Archive for the ‘Censorship’ Category

Disney refused to cut gay scenes in ‘Lightyear,’ Malaysia’s censors say – Los Angeles Times

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia

Malaysias film censors said Friday that it was Disneys decision to ax the animated film Lightyear from the countrys cinemas after refusing to cut scenes promoting homosexuality.

The Film Censorship Board said it approved the movie with parental guidance for those under 13 on the condition of modifications. Scenes and dialogues that it found to contain elements promoting the LGBT lifestyle which violate key aspects of the Guidelines on the Film Censorship were ordered to be cut and muted, the board said in a statement.

However, the film distributors did not agree to comply with the instructions and decided instead to cancel the screening, the board said, adding that it would not compromise on any LGBTQ scenes. The board did not specify in the statement which scenes violated censorship guidelines.

Lightyear includes a female character voiced by actress Uzo Aduba briefly kissing her female partner in one scene in the $200 million film.

Authorities across much of the Muslim world have barred Lightyear from being played at cinemas because it includes a brief kiss between a lesbian couple. Many Muslims consider gays and lesbians to be sinful and many Muslim-majority nations criminalize same-sex relationships. The United Arab Emirates also announced it would ban the Pixar animated feature from showing in movie theaters because of the kiss.

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Disney refused to cut gay scenes in 'Lightyear,' Malaysia's censors say - Los Angeles Times

Once the Books Start Coming Off the Shelves, Well See You In Court.: Book Censorship N… – Book Riot

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When putting together the book censorship news this week, it felt like each story was trying to one up the next, ranging from the ridiculous to the truly chilling. Were seeing an increase in lawsuits and legal involvement, from residents suing officials for banning books, to parents suing teachers for reading LGBTQ books in class, to the ACLU planning legal action against a schools new book challenge policy.

This is why Kelly Jensen and I keep emphasizing that simply reading banned books or buying them isnt enough: this is a systemic issue, and it needs a systemic solution. We need to organize in order to fight back against this wave of censorship, and that includes paying attention to who is getting elected to school and library boards if you have the opportunity, running for these positions is one of the most effective ways that you as an individual can fight censorship.

In May, we announced the School Board Project, which is a database in progress that documents every school board and school board election in the country, state by state. Its a massive project, but weve been chipping away it, prioritizing the states that have school board elections coming up. Eventually, we hope to do the same thing for library boards.

As Kelly explained, this is meant to be a resource that you can build on for your own local activism:

The School Board Project allows anyone to download the spreadsheets and add any relevant information that helps them. For example: individuals or groups may find including the names and stances of those running for boards in the sheet to help guide voters and/or as a means of tracking the kind of topics that are producing the most discussion in those districts. It can be useful for those considering a run for school board to collect information about what they need to do to become eligible or how long they have to prepare for a run. The possibilities here are wide open.

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Today, Im happy to announce round two of the School Board Project. In addition to the states already included in round one Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Virginia we have also documented the upcoming school board elections, and how many seats are available, in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

Just open the document and save a copy, and then you can add any extra information or delete states that arent relevant to you.

Wed also like to get in contact with grassroots anti-censorship organizations that are helping people with these values run for school or library boards. If you know of any groups like this, especially on the state level or smaller, please let us know!

If you want to be involved in literary activism and the fight against censorship, one easy thing you can do is sign up for our Literary Activism newsletter. Well keep you updated about the latest relevant news as well as give you practical tips for how you can help in the first against censorship. Its also the best way to make sure you see this Censorship News Roundup every week!

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Once the Books Start Coming Off the Shelves, Well See You In Court.: Book Censorship N... - Book Riot

Banning books will not censor thoughts and ideas – Monroe Evening News

Mary Strevel| The Monroe News

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. These are the uplifting words of a young Jewish teenager, Anne Frank, who you might remember from school if you were lucky to be in a school district that did not ban her book.

Her diary was written in the midst of World War II while hiding with friends and family from the Nazis who were exterminating Jews. This book is one of the most banned books over the past 50 years. She used her diary to express thoughts that she wasnt quite comfortable with her relationship with her mother as well as the maturing of her body. Anne writes, Who would ever think that so much went into the soul of a young girl? A young girl today can truly empathize with those thoughts. Some things even 80 years later resonate to us.

I wonder what she would make of this world we are living in today racism, xenophobia and discrimination.Would she be surprised that her diary has beenbanned for not only expressing her sexual feelings but for issues that might make children feel uncomfortable?After many years of teaching this book to a variety of ages, I learned that students were mostly concerned about the physical limitations of her world than anything else.How did eightpeople hide from the Nazis for twoyears in 450 square feet? How could they keep quiet all day long so the workers below them would not know of their existence?

How could Anne say, The sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit after what happened to her and her family as well as 6 million Jews? Would she bestartled to learn that the New York Times reported that 31% of Americans and 41% of millennials believe 2million Jews died in the Holocaust, not 6million, and that same percentage cannot identify Auschwitz?

The consequences of book banning is that we erase from discussion issues that make us feel uncomfortable. As a former English teacher, I never had a problem with a parent objecting to a child reading an assigned book. That is their prerogative as their childs parent. However, parents going to the school board to ban a book for all children in classrooms is unconscionable.

Nazis and other totalitarian societies ban books to control the political message.They do not want anyone questioning their authoritarianism.Their ideas are the only ideas that count.The Nazis put it as un-German. The arts, whether it is literature, drama or any artistic endeavor, always come under attack by leaders who want to control the cultural message of their society.

Ironically, some of the books like Anne Frank's are the ones that will help us understand what happened during a specific time of upheaval in our world. Today, the books being banned touch on such topics as race, religion, gender identity and sexual orientation. These are all topics that young adults are talking about whether parents know it or not. They are talking to each other about this and banning books about these topics will not stop the dialogue from happening.

Ukraine is now fighting for its independence.In those parts of the country where the Russians have overrun, you can be sure that books and any writing that does not conform to their message will be banned.

I leave you with the words of Anne Frank, I live in a crazy time. I would suggest to her if we could talk that the world we live in now is also a crazy time.Books are being banned because someone might feel uncomfortable with the truth.George Orwell, the author of the most banned of all books, "1984," said, In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Books can be banned, but thoughts and ideas cannot be censored.

Mary Strevel is a member of Stronger Together Huddle, a group engaged in supporting and promoting the common good of all. She lives in Temperance and is a retired teacher from Monroe High. She can be reached at mdstrevel@gmail.com.

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Banning books will not censor thoughts and ideas - Monroe Evening News

Charlottesville, COVID, Trump and free speech: How white supremacy entered the mainstream – Salon

I researched and wrote a lot about white supremacy, particularly in its alt-right manifestation, throughout the course of 2017, namely Donald Trump's first year in office. I hazarded a number of guesses as to where the movement, and more importantly the reaction to it, was headed. Keeping company with this unsavory crowd over an extended period of time, I came to have a deep appreciation for how characteristically American this movement was, and how right it felt to experience it as a natural growth of individualistic capitalism run amok. But by the end of that year the alt-right panic was being subsumed by the #MeToo panic, and honest discussion about the nature of the white supremacist resurgence became more and more difficult in liberal forums.

Around that time I wrote a long essay (published only recently in three parts) analyzing the fate of the leading figures of the alt-right, and focusing on the various methods proposed to deal with the alleged existential threat, including all sorts of power applied by the state and its legal apparatus. I took an absolutist free-speech position with respect to the neo-Nazis a stance that seems almost ridiculously outdated in these self-righteous times and argued in favor of the old-line ACLU position rather than the speech compromises endorsed by critical race theory. I raised the question of watchdog biases, and the dangers of permitting such groups, which are de facto instruments of ever-shifting state policy, such great authority in deciding who gets to speak and who doesn't.

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As I reviewed the essay recently, it struck me how extensively the reaction to white supremacy has proceeded along highly undemocratic lines, and how it continues to be a harbinger of worse developments yet to come in the polity, to a far greater extent than even I expected.

Violent reaction against speech is now far more pervasive and legitimate than it was at the beginning of the Trump administration. Among millennials and post-millennials, freedom of speech was already viewed ashighly questionable. Demonizing Trumpism allowed powerful media companies to assume total control over what speech would be allowed and not allowed. It has become a truly expansive definition, and depends on the whim of the moment. The apparatus of domination and control I described with respect to the alt-right was transposed in its entirety to a thought category called "disinformation" (itself a term of disinformation) and applied to vaccine skeptics or generally anyone who disagreed with official pronouncements about any aspect of COVID-19, even those that were subject to change thanks to new information or scientific reinterpretation.

It has become commonplace for media companies to deny platforms or visibility not just to the most extreme neo-Nazi rabble-rousers like Andrew Anglin and Richard Spencer but to anyone who falls afoul of any aspect of the established liberal worldview on issues of elections, racism, schooling, historical interpretation, science, war, violence, sexuality or indeed anything and everything that doesn't sit well with the narrow spectrum of reality endorsed by the propaganda arms of the American national security state, fed on illusive notions of meritocratic wokeness.

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Was this a price worth paying for making the alt-right invisible? To have such an unprecedented level of institutional (albeit non-governmental) censorship in this country? It starts with Alex Jones, and ends up going after Palestinian activists. It always does. I knew it, and anyone with an eye on history should have known it too.

Every form of domination requires an unacceptable other in order to privilege its own power. In the circa-2017 phase of alt-right ascendance, the antagonists were all those who deployed a racist perspective to question the liberal dogma of perpetual progress by slow degrees. The alt-right enemies of immigration, racial equality and even of interracial relationships or the recognition and celebration of minority cultures were demonized as uncouth savages who had no business seeking a political platform in American democracy.

If liberals believe they triumphed over the alt-right, consider Glenn Youngkin, the Biden administration's Trumpist immigration policies and ever-increasing police violence against people of color.

Yet consider this: Despite the liberal triumphalism associated with banning controversial speakers on campus and shutting down the social media accounts of alt-right influencers, Glenn Youngkin was recently elected governor of Virginia, in large part driven by antipathy toward the (mostly imaginary) teaching of critical race theory in schools. Consider that the Biden administration has to a large extent kept in place Trump's exclusionary policies on the southern border. Consider that police violence against unarmed black men and other people of color has only accelerated.

But who supports those things? Large numbers of conservative white voters, of course, not just in the devastated Rust Belt but all over the country. But also, going by the shift of Latino voters toward Trump in 2020, a growing number of some of the liberals' most cherished constituencies as well.

It is not coincidental that once the neo-Nazis were banned, an entire liberal industry arose to teach white people to search out their most minute expressions of racism (by authors like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo), and to turn that into a beneficent self-improvement project, such as one might approach an addiction or an unhealthy diet. Now the enemy is not the alt-right, but everyone who thinks in unpredictable directions about the current state of our political economy.

To be fair, America faces legitimate social and political quandaries: In the current climate we cannot permit more immigration, although we desperately need it from an economic point of view. We certainly can't ban it, which would be economically devastating as well as giving in to the nationalists. So the almost comical answer we have settled upon is to maintain a repressive regime toward immigration and construct as enemies everyone who wants either more or less of it.

The urge to suppress the alt-right was not about "democracy" or some other hazy, high-minded ideal. It was about maintaining the status quo, and the recent expansion of the list of enemies is part of a more ambitious campaign to maintain the status quo as it faces even greater threat, especially during the pandemic.

If censorship and legal targeting of the alt-right were supposed to banish thescourge of white supremacy, let us ask the obvious question: Did it succeed? Obviously it did not, and it arguably made white supremacy, in both its overt and covert manifestations, stronger than ever.

Imagine a situation where a confident liberalism, true at least to its principles of allowing fair market exchange and removing unnecessary obstacles to personal economic advancement, not only permitted the free play of alt-right ideas (or more extreme manifestations) but even encouraged them in order to draw clear distinctions between right and wrong, trusting the democratic public to make its own decisions. Instead, an authoritarian attitude drove the construction of an illiberal liberalism as the only viable political option. At certain points the mythology of that ideology has bordered on the absurd, as in the depiction of Jan. 6, 2021, as an unprecedented existential calamity, or the various travesties of imagination surrounding the Russiagate scandal. This happened to such an extent that white supremacy started sounding reasonable to some people by comparison.

Liberals present themselves as occupying the reasonable center of political discourse today, but in some ways they are more extreme than the most delusional and paranoid Republicans. They have reduced all of human life and its activities to strict monetary calculation, and have destroyed art, imagination and creativity in the process. Their imaginary visions of democracy, human rights and meritocracy are entirely in the service of justifying the current form of capitalism, which is trending toward eradicating life on the planet.

Despite liberals' endless self-scrutiny in search of microscopic evidence of racism, I would suggest they are the most effective carriers of the white supremacy virus.

If I haven't yet alienated all liberal readers, I would go further, to suggest that despite their relentless search for rooting out micro-racism in their minute words and deeds, liberals are in fact the most effective carriers of the white supremacy virus. Emboldening Israel at the cost of any recognition of the rights of Palestinians is white supremacy. Instigating a massively expensive and apparently endless proxy war against Russia, as a first step in checking or confronting the inevitable hegemony of China (those creepy Asians who've become too big for their boots), is white supremacy. Converting the George Floyd protests of 2020 into ultimate advocacy for more money for more police as nearly all Democrats in positions of power now advocate is white supremacy. Wanting to "save" Afghan women and children by lamenting the end of the 20-year invasion and then imposing sanctions and stealing their money is white supremacy. Which party, I ask you, is more associated with these policies today?

No one has to believe that liberals steal elections or that vaccines are more dangerous than COVID or that school shootings are false-flag events or that there's a Jewish conspiracy to replace white people. But censoring these thoughts only gives them more durability, as we ought to have learned from repeated examples over the last few years.

Here's how it works: An illegitimate thought is censored, which gives it a certain resilience as the wrong way to think, opposed to which is the correct thought. Censorship becomes the force by which the liberal-bourgeois state codifies various elements of power such as to propel them beyond the critique of power. In this dynamic, the unfairness of a two-party electoral democracy representing only narrow bourgeois interests, the unequal and even unscientific foundations of American public health, the interdependence of imperial violence with chaotic domestic outbursts, and the bipartisan consensus over the punitive treatment of immigrants become untouchable issues, precisely because quasi-state censorship has elevated them to the status of sacred truths threatened by extremists and therefore not subject to rational critique. Censorship is the process by which the illegitimate is made legitimate.

In these last days of empire, when liberalism is on the defensive and fighting for propositions that are ecologically and even economically unsustainable, we will not see an end to the violent repression of nonconformism, only its reinforcement. Thus it is that so-called wokeness which is entirely compatible with corporate globalization, and in many cases strongly aligned with it becomes the darkest force in the land. It feeds denialism, denies that denialism is real and then denies the humanity of those who aren't woke enough to accept the boundaries of correct thought, whether they are nominally on the left or the right.

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Charlottesville, COVID, Trump and free speech: How white supremacy entered the mainstream - Salon

Russia Is Taking Over Ukraines Internet – WIRED

Russia is also trying to control mobile connections. In recent weeks, a mysterious new mobile company has popped up in Kherson. Images show blank SIM cardstotally white with no brandingbeing sold. Little is known about the SIM cards; however, the mobile network appears to use the Russian +7 prefix at the start of a number. Videos reportedly show crowds of citizens gathering to collect the SIM cards. The Russian forces realize they're at a disadvantage if they keep using Ukrainian mobile networks, says Cathal Mc Daid, the chief technology officer at mobile security company Enea AdaptiveMobile Security. The company has seen two separatist mobile operators in Donetsk and Luhansk expanding the territory they are covering to newly occupied areas.

Who controls the internet matters. While most countries place only limited restrictions on the websites people can view, a handful of authoritarian nationsincluding China, North Korea, and Russia, severely limit what people can access.

Russia has a vast system of internet censorship and surveillance, which has been growing in recent years as the country tries to implement a sovereign internet project that cuts it off from the rest of the world. The countrys System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, can be used to read peoples emails, intercept text messages, and surveil other communications.

Russian networks are fully controlled by the Russian authorities, Malon, the Ukrainian telecom regulator, says. The rerouting of the internet in occupied Ukrainian areas, Malon says, has the goal of spreading Kremlin propaganda and making people believe Ukrainian forces have abandoned them. They are afraid that the news about the progress of the Ukrainian army will encourage resistance in the Kherson region and facilitate real activities, Zhora says.

At the heart of the rerouting is Miranda Media, the operator in Crimea that appeared following the regions annexation in 2014. Among partners listed on its website are the Russian security service known as the FSB and the Russian Ministry of Defense. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

In many ways, Crimea may act as an example of what happens next in newly occupied areas. Only in 2017, Crimea was completely disconnected from Ukrainian traffic. And now, as far as I know, it's only Russian traffic there, says Ksenia Ermoshina, an assistant research professor at the Center for Internet and Society and an affiliated researcher at the Citizen Lab. In January last year, Ermoshina and colleagues published research on how Russia has taken control of Crimeas internet infrastructure.

After it annexed Crimea in 2014, Russian authorities created two new internet cables running along the Kerch Strait, where they connect with Russia. This process took three years to completesomething Ermoshina calls a soft substitution model, with connections transferring slowly over time. Since then, Russia has developed more advanced internet control systems. The power of the Russian censorship machine changed in between [2014 and 2022], Ermoshina says. What I'm afraid of is the strength of Russian propaganda.

Its likely that rerouting the internet in Kherson and the surrounding areas is seen by Russian authorities as a key step in trying to legitimize the occupation, says Olena Lennon, a Ukrainian political science and national security adjunct professor at the University of New Haven. The moves could also be a blueprint for future conflicts.

Alongside internet rerouting in Kherson and other regions, Russian officials have started handing out Russian passports. Officials claim a Russian bank will soon open in Kherson. And the region has been moved to Moscows time zone by occupying forces. Many of the steps echo what previously happened in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. Russia is making it clear that they're there for a long haul, Lennon says, and controlling the internet is core to that. They're making plans for a long-term occupation.

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Russia Is Taking Over Ukraines Internet - WIRED