Cato Institute has a long paper by Danielle Keats Citron, “What to Do About the Emerging Threat of Censorship Creep on the Internet”, link here. This may very well have been printed as a Policy Paper. Citron is the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace”.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
"What to Do About the Emerging Threat of Censorship Creep on the Internet", substantial position paper at Cato
Cato Institute has a long paper by Danielle Keats Citron, “What to Do About the Emerging Threat of Censorship Creep on the Internet”, link here. This may very well have been printed as a Policy Paper. Citron is the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace”.
The paper notes that major content companies, especially
social networking platforms, have to adjust their practices to European law
which is often stricter on expectations of prior restraint and on specific
group-oriented concerns over hate speech than American law. This concern
appears in areas like “the right to be forgotten”. On the other hand, this might give tech
companies a heads up if American law loosens Section 230 protections (as over
Backpage) although European law does have some due process in downstream
liability cases.
European politicians have extracted concessions from tech
companies by threatening to hold them liable for extremist speech. But Europe
really is in a hypocritical quandary over handling especially radical Islam.
Saturday, November 25, 2017
A small press gives its perspective on "Small Business Saturday"
Today, at the “Small Business Saturday” hosted by the DC
Center for the LGBT Community in Washington DC, I was able to talk to a small
press owner for Red Bone Press.
I did buy one book, a collection of free-form poetry by
Marvin K. White, “Our Name Be Witness”.
The press says it specializes in black (or presumably other “intersectional”
minority) lesbian and gay issues.
This appears to be a trade press, not self. It appears to manage the actual production and
distribution of books rather than outsourcing it to a self-publisher (like
Create Space or Author Solutions).
The owner told me she spends at least two days a week on
marketing and running the business as a business (wholesale and retail) as
opposed to developing more content (which I spend my time on).
She also said
she spends considerable effort reaching independent bookstores and has been to
the Miami Book Fair (covered last weekend).
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Atlantic: Two big essays on the alt-right, including a bio of Andrew Anglin
The December 2017 “Atlantic” (a literary magazine that I
recall being mentioned in junior English in high school back in 1960) has two
big essays on the alt-right and white supremacist movements that surfaced in
Charlottesville.
Luke O’Brien offers “The Making of an American Nazi”, a booklet-length
biography of Andrew Anglin. , publisher of the Daily Stormer , p. 54 in print.
For a 30-year old (roughly) Anglin looks particularly unattractive
in the photos with the shaved head. But his own evolution reads in the article
like a journey into mental illness and nihilism. He started out in the most
liberal, hippie culture in Ohio, according to the article, and seems to have
dead-ended inside before he adopted what seem in the article like arbitrarily
convenient beliefs, easily rationalized.
There seems to have been a sudden disgust with the weak.
O’Brien offers a video about how the anonymity of the
Internet facilitates extremism. He talks
about radical groups “growing in the shadows”.
Then Angela Nagle offers “The Lost Boys: Brotherhood of Losers” where the print version (p. 68) seems to mock
Donald Trump’s idea of meritocracy.
She talks about how the alt-right is actually splintered
along the lines of commitment to extremism (not “united” as Charlottesville
tried to claim), but takes some exception to the criticism many of us have of
exaggerated minority-defined “safe spaces” on campuses.
She writes, “Together, right and left created a world in
which a young person could invent his own identity and curate his own personal
brand online, but also had dimmed hopes for what used to be considered the most
basic elements of a decent life – marriage, a job, a house, a community.
(Liberalism claimed that a village could raise a child, but never got around to
building the village.) Amen, Hillary.
The hardcopy made good reading on the plane to Florida last Friday.
Update: Dec. 4
Anglin is defending a lawsuit in Montana from someone he trolled, and his defense is bizarre, Post story.
Anglin is defending a lawsuit in Montana from someone he trolled, and his defense is bizarre, Post story.
Labels:
biography,
faith and conservatism,
periodicals
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Miami Book Fair 2017
Despite the fact that my own books on political theory from
an autobiographical perspective haven’t been tremendously significant
commercially (that is, from sales of copies
-- “instances” of a “class”), the Miami Book Fair for 2017 did have
several book vendors emphasizing community engagement from physical books
One of the tent stations dealt with children’s literacy, and
another pod offered matching charity donations.
As I related on Wordpress, Author Solutions had eight tent
cubicles including one for Xlibris displaying ny own DADT3 book. All copies were available for $5 cash on
site.
PBS Books describes the fair.
The Fair runs until Nov. 19
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Yahoo: "Hate in America: Where It Comes From and Why It's Back"
Andrew Romano and Lisa Belkin have a booklet-length piece on
Yahoo, “Hate in America: Where It Comes from and Why It’s Back”, link
What comes through the piece is how important “tribal”
identification has usually been for most people, and how politicians want to
exploit it.
It seems as though doing your own thinking is indeed a
luxury.
Monday, November 13, 2017
More remarks on independent bookstores in great multiplicity; publishers worry novelists could inspire copycat terrorists (they really worry)
Well, in practically every college town or even major tourist
stop, I find little independent stores selling used book and sometimes a
curated selection of new books. On the
hip (for conservative Richmond VA) Cary Street Saturday (a cold day), I
stumbled upon Chop Suey Books, although I didn’t get to meet the store cat, who
was sleeping in a closet.
I’m beginning to believe that my little “Do Ask Do Tell”
series could catch eyes in places like this.
While some of the self-publishing companies have bookstore returnability
policies and campaigns to contact samples of them, it seems as though there is
a large number of smaller ones that I simply stumble on. Some of them also sell
antiques. It’s hard to imagine a
business model to sell self-published books in these stores that could work
with a reasonable logistical effort by the author. But it is something to think about as I start
working up my sci-fi novel.
In a meeting today with an attorney and would-be suspense
author, I was told that publishers are telling suspense authors to stay away
from depicting terror plots that are really too realistic and could actually be
carried out. I can recall right after
9/11, the CIA said, “what we had was a failure of imagination.” No longer.
I said, well, publish on Create Space. And he says, that destroys your
chance to ever sell. I also heard that
the most vulnerable pile of inadequately defended nuclear waste and raw
materials in the world is in Kazakhstan.
The lapse at the NSA leading to the explosion of malware
last spring may already be a case of life following art.
Saturday, November 11, 2017
When moving and downsizing, I find "racist" (and "sexist') children's books in the family collection, still surviving
When I unpacked the multiplicity of boxes from moving and
downsizing, a couple of real antiques popped out.
One of these was an orange hardcover children’s book, “Little
Black Sambo”, 24 pages, from the M.A. Donohue and Company, Chicago and New
York, no author given, no date given (probably the 1940s). But it starts out by
talking about a “little black boy’ with the name of the book.
We know the tale. A tiger wants to “eat him up”, and he
manipulates the tigers into a rosy ring so that they turn to butter, and he
eats the pancakes.
I may remember this book from the family’s first apartment
in Arlington VA in the late 1940s.
Of course, the racism is obvious, as well as the disregard
for the intelligence of “higher” wild animals.
There was a pancake house chain called Sambo's until the early 1980s. but the racism of the na,e contributed to its undoing -- a lesson in trademark.
There was a pancake house chain called Sambo's until the early 1980s. but the racism of the na,e contributed to its undoing -- a lesson in trademark.
I also found a Wolf Cub Scout book, which I thought was a
family antique (I was forced to be a Cub Scout for one year when I was 8), But I see a receipt from a purchase at a
country store in Owatonna MN along I-35 in January 2001 when I was living in
Minneapolis.
In any case, there’s a lot of stuff on chores that little
boys need to learn to do to measure up.
Of course, we all know the odyssey of scouting, especially
on LGBT and then plain gender over the past two decades.
And the BSA, headquartered in Dallas, actually would show up at job fairs for computer programmers in the 1980s.
A few of them didn’t survive. One of these was Duvall’s “Facts of Life andLove for Teenagers” from the 1950s.
Thursday, November 09, 2017
Vox interviews author of "The Atheist Muslim"
I don’t think I’ll get around to reading Ali Rivzi’s “The
Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason” soon, but I wanted to link
to the interview on Vox between the author and Sean Illing, :An atheist Muslim
on what the Left and Right get wrong about Islam, link .
The author talks about identity exploration and commitment,
in binary combinations that can lead to identity foreclosure, or identity
drifting. Young men may find real identity in what they believe is the literal
interpretation of scripture, as well as a sense of “belonging”.
The book (256 pages) is published by St. Martin’s Press.
Monday, November 06, 2017
Milo publishes books by other conservative authors (Pamela Geller)
Milo Yiannopoulos wound up self-publishing his book “Dangerous”
with his own little book publishing company “Dangerous” after a psedo-scandal
last February; now Milo seems interested in publishing books by other
conservative authors who find trouble getting published by the establishment
presses and who don’t want to go their own self-publishing routes.
He has published Pamela Geller’s “Fatwa: Hunted in
America”, as Pamela describes in her own article in American Thinker. Geller had tried to sponsor a “cartoon
drawing” contest in 2015, resulting in the failed Curtis Culwell CenterAttack.
Friday, November 03, 2017
IIT theories from the physics of consciousness could help studies with persistently unconscious patients (Scientific American)
Continuing the idea of Integrated information theory (IIT)
from Oct. 25, Christof Koch looks at the concept in developing was to evaluated
patients in a vegetative state or in UWS (unresponsive wakefulness syndrome),
in a Scientific American article Nov. 2017 on p. 28, “How to Wake an
Unconscious Mind” or “How to Make a Consciousness Meter”, link (paywall).
Koch talks about the conscious experience as “different”
from all other experiences, yet “seamless, integrated, and holistic.” The also
characterizes IIT with a pertubational complexity index, or PCI.
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