed to exist freely. On the other hand, if those people decide their existence is predicated on harming others, the conflict that arises does not need to be defended. It does not materially benefit or even defend, for instance, the European cultures being talked about. If one demands that the existence of presence of others be punished merely at their whim, that person is wrong.

I can see someone saying, "BUT SJWs OR NPCs [Social Justice Warriors, or our new nickname, non-player characters] DON'T PERMIT THE EXISTENCE OF PEOPLE THEY DISAGREE WITH!"

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the position. What "we", broadly speaking, want, is to be tolerated and accepted as we are. We often have family members or friends who are or were centrists, right-wing, or even alt-right. It's their beliefs that are the problem. You might say, to put it in Christian terms, that we love the sinners and hate the sin.

But in all seriousness, "white pride" parades and groups have never done anything to actually preserve great works of art or literature. In fact, a lot of preservation work that's been done by various societies - such as by Muslims during the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire - was done in a spirit of tolerance and sharing. In addition to that, questioning something is not the same as destroying it. I've talked about this stuff before, and it's a huge topic, so let's get back to Tumblr specifically and the future of the arts and queer community on it.

Where do we go now?

Well, Mastodon seems to be an option. I've heard Newgrounds, as mentioned, is a possible haven.

At this point, I think it's time for businesses to be more honest about sexual content compared to other banned content. This purge is timed to match with December 17th, the day to end violence against sex workers. I have gone on record many times as being in support of sex workers, and have occasionally tried to talk about the difference between trafficking myths and trafficking facts, as well as other related issues. Sex workers and creators of sexual content (including writers, artists, cam girls, photographers, and etc) are all being harmed by this foolish and ill-judged, puritanical move - and nobody is being saved from actual hate speech, things that could, in fact harm adults.

Maybe we can talk Tumblr down from its terrible, foolish decision. Maybe not. But I'm making a profile elsewhere just in case, and I'll keep posting and sharing there - and on Tumblr - for as long as they let me. Queer people are not a mistake, nor filthy.

"Filth" is not necessarily even harmful.

We don't deserve to be erased.

***Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet:

*** Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: The mailing list * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * OG Blog

#freeze peach #@staff #tumblr #free speech #nazi #mastodon #shut down

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stephenjaymorrisblog · 3 years

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Censorship of Words

Stephen Jay Morris

02/11/21

It’s those nattering potentates of conservatism that are always the first to whine, “We are victims of Left wing censorship!” Truth be known, Right wing McCarthyism was the originator of so-called “Cancel Culture.” It is similar to Nazis complaining about International Jews persecuting the Aryan race. Any Right winger would love the so-called Left to be d-platformed. Conservatives are not absolutists when it comes to protecting First Amendment rights. Just so long as they aren’t affected.

Tumblr has been a stand-up company and has never censored me. Other social media platforms have. On February 21, I was suspended, for unknown reasons, by a platform who shall remain nameless. A dialog box popped up, stating that I had violated their community standards. It included a short list of violations: “Advocating Violence, Racist Language, Obscenity.” I had not committed any such acts. I did call Conservatives stupid. Whoa! That’s worse, I gather, than calling a Black person the N.-Word. Sarcasm aside, they deleted my post and suspended me for 24 hours.

This is nothing new for me. I have been censored occasionally, on the Internet, since 1999. I have used violent hyperbole, but not because I actually meant it. I did so to be emphatic and edgy. I’ve used four-letter words, as well as dirty sex terms. Tumblr is the only place where I can post honestly.

There is a more terrifying reason for censorship: to suppress my Leftist sentiments. The authorities are playing down the middle. I assume you are familiar with the phrase: “All sides do it.” They think that they're being magnanimous by censoring the extreme Right and the ultra Left. They see themselves as solomonic. But, no—it’s not about that. It’s not about some algorithm. Actually, it’s all about money. You think FaceBook or YouTube cares about social justice? Social media wants you to post photos of your pets, or what you ate last night, or videos about friendships and family. Now, when you do a speech about Capitalist exploitation, an ad for toilet paper abruptly pops up in mid-rant! On the other hand, there is some Conservative raving about the “Evils of Communism” on Tik Toc, a web site run by Communist China! What’s a pseudo intellectual to do?

Brilliant talk radio host, Randi Rhodes, used to be on AM radio, representing the Progressive point of view. She was no fire brand revolutionary; she could have had tea with your mother. Now, she has a TV show streamed over the Internet via Free Speech TV. Well, I couldn’t stand watching her show on that station because of their New Age, doggy poo-poo played during her breaks, so I caught it on YouTube—over the last two years. Well, yesterday, YouTube suspended her account because she had shown previously unseen footage of the January 6 Capitol attacks and riots, which C‑Span had aired. So what the FUCK, Donald Duck!? If they can suspend a nice Jewish girl like like Randi Rhodes, what are they going to do with folks like you and me?

If the Leftist community was smart, they would start their own platform. That way, no one could censor anybody. But, that would be a problem in itself for me, because I incorporate racist words and sexist language in my writing style to prove points I am making. I mock racists and other villains of the world by using their own language. As such, I would not fit in with an Authoritarian Left format. Using street language removes any elitist façade from my writing.

I was considering starting my own political Vlog. However, I don’t know if now is a good time for that. The political environment is poisonous piousness. You see, I am becoming alienated with the live streams by Zoomers who are gamers; they view debating as a contact sport.

A lot of Zoomers and Millennials have written off Baby Boomers as senile old farts. On the other hand, were I to present my case, they might see me slightly differently. I have held great respect for people from older generations. In 1974, I was in the back seat of a car going to Isla Vista for a Peace & Freedom Party conference. Seated next to me was a 90-year-old Wobbly—a member of The I.W.W. Man, was that an interesting encounter!

But, I digress. After some careful thought, I’ve decided to wait until everything cools down. I’ll continue to do my video show about music and culture. Until then? “Forget about it!”

Update 02/13/21: Well, the unnamed platform ultimately gave me a three-day suspension. They have millions of users and, for years, they ignored me. Upon further investigation, I learned that complaints were made against me. I think someone specifically informed on me. After the January 6 attacks on the Capitol, social media has been clamping down hard on hate speech. They even showed me posts I had made way back in April, when I called the MAGA crowd rude words.

So, I took a new vow: I will no longer post any opinions on social media platforms. I will continue to maintain my music group, “Adventures in Garage Land,” and will post my political views on Tumblr only.

So, as for the rat who snitched on me: I don’t really care. I will struggle upward until I am satisfied.

#censorship #facebook #twitter #capitol siege #poets of tumblr #stephenjaymorris #anarchism

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threesquaresuns-blog · 6 years

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China & How The Internet Can Bolster Civil Society

China is an interesting case. Google is so commonly used and relied upon, that “Google’s my best friend” has been uttered in jest more than once by my friends and I, when we encounter something we don’t know. However, Google, and other international Web 2.0 services, are blocked by China’s Great Firewall (TED 2012) , forming what Xiao Qiang (TEDx Talks 2014) dubs, the “Chinternet”, a phenomenon whereby even with globalisation and economic advancements, freedom of the Chinese is still restricted, in terms of their political rights to have freedom of speech, association, beliefs, and assembly.

Although they’re different people from different occupations and circumstance, Qiang (TEDx Talks 2014), Michael Anti (TED 2012) , and Victoria Mui (Dan Lok 2017), all agree that this phenomenon exists because by preventing its people from accessing the global internet, the Chinese government is able to supply them with alternatives, through which they can better monitor and control the people, while protecting itself.

The image below illustrates China’s social media and internet eco-system (Oniix 2018) :

The eco-system is far from barren, being just as vibrant as that of the rest of the world, although filled with similar, yet different, sites. With China being such a huge market, even foreign celebrities (Kary 2015) have opened Weibo accounts and sought to establish a digital presence in among Chinese netizens. However, these are not mere social media platforms. they were developed because, while the government wants to censor the people, it understands the people’s need for social networking (TED 2012). Thus, in monopolising the internet, the government gains a comparatively greater power and hold over the people, without antagonising them outright. The situation is such that every year, around early June, censorship is tightened to prevent discussion of the Tiananmen Massacre, seeking to effectively erase the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests from Chinese history books...and it has succeeded much too well, with only 15 out of 100 university students recognizing the Tank Man photograph for what it is (Ser 2016). This fact really surprised me, when I first heard of it.

However, despite these government efforts, a public sphere has been forming and growing over the years in China (TED 2012) - people are becoming Aware, and are using the internet to voice out dissent, they’re forming communities online that have led to meetings in physical space, although those are still met with police action (TEDx Talk 2014).

Fart People (屁民) Voice Dissent

Qiang cites this incident as indicative of how the internet can help galvanize civil society in China. In 2008, Lin Jiaxing, a then official, had harassed a girl. When she escaped and her parents confronted him, he pulled rank and said that they were “worth less than a fart” to him, ending his tirade with a threat. The incident was caught on security camera (TEDx Talk 2014), and after being leaked on the internet, went viral, and sparked widespread criticism. Lin was eventually sacked. From here, netizens picked up on the term “Fart People”, noting the disparity between the government’s slogans that constantly put the people on a pedestal, and the actual treatment of the people by government officials. Netizens then reclaimed the term to voice their opinions about issues concerning government officials, such as when addressing the lack of democracy and corruption.They started calling themselves 屁民 with pride. Other incidents followed this. The 2011 train crash at Wenzhou sparked an unprecedented public outcry on the internet over 5 days, that led to the rail minister being sacked.

Other Creative Code Words to Subvert Censorship

Some examples are (Luo 2015):

Eye-Field (目田), since Freedom (自由) is censored,

Take a Walk (散步), since applications for official protests are usually denied, and could be dangerous, activists have opted to protest against state actions by “taking walks”, instead.

National Treasure (国宝, also symbolised by a Panda, a national treasure of China), homonym of the Domestic Security Department (DSD) ( 国保 ) that deals with “subversies” like human rights activists, religious groups and dissidents. Has more power than regular police and use violence to suppress “dangerous elements”

Your Country (你国), used by netizens to separate mention of Their Country, and the one run by the Chinese Communist Party, where in the past, the communist party and state were often viewed as one and the same.

Malaysia In Comparison

After the last election, Malaysia’s ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, lost to the Opposition for the first time in Malaysia’s 61 year history. It was a victory for the Opposition, but also for the people, against a corrupt government and prime minister, Najib. The rule of BN was rife with corruption, and although government censorship was not to the same extent as that of China, there were still instances like the blocking of Syed Akbar Ali’s blog (FMT Reporters 2016) which was critical of the Prime Minister. Another blogger, Raja Petra Kamarudin, fled the country after hearing he would be detained without trial for the 3rd time (Bland 2010), after publishing writings about Najib, his wife, and the mruder of Mongolian translator, Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa. There was no apparent transparency in the handling of scandals involving the government, or more specifically, the then-Prime Minister, and Najib’s responses to public outcry often did not make sense. One incident gave birth to the Kangkung meme, and the opposition adopted the vegetable as a symbol (Palatino 2014). Everything culminated in a Fake News law (Hutt 2018) being passed right before the elections, and the wording was so general and loose, that it would be up to the courts to define what constituted “fake news”....and that seemed to play heavily in the favour of Najib and the ruling party, with spokespersons citing mentions of Najib’s IMDB scandal as attempts to tarnish his good name. Fittingly, Malaysian lawyer and human rights activist R. Silvarasa once noted that while the Malaysian constitution guarantees free speech, it does not guarantee “freedom after speech” (Hutt 2018). After the election, hopefully, this will have changed for the better.

I think that while China’s netizens are still far from having that the level of freedom that we Do have here, the Chinternet, by still affording users with the ability to form networks and communities, will indeed continue to bolster the growth of Chinese netizens as a civil society, and allow them to eventually enact effective change in their country. Because as noted by Qiang, while the censorship in China has allowed it to perpetuate lies, no people can live in a lie indefinitely (TEDx Talk 2014), and the people will ultimately choose freedom and dignity, rise up and prevail.

#mda20009 #SocialMediaAndChinaAcaseStudy

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mirceakitsune · 3 years

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Trump and the events that transpired today

It's AM as I start writing this journal, likely past 5 AM once I finish it. I'm tired after today and don't know to what extent I can be fully coherent, politically and socially correct, or whatever else I'm supposed to about what happened. But after the events that took place today I need to speak up. I am sick, feeling I have had it... but for once it's on a matter I can discuss with others in this world, shared by millions of people. Even though I'm nervous to even talk about it as the divide keeps growing; I don't know on which of those websites even journals discussing politics will still be allowed by the administration, I already have a hard time keeping track of the different rules on each of the +8 websites I post anything on... as far as I'm aware we're still allowed to discuss for now.

I don't know exactly who the people that invaded the Capitol building today were. Many say it was Antifa protesters disguised as Trump supporters; I find it hard to understand why they'd interrupt the crowning ceremony of their lover Biden if they were already winning, but who knows at this rate. The people who initially walked in there were likely Trump supporters, with Antifa coming later to start violence so they could say Trump did it. A woman was shot in the neck and unfortunately died soon after, no footage showing who did it yet... scary stuff but it's to be expected given the times we're living in, RIP.

I will start by saying the following thing: I was NEVER a real Trump supporter, and I likely never will be. I'll share a little secret: In 2016 when I first heard he won, I fell in a depression for the entirety of the next day, fearing that he was going to bring about the end of the free and modern world that seemed to be going well till then. And in some ways I was right: Bullshit like SESTA / FOSTA and the repeal of Net Neutrality and other garbage happened under his leadership. But things have changed SO much since that day. The true liberals and progressives I once knew and was proud of being among no longer exists: The left's tolerance has been replaced with hate and fascism, their love for freedom with "freedom as long as we aren't offended or our narratives challenged", even the free internet they once praised is now seen as a tool of "spreading hate and misinformation" unless guided by their censorship regime. No matter how difficult this was for me, I had to accept that only Trump and some of the people around him are still fighting for REAL freedom... putting aside some religious or "think of the children" bullshit the Republicans can't let go of; Freedom to think and say what you want, to live your life as who you are, to go outside without having to wear a god damn mask and breathe like a fucking sapient being that still has any right to live! I don't care that much about either left of right doctrine... all I truly wanted was to be free, to live in a world where everyone minds their own business without using fear and prejudice to control others. I'm also not a patriot as one way or another I believe in a world where people are just citizens of the planet and countries are mainly different legal / cultural zones... I do however believe in a movement to support the people of the world, even if that's currently dressed under patriotism.

Today I watched Trump's speech before the Capitol was stormed. I literally saw and felt a different man from that fool I too once hated and demonized. And I hated him for good reason: He still hasn't denounced his wall of hate (the Mexico border wall bullshit), never had the will or bravery to openly defend the LGBTQ community and distance himself from those supporters that oppose them, attacked Section 230 which is unacceptable despite his justified war against big tech and the corrupt media... I am and will remain outraged at those things about him, he was no ideal example. But you know what? He's not the demon the media makes him out to be either. And as much as I HATE to say this... he is a hero in his own way: For having the courage to fight the biggest organized crime network in the history of humanity... one known as globalism. THAT is why some people turn to him while others want him to look like the devil: Not because they're fascists but because he stood up against a problem everyone else is one way or another a part of, a problem you can't even talk about without being called a conspiracy theorist and raving nut, a frustration many of us feel yet is only deepened by this denial instead of anyone ever addressing it.

Let me be very clear on an essential thing: I'm well aware there are real neo-Nazis, xenophobes, racists, misogynists, transphobes, puritans, psychopaths, etc. in Trump's circles. Yes they are pests, and I too will smite those fools if they try to use Trump (or any other means) to impose their own bullshit on this world! The vast majority of Trump supporters I've seen have nothing to do with this hate: I've watched livestreams from dozens of Trump rallies by now, have only seen decent and peaceful and creative people dancing and having fun... unlike some Antifa and BLM rallies which are far more aggressive by comparison. It's always the media transmitting from those protests, journalists putting up theatrical scenes about how they're surrounded by dangerous extremists on their crusade to find the Proud Boys hiding in the crowd. There were at least 1 MILLION people supporting Trump in Washington DC today, kilometers of street filled with people. Including countless black people who were allegedly discriminated by him, who will also tooootally die from COVID tomorrow because they didn't respect social distancing... did I forget to mention the pro-LGBT flags being waved at those rallies? Really: Is anyone trying to tell me those are all evil intolerant whatever-phobic lunatics? Because I'm not going lie to myself because the media decided what we have to believe: The traitorous brainwashing media can go to hell, together with big tech and especially big pharma after what they did to the world with COVID.

I also watched dozens of livestreams from courts, of proof being presented regarding the massive election fraud that put Biden in office. There is no such thing as "there was no fraud", there were hundreds of testimonies under oath some with footage and documents; Courts simply refused to see the evidence or decided to ignore it citing procedural grounds... because like everything else, the globalist octopus (mafia reference) owns the justice system and every part of society. Dominion voting machines were programmed to default to Biden votes, they were designed with the mindset "here's a big button to vote for Biden... because you don't really want to vote for Trump do you, though if you really want to I guess you can click here". And other forms of manipulation that ultimately caused Biden to get MILLIONS OF VOTES OVERNIGHT, which is so normal and definitely not suspicious at all.

Now that the brave and mighty police secured the Capitol building and drove those pesky citizens away, senators led by lowlife-by-profession Mike Pence resumed their session of shoving Biden down our throats at any cost (sadly not in a fun vore way). I watched their vomit inducing speeches as they went on about how they're sticking to their duties in such difficult times, and how those thugs who entered the building tried to stop them but failed. This will only add to the frustration, which they don't even realize or care about: They know all too well what their duty is... to sell the world to those who are desperate to have UNLIMITED POWER AT ANY COST. Their decision was fueled by sheer stupidity and ambition, and will only ensure that if Biden is allowed to become president he'll only be even more illegitimate than he already was. After such a shock there was no way any valid session could continue, no one is in the capacity to count electoral votes and certify a fucking president right now after today... they haven't even cleaned up the fucking blood from the staircase! An absolute disgrace.

But fear not: There are people who will stop this, people who won't allow this hell to come true. They aren't racists, homophobes, psychopaths... the media will no doubt paint them as such, and many will believe the lie, but with the same force others are seeing the truth now more than ever. They think China's authoritarian domination can be forced on us, just as their Covidist masks, or their censorship in the name of stopping hate, and everything else the globalists decided must be forced upon the planet. They have no idea how badly they're furthering this divide: The hate and sickness on both sides has reached a point where riots and tragedies are going to be unavoidable. Of course they tell themselves "we're gods on this Earth so we'll be able to control it", they're used to thinking they can hold unlimited power and nothing they do ever has any consequences. The truth will strike, the more you keep the pot on the kettle the harder it will explode once it blows off: All they did today was ensuring it will strike even harder. Save this journal if you wish, so you can remember those things for future reference, to know that some fool out there and in this community saw this and wasn't afraid to say it.

Whatever you think of me, believe me when I say this: I truly am sorry that it had to come to this... on multiple scales. I don't know if many friends that I do care for will ever understand me... such as a certain purple furred vixen, or a kind albeit sometimes rough unicorn who is one of my soul parents, not to mention a very close fox working on building a lab and bringing genetic transformation to life; They all more or less believe some of the official narratives, and I feel barely tolerate me for not doing the same. If there was another way to see the world and live this life, I would have taken it. If something would have been different in the past and led to a different outcome, I could be living a life of standing with the majority instead of against it... something I wish I knew what was like, I never did, I can only presume it must be peaceful and relaxing to live in such a world, but I'll likely never experience it as I don't have the naivety for such a leap. I'm sorry it's like this. And my only wish is that all of you will get to see who truly made it like this once all the lies are exposed! Whatever happens, whether it will be Biden or Trump in the end... please let what they did be exposed.

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