Tag Archives: Free speech
Books are made of win, cont’d: Information needs hard copies
Jonathan Franzen makes the case for books over e-books: My problem with e-book readers is that one minute I’m reading some trashy website, the next minute I’m reading Jane Austen — on the same screen. I think, for serious readers, … Continue reading
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Twitter chooses profits over free speech. In other news: water is wet, and 2+2=4.
You knew this was coming, didn’t you? In the victory against SOPA and PIPA, advocates for the free and open Internet successfully fended off censorship imposed by government; now we are reminded that there’s nothing preventing online social networks from … Continue reading
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Miscellany: Blume, Hitchens, Lamarr, Tyson; The West Wing as science fiction; groupthink and solitude; what e-books can’t do; and the end of SOPA (for now)
Time for another grab-bag of links that caught my eye: 1) An NPR interview with the incomparable Judy Blume, who talks about censorship, how to inspire kids to read (and how not to), the folly of labeling authors and books … Continue reading
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Fight this bill, cont’d: SOPA and PIPA will hurt content creators, too
Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, Trent Reznor, the band OK Go, and many other artists have written an open letter to Washington: As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive … Continue reading
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Fight this bill, cont’d: What the Internet-killing bills will do, and why you should care
This one is important, and I highly urge you to watch. Clay Shirky brilliantly explains what damage the SOPA and PIPA bills will do, puts them into historical context, and — most importantly — links the issue to the larger … Continue reading
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Fight this bill
Go read the posts at FlickFilosopher and Boing Boing for more reasons why this matters. A key passage from Cory Doctorow: I don’t think that any amount of “piracy” justifies this kind of depraved indifference to the consequences of one’s … Continue reading
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“All people deserve respect. But not all ideas do.”
Johann Hari of the Independent gives a rousing defense of free speech — both “for people who are wrong and people who are right”: Hari refers to his own plagiarism scandal at the beginning of the clip, but here he … Continue reading
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Religious defamation and free speech: writers speak out
Following up on my previous post, here are Wole Soyinka, Ariel Dorfman, Azar Nafisi, and Kwame Anthony Appiah providing video statements as part of PEN’s efforts to counter UN initiatives to censor anti-religious criticism. What they said. (via PEN)
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The problem with religion is [COMMENT DELETED]
The jaw-dropping stupidity of the Texas Board of Education (which I’ve written about before) appears to know no bounds. Via Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy: As I wrote a couple of days ago, the Texas State Board of Education was … Continue reading
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