#pro freedom of expression

[dead-pidove-do-not-eat]

Sooo not to get political on here but I think it’s relevant to my whole schtick… if you know any non-partisan voters.

Trump said he’s planning on banning violent videogames. As is Project 2025.

Page 908

— 876 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Other conservatives are more skeptical concerning the effect of online expe￾rience on the young, comparing the concern about social media to concern about video games, television, and bicycle safety.

[pro-anomalocaris]

your discomfort does not entitle you to explanations as to what anyone writes

your discomfort does not entitle you to cruelty about what someone writes

your discomfort does not entitle you to being hurtful without repercussions over what someone writes

hope that helps but if it doesn't, please know that never unlearning the idea you are owed explanations by everyone for every behavior isn't going to mess up my life - it's going to mess up yours, because "I don't believe in boundaries" is rarely a phrase heard among happy people

a writer who writes about taboo subjects doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they write what they write

an artist who draws dark, macabre art doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they draw what they draw

a writer who writes about taboo subjects doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they write what they write

an artist who draws dark, macabre art doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they draw what they draw

a writer who writes about taboo subjects doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they write what they write

an artist who draws dark, macabre art doesn’t owe you any explanation as to why they draw what they draw

hope this helps 🥰

[ichverdurstehier]

I'm very pro-fanfiction but for the love of Jjong please tag your fics properly. If there's incest, tag it for incest. If there's an age gap, tag it for age gap. If there's grooming, tag it for grooming. If there's a character with a vagina involved in the ship, DON'T tag it m/m. Vaginas are female organs.

TAG YOUR FICS!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!

[alwaysbewoke]

[emperornorton47]

[sarahowritesostucky]

"Censor-shipping"

Thing that pro-censorship people have told me I'm not "allowed" to write, because reasons:

m/m

a/b/o

rape

dub/con

infidelity

drug use

religions

self harm

violent crime

polyamory

abortion

underage

polygamy

slavery

incest

crossovers

cannibalism

Guess how many I decided to not write about?

(Hey, you guys! I invented a new term: it's "censorshipping" 😂)

OOH, one of the trolls came out from her bridge as soon as the above post came off my queue:

I HAVE to imagine it is either a relatively unintelligent teenager, or else god help us if it calls itself an adult 😳

I don't think it understands that books are constantly being written with horrible things that happen in the plots. Including each and every one of its personal squicks.

Does it ever go to the library??

Does it belong to Moms for Liberty? I bet it's a card carrying member of Moms for Liberty 😂

Ignorant cowards hide their hate behind anons 🥱

[galerymod]

Peace froce is one of my player names and PATS is my one man team. Peace after the storm.

Maybe thier don't like it, but in this game everything has been leveled over time and there's hardly any pay to win.

It's fun to play with a random team of 5 players and fight another team for a bag or as a dead match.

Mod

An individual who engages in gaming for its intrinsic enjoyment. 🤣🙃✌️

The digital death is waiting for you during your lunch break, tactics are key.

Life is a competition if you let it be, the game 🎮 is definitely one because it's fun.

It's just a game and yet, in the moment of playing, it's everything.

[cookie-waffle]

Conservatives paying YouTube to promote anti-education and anti-freedom of expression propaganda by trying to convince parents that there is something wrong with their sons for not being “manly enough,” and that education is the issue:

How DARE they allow our boys to feel accepted! How DARE boys be taught to to respect women and not use violence or anger to get what they want!

obviously, boys should all be mindless troglodytes who bonk women on the heads with giant clubs and kidnap them when they want to talk to a girl. Now, that’s a MAN

[agentfascinateur]

The strange case of "Canadaland" and Gaza solidarity protests:

As examples, Brown pointed to articles about the use of the word intifada, the chant, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ and an incident in Toronto in February where one protester dressed as Spider-Man climbed scaffolding outside Mount Sinai Hospital. Brown said the media not explicitly labelling these things as antisemitic, but rather writing about their contested meanings, is “very frustrating for Jews who feel like they know exactly what they are seeing. The term is gaslit. It can feel like we are being gaslit, constantly.” Brown is wrong on multiple accounts here.  At a broad level, as Brown knows, only some Jews agree with his categorization of these examples as antisemitic. Why should that segment be granted the privilege of speaking for the whole? Brown also ignores the outlets that have explicitly claimed the examples he cited are antisemitic. More importantly, people usually look at surrounding details to determine whether something is hateful. For example, when discussing the hospital incident, Brown emphasized it would be difficult for it to be a genuine coincidence that Spider-Man “climbed on the awning of the one Jewish building.” However, a detailed piece from David Gray-Donald at The Grind, who was with the rally as it moved throughout downtown Toronto, notes that the hospital scaffolding was in fact just one of at least eight things Spider-Man climbed over the course of a few hours. Gray-Donald’s piece also contradicts many other claims made about the protest. 

(...)

Ironically, Brown said there isn’t much to be gained by the media going to protests to get a sense of how Jewish people feel because only the extreme ends of the community will be represented there.

Silo thinking used in a phony blanket orthodoxy is gone to smithereens, aided by Israeli forces' antics.

[roguetelepaths]

It's not often I dip my toes into shipcourse, as an adult who does not like minor/adult ships or harassment and would rather curate my environment in a way that allows me to pretend the former doesn't exist than go out of my way to engage with it for cheap internet outrage points, but one place where the proship ideology loses me is in this idea of having to go along to get along. You can dislike things, sure, but you'd better not talk about the fact that you dislike things or why, because that's Yucking Someone's Yum, and don't you know YKINMKATO? If you complain, you're being a killjoy at best, and at worst, you're actively contributing to harassment.

I want to be able to talk about common ships and tropes in my fandom that I dislike, things that make me uncomfortable or that I think are deserving of criticism, without making it seem like I'm trying to control the things other people write. I'm not. I'm trying to express myself, same as everyone else.

Anti ideology often goes after people for nothing (a height difference between two adults, an interabled relationship between an Autistic and allistic person of the same age, and the childhood friends to lovers trope are all things I've seen branded as "pedophilia", please stop, you do not know what that word means) but proship ideology at this point feels like toxic positivity. Fiction is meant to elicit emotions, and criticism, discomfort, and dislike are all valid emotions that a work of fiction can elicit. Fandom spaces are not truly free unless they provide room to experience and process all emotions that a person can experience as a result of engaging with fandom, not just the happy ones.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Abigail Shrier

Published: May 3, 2024

Frat parties with offensive themes are swiftly punished. But publicly contemplate murdering Zionists? That’s a different story.

A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

In January, a junior at Columbia University, Khymani James, told a disciplinary committee at the school that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.” “Be grateful that I’m just not going out and murdering Zionists,” he instructed them. Then, James headed back to campus, scot-free. (If he hadn’t also posted a recording of the meeting to his social media site, discovered four months later, there might never have been any repercussions at all.)

It was the sort of stunt a star quarterback for the football team could have gotten away with a generation or two ago, when college coaches might have been eager to sweep sexual assault allegations under the rug. Or the son of a major donor to the university. James apparently enjoys a level of privilege every bit as sacrosanct: as a leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at an Ivy League school, he could threaten Jewish students at his pleasure, university codes of conduct be damned.

If there was ever doubt whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct, on April 23, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) asked four Columbia University professors and administrators this explicitly. Every one of them said: “Yes, it does.” As for the encampments, they violate Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct, disruptive behavior standards, university policy regarding “tenting,” disciplinary rules against “vandalism/damage to property,” unauthorized “access/egress” rules as well as Columbia’s policy against harassment, according to a Notice to Encampment circulated by the university.

In the last two weeks, self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian protesters have set up encampments at dozens of American universities. Heedless of university restrictions against intimidation and harassment, they demonstrate where, when, and how they like. They cry “Go back to Poland,” “baby killers,” and “globalize the Intifada” at Jewish students. They wave the flags of designated terrorist groups, like Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and hold up signs that beckon “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing at Jewish counterprotesters. (Al-Qassam is the wing of Hamas that carried out the October 7 massacre.)

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it. 

At UCLA, protesters blocked students from entering the library during the midterms, asking those who wished to enter: “Are you a Zionist?” After a Jewish girl was reportedly beaten unconscious by pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA arrived in masks and hoodies, shooting off fireworks, firing tear gas, and throwing objects at the pro-Hamas protesters and attempting to physically destroy the encampments. Only then did UCLA call in the police to remove the encampments.

Instead of immediately suspending the pro-Hamas protesters for breaking university rules, for weeks, university administrations instead chose to “negotiate” with the rule-breakers. At Columbia, the administration offered to review its policy on “socially responsible investing” (read: divesting from the world’s only Jewish state), and offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza.” At Brown, the administration promised protesters that they would put divestment from Israel on the agenda. At Northwestern, the administration meekly tossed rewards, including the promise to establish a full-ride scholarship for Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics. 

At Columbia, protesters rejected the offers, knowing they had the upper hand. When police arrived to break up the encampments, Columbia faculty in orange vests linked arms to form a human wall against the police, shielding the rule-breakers.

[ Faculty of Columbia University link arms to protect students inside threatened with suspension if they refused to voluntarily dismantle the pro-Palestine encampment on campus by 2 pm on April 29, 2024. ]

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades. 

In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up��around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.

American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate. 

Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech. 

After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”

Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech. 

In the abstract, if “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing. 

But in practice, the two types of incidents—rather, the two targets of the incidents—are treated entirely differently. Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. 

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way. 

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either. 

[leprosycock]

im an adult looking to get into "proship" and "rpf" spaces for the first time.. do you have any advice on where to start? ive always been really nervous about starting out and since ive lurked your blogs for over a year i thought id ask you!

this isn’t great advice because i’m day drinking after getting off work but like. honestly you just have to follow likeminded people and that’s it. that’s how i started years ago when i realized i was super into shotacon, i just followed people on twitter who advertised themselves as very pro freedom of expression and posted cool porn. look through an account’s followers if they represent those free-thinking ideas. try to avoid discourse accounts too, because they’re a massive waste of time and will only make your day worse. posting art is also a good way to gain a likeminded following if you do art! fic as well, i usually put the account that corresponds to the fandom i’m posting in in the notes.

[panuccispizza]

the absolutely disgusting feeling in my stomach from scrolling through someone's profile full of AI images is insane I thought I was too autistic for that level of feeling. if you have the ability to shit out 20+ very aesthetically pleasing "watercolor inspired fantasy art" pictures in one day you're sick and twisted and I actually want you to get hit in the ankle with a scooter. I hope your water spills on you next time you go to take a drink. you're avoiding being human.

[sephirthoughts]

all of this

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

[red-veril]

If you watched "The Wind Rises" and think it's nationalist propaganda you clearly saw another movie. In your head.

Baffled.

[waldensblog]

K there really needs to be a way to block live on the app because it's really annoying. ALL of them are OFesque and I just saw one pose that very much squicked me out and like - look, live and let live but STOP.FORCING.ME.TO.SEE.THIS.