Mediaboss Marketing

To the Editor:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin Roosevelt said this at his inauguration in 1933. Today we have a clear example of this.

A vocal minority, driven by fear, is attempting to suppress the publics access to knowledge. This minority wants to ban books from the local library and our schools that they think are a threat to their beliefs, their ideology and their view of American culture.

Most people would agree that parents are the most important influence on shaping a childs thinking as he/she grows up. That is how it should be. However, these book banners seem to fear that their influence in not enough. They want to remove all reading material that doesnt agree with their way of thinking. This is an attempt by a minority to dictate what the majority of readers should have access to. Exposing people to a variety of ideas is the way we develop critical thinking skills. Parents who dont want to expose their children to different points of view should home school them.

America is a multicultural country. A minority of Americans are fearful of what they see as a threat totheir view of what constitutes American culture. Any attempt at censorship of the printed word by a minority is an attack on our First Amendment freedom of speech. Whether it is written or spoken, speech is speech.

In his book On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder says, It is institutions that help preserve our democracy. They need our help. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. He suggests that we each pick an institution and work actively to defend it.

Book banning is a double-edged sword. Book banners are motivated by a fear of knowledge. People who disagree with them often remain silent out of fear of retaliation. We live in a society today where some people view violence as a legitimate form of self-expression.

President Roosevelt was right.

Margery Abel

Franklin

See more here:
The road to tyranny starts with censorship - Smoky Mountain News

Years before Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "no-limits" partnership and the Kremlin launched a wide-ranging censorship campaign following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow were sharing methods and tactics for monitoring dissent and controlling the Internet.

That growing cooperation between the two countries is shown in documents and recordings from closed door meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), its chief Internet regulator, and Roskomnadzor, the government agency charged with policing Russia's Internet, that were obtained by RFE/RL's Russian Investigative Unit (known as Systema) from a source who had access to the materials. DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked and hacked documents, provided software to search the files.

Beijing and Moscow have been deepening their ties for the past decade and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since Xi's first trip to Russia as leader in 2013. Over the ensuing years that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet.

President Vladimir Putin (right) and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Moscow in March 2013 during Xi's first foreign trip as leader.

The files give a behind-the-scenes look at some of those discussions -- the content of which has not been previously reported -- and offer a window into the practical level of cooperation under way between China and Russia when it comes to monitoring and restricting their respective Internets.

Among those deliberations -- which are cataloged through meeting notes, audio recordings, written exchanges, and e-mails that have been verified by RFE/RL -- Russian officials are seen asking for advice and practical know-how from their Chinese counterparts on a range of topics, including how to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs and Tor. They are also seeking ways to crack encrypted Internet traffic as well as seeking tips from China's experience in regulating messaging platforms.

In turn, Chinese officials sought Russian expertise on regulating media and dealing with popular dissent.

In a 2019 exchange, officials from the CAC also made requests to Roskomnadzor to block a variety of China-related links to news articles and interviews that they had deemed to be "of a dangerous nature and harmful to the public interest."

In another instance in July 2017, Aleksandr Zharov, who served as the head of Roskomnadzor until 2020, asks a Chinese delegation led by Ren Xianling, then-deputy minister of the CAC, to help arrange a visit for Russian specialists to China, where they could study the operations of the Golden Shield Project -- the all-encompassing Internet censorship and surveillance system that helps make up what is colloquially known as China's Great Firewall.

A Russian delegation led by then-head of Roskomnadzor Aleksandr Zharov meets with a Chinese delegation led by Ren Xianling, then-deputy minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, on July 4, 2017.

The outcome of that visit is not outlined in the files RFE/RL received and Roskomnadzor and the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the contents of the material.

A Decisive Period

While not conclusive, that request highlights how Russia has sought to emulate China in exerting control over its people in the social-media age, says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the Red Web, a recent history of Moscow's attempts to control the Internet

"2017 was a crucial time that decided what direction to take Russia's Internet towards," Soldatov told RFE/RL. "It was this period when Russia was looking at how to build the more sophisticated system that it now has in place and it looks like the Russians learned something about how to do this from the Chinese."

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to smother freedom of speech online. Many of those measures have stumbled in practice, including a clumsy attempt to ban the Telegram messaging app in 2018, while other tools like VPNs and Tor also mostly eluded Russian censors.

But in 2019, those efforts reached a zenith when a controversial "sovereign Internet" law went into force that allowed Moscow to tighten control over the country's Internet by routing web traffic through state-controlled infrastructure and creating a national system of domain names.

While many of Russia's measures are still a far cry from those inside China, they have continued to be more technologically advanced and restrictive, a process that has accelerated since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Behind Closed Doors

The first closed-door meeting RFE/RL obtained records from is on July 4, 2017, in Moscow, where a Russian delegation led by Zharov met with a Chinese group led by Ren. Aleksandr Smirnov -- the head of the Kremlin's public relations department, which oversees information policy on behalf of the president -- invited Zharov to a Russian-Chinese media forum that took place in conjunction with an official visit by Xi.

In addition to attending the official part of the event, Smirnov told the Roskomnadzor chief in a letter to meet with CAC to "exchange experience in regulating the Internet sphere." The discussions, according to the letter, came about after a request from the Chinese.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in the Kremlin on March 21.

According to documents and audio recordings examined by RFE/RL, the talks lasted more than two hours and involved Zharov with two deputies and one assistant, along with Ren and three CAC officials, plus translators for each side.

The discussions quickly turned to practical requests for expertise, with Zharov asking about Chinese "mechanisms for permitting and controlling" mass media, online media, and "individual bloggers," as well as Chinese experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services, and VPNs.

Zharov would go on to suggest that the CAC send a team of specialists to Russia to study the technical aspects of Russia's system for blocking content online, which he said took place with a "high efficiency" inside the country. The Roskomnadzor chief then requested that they be permitted to send a team to China to study the operations of China's vast Internet censorship and surveillance system, the so-called Great Firewall, because "more than 95 percent" of prohibited content in Russia is "foreign-produced."

The Chinese side asked for more details on the types of information blocked in Russia and how it monitors online discussions and processes personal data. Ren also asked for specifics and methods for Russia to use the Internet to "form a positive image" inside and outside the country. Zharov responded that image control was outside the purview of Roskomnadzor and that it should be raised with the Putin administration.

The Chinese delegation also asked about protests organized by opposition figure Aleksei Navalny a few months prior in March 2017 that coincided with the release of a documentary detailing alleged corruption by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and wanted to know what tools Roskomnadzor used to regulate media coverage of the nationwide rallies.

Police detain Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny (center) during an anti-corruption rally in central Moscow on March 26, 2017.

"These high-level exchanges have been going on for some time and they've always been focused on understanding what the other side is doing in one area, where they see the other falling short, and what they might learn from each other," Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told RFE/RL. "Internet censorship has been a big part of it because it relates to political stability at home and the shared view that outside forces are meddling from abroad."

Zharov said that protests in some cities took place with proper permits from the authorities, so information about them was not restricted online, and that a decision to let them take place was made because they were deemed relatively small-scale and enthusiasm for them would fade within "a few days." He added that the decision to let the protests take place was influenced by Putin's "very high level" of support from the public, which he said "fluctuates at around 89 percent."

The Roskomnadzor chief may have misrepresented popular support for Putin at the time and downplayed the level of sustained interest inside Russia for the Navalny documentary to his Chinese counterparts. According to polling by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center at the time, Putin's trust or confidence rating had fallen to 49.9 percent, with his approval rating sitting at some 81 percent. Also, according to a previous RFE/RL investigation, the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) -- a specialized unit within Roskomnadzor -- tracked online interest and discussion about the Navalny documentary and their internal metrics show that it only began to decline on the Russian Internet by July -- nearly four months after it was released.

Few follow-up details are offered in the files obtained by RFE/RL about the requests and enquiries raised in the meeting, but Roskomnadzor compiled and shared a summary of the discussions with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency. In that document, Zharov strikes a positive note and calls for expediting joint efforts with China to improve the blocking of information and the need for the "exchange of experience at the level of technical specialists" between the two countries.

Pushing Ahead With Deeper Ties

The 2017 meeting came after a wider push in the preceding years for deeper cooperation between Beijing and Moscow when it came to monitoring and controlling information online and saw new agreements on increased collaboration signed by Xi and Putin.

A breakthrough was reached in April 2016, when the Safe Internet League, a censorship lobbying group funded by Konstantin Malofeyev, a conservative Russian oligarch with close links to the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church, organized a conference in Moscow that featured a large Chinese delegation led by Lu Wei, who at the time was the head of the CAC, and Fang Binxing, the architect of the Great Firewall.

Denis Davydov, the executive director of the Safe Internet League, told The Guardian in 2016 that the deal to hold the conference was reached in December 2015 in Beijing between Fang and Igor Shchyogolev, a university friend of Putin's and former communications minister who serves as a Kremlin aide on Internet issues.

Malofeyev and the Safe Internet League were part of a group pushing for closer cooperation in order to learn from China how to better tame the web and limit Western digital influence. Shchyogolev also played a key role, and Soldatov says he was one of the main figures pushing for a pivot to China at a time when some elements of the intelligence services were still suspicious of involving the Chinese more closely in Russian domestic affairs.

Following the July 2017 meeting, officials from Roskomnadzor and the CAC continued to meet and share expertise.

By 2019, Russia had introduced its own "sovereign Internet law" and Putin began to accelerate moves to bring foreign technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to heel by imposing fines and introducing laws that required corporations to keep employees in Russia and thereby expose them to potential arrest.

During a June 2019 meeting in Moscow, Xi and Putin announced an upgrade in their ties to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," with cooperation on information and governing the Internet front and center. The two leaders said they shared a need for "peace and security in cyberspace on the basis of equal participation of all countries" and vowed to "promote the construction of a global order for the governance of information and cyberspace."

More Practical Cooperation

One month later, Zharov and a team from Roskomnadzor met with a Chinese delegation in Moscow led by Zhuang Rongwen, who was appointed to head the CAC in 2018.

According to readouts and recordings from the July 17, 2019, meeting, Roskomnadzor's representatives asked about Chinese expertise in being able to counteract attempts to bypass blocking, with Zharov citing the agency's failed attempts to block Telegram in 2018 as an example.

The Russian side also said it wanted to learn how China uses artificial intelligence to identify and block "prohibited content." A response from the Chinese delegation is not in the files, but a 2023 RFE/RL investigation revealed that Roskomnadzor has begun to use artificial neural networks to track Russians online, particularly searching for posts that insult Putin or call for protests.

On the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, in October 2019, Roskomnadzor and the CAC signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of "forbidden information" and the obtained documents show select requests from the CAC in December 2019 to block information inside Russia under the guise of that deal.

Among those requests, which were laid out in three separate letters containing links to articles and sites, Chinese officials asked to censor a Chinese-language BBC story about China's "toilet revolution," a government campaign launched in 2015 to improve the country's sanitation; a blog post that discusses rumors of Xi suffering a back injury that received less than 4,000 pageviews; and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China's firewall inside the country.

Other requests include the homepage of The Epoch Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong religious movement that is persecuted inside China, and links to profiles on the Russian social-media site VKontakte. In one instance, a user shared a video of an apparent ethnic Uyghur couple dancing that is titled "Rustam and Zumrad (Uighurs rock)." Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown and internment system against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang that the United Nations described as committing "serious human rights violations" and some Western countries have designated as genocide.

Another request features the VKontakte profile of a Chinese university student that contains a video interview of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin in 2000 with CBS's 60 Minutes that is archived on the nonprofit U.S. network C-SPAN. The interview touches on human rights issues, U.S.-China relations, and religious freedom in China.

"The scope of these requests is quite sweeping and it's interesting that it extends beyond Beijing's classic set of issues like Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Tibet," Small said.

RFE/RL does not know Roskomnadzor's response to the Chinese requests, but at the time of publication the links are still accessible inside Russia.

"It's a wide-ranging approach to image management and it's interesting that Beijing thinks they can make these broad requests from Russia," Small said. "It's an externalization of how these issues are handled inside China and perhaps a hint of where this cooperation is headed."

Read the original here:
Exclusive: Leaked Files Show China And Russia Sharing Tactics On Internet Control, Censorship - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Melissa Tempels first-grade class at Heyer Elementary School in Waukesha County, Wisconsin has spent weeks preparing for its upcoming spring concert. The class was going to perform Rainbowland, a 2017 duet by Miley Cyrus and her godmother, Dolly Parton, with lyrics that advocate for inclusion. That is, until the school administration asked Tempel to remove Rainbowland from the concert.

In a statement, the Waukesha School District said the lyrics could be deemed controversial according to a school board policy on controversial issues in the classroom. A first-grade class singing Rainbowland is obviously not a cause for concern, but a school district that perceives inclusion as controversial is.

If this type of censorship sounds familiar, its because weve seen similar stories across the country. The censorship of racial and LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom has garnered national attention ever since Florida passed its notorious Dont Say Gay law in 2022.

While classroom censorship in Wisconsin is not new, two recently introduced bills threaten to impose it here in a big way.

During the 2021-22 legislative session, conservative Wisconsin lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill that was ultimately vetoed by Governor Evers. This session, to bypass the veto pen, the same primary legislative authors have introduced joint resolution AJR 8/SJR 7, calling for an advisory referendum on whether school districts should be prohibited from teaching "that an individual by virtue of the individual's race or sex bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex?

The fact is that American history has been shaped by exclusion, slavery and systems of oppression along racial lines, and the restriction described by this referendum would have a chilling effect on accurate education in Wisconsin schools. While America's troubled past and current racial disparities are certainly distressing, they do not become less so by whitewashing history. Instead, this prohibition only serves to rob young people of important opportunities to learn about and process the realities they face.

This referendum provides an illusion of democracy. Lawmakers have created so many mechanisms of voter suppression here in Wisconsin that any referendum will always fail to represent the true will of the people. More importantly for this conversation, the people who will be affected the most by this referendum young people wont have the opportunity to vote on the issue.

We oppose the use of referenda to silence marginalized voices. In the early 2000s, voters in states across the country passed ballot measures that banned gay marriage through the same type of moral panic we see with the current wave of classroom censorship. Oppression is oppression even if voters advise it.

Legislators have also introduced Assembly Bill 15/Senate Bill 10, which would require public libraries and public schools to limit student access to material deemed harmful. However, most banned books are not deemed harmful because theyre violent or pornographic, but because they challenge dominant hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality.

The stories of Black, Brown, and queer people are disproportionately targeted by book bans. According to the Pens Americas Index of School Book Bans report, 41% of the books banned in the US from July 2021 to June 2022 had an LGBTQIA+ characters or themes, 40% had a protagonist or secondary character in a racial minority, and 20% related to race and racism. Meanwhile, only 21% of the banned books contained sexual content.

The most challenged book in 2021 was Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe not because of pornographic, hateful, or violent content that could be argued as harmful but because it challenges the gender binary. When The Hate U Give is banned in schools and libraries across America, young people might be protected from the distress of reflecting on racism in our society, but children of color are not protected from the distress of being told that its dangerous to talk about their lived experiences. Books like these are dangerous to dominating power structures because they offer youth a chance to see different viewpoints and the wide variety of human experiences.

In school, young people conceptualize their understanding on race, sex, gender, and their own identity. When adults in their community actively restrict the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, it is hugely damaging for youth that do not fit within these confines, especially for queer kids of color. Censoring harmful material merely provides an excuse to ban books on gender and race, a move which will prove harmful to young people.

State legislatures, local governments, and reactionary school boards are engaged in a nationwide, coordinated campaign to censor what students learn in the classroom by banning books and shutting down discussions of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and an accurate recounting of American history. The mission of the classroom censorship movement has never been about protecting kids. Its an entirely political project intent on the erasure and suppression of marginalized communities in schools.

We know that Nazi Germany burned books they deemed dangerous before turning that same logic into violence against people in the Holocaust, but the US has a history of similar tactics. From 17th century Puritan book burnings to The United Daughters of the Confederacy working to ban books challenging slavery, controlling books has historically been used to silence the voices and suffering of marginalized communities.

Stepping out of the classroom, we are seeing these state legislatures use the same tactics to attack other American constitutional rights.

The advisory referendum proposal and bill introduced in the Wisconsin legislature are just pieces in a larger puzzle of state governments and groups attempting to censor views that challenge the status quo. Across America, discriminatory rhetoric has put freedom of speech, protest, and voting rights all under attack.

Since Gov. Desantis of Florida signed an anti-protest law in 2021, there have been at least 126 bills and laws nationwide with similar or exact language, including a bill recently passed by Wisconsins state Assembly.

In 2018, Florida passed a Modern-Day Poll Tax that required formerly incarcerated citizens to pay all their court debts before regaining their right to vote. The American Bar Association the predominant professional organization for attorneys estimated that this is keeping nearly a million Floridians from the polls. Just a few months ago, in February, 2023, Wisconsin introduced a bill that mirrored the Florida Poll Tax in an attempt to suppress formerly incarcerated citizens voting rights. Voter suppression efforts like these arent just happening in Florida and Wisconsin. According to the Brennan Center of Justice, state lawmakers in at least 32 states have pre-filed or introduced 150 restrictive voting bills.

Additionally, 32 bills have been filed in different states this year attacking drag shows in an attempt to suppress the freedom of speech and expression for LGBTQ+ people. In fact, more than 450 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced throughout the US during the 2023 legislative session, including heinous attacks on the rights of non-binary and trans people to access gender-affirming medical care.

The ACLU of Wisconsin understands that attempts to impose this extreme agenda on state and local levels fuel anti-democratic movements on the national level. These increasingly drastic measures to undermine our rights must be stopped not just for the sake of individual states, but for the country writ large.

Check out this toolkit from the ACLU to take action against classroom censorship efforts in your own school.

Read more from the original source:
From Don't Say Gay to Rainbowland - ACLU of Wisconsin

Its a bright mid-afternoon in Corinne Fishers New York apartment, where she apologises for her next door neighbour renovating for what seems like the past year. Dull beats punctuate the sentences of our conversation, one Ive been trying to organise for some three weeks, battling schedules and time differences.

For those trying to pin down Fisher, a long road lies ahead. People can accuse me of a lot of things, she laughs, twisting her shoulder-length brunette hair with her fingers to lie along the top of her spaghetti straps. Her broad New Jersey accent, thick and juicy like tomato sauce-covered meatballs, unravels as she meets me at eyeline again. But laziness is not one of them.

Born to a Jewish father and a lapsed-Catholic mother with a radical approach to sex (we were never shamed for talking about it), Fisher studied film direction in New York City before pivoting to open-mic nights and improvisation work (Fisher is an alumna of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatres prestigious improvisation training program) in late 2010.

Her art first made critics stand up with her debut one-woman show Corinne Fisher: I STALK YOU, which ran at The Peoples Improv Theater in 2010 and was featured in Time Out New York. Since then, she has boasted regularity on the stand-up scene, selling out shows across the US and internationally, including at The Comedy Store, New York Comedy Club, The Stand, and Carolines on Broadway as well as The Wilbur in Boston, the Athenaeum in Chicago, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York City.

In 2013, when Fisher was dumped by a then-boyfriend at a Panera Bread restaurant (Its like a step above McDonalds), she texted her friend on the comedy scene, then-Saturday Night Live intern Krystyna Hutchinson (they had previously teamed up at Gotham City Improv to tell tales about their own sex lives) to say: We should do a podcast where we interview the guys we fucked. Raunchy, rough, and a subverting mixture of absurdist and caustic, Fisher and Hutchinsons Guys We F**ked, debuted under the radar, later that year. A blend of bold-face interviews, mostly about sex with the people who they used to do it with; and tough-love agony-aunt style advice (Stalins regime, at times, was more compassionate), the series had an unusually high hit rate for a new comedy show.

We wanted the title to draw people in, and I guess we did that, Fisher laughs today. It quickly became a megalith, top-five iTunes chart sensation and self-proclaimed anti-slut-shaming podcast, drifting somewhere between voyeurism and education, all under episode titles such as WHERE DO YOUR ORGANS GO WHEN THE BABY COMES OUT? and DID I RUIN THE BEST SEX OF MY LIFE BY BEING A BITCH?.

The show... provides a fascinating insight into the way we shape our own narratives, like how we truly believe that the person we flirt with at work needs to be with us and not their live-in girlfriend

It grew to host several like-minded provocateurs, fellow comics and people in the sex industry such as Hannah Berner and Amber Rose, and remains steady at over one million listeners (f**kers, as theyre called) worldwide, who share not only intriguing sexual encounters but experiences of sexual assault, abuse and shame due to sexual exploration when censorship doesnt block their content, that is. I just think its so silly, Fisher says now. Out of all the problems we have in the world, the f-word is the thing youre gonna focus on?

The show, now in its 10th year and exceeding 500 episodes, provides a fascinating insight into the way we shape our own narratives, like how we truly believe that the person we flirt with at work needs to be with us and not their live-in girlfriend, or how we refuse to identify ourselves as victims because the sexual assaults weve experienced havent been that bad.

I dont ever want to make someone feel like a victim, Fisher shares. I dont know what its like in Ireland, but were obsessed with victimisation over in the US and sort of making it our whole identity. And I think that can be just as dangerous as not recognising that something bad has happened to you. Its a big reason why weve moved on from the term sexual assault victim to sexual assault survivor, because otherwise theres this like stench of stigma on having something like that have happened to you. If you really dont consider yourself a survivor or victim, then you really dont have to deal with it. Its a lot to ask someone to unpack. And, quite frankly, we dont have the time. Being a woman is exhausting enough already.

Corinne Fisher will be performing at Whelan's in Dublin on April 3rd. Photograph: Alex Schaefer/Joseph Alva Photography

As it happened, Guys We F**ked came at a good time. The early aughts bet on bawdy, female-driven comedy with a never-before-seen tenacity: Whats Your Number?, Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher which starred Cameron Diaz as a weed-smoking, foul-mouthed school teacher received widespread critical acclaim, allowing the new genre of hard female comedies, resplendent with women behaving badly, to provide new footing for the way we view us all. None of this dismisses Guys We F**keds brilliance, instead commending Hollywood for catching up.

[Comedian Grace Campbell: I treated my need for male validation as an addiction]

The ahistorical truism of internet comedy before that used to be that the more a site led with sexually explicit content, the fewer women signed up for it; early doors dating sites resorted to euphemism, letting users look for activity partners or meet-cutes and added questions about hobbies or children to attract people seeking long-term relationships, less the seedy underbelly. While comedy generally remained an outlier to such tact, shows such as Guys We F**ked allowed the underground feminist streaks finally to let their roots grow out.

Weve gotten a few people who have written things like, I bet your dads proud!, which is actually funny because no one was more proud of me than my dad

According to the Luminary, the US-based subscription podcast network on which Guys We F**ked is hosted, the typical listener is female, between 25 and 35, and lives in a big city, most likely New York or Los Angeles. Were huge in Australia too, Fisher continues. Im not sure where specifically, but big, big, big. She credits the recent cultural shift in sexuality with its simultaneous release and acceptance. Its so funny, when we started [the podcast], the idea of having a threesome was so interesting and shocking. These days you see, like, Refinery29 articles about 5 Ways To Make Your First Threesome Amazing. Its hacky, she smiles, but good.

Ten years down and topics such as transitioning, shower sex, codependency and flatulence are commonplace. Do they get tired of being the sex girls? Oh, god, yes, she laughs. We joke that its gonna say Guys We F**ked girls on our graves. I mean, you know, Im very proud of the show. But to me, I think my issue with it is that I dont think about it as a sex show. Its a feminist show. So, Id be perfectly happy to be thought of as a feminist, but it kind of bothers me that when people hear about this programme that weve done for a decade, all they get out of it is sex. That makes me feel like Ive failed in the messaging, you know? Its not at all about sex really, we just put that title on to get people to listen.

Theres nothing new about comedy with a feminist bent, but recognition of the hitherto artistic radicals who paved the way for Guys We F**ked, such as Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues or Candace Bushnells Sex and The City, act as useful relics when feminists were labelled as not funny, a smear that persists. Its just a joke, an anti-feminist (or reply guy in todays parlance) might retort. Weve gotten a few people who have written things like, I bet your dads proud!, which is actually funny because no one was more proud of me than my dad. He passed away not too long ago, but up until then he was literally my number one fan.

[I flattered him, knowing hed try to kiss me: Alan Partridge interviews Steve Coogan]

Offstage, Fisher behaves assuredly, breaking character occasionally to laugh. Her dark hair and sweeping eyes lean into Disney villain territory, with a brogue one might associate with the feminist heroines we categorise with Gloria Steinems 1970s, all steady-voiced and strong-postured. She talks about travelling and quotes Michelle Obama (or is it Hillary Clinton?) about learning about a place by the way they treat their women.

I ask her feelings on the word ladylike. My relationship with that word is estranged, she laughs

Onstage, shes fearless. Fisher draws your attention like a petite, pouting fawn ambling through a shooting club meadow wide-eyed and vulnerable, yet perennially the focus of your attention, nimbly darting through the danger. Her voice is an important part of that. Defiant and booming, it erupts from her lips like a loaded gun. I ask her feelings on the word ladylike. My relationship with that word is estranged, she laughs. I think its been used as a way to tell women to shut up and sit down in a way that sounds somewhat still socially acceptable.

This subject matter isnt Fishers alone, of course. It would be easy to lump her in with others who talk dirty, Amy Schumer, Grace Campbell, and Ali Wong among them, but such comparisons often read like a trap, suggesting that female comics exist only in the context of one another, rather than the world at large. That said, theres something to be said for Fisher and Hutchinsons work, allowing material of a sexual nature to become the default and not the exception.

The light dims in Fishers apartment as next doors renovations kick into a higher gear. She leaves for Ireland next week for eight days (my friends are going for 10 and no offence to them, but theres nothing relaxing to me about leaving for more than eight days) where her friends have a whole itinerary planned. Ding, my phone goes off. A bonus episode of Guys We F**ked has just dropped. SHOULD HE TELL YOU YA CANT SLEEP OVER BEFORE YOU GO TO HIS PLACE TO F**K? Another day another dollar, especially when podcast hosts wont let you use every letter.

Guys We F****d is available to stream or download on all podcast platforms

Read the original here:
'I don't think about it as a sex show. It's a feminist show': Corinne ... - The Irish Times

In February, Program Think, 46, reappeared in trial for the first time since his forced disappearance in May 2021. He was convicted of having "written more than 100 seditious and defamatory articles''. In addition to the harsh prison sentence, he was also deprived of his political rights for two years, while 20,000 renminbi (2,671 euros) worth of his property was confiscated.

Ruans wife noticed that after nearly two years in secret detention, her husband's weight had halved and most of his hair had turned white. In early March, one of his lawyers was denied a prison visit, and notified that two state-assigned legal representatives had instead been appointed by the court.

Mapping of corruption within the party

Launched in 2009, Program Think originally published technical advice on cybersecurity on his blog. In time, he started to translate foreign news, compiling data, and producing investigative and political content. In 2016, the blogger published a mapping of the connections and hidden wealth of high-ranking Chinese Communist Party members on Github, exposing the high level of corruption within the regime.

Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he began a crusade against journalism as revealed in RSFs report The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China, which details Beijings efforts to control information and media within and outside its borders.

China ranks 175th out of 180 in the 2022 RSF World Press Freedom Index and is the world's largest captor of journalists with at least 115 detained.

View post:
China: Anti-censorship blogger sentenced to seven years for ... - Reporters sans frontires