#if you associate the two sides with particular modern political factions

[shredsandpatches]

tfw you're an intensive class at manuscript camp and you see takes about richard ii that are based on the assumption that he is meant to be a Villain Protagonist

[jed-thomas]

Ministers with and without Portfolios

When you want to demonstrate your sincerity, you write a letter.

The summer is nearing its summit and 1982 is disappearing in a confused fog. Somewhere, Micheal Foot opens up an envelope. An ambitious young candidate, recently selected in some leafy suburb of London, has written to him. You can feel the youth in his writing - and, regrettably, a palpable eagerness to impress. Nevertheless, there are some admirable phrases:

Socialism ultimately must appeal to the better minds of the people. You cannot do that if you are tainted overmuch with a pragmatic period in power.

For men like Foot, members of a modern British tradition, politics and oratory are not separable. Even the timbre of your voice comes into it. On some cold picket-line, at some bored union congress, or against the baying of the other half of the House, you have to fill the air and rouse the spirits. In so many ways, the tradition of British socialism is a poetic tradition.

Maybe, then, he spots it a mile away. A lack of inspiration, the absence of a real perspective. That faint sense of pantomime. Or otherwise, Michael Foot, soon to be an ex-leader of the Labour Party, dimly registers the writer’s display of party-loyalty and just puts the letter aside. This man had crashed the party’s vote-share in Beaconsfield. Tony Blair is saving face.

X

Last Friday, it was announced that the constituency of Hartlepool would return its first Conservative MP in 62 years. Labour’s vote-share crashed by 16%. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Conservative victory in Hartlepool is only the second time in 40 years that a party in government has taken a seat from their opposition.

In immediate response, Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer MP moved to reorganise the Labour Party’s campaign office. Importantly, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner MP was removed from her position as Chair of the Labour Party, the position ultimately responsible for election campaigns. As the Deputy Leader is elected separately, Starmer’s decision has been criticised as an attempt to undermine the influence of a senior elected official. However, as the days have passed, Rayner has emerged with a new position - or, more accurately, a few new positions. Angela Rayner MP now shadows Michael Gove MP as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and occupies the newly-created, elegantly-titled office of Shadow Secretary for the Future of Work.

Former MP for Hartlepool and Minister without Portfolio under Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson has been named by sources within the party to Guardian columnist Owen Jones. According to Jones, Mandelson signed off the press strategy for Shadow Cabinet members following the result in his former constituency.

X

It’s raining in Stockport. The King Street bridge is abandoned. Looking at the slow river, she knows that she is a cliché, a tired punchline. And she knows that she’ll have to leave school. Other girls have done it, so she’ll get through it, too. But it’s an abrupt and unceremonious change to whatever path she was on before. 16 and pregnant. A joke. Then again, wasn’t this always the intended outcome, in one way or another? Cornered. It was going to be a long time before she understood that there was anything that could be done about that.

The wind takes a few of the leaflets out from under his armpit and scatters them all over the carpark of Oxted station. A favour, he thinks. It’s 8 in the morning, they’re all commuters. No-one’s taking them. As if some serious city lawyer is going to read about the future of proletarian resistance, let alone in a pamphlet handed to him by a spotty adolescent. East Surrey Young Socialists. He isn’t blind to the humour of that. Some preachy privately-educated Surrey boy. He had tried to explain that he’d gotten into Reigate fairly and squarely, that it’d only just started asking for fees in the last few years. Much to his chagrin, by the way. People around here don’t listen. If they did, they’d see that there was nothing to be scared of. But they’re closed off, rigid. It’s enough to make you want to pack it all in, honestly.

His father was staring out at the snow falling on the houses of Hampstead Garden in one of his attitudes of preparation. He had an abiding sense of danger, of impending calamity. Peter always attributed that to his religiosity. Eschatology. The End Times. “Have you compiled your application yet?” “Of course, Dad.” Peter knew the counterpoint melody. Your mother and I have worked too hard. He would say it like that because his mother is the real concerned party. Descendants of the Labour Party aristocracy are obsessed with elite education. He is pretty sure that he will get in. He’s clever, goes to a good grammar. And when he gets in, he is going to have fun, the sort of fun you can only have at a place like Oxford. Judgement Day is a long way off.

The Hampstead Garden Suburb was the brain-child of two idealist architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. The pair were disciples of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic philosophy with global reach that found particular purchase among British socialists; indeed, Unwin was a life-long and active member of various socialist organisations. Hampstead Garden was to be spacious, communal and open to all social classes. It was built on land purchased from Eton College by a wealthy patron. The Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust Ltd., established in 1906, executed Parker and Unwin’s designs.

Peter Mandelson was born in 1953 to an advertising manager and the daughter of Herbert Morrison, the Leader of the House of Commons under Clement Attlee. He was raised in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, attended a local grammar school and then, studied at Oxford. As a teenager, he was a member of the Young Communist League. At university, he joined the Oxford University Labour Club.

As a veteran in public relations by the time of Tony Blair’s bid for leadership of the Labour Party in 1994, Mandelson, distrusted by trade union representatives within the party, played his part in the successful campaign in near anonymity, being referred to by staff only as “Bobby”. In his acceptance speech, Blair used the moniker when expressing gratitude to his campaign team. After running Blair’s successful general election campaign a few years later, Mandelson was appointed to the office of Minister without Portfolio, allowing him to attend Cabinet meetings without having any formal obligations. Critics have likened it to a sinecure. In 1998, Mandelson resigned from government, having failed to declare dealings with millionaire Cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson. He is now a peer, happy to be part of the club.

Oxted is an incredibly old town. When William the Conqueror ordered a survey in 1086, Oxted had its various assets - hides, churches, ploughs - recorded. It remained a sleepy time-capsule until it was reached by the new railway system in 1884 and run-off trade from London began to bring money into the town. At the beginning of the last decade, it was the twentieth richest town in Britain by income.

Born to a nurse and a toolmaker in 1962, Keir Starmer was named for the first parliamentary leader of what would become the Labour Party, Keir Hardie. He attended a grammar school and was the first in his family to graduate from university, obtaining an undergraduate degree in law from the University of Leeds. As a result, he undertook postgraduate study at Oxford and became a barrister in 1987. During this time, he edited Socialist Alternative, a controversial magazine associated with various factions on the Marxist left.

Starmer is a relatively green politician, having only been selected as a candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras in 2014. The majority of his life has been spent working in the legal system. In 2010, Starmer successfully prosecuted 3 Labour MPs and a Conservative peer on charges of false accounting. In 2011, he encouraged the rapid prosecution of several rioters, sometimes on the testimony of undercover police officers. In 2012, Starmer brought a case against former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne which resulted in the only resignation of a Cabinet Minister over legal proceedings in British parliamentary history. In 2020, as Leader of the Opposition, Starmer ordered Labour MPs to abstain on the third reading of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, which granted undercover police officers full legal immunity for all actions undertaken on duty. Desperate to be heard, Starmer re-tweeted a Guardian column by Angela Rayner MP, adding: ‘We’ll make sure you know Labour is on your side.’

Stockport lies just south-east of the City of Manchester at the point where the Rivers Tame and Goyt become the Mersey. Although bisected by the feudal borders of the counties Cheshire and Lancashire, it belongs to a different epoch. Stockport is a town with almost 300 years of industrial history, home to one of the first mechanised silk factories in the entire British Isles. Surveying all of England for his 1845 history ‘The Condition of the English Working Class’, Friedrich Engels remarked that Stockport was ‘renowned as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes’ to be found in the industrial heartlands.

By the time Angela Rayner was born on a Stockport council estate in 1980, the country seemed eager to be free of this history. This eagerness sometimes manifested as a disdain for trade unionists and benefit claimants. Both of Rayner’s parents were eligible for benefits. And at 31, Angela Rayner was a senior official for the public-sector union Unison.

Having left school at 16 to raise her first son, she got her GCSEs by studying part-time at Stockport College, where she eventually qualified as a social care worker. At work, she clashed with management, discovering a flair for negotiation that would get her elected as a union steward. Finally, after years and years of confusion and uncertainty, someone was being made to answer.

[neptunecreek]

Speaking Freely: An Interview With Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian whose work lies at the intersection of ideas and historical change. She is currently on research leave from the University of Chicago, where she teaches early modern European history. She is also a writer of fiction; her 2016 novel, Too Like the Lightning, was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Ada’s research encompasses many topics, including the history of censorship. In 2018, she worked with EFF’s own Cory Doctorow on a project that looked at censorship and information control in information revolutions.

I’ve been thinking about censorship for a long time, but much of what Ada said during our conversation still managed to surprise me. We talked about censorship during the Inquisition, and how that parallels to today’s online censorship challenges. We also discussed what Ada, as an historian, sees as the harmful long-term effects of censorship, some of which might surprise even the most dedicated free expression activist. It was an honor and a pleasure to get to interview Ada for this wide-ranging edition of Speaking Freely.

York: My first question is what does free speech, or free expression, mean to you?

Two very different things, because I’m both an academic studying a phenomenon, and then a human being living in a world. So, as an academic studying a phenomenon, you observe, you describe … and in that sense, I can—when having my historian hat on—speak very neutrally about it. I spend a lot of my time researching major censorship operations of the past—researching the Inquisition, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, researching the Comics Code Authority. With your historian hat on, you can discuss these things very neutrally, even with a sort of fondness of “yes, this is my subject, and these people are terrible, and it’s kind of fun in that way.”

This is very different from when you zoom out from that semi-artificial historian neutrality to the realities. One of the things that has colored my approach to free speech is trying to de-separate and reunify those things. One of the problems we’ve faced trying to understand free expression, and its significance, and what the consequences are of infringing it, is that so much of our historical research on it tries to present as neutral, because that’s how you present historical research—distanced and balanced. But, in a way, that undermines the power of that historical research to show how bad it is and galvanize action. Does that make sense?

York: Absolutely.

In that sense, I consider my work parallel in facing some of the challenges as my colleague Kathleen Belew, who works on the history of white supremacy in the U.S. We’re studying phenomena that we’re fascinated by, but when you try to think about them directly and honestly you have an ethical responsibility to consistently remind the reader of the terrible consequences of them.

York: I’d like to dig into that a bit more. Tell me about one historical phenomenon in terms of censorship that perhaps I or our readers wouldn’t know about.

One of the victims of censorship that I’ve never heard anyone else talk about, although I’m sure someone must have, is the later future capacity to tell histories of the period when censorship happened. Because, since there was censorship, it sort of invalidates the historical record and the documents that survived, which you know were coerced or doctored (or if they weren’t, were written in a state of fear and self-censorship). It renders that whole historical record patch unreliable in a way that then makes it easier for later people to come and make claims about that period that you can’t refute using the historical sources.

To give the specific example that made me think of this: I work a lot on the Renaissance and the early period of the Reformation, and this is a period where everybody knows the Inquisition is in full operation. And lots of people tell histories of the Renaissance where they claim that all these important people, big ideas people who changed the world, were secret atheists, secretly anti-Catholic, or anti-Christian. And you come to this person who’s made this claim and you show them tons of documents and the person comes back and says “oh, there was censorship, so they weren’t being honest, and if you read between the lines they really think this…”

And it’s true there was censorship, and so you have to be very careful in interpreting the documents. The fact that there was censorship means anybody can come to those documents and claim that anything was false because censorship was there, and that what people really did or thought matches their narrative.

York: Wow, that’s really interesting, I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Yeah, we’re very conscious of the consequences of censorship during the short term, within our lifetimes. But censorship sort of poisons the historical record for centuries after it by making this tool by which people can invalidate things.

It’s similar to how we see people invalidating things now—like “that climate study wasn’t really valid because those people got funding from a leftist political group”—they’re invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity in the development of the document. And the more a period is known to have censorship (which isn’t the same thing as actually having it) or other pressure that are in some sense potentially distorting or affecting what people say and write, the easier it is for people to make the claim that they don’t really mean what they say.

I don’t think we think about truths on that larger historical scale being one of the victims of censorship.

York: Yeah, the way that you framed this reminds me of something I’ve been thinking of, which is how the LGBTQ movement here in Berlin was censored by the Nazis...but that’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying. Here it’s the lost information about what happened in Berlin, and what you’re talking about is the mistruths that result from that.

Yes - it will never be possible to write a history of LGBT issues during and before this patch of censorship. Everyone’s always going to be combing through partial records trying to construct what might have been. A good historian will be modest in their claims. You can coax a lot out of a few documents, though.

It’s easy for anybody who has a strong pre-expectation of what must be true to project that pre-expectation onto the material, because anything that doesn’t match that pre-expectation can be dismissed as unreliable or false. And so it will make it both easier to create histories that distort in a pro-LGBT and an anti-LGBT way and in many other ways that will tie into future political issues we haven’t even gotten to. [You] know, 50 years from now when the new frontier of ethics is, I don’t know, octopus rights (because we will have already given civil rights to high primates and will be working on octopuses next), the factions in that battle will be able to exploit documents to advance narratives on any and all sides of a polarizing issue.

York: That’s really fascinating. I don’t mean this to be such a big question, but … what led you to that particular interest in the historical aspects of censorship?

I was led to it because I did my dissertation on Atomism and Epicureanism and we associate these with the history of atheism, which I was always very interested in. So I sort of came to it wanting to find secret atheists. And yet the more I looked at the material, the less I saw any evidence of that, and the more I saw rather orthodox Catholics nonetheless being interested in and reading this radical material.

As I’ve published and had to defend this thesis, I will then over and over have the following conversation:

“But aren’t all these people secret atheists?”

“No, here’s all the things that they say that is incompatible with atheism.”

“Oh, but they’re just being disingenuous.”

It’s been fascinating to watch that ineradicable repetition of “oh, but they’re just secret atheists, right?” But this happens with all our myths about the past. And yet, when I’m working with Renaissance materials, every single book I pull out has been censored, especially in the printed period where quite early in the dissemination of the printing press, the Inquisition had this system set up where you had to submit a text to a censor before you could have permission to publish it. Every book has a page at the front that says who censored it and that it has official permission to be censored, and that it’s good. And on many Italian books it’ll be one page, but if they’re produced under the Spanish or Portuguese regime where the Inquisition was better funded, it will sometimes be dozens of pages or, in a few of extreme examples, half of the book will be filled with letters from censors. The censorship is extremely visible and extremely integral to the text.

At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos...there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number one target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”

And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”

And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.

York: I’ve thought about that as well, in terms of how countries censor the Internet. In my previous work at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, I managed a project that looked at the various reasons and ways in which governments censor the Internet and the tools that they use to do so.

Okay, I want to talk about a couple of parallels here: You’ve got some countries that are more secretive, and others that are very visible in the way that they display blockpages. And then you also talked about the goals of the Inquisition, and I’d love to get your thoughts on why governments—and companies for that matter—censor today.

So, in recurring patterns, one thing I’ve noticed is that pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press—which is of course earlier in the East than in Europe—recognizes that it isn’t possible to track down and destroy every copy of a thing. You’re never going to track down all of the copies once it’s been printed, and efforts to attempt to do so are actually remarkably rare in addition to being consistently unsuccessful. We think of the Inquisition as doing a lot of book burning, but an Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one copy of a book. In fact, the Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned in order to have them for reference.

So what is the Inquisition doing if it’s not trying to obliterate texts? I think it’s trying to do a couple of different things. A big one is projection of power, because every time you pick up a book, the first page you see is that the Inquisition had control over this book. Every time you’re thinking about publishing, you’re thinking about getting past the censor. Whether you’re the author, publisher, or especially the reader, the act of reading becomes an act of being reminded of orthodoxy, power, et cetera, especially in the practice of expurgation, which ties into the visibility question for the internet.

The expurgation system was basically “you may have this book, but you must go to page 210 and cross out paragraph 3—that paragraph is forbidden, but the rest of it you may have.”

What you produce at the end doesn’t actually obliterate the content—you can put a light behind it and see the text, it’s not that hard—but what it means is that every time you turn the page and see the blacked-out parts, you’re reminded of power, reminded that there is an authority out there, lurking. And one of the most telling examples of this is that the content censored isn’t always what we’d think of as the most meaningful.

Here’s an example: There’s an encyclopedia of animals, think a subset of Wikipedia, published by Conrad Gessner in the late 1600s, and he’s collected material that’s been sent to him by people all over Europe who observe animals. He has pictures of animals and little articles, and it’s really as close to Wikipedia as anything gets, because it’s crowdsourced in the pre-modern world.

And the Inquisition looks at it because he’s a Protestant and because they look at everything. And they say “okay, you can have the animals,” but under each animal he’ll usually thank the learned and excellent Doctor So-and-So. But if Doctor So-and-So is a Protestant, he must cross out “learned and excellent,” because Protestants aren’t learned and excellent—they’re bad and wrong. And so you have to go through this six-volume giant encyclopedia and find every point where he praises a Protestant as learned and excellent, and cross it out.

Notice no information has been destroyed at all—what this is is a didactic tool, it’s just like making Bart Simpson go through and write “I will not do X” over and over again on the blackboard.

York: [laughs heartily]

It’s making you go through and write “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad” on every single page. So it’s about turning your reading process into a tool of power for this entity, to reinforce barriers, to reinforce what is taboo and not taboo, and to remind you through every bit of the reading process that there is this authority out there. And that’s what parallels the versions of censoring the internet where they make it obvious, whether it’s having a box pop up, or having the page partially load—that reminds you with a little chill that you tried to do something forbidden. And it has a didactic, power-projecting purpose.

York: That’s so interesting and true.

I see that over and over...they know they’re never going to eradicate material that’s already there, but they can turn that material into a tool for advancing their own agenda. And then the other half of this is that a lot of these activities aren’t for erasing information that already exists, but to cause self-censorship and prevent the production of new things that don’t yet exist.

The motto for the book I’m currently working on is, “The vast majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the vast majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.”

York: Yeah, absolutely.

We had a great discussion in class at one point about the Galileo trial—you’re the Inquisition, here’s this guy Galileo, you think his ideas are dangerous. You then have a giant, showy trial that makes him a hundred times more famous than he was before, so that everyone is talking about him and he remains a major figure in the history of culture for hundreds of years afterward...what are you doing? It would be much more sensible to have him quietly murdered, which is not hard in 1600. It would be more sensible to smear him, say nothing, accuse him of sodomy, any normal sort of destroy-your-enemy tactic of 1600 makes more sense, if what you want to do is silence Galileo.

And a student in the class was asking: “How do we judge when censorship succeeds?” The answer is we have to figure out what the goal of the censorship was, because if the goal of the Galileo trial was to silence Galileo, it was one of the worst failures of anything anyone has ever tried to do in the history of the planet. But if you think of it differently, the goal of the Galileo trial is that it gets Descartes to withdraw his treatise that was about to be published, and then revising it to be way more orthodox and way more Catholic, and then publish that, which continues to be the dominant force in the French intellectual world for a century, and results in a much more orthodox and much more Catholic France than it would have if Descartes had published the uncensored original version—that’s the victory of the Galileo trial.

York: This feels like what we’re seeing in Egypt at the moment—the silencing of some of the louder voices in order to prevent more people from coming forward...of course, the main impact is self-censorship.

Yeah, and...I’ll talk to people sometimes about censorship and they'll want to say things like “okay, we’re going to talk about real censorship, not self-censorship, that’s different.”

York: [laughs]

And I have to say “No, it’s not different.”

The other one I sometimes run into is “We’re going to talk about state censorship, because only state censorship is real censorship—”

York: Yes, that’s my life.

[Palmer laughs] Nooo, it’s not true! And if you want an absolutely foolproof thing that’ll shut that person up for a few minutes while they try to come up with a rebuttal: “The Inquisition wasn’t the state. The Inquisition was a private organization comparable to Doctors Without Borders or Unicef that was organized through Rome, but run by private organizations like the Dominicans and the Jesuits, and was decentralized with lots of offices all over the place and often competed with the state.

In addition to which, the First Amendment—Congress can make no law—there is absolutely no incompatibility with the Inquisition operating in the U.S. right now like the way that it operated in France and Spain and everywhere else. What it is is an organization that has permission to have private police, and have private prisons, and arrest people on private authority and do its thing...the U.S. allows all that stuff. There’s nothing in the First Amendment or the U.S. legal system that wouldn’t allow the Inquisition to operate. There are particular things about policies against religious restriction that might mean they’d have to work around certain local laws in certain states, but [the Inquisition] could absolutely operate the same way here, and it wouldn’t be against the state, and it wouldn’t be against the First Amendment.*

And when you get that across to people who are trying to argue that it isn’t censorship when it’s not the state, I’ve found that to be very successful in getting people to wake up and see that it’s more complicated. Because nobody would ever argue that the Inquisition wasn’t censorship.

York: In that sense, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on the increasingly centralized—I mean, I’ve called it censorship but I’m not sure everyone agrees—behavior of platforms like Facebook.

Right, it’s a major example of the dangers of centralization, which is to say that we want to have lots of platforms that have radically different policies so you can move from platform to platform and voice to voice, and they all can regulate stuff, because they’re private groups and they do. But if you have a plural set of voices, then you’re always going to have some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and some will only print radical ones. It creates an ecosystem in which the consumer of media knows perfectly well which printer to go to.

One of the things that electronic stuff is enabling is that for the first time we’re approaching levels of things that were sort of undreamt of in the pre-digital world in terms of scale and efficacy...they’re now possible. You can make a program that can hunt down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it from being there. That’s something the Inquisition would surely have liked to do if they could have.

It’s always been the case, before and now, that when you get to the very bottom of it, there’s a deeply human penetrability of all censorship systems, because censorship has to be done by people—not only by people, but generally by more educated and more literate people. What is the Inquisition? It employs thousands upon thousands of fresh-out-of-college lit majors with a first job out of college where you go through books, and read them, and report dangerous content. And that’s your day job while at home you’re writing your own treatise.

We have letters of these young scholars whose first job it is while they’re looking for a second job.And we even have letters where they’re writing to each other, like, “Oh Francoise, I got your book to censor today, and I’ll be sure to do an extra good job and make sure that it gets through.”

It creates this level of sympathy and human penetrability to the system. [The] great example of this is a treatise against Jesuit education and endorsing radical enlightenment education, written by one of the leading lights of the Portuguese enlightenment in the 1740s. And it’s printed in Naples because he knows he can’t get it printed in Portugal where the Jesuit-led local Inquisition is very powerful...just think of the Inquisition as very, very decentralized: a plural group of organizations that have to run themselves separately but are pretending to be one thing. He has it printed in Naples. And the local Jesuits find out, intercept the boat at the port in Lisbon, raid it, and seize the entire print run—this is as close to eradication as the Inquisition gets—and they destroy that print run, leaving only the copies that the printers in Naples had as their reference copies. However, within three months, a new edition of this book is printed in Portugal by one of the Inquisitors whose job it was to destroy the first edition. He’d kept a copy from the library of banned books, and then liked it and secretly printed it.

The human being is the point of penetrability there. And that doesn’t happen to every book the Inquisition tries to destroy, but it sure happens enough that it makes an enormous difference. So whether it’s a fresh-out-of-college English major who decides this radical book is actually kind of cool and lets it slip, or it’s this person printing an underground version of a forbidden book, there’s always been this hidden level where, when enough of the culture supports an intellectual movement, the human beings doing the censoring also become sympathetic to that movement and let it slide.

That has enabled, for example, the proliferation of local materials against attempts at global censorship. When, the L'Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert radical enlightenment encyclopedia is printed in France, France loves it. It’s full of the richest, newest enlightenment philosophy, it’s full of cool technical illustrations. We have a wonderful report of where the King and Queen were looking up how silk stockings are made, and she was excited to learn how her silk stockings work. We have an endorsement from the king and so on. They gave it official royal permission to be printed despite all of its radical and especially anti-centralized church stuff. It got as far as volume seven until the Papacy was like, “No, this is not okay.” And so it was banned in Rome. And when things are banned in Rome, the order is it must also be banned in France, and France has to have a ceremonial book burning and ban this book. But everyone in France likes this book, including the king. So what they do is have a ceremonial book burning in which they carry the Encyclopédie over to the fire, but then set it aside and burn in its place volumes of Calvinist sermons which they don’t like.

And so they keep the Encyclopédie, and from then on everyone in France knows that it’s officially forbidden but they don’t care. And they keep printing it in secret across the border in Switzerland, and smuggle it in, and it’s allowed to be smuggled in with such regularity that people who are printing more radical forbidden works wrap them inside the Encyclopédie—because if the border guards catch you they’ll just let you go, because the whole of France is angry at the Pope about the ban and wants to support the book.

That’s a space where you can say the region of an empire was able to, independently because of a cultural movement, allow the dissemination and proliferation of a text even when it had been banned by the central government. But we’re talking about books, and those take weeks to travel on horse. In the electronic world, that kind of regional, local autonomy and permeability starts to become much harder. Hackers can hide things on the darkweb and so on, but your average citizen of 18th-century France had much more access to the Encyclopédie than your average citizen in Guangzhou in China right now has access to electronic materials banned by the central government. You see that difference?

York: Yes, definitely.

So I think that’s one of the key things that’s changing.

York: I think what concerns me is the effectiveness of censorship now.

I think of it as saturation—how much of the material can be touched by the censorship. And that varies. So if we look at something as simple as how the Kindle automatically updates books that Amazon puts in, but the Kobo doesn’t change ebooks unless you give it explicit permission. If some malign actor took over the administration of both Kindle and Kobo, that malign actor could delete every copy of 1984 off every Kindle simultaneously and replace them with a propaganda wheel. But, in the case of the Kobo, it would say, “We want to update your copy of 1984, is that okay?” A few people would not know what was going on and say yes. But a few people would notice what was going on, say no, and a large number of Kobo owners would retain the original text. That very simple difference between the design of two ebook readers would therefore result in 100% saturation of censorship implemented through the Kindle, but maybe between 30-80% of saturation of censorship through the Kobo, depending on how many Kobo users get alerted to the censorship before they hit okay on the button. And both of them are censorship, but one of them is far more irrevocable.

York: That’s certainly true. I think a lot about how architecture of a technology influences the impact of censorship. Okay, I have one last question for you, one that I’ve been asking everyone: Do you have a free speech hero, either from past or from present?

A lot of people don’t know how hard Diderot worked on the Encyclopédie. Diderot was prizedly, personally an atheist, and his atheistical writings are absolutely gorgeous. They’re fascinating to read from a modern standpoint, because the atheism of his century was totally different from post-Darwin atheism, it’s the atheism of somebody who doesn’t have science on his side.

York: Oooh—

...who doesn’t have an atheistical explanation for how the world works, and why forest animals have forest camouflage and desert animals have desert camouflage. Who, when he writes about it, admits that science is in fact on the side of theism and that he doesn’t have good explanations for things, but that he nonetheless in a groping and incomplete way feels like atheism describes the actual events that he sees in the world around him—the chaoticness of daily life, and the lack of apparent meaning and providential action in human life. And therefore he feels sort of, as he says, on an irrational and instinctive level that atheism is true, and he’s trying to grope toward a coherent atheism but doesn’t have it yet. It’s really beautiful and some of the most heartful, honest—a philosopher telling you that he doesn’t know the answer and that he’s uncertain of his own convictions. Beautiful material.

In the 18th-century, or really the very end of the 17th, is really the first point in Europe’s history that there started to be atheism as a movement. But it wasn’t just a silent thing or something that people use as a slur toward other people. There was actually atheist literature, atheists talking to each other, atheist poetry, and Diderot was perfectly positioned to really be the leader and center of this movement. But he self-censored everything, and he didn’t publish any of his atheistic work in his lifetime at all. He circulated it privately among friends and that’s it, because he was the editor of the encyclopedia.

The purpose of the encyclopedia was to enable universal education for the first time, to empower everybody by giving everybody the knowledge to understand their tools, their agriculture, the way society was put together. It was a project to try to transform the world to where everybody had the power that only elites had before. And, as he also articulates it, it’s insurance against a new dark age. That if a new dark age should come upon humanity and only one copy of the encyclopedia survives, it would preserve all the technology, all of the social and ethical development, kindness of law that had developed at that point so it would be possible to reconstruct all of those things, and humanity would never be doomed to lose its achievements again.

He knew that if the editor of this project was known to be an atheist, that they would absolutely crack down on this and they would never allow it to circulate. So, in order to protect everyone else, in order to protect the achievements of everybody else leading up to him, and in order to achieve effective immortality of everybody else’s life, he self-censored his own and didn’t allow any of it to be published in his lifetime, leaving orders that it be printed not only after his death but after the death of his daughter, who was a pious Catholic and he didn’t want her to be sad that her father was going to hell.

As the result of this, some of his works were permanently or temporarily lost or inaccessible. This is a bit part of why Voltaire’s works are on high school syllabuses and almost nobody knows Diderot wrote anything that wasn’t the Encyclopédie.

Rameau's Nephew, which is one of the most absolutely most amazing philosophical works I’ve ever read—the work in which Diderot wrestles with the fact that by radically changing the education of the new generations, and encouraging them to dismantle current institutions, and create better ones—Diderot realizes that this also means creating a future in which his generation will no longer have a place, in which his values will be outdated and replaced by values that will be better but also frightening to him and to his peers who didn’t grow up in that world. [It wrestles] very directly with the problem of progressivism versus conservatism, and the fact that being progressive means that by the time you’re old, the world will be a place where you’re no longer comfortable.

It’s an amazing work, and it survived only in one handwritten copy which was missing for over a century until it only turned up by chance in a used book stall on the side of the Seine in the late nineteenth century. If that one copy had been destroyed, we wouldn’t have it at all. And he decided to risk that for all of his work in order to give us the encyclopedia and universal education.

York: That’s really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that.

What we want is a world where nobody ever has to do that again.

* Under US law there are some situations in which a private actor may be considered a "state actor" subject to First Amendment restrictions. But these are difficult and highly specific legal questions. Although EFF has First Amendment experts, we are not historians and do not know enough about the Inquisition to know whether a good state action argument could be made under modern US law. Nevertheless, recent history has shown that modern-day private censors like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family, or the various private groups that sustained the Hollywood Blacklist, have been able to exercise great influence without official state action.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3aS6GsP

[kershmaru-blog]

What is Feminism? An outside male perspective

First I think I need to acknowledge that feminism means vastly different things to different people. There are quite incompatible, warring factions within the movement, and what I dub amateur feminism or feminism of the masses, is another story altogether. I am talking about the feminism of the vast majority of self-described feminists who never came in direct contact with professional gender studies or feminist theory and wish for nothing but equality.

What I think all feminists have in common is the perspective that our world is male-dominated, that there is a relative lack of positive female role models even within the west - which is true if your viewpoint is that you need your role models to share such superficial criteria as sex, sexuality, and gender with yourself - and that our society values males more than it does females.

 I should introduce myself. I go by Kershmaru, which is an old Gamertag I came up with. It consists of a nonsensical first syllable and an ending for Japanese first names. So I am Japanophile. Sue me.

I do value my privacy and privacy rights in general (you don’t have to fear that I expose private conversations between us, or even write about them in an anonymous format without your express permission), but that is not the reason I go by a pseudonym. I may or may not announce my real name after some time. There is a reason for my anonymity: Part of my philosophy is that the source shouldn’t matter and that every post, every argument, and every article should be able to stand on their own, on their own merit.

I am 27, single, male, white, an atheist and from Austria, for those of you who care about such things. Personally, I think that my writing tells you more about myself than those more or less random metrics. In fact, I think the only thing I mentioned which tells you anything worth knowing about my worldview is that I am an atheist.

 Why write about feminism at all? Firstly, because there is a growing divide between feminists and social justice advocates on one side and anti-feminists and anti-SJWs on the other.  There is very little civilized dialogue between the two sides, and in all honesty, I believe such dialogue would be enriching for both sides.

Secondly, despite its vast influence over politics and media, some strains of feminism seem to have developed an “us vs. the world” mentality. I think those people would benefit from an outside perspective. The aim of this blog isn’t to explain your own ideology to you; it is only a subjective viewpoint and an outside perspective.

 I am neither a feminist nor an anti, despite the fact that I am sure I will be accused of being both, if nothing else because of the forums I plan to post this on (minds.com and tumbler).

 I am an advocate for equality as far as it is reasonable.

Some of you might have read this far only to stop after reading about reasonable inequality. For those who didn’t, hear me out: There are currently disparities in rights that are unfair but without an alternative.

The most striking of these rights is the right to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. (I am well aware that in some states in America, the religious right fights against the right to choose, and I am squarely on board with the feminists on this one. Women need to remain the sole decision makers regarding their own bodies)

To clarify my views on abortion, I regard it as a necessary evil. There are cases in which it entirely is a medical necessity (i.e., Pregnancy within the fallopian tubes, which cannot be brought to term and if unchecked will cause massive internal bleeding and the death of the mother), but for a variety of reasons - I can go more into detail if you want me to - I also am in favor of all other cases except late-term abortion. There needs to be some time for a prospective mother to decide what she wants to do, and she shouldn’t have to make rash decisions. But there should be a time limit after which the rights of the fetus are protected. Such a limit is necessarily arbitrary, but as I said before, a necessity to give the mother time to think. Would I be in favor of fewer abortions? Absolutely. But the way we can arrive there is only by providing easy access to contraceptives, not through clumsy attempts at social engineering through abstinence-only education. It would also help if there were more resources for nascent mothers, like easy access to childcare, legally protected maternity leave (which of course makes women less attractive on the job market) and easy access to adoption services.

 My personal views aside, the status quo in wide parts of the western world is that women have the unilateral power to make decisions on whether or not they will become parents, even after the fact. Men cannot legally interfere with this decision.

If the woman decides thusly, the men become fathers, with all the legally binding obligations that entail. (An exception is a policy in Sweden of which I am not sure whether it has been implemented which would allow men to opt out of paternity, but only by relinquishing all legal rights. That is not equal to the female power to chose; in my opinion a useless policy)

If the woman doesn’t want to be a parent, the man also never gets the chance to.

 This situation is intrinsically unfair. But the alternative, making women into incubators against their will is so dystopian that I will not even consider advocating for it. (on a side note, if artificial wombs were already available, I would likely be in favor of protecting the fetus and bringing it to term in such a device if one of the parents - in this case, the father - wishes it, at least if the conception was consensual in the first place. But because such devices don’t yet exist and will likely have to navigate a maze of “ethical” obstacles, this point though interesting is mute)

There you have it: A right, in favor of women no less, which is intrinsically unfair and unequal but needs to stay this way.

 But enough distractions. Time to get to the meat of it. Feminism.

To some a necessary struggle against oppressive structures, to others a totalitarian system based on religious dogma aiming to police, form, and control every aspect of culture, politics and interpersonal relationships.

Firstly, I agree that there are inequalities in men and women, even within the western world.

I also believe that there are differences between men and women based in biology. Are these differences reinforced by cultural norms and traditional gender roles? I think they are.

As you can see, I neither fully subscribe to an entirely biologic-deterministic nor to a socially constructed worldview. Both lack - to me as a layman regarding gender studies - merit (I also will avoid using overly technical or predefined language in this blog due to the emotional baggage and presuppositions associated with such terms. Here, where I was forced to use it nevertheless is the best place to inform you of my rationale for this decision).

What are these differences? Most of them, like muscle strength, are irrelevant regarding the modern work environment. The obvious exception here are positions that demand high fitness and muscle strength, like construction, firefighting or some military jobs. I am of the opinion that such positions should absolutely be open to women who pass the requirements, though I will admit that men aiming for these posts hold an unfair biological and physiological advantage. Two mutually dependent differences aren’t irrelevant: Risk aversion and resource management (meant are personal resources like stress)

Men are less risk-averse than women (as can be seen in factors such as gender differences in gambling behavior https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/ )

This primes them for high risk, high reward positions which are highly valued by our society (politicians, CEOs)

To clarify, I don’t believe that women aren’t qualified for these positions. Quite the opposite, I think those who make it there in a meritocratic system are qualified. I also find them to be outliers.

Can the frequency of such outliers be increased by shifting cultural norms and by nurture? I believe it can be. But should it at all costs? I am not a father, and I may well never be. But the way I would raise my children, regardless of gender, would be to try to instill in them the same primal curiosity, the same drive to see the beauty in our universe I feel, and to reinforce in them whatever interests they have. I wouldn’t project my insecurities and wishes on them.

The other thing I mentioned, resource management, is in favor of women. Women manage their own stress better, this meta-study on burnout suggests http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879110000771 and have a higher life expectancy.

There are fields in which women are yet underrepresented which cannot be explained by the two metrics of risk aversion and resource management, for example, science and engineering. This may be partially due to biologic differences, but I do believe we will see more women drift to these professions organically over time. After all, curiosity isn’t a male trait. At least I didn’t see any evidence for it.

I believe in a meritocratic and free system. It may take some time until the gender balance approaches the distribution of genders as dictated by biology, but I don’t see the problem in that. In most circles, no one doubts that women can be as capable as men in a given position, and that, rather than gender parity, is to me the sign of achieved equality.

 Which brings me to my main gripe with feminism. Regardless of their exact strain of feminism, a lot of feminists believe in particular policy implementations that go against meritocracy, such as diversity quotas.

 The belief that those measures are necessary is founded partially in what presents itself to me as a persecution complex: That the world is still in the fangs of patriarchy. There is an interesting philosophical debate to be had on the topic who or rather what is in control of our world and society, but that goes beyond the scope of this blog. I may write an article on it on minds.

 I am not saying sexism is dead, or that unconscious bias doesn’t exist. What I am saying is that bias isn’t the sole explanation for societal ills and injustices. Consider this if you will: A biased opinion against people with the descriptor d. A person with d may be discriminated against by d-cist people and learn that this bias exists. They will now be conditioned to look out for this prejudice, and it will color their perception of reality. If they encounter repeated injustice, perceived or real, they are more likely to attribute it to d and d-cist opinions.

This in itself can pose a problem, if they set out to cure d-cist attitudes. An overreach can antagonize and prejudice people who didn’t hold d-cist positions to start with. Overestimating the scope of a problem or applying the wrong solution can be as destructive as doing nothing at all. It can not only promote d-cist attitudes in reaction to the overreach but can lead to its own set of social problems and injustices. For example, if you insist on thinking in these categories, a person with d might be promoted due to a diversity quota over a socio-economically disadvantaged person without d, who might even have better qualifications and a more significant need for the position.

The belief that d-cist attitudes are rampant in society at large can also lead D’s to self-segregate and take on a hostile attitude towards people outside their community or society at large. This can lead to other problems, like shifting attitudes towards D’s, actual d-cism and mutual hostility.

D can, in this context stand for any arbitrary attribute, from gender, sex, sexuality, race to wearing glasses. (if you think that the last example is ludicrous or ridiculous, remember that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered people wearing eyeglasses on the suspicion that they were intellectuals. Say what you want about the treatment of women in history and today, but I cannot think of an ideology or system, extant or extinct that promoted female genocide.)

 Herein, as alluded to before, lies my biggest problem with feminism (And the biggest problem of many others): Both its dogmatic, overly simplistic assertions about the nature of our world, and the political solution widely championed by feminists.

 It needs to be said that I respect everybody's right to an opinion. We all would like the world to be different in subtle ways. Some of these problems and complaints seem petty to outsiders (manspreading), but if you feel like there is a problem, you absolutely have a right to speak out. Issues come into play when you try to control culture or media because then you infringe upon others right of expression. I am well aware most feminists, particularly but not exclusively the aforementioned amateur feminists only want perceived equality in specific circumstances that are near and dear to them, such as political representation, positive role models, unbiased education. Again, nothing wrong about that. But most of the proposals I have seen to bring such changes in short time are flawed. And the used rhetoric can be downright abusive. What possible use have “teach boys not to rape” seminars and workshops? Literally everybody knows rape is an unforgivable crime and one of the most damaging, traumatic events to the victims. There is nothing to learn here. The only ones who could learn from such a seminar are those who would never rape in the first place. What right do you have to indoctrinate children to look at each other and themselves as sexual deviants, these barely restrained predatory monsters? But I digress. Do you know that some definitions of rape only encompass penetration, but not forcefull envelopment? That is right, according to some definitions - which have been used for studies and statistics - , if a woman forces herself onto a man that isn’t rape. Not to mention that the current culture makes it very hard for male victims to speak out, especially against female perpetrators. Feminists may interject here that they are addressing these cultural norms, but the truth is that male advocacy or men’s rights is a derogatory term often named in a breath with pick up artists or similar lowlifes. Disparate incarceration and suicide rates, as well as a gendered and biased justice system, are a joke to some feminists. Worse yet, if the issue is brought up some see it as a twisted form of justice, recompense for millennia of oppression.

 There is no doubt that women were denied their fair shake by society. Heck, they still are outside the western world. But there can also be no doubt that things are different now. Claiming otherwise is delusional. We may not yet be a society reflecting the real interests and qualifications of the individuals therein, but the main ingredient missing, in my opinion, is time. Time for genuine bigots to be retired from their place of power. Time for girls to speak out about their “boyish” hobbies and interests and potentially make them into a career. But it is also necessary to acknowledge the progress we already made and to think more critically about complaints concerning sexism or other forms of bigotry in the western world.

 I really don’t know exactly how to structure the following because every subpoint would be deserving of its own blog post, and they may get them, in time. In The meantime, here is a more or less unstructured rant about some common feminist complaints about western society. It is by no means a full list, and I would caution you against using what I have written to extrapolate my stance on other issues. Making assumptions without sufficient information is a profoundly human trait; albeit one we need to work hard to overcome. Feel free to disagree and tell me why it is you disagree. I am more than willing to change my position if you present me with a good argument.

 What about sexualized media? First off, I know that this is an unfair argument because a good part of feminists see female sexuality as liberating and liberated. Personally, I have no problem with any form of sexuality or sexual imagery for the purpose of advertising or marketing. To put it in plain English: Sex sells. Using sexuality in marketing isn’t oppressive or objectifying, it is a good business practice. I agree that it can become ridiculous at times, especially if there is absolutely no connection to the good or service being advertised. It is a cheap tactic to draw eyes, but an effective one.

What about the male gaze in movies? I would argue that the same is true here. And I would also say that not only men sexualize women. Humans, in general, are very good at sexualizing each other, regardless of their sexuality. Envy and critique replace lust as the motivating factor, but women also look at legs and breasts and men at abs.

What about the elephant in the room: the pay gap? It would be more honest to speak about a earnings gap. It is true, men and woman earn disparate incomes, but they also work in different professions. If you compare apples to oranges, of course, there will be a disparity. If you compare people within comparable positions, the earnings gap shrinks. If you control for hours worked, qualifications and other factors it shrinks again. It doesn’t disappear altogether, but that is where the risky behavior and assertiveness comes into play. Women can and should be more self-aware and aware what they are worth, and ask for financial recompense. That is what men do.

(It should be mentioned that there is a gap in payment amongst male and female CEOs, which of course cannot be ascribed to divergent qualifications. But the pay amongst CEOs, in general, is highly variable and depends on the worth of the company. Once a woman is in charge of Amazon, Microsoft or a comparable Company we will see this gap shrink)

On a side note, there are legal protections against pay discrimination in many countries in the western world, including the US. Of course, legal protection doesn’t mean that it cannot happen. Despite my above explanations, I do not doubt that there still is gender-based discrimination in isolated cases. If you think you are being discriminated against, be very careful. You might well have a case, but if you try to litigate and the court doesn’t find in your favor, you might well be out of a job. That being said, you have a right to take up your legal arms and fight in court. As somebody opposed to discrimination, I wish you the best. Nobody should suffer any form of discrimination, least of all due to a trait of their person they have absolutely no control over.

The lion’s share of the earnings gap is due to individual choice. Men work more dangerous and dirtier jobs than women and are compensated for that. You want parity amongst CEOs? What about equality amongst miners or sewer workers? Some careers are simply higher paid than others. A lot of male-dominated fields fall into that category. If a woman wants to enter these fields and she has all the necessary qualifications, she is free to do so, and I would encourage her. As I would encourage everybody to pursue the career they want.

Should some of the traditional female professions be better compensated? Well, talking about dangerous jobs, I think that teachers should be paid much more but also be held to a higher standard.

What about cyberbullying? Well according to the data, http://soc101group2.providence.wikispaces.net/Gender+Distinctions+in+Cyber+Bullying women are more likely to be the perpetrators. That, of course, may change over time and depends on whether or not you count gossip as “bullying.” Also all studies I could find depended on self-reporting, so take them with a grain of salt since that is amongst the least reliable study designs. It should also be said that one amongst the most recent studies I could find (from 2016, conducted amongst US highschoolers), on statista.com showed contrary trends. It might just be that the interviewed girls didn’t count gossiping as cyberbullying; and I am not certain gossip should count. I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

What about “bossy?” When a man is a boss, he isn’t considered “bossy.” Neither is a female boss. The male equivalent to “bossy” isn’t “boss” it is “dick” speaking of which…

What about sexualized slurs you might ask? What about them? How often have you called somebody a dick or a prick and not even thought of it as a sexual slur? This does of course not mean that sexual slurs should be societally acceptable. My point is that those against women already aren’t, while those against men clearly are. Here we come to another aspect of my philosophy, this time concerning free speech: everybody should be allowed a chance to speak freely and out themselves as an ass, the right to free speech doesn’t mean freedom from social condemnation.

 I cannot possibly go into detail on all I touched on without writing a veritable book. This is as good as any a place to take a break. I will be back next week with some thoughts on the Weinstein scandal and rape culture. In the meantime, as alluded to before, I am here to talk. Comment with your thoughts, questions, and of course, criticism. I will do my best to explain myself and my positions. Tell me where you disagree and agree with me and if need be, enlighten me if I made some factual errors or overly simplifying generalizations.