HOME |
RSS | 
Can't
get online porn at your local library? That's censorship, according to
the ACLU, who is suing
a Washington state library district:
If you log on to a computer at the Wenatchee public library and type "porn" into the search engine, the list of results will appear as if porn doesn't exist.
The North Central Regional Library District banned pornography from its computers. The censorship also means other websites are blocked. The board decided it's a matter of a safe work environment and its responsibility to the public.
"We believe having pornography in public places hurts our ability to accomplish our mission," said Dan Howard, director of public services.
But not all libraries ban porn:
... despite repeated complaints from women about men watching porn in full view of their children, the Seattle Public Library held fast to its policy of unrestricted online access for adults, according to the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
The paper says the King County Library System has a similar policy: it only filters kids' access on computers. The American Library Association endorses the same stance.
"Sometimes, in a library, you're going to see information that's going to make you uncomfortable," Barbara Jones, director of the association's intellectual freedom office, told radio station KUOW Wednesday.
What do you think, Neatoramanauts? Should porn be banned in taxpayer-supported public libraries? Is now allowing online porn to be viewed by adults in a library a form of censorship or just common sense?
(Photo: Shutterstock)
A
lot of people have compared the Internet censorship bills SOPA and PIPA
with the Great Firewall of China, but how are the recent anti-SOPA protests
viewed by those most affected by Internet censorship?
Beijing-based Evan Osnos wrote about how the Chinese people view SOPA:
In China, the reaction to American protests has ranged from sympathy to gentle Schadenfreude, as Chinese Web users try to sort out whether they are being held up as victims or patsies or pirates.
After several years in which American diplomats have inveighed against Internet censorship in China, the proposals have inspired a bit of snickering. “The Great Firewall turns out to be a visionary product; the American government is trying to copy us,” one commentator wrote.
A Chinese message making the rounds on Thursday said: “At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the ‘American imperialists’ are racing to catch up.”
Ah, and in case you were wondering, yes, SOPA was animated by the Taiwanese a while ago.
As
you may know, Congress is considering two bills, SOPA and PIPA, to combat
online piracy, ostensibly by foreign rogue websites. While the aim seems
noble, the devil is in the details.
There are many criticisms of SOPA and PIPA (e.g. the ones at EFF, Gizmodo, and reddit), but let me focus on one: under the proposed law, linking to a website with infringing content is illegal.
Censorship aside, that presents a huge day-to-day operational problem for many law-abiding websites. For a blog like Neatorama, which has nearly 40,000 posts and over 311,000 comments, this means that we'd have to police every single comment to ensure that nobody links to a rogue site (and continuously checking that legitimate links in past comments haven't gone rogue), otherwise we'd be breaking the law. A gargantuan task, indeed.
I urge you to contact your members of Congress and ask them to vote against SOPA and PIPA: Link
Update #1 1/18/12: Sign the Petition or Call Your Representative and tell them to vote against SOPA and PIPA – Thanks for the suggestion, ray hahn!
Update #2: Header on all Neatorama posts now links to the petition and call pages.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music.
People around the world have been trying to regulate music for centuries, but in the 1980s, Tipper Gore launched the first campaign to rate albums. Here’s the story of how a vice-president’s wife took on graphic lyrics in music and won …sort of.
DARLING TIPPER
In 1984, Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, bought Prince’s Purple Rain album for her 11-year-old daughter Karenna. They put on the VD and Gore liked it …until she got to “Darling Nikki,” a very sexually explicit song, and one Gore thought was inappropriate for an 11-year-old. Had she known, she never would have bought the album.
Gore did some more “research” on the level of vulgarity in popular music -she watched MTV for a few hours and found more songs that troubled her, including Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” and Mötley Crüe’s “Looks That Kill.” “The images frightened my children, they frightened me,” she said. “The graphic sex and the violence were too much for us to handle.”
She started talking to some friends -wives of prominent Washington businessmen and politicians- and decided to use her influence to do something about it. With Susan Baker (wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker) , Pam Howar (wife of powerful realtor Raymond Howar), and Sally Nevius (wife of Washington City Council chairman John Nevius), Gore formed the Parents Music Resource Center, or PMRC, in 1985.
PMRC’s stated goal: to raise parental awareness of “the growing trend in music towards lyrics that are sexually explicit, excessively violent, or glorify the use of drugs and alcohol.” The group even suggested that the increase in some crimes in the previous 30 years directly correlated with the popularity of rock music -rape was up 7% since 1955 and teenage suicide was up 300%.
PMRC TO RIAA: X, V, D/A, O!
more …
September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. In honor of the occasion, here is a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Talk about an easy subject to research! It might have been easier to write up a “books that have never been banned anywhere” list. The banning of books seems so ridiculous, simplistic, and stupid to most of us. But man, in all his Jeckyll and Hyde glory, will all-too-often, when trying to solve a problem, come up with a solution much worse. This is “the 29th annual Banned Books Week.” The week is used to condemn censorship and “thought police.”
O.K., let’s take a look at a brief (in the scheme of these things) list of books that have been (ironically) banned here in the U.S….
1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 has to head this list of “ironic books banned.” Why? Fahrenheit 451 is an entire novel about the future and the banning (and burning) of books. It was banned, ironically, because one of the books that eventually gets banned and burned is the Bible. Drawn your own conclusions, my (hopefully) intelligent readers.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Mark Twain was a racist? A product of the times? Twain uses the bombshell “N” word so as to illustrate the awfulness of the word (and all its connotations). This vicious word is still, far and away, the most highly-charged and controversial word in the English language. So, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban the book. Or better still, as in more recent examples, issue the book with the “N” word cleverly edited out.
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
There isn’t enough time to edit out all the examples of the expression “f*** you” being used in this one. Also banned because it promotes youthful rebellion and disrespect of authority. Catcher in the Rye was the book that guy was reading when he shot and killed John Lennon. So maybe if it were still banned… hmmm, slippery slope, isn’t it?
4. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Handford
Misprint, right? Uh, no. The very first Where’s Waldo? book was, indeed, banned, because in one of the Where’s Waldo? drawings a beach is shown featuring a woman lying on the sand with part of her breast showing. It was actually just a side view of her breast, with a penciled-in microscopic nipple shown.
Do you realize the meticulous research and hours of time it must have taken whoever discovered this “offensive” character amidst all the thousands and thousands of characters featured in a Waldo book?
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
This is the incredible story of an ever-hopeful and ever-wistful young girl who is eventually killed in the Holocaust. In some ways, it is the ultimate example of the ever-classic theme of “Good vs. Evil.” Or one very good person in the face of perhaps the greatest evil of the past several centuries. Yet despite her incredibly horrible enemies and fate, this remarkable teenage girl still believes in “the basic goodness of mankind.” Banned by the Alabama State Textbook Committee in 1983 for being “a real downer.”
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Like our pal Huck Finn, this book has been banned because of the free-flowing use of the “N” word. And like Twain’s book, it is used to paint an accurate picture of the period (and all its ignorance). It has been banned across America for “racial slurs” and for “promoting white supremacy.” Also because a parent thought the way “blacks are treated by members of [the] white community in a way that would upset black children.” Only ironic because never, but never, in the entire history of literature, has good and evil been so clearly portrayed and delineated. Real (not ersatz) racism is shown under a clear magnifying glass, in all its vicious cruelty.
(As a sidebar, to those of you who do not like reading -definitely see the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is without question one of the greatest movies ever made. One of those rare times “the movie is equally as great as the book it is based upon.”)
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
The Harry Potter books are far and away the most banned books of the past decade. Extremely ironic in that the Harry Potter series has probably inspired more young people to read than all the Hooked on Phonics and Pizza Hut books in the world.
Also one other point for all those people who have worked so tirelessly to ban these highly-popular books: strip away the magic and the Dr. Seuss creatures and the wizards and sorcerers, and ultimately the series boils down to the message that love, understanding, and tolerance are the most important things in the world.
8. Little Red Riding Hood
(You can’t make this stuff up, folks!)
Little Red Riding Hood has been banned for the use of alcohol (one of the items in Red Riding Hood’s basket is a bottle of wine).
9. Sleeping Beauty
The fairy tale was banned for promoting witchcraft and magic.
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
This classic was banned for “vulgar language.”
11. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Why do I feel like I am writing a Monty Python sketch? Could there possibly be a more harmless, innocuous book than Harriet the Spy? O.K. this one was banned because it “teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk, and curse.”
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
This book was banned in the South during the Civil War because of its anti-slavery content. Well, heck, that was over 150 years ago. Fortunately, as we all know, man has come a long way since those days of ignorance.
Remember all the hullabaloo about Net censorship? Well, a while ago, comic books went through the same thing. In 1954, a censor called the Comics Code Authority was created to quell public concerns over inappropriate material for comic books to protect children.
Comic publishers had to submit their comics and get approval from the CCA. The requirements were pretty strict (for example "in every instance good shall triumph over evil." Zombies, werewolves, and vampires were a no-no).
In 1971, Spider-Man creator Stan Lee was approached by the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare to do a comic book tale of the dangers of drug abuse. But even though drug abuse was portrayed as a bad thing, the inflexible CCA didn’t allow it (after all, the rules prohibit the mention of "drugs," period.)
What happened next made comic book history. Here’s Stan Lee telling us in an interview with Comics Alliance about how he went against the CCA and published the comic book anyway: Link [embedded Flash video clip] – Thanks Brian!
In the 1920s and 1930s, censorship of movies was often goverened by local boards, and achieved by snipping the scenes from the film reels. It won’t surprise anyone that those clipped film segments were sometimes saved. Here a number of them have been assembled into a montage, which was submitted to the 2007 72 Hour Film Festival in Frederick, Maryland.
Censors of that period seem to have been particularly interested in feet. The video is probably safe for work (depending on where you work).
Arlington High School junior and debate club president Justin Surber likes to wear his black T-shirt featuring Friedrich Nietzche’s famous words "God is Dead." He wears it to provoke debate, he says, believing that his right to free speech is protected.
The school’s yearbook, however, apparently disagreed. Gale Fiege of HearldNet has the story:
Nobody has told him he can’t wear the shirt to school. He wears it to provoke debate, he says, and that’s why he wore the shirt the day the debate club photo was taken for the yearbook.
Now Surber believes his T-shirt prompted the school’s yearbook adviser to ask for a retake of the photo, without the T-shirt.
“I feel I am a victim of censorship,” Surber said.
When a student yearbook staff member came to take a second photo of the debate club a few weeks ago, Surber’s friend Reed Summerlin asked for an explanation.
The yearbook staffer indicated she had been asked by the yearbook adviser not to tell Surber the reason for the retake, Summerlin said. “She said it was about Justin’s shirt.”
Link (Photo: Dan Bates / The Herald) – via Unique Daily
What do you think? Was that a case of censorship, reasonable yearbook policy, or just a tempest-in-a-teapot indignation of a teenager?
Danvers High School Principal Thomas Murray was not amused – I repeat, not amused – when kids in his school started saying the word "meep." Anyone caught uttering or displaying the word of choice of Beaker, the orange-haired muppet from The Muppet Show, will be – gasp – suspended!
It’s no surprise that using bad language in school can get you into hot water. But "meep"?
Danvers High parents recently got an automated call from the principal warning them that if students say or display the word "meep" at school, they could face suspension.
Meep doesn’t mean much, unless you are Beaker — the hapless, orange-haired assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on "The Muppet Show."
While meep may be nonsense, what it represented was no laughing matter to the high school’s administration. High school Principal Thomas Murray said students were using it and other words to disrupt school in a particular part of the building on Cabot Road.
Link | Article at ABC News | Apparently, you can’t even email the word "meep" to him, but one presumes that "Bork, bork, bork" is still safe.
The last week in September is Banned Books Week. To mark the event, an interactive map has been created that shows requests for removal of books from public libraries and school libraries for the period 2007-2009. The map is created from cases reported to and documented by the American Library Association.
The image above is a screencap. The interactive map itself can be accessed at this link.
The ALA also has a listing of the top ten most frequently challenged books for 2008.
Many people are aware that Harry Potter, The Anarchist Cookbook and Stephen King books have been banned from schools around the country, but as many civilizations have figured out, censorship is a slippery slope. It is pretty strange to consider Shakespeare has not only been banned from public schools over sexual themes, but that censored editions have been out since the 1700s.
Photo Via florian.b [Flickr]
Of the Radcliffe Publishing list of the top 100 books of the past century, almost half have been challenged by schools, many are banned in whole countries. Here’s a few banned titles that just may surprise you:
*Note: Plot summaries may include spoilers. I know all you Neatorama readers are pretty intelligent, so I wouldn’t doubt if many of you have read these books. I’ve included the summaries to give an idea as to why the books may have been banned.
Plot: A soldier, Henry, on the Italian front meets and seduces a young woman, Catherine. Their relationship continues as he heals a knee that was injured in battle. By the time his knee is fully healed, Catherine is three months pregnant. Unfortunately, Henry has to return to the war and the Germans break through the Italian lines. The Italians charge the soldiers for treachery for letting the Germans defeat them. Henry escapes during another officer’s execution and runs away to Switzerland with Catherine. They live happily until Catherine gives birth to a stillborn and then dies in labor.
Where it’s been banned: Published in 1929, this novel caused trouble immediately. Boston banned the magazine it was originally published in, claiming the story was too sexual. Italy banned the book because of its portrayal of the army’s retreat from Caporatto. The Nazis burned the book in 1933. In 1939, Ireland banned the novel. In modern America, plenty of school districts have banned the publication for sexual content.
Source | A Farewell to Arms
Plot: The book’s plot uses the same story line as Tarzan. A couple of civilized people, Bernard and Lenina, enter a primitive society and bring a “savage” back into their modern society. The difference here is that these “civilized people” live in a futuristic world filled with castes, happy drugs, sex without reproduction and euthanasia. Love, sadness and families have become obsolete, as well as self-expression and exploration.
The Tarzan in this piece is the son, John, of an ex-civilized woman who now lives with the “savages.” John was raised with family, love and Shakespeare. When they return to the city, John becomes a spectacle for society types and even Lenina starts finding him interesting. John begins falling in love with Lenina even as he is disgusted with the modern world and her role in it. John finds he cannot escape this world and eventually kills himself to discontinue playing his role as a tourist spectacle.
Where it’s been banned: This text is one of the most frequently banned books in literary history. It was banned in Ireland the year it was published, 1932. Multiple school districts have restricted access to this book because the atheistic people in the futuristic society it depicts take drugs and have promiscuous sex to avoid emotional connections. There are a lot of people who try to compare this book to our modern society, but if that was accurate, would we still be banning it from school?
Source | Brave New World
Plot: A teenage boy, Holden Caulfield, runs away to New York after being expelled from reform school. The book is a first person narrative and over the course of the story, you learn about his brother’s passing and how that has affected his present state of mind. Throughout his adventure, he drinks, smokes, hits on adult women, gets beaten up by a pimp, is hit on by a past teacher and deals with many other activities that a teen shouldn’t be going through. He constantly complains about other people his age, calling them “phony” or stupid. The novel explores Holden’s psychological need to grow up after his brother’s death. It also does an excellent job depicting his desire to protect young children from becoming adults.
Where it’s been banned: In 1960, a teacher was fired from her job for requiring her eleventh grade class to read the book. Between 1961 and 1962, it was the most censored book in high schools and colleges. This novel has been banned in schools throughout America for being anti-white, blasphemous, profane, racist and overtly sexual. How anything can be racist and anti-white, I don’t know.
Update: I meant this statement as how the book can be racist against both blacks and whites at the same time, which is what the people condemning the book seemed to imply. Personally, I don’t think you can be racist against your self and persons of other races at the same time, I think it makes you more of a person hater than a racist. Although I’m sure many readers would still like to disagree with this.
Completely unrelated but interesting: many murderers read Catcher In The Rye shortly before committing their crimes.
Source | The Catcher in the Rye
Plot: Considered to be the first modern erotic novel, there are quite a few naughty bits in this book, if you want to read a bit, there’s an excerpt on the Wikipedia page. The story revolves around a young country girl who must leave her village due to poverty. She is forced to work at a brothel, but escapes with her true love before she loses her virginity. When her love is forced to leave the country, she has to take on a variety of male “acquaintances” in order to survive.
Where it’s been banned: This book was monumental to both English and American obscenity standards. A year after the book was released, John Cleland and the publisher were both arrested and charged with “corrupting the king’s subjects.” They subsequently stopped publishing the novel, but it still managed to become popular thanks to pirated editions circulating the country. Cleland attempted to clean up the book and republished it in 1750, but he was arrested again, although this time the charges were dropped. The book continued to be published underground and in 1963 there was an obscenity trial against a book seller carrying the novel. Although the defense lost, it helped to shift public opinion about obscenity laws in Britain. In 1970, the unabridged book was legally published for the first time.
Over in the states, the book was banned for obscenity in 1821. In 1963, a publisher tried to re-release the book under the title John Cleland’s Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure. The book was also banned under this title, but the publisher, G.B. Putnam, challenged the ban. The Supreme Court ruled the novel did not meet the standards for obscenity. This was the last book to be banned by the US federal government.
Source | Fanny Hill – Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Plot: Set in 1930, it tells the tale of a Tom Joad, a recently paroled murderer, and his family of farmers. The group is forced to leave their home in Oklahoma that has fallen victim to the dust bowl storms. They hope to find better luck in California, though on their way out West, they constantly run into other families hoping for the same luck.
When they get to California, they find the farmers have bound together to exploit the massive amount of laborers offering their services. When workers begin to unionize, the Joads work as strike breakers and end up involved with a bloody strike, forcing Tom Joad to kill again. In the end, practically all of the family’s actions prove to be pointless as they are starving and homeless in California.
Where it’s been banned: Published in 1939, this Steinbeck story caused an uproar as soon as it was released. These days, the book seems to be fairly mild, with a few references to sex and some minor curse words, but the book was quite racy for its day. Kern county was one of the first places to ban the novel as they were insulted by how Steinbeck depicted their citizens. It was immediately burned by the East St. Louis library, banned from Buffalo, New York and Kansas City. Since then, it’s been banned in many high schools -mostly for bad language. A parent in Burlington, North Carolina said, “book is full of filth. My son is being raised in a Christian home and this book takes the Lord’s name in vain and has all kinds of profanity in it.”
Internationally, the book has had trouble too. In 1953, Ireland deemed the book obscene and banned it. In 1973, eleven publishers in Turkey were charged for “spreading propaganda unfavorable to the state.” Why Grapes of Wrath would be seen as unfavorable to Turkey, I have no idea. If you do, please tell me in the comments.
Source #1, Source #2 | The Grapes of Wrath
Plot: Lady Chatterley’s husband has become paralyzed and impotent. She struggles to remain faithful to him, but ends up having an affair with the gamekeeper. The novel covers her struggle to live only mentally, although she proves to need physical stimulation as well.
Where it’s been banned: The Penguin Books 1960 British publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was one of the first novels tried under England’s 1959 obscenity law. This law gave publishers the right to release racy books, as long as the work was of literary merit. Penguin was found not guilty and the novel was legally available in England for the first time. The trial was later turned into a BBC show known as “The Chatterley Affair.”
Conversely, Australia not only found the book to be legally obscene, but also banned publication of a book depicting the British trial called The Trial of Lady Chatterley. A copy of the book was smuggled into the country anyway and published underground. Many people read the book and it eventually led to lesser censorship of books in the country.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Plot: Humbert Humbert, is invited to move in with a woman who wants to sleep with him. He is about to say no, when he sees her 12 year old daughter, Lolita, playing in the yard. The woman discovers his ulterior motive and plans to send Lolita to boarding school but she is hit and killed by a car. Humbert tries to drug the Lolita to have his way with her, but she instead seduces him.
Humbert becomes Lolita’s guardian and falls in love with her although she has very little interest in him. She escapes his guardianship by making plans with another pedophile. Humbert tries to find Lolita and her abductor, but gets nowhere. Two years later, a married and pregnant Lolita contacts him requesting money. He brings her money and tries to get her to leave with him. She refuses. She does, however, give him information on her abductor and Humbert tracks down the man and kills him. Humbert goes to jail, where he writes a novel called Lolita.
Where it’s been banned: The book was released in 1955 and received little attention until author Graham Greene sang its praises in an interview with The London Times. After reading the statement, the editor of the Sunday Express replied that the book was “sheer, unrestrained pornography.” That’s when the book was banned in Britain and all imported copies were ordered to be seized by the customs department. By December 1956, France followed suit, although both countries repealed the ban in 1959. Argentina and New Zealand both banned the book in the following years.
Surprisingly, the book wasn’t criticized as much in America, in fact, in its first three weeks available it sold over 100,000 copies.
at Amazon
