Censorship

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010

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#12 is interesting

Karl Rove’s chief IT consultant, Mike Connell—who was facing subpoena in connection with 2004 Presidential election fraud in Ohio—mysteriously died in a private plane crash in 2008.  Connell was allegedly the central figure in a longstanding plot to electronically flip votes to Republicans.

Kinda wonder if he was using the same private airline that Wellstone was?

Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010

And Progressive on the Prairie has a great link about censoring a book about censorship. Very odd.

To Hell with censorship, and such

TheOutsiders

A Gargoyle Leader columnist rights a fantastic editorial about the SF school district censoring “Stuck in the middle.”

Another was “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton, and then all of her books. At the end of “The Outsiders,” Ponyboy is reading “The Carpetbaggers,” by Harold Robbins, which someone says is too old for him.

“The Outsiders” is one of my favorite books, I named my dog after the character ‘Sodapop’. I love the book because it reminds you that you can never change where you come from, and you should be proud of it and never run from who you are, at least that is what I got from it. Of course there is all kinds of social class judgements, etc. and other themes, but any movie that has Tom Waits, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillion and one of the Sheen brothers has to be good? Right.

But back to the main point. Censorship is stupid.

One more reason why the Sioux Falls School District sucks dog-doo-doo

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Like I have said on several occasions, I thank the Lorde Jezus I don’t have kids. One more reason;

A graphic novel about middle-school life has been taken off the shelves at Sioux Falls schools after a parent complained about cartoons containing foul language, sexual references and teen smoking.

Editor Ariel Schrag’s “Stuck in the Middle: Seventeen Comics from an Unpleasant Age” will be available only to teachers for checkout.

Here is the full Gargoyle story. This comment made me laugh;

She said the message a student draws from a cartoon might be a bad one.

Yes, those evil cartoonists and editorial satirists how dare they use humor to drive a point home. But Shrag fights back;

Schrag found that logic puzzling. The positive resolution to a cartoon is how the reader relates the story to his own experiences, she said. “Not all stories have a happy ending.”

Really? I thought everything was sunshine and butterflies in Sioux Falls?

“I think a prose book that would have similar content would go unnoticed,” Schrag said. “It’s a lot easier I think to sort of demonize graphic novels. It kind of comes down to laziness.”

And ignorance.

Freedom’s strongest front in Iran: Twitter?!?!?

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Ever since Iran’s presidential election a few days ago, there have been massive protests in the country’s urban centers. While the government has been successful in shutting down most communications coming out of the country, they have thusfar been unable to quash the thousands of tweets coming from the protestors.

Helping the twitterers out by setting up over 9,000 proxy servers and launching DDoS attacks on Iranian government websites, the guys with plenty of time on their hands at 4chan.org seem to be this country’s major cyber warriors – all those jokes about the 101st fighting keyboard brigade must have struck a nerve. Even the Pirate bay is getting in on the action by seeding torrents of videos taken down by youtube for their graphic content.

The information coming out has included pictures of injured and dead protestors, video of the Basij thugs shooting into crowds, and communications to other protestors about which places in Tehran and elsewhere are safe to gather.

From all the information coming out, this appears to be the beginning of a big revolution in Iran. Let’s hope they can change their country for the better. Here are their demands:

Demands from the protesters  

1. Dismissal of Khamenei for not being a fair leader
2. Dismissal of Ahmadinejad for his illegal acts
3. Temporary appointment of Ayatollah Montazeri as the Supreme Leader
4. Recognition of Mousavi as the President
5. Forming the Cabinet by Mousavi to prepare for revising the Constitution
6. unconditional and immediate release of all political prisoners
7. Dissolution of all organs of repression, public or secret.

 

 

I’ll be back to update this with links when I can.