Olives @olives@qoto.org

Conservative parents in Utah furious that the Holy Bible was removed from a school district for containing "violent and vulgar" content. This removal was filed by someone trying to make a point about how terrible the book ban law is.

I am extremely suspicious of censorship within prisons. It's important to know if there are any Eighth Amendment violations (i.e. inhumane conditions).

There might be other value in speech / expression as well, perhaps to aid reintegration or political advocacy

https://nysfocus.com/2023/06/06/doccs-prison-blocks-journalism-artists-creative-work New York prisons ban journalism from behind bars.

https://reason.com/2023/06/08/gary-genslers-sec-cracks-down-on-coinbase-and-binance/ SEC cracks down on Binance and Coinbase, alleging that cryptocurrencies are securities like stocks and bonds, and that they're operating as unregistered securities brokers.

These companies reject this characterisation.

https://reason.com/2023/06/08/supreme-court-sides-with-jack-daniels-against-doggy-chew-toy-company/ U.S. Supreme Court rules that doggy chew toy company can't parody another company's trademark because it might "mislead" consumers.

https://reason.com/2023/06/08/a-city-banned-pride-month-themed-library-displays-then-it-threatened-employees-who-criticized-the-decision/
The City of Orem in Utah is criticized for threatening employees who criticized them for not allowing displays highlighting Pride Month, Black History Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month in their public library.

FIRE has sent them a letter to Orem city officials threatening that if they do not cease these incursions on employees' free speech, then they will sue them for violating the First Amendment.

The Backpage case is wild (and has been going on for five years). The site took ads for escorts (which is legal in much of the country, although there may have been ads for prostitution too incidentally, which is far less legal, although still consensual and it's not clear they knew of these).

However, because there may have been a few cases of sex trafficking, they want to hold the site owners liable. This is despite the site co-operating with the police to bring these traffickers to justice.

This is in spite of the Deputy of the Department of Justice admitting back in 2018 that prosecuting Backpage would just drive people underground, and make sex workers much less safe. Indeed, a recent report by the GAO has admitted to that much.

They could have just never taken up this case, or dropped charges after it became ever more evident that this was a terrible idea to begin with, but they insist on pushing this through.

As you would expect, the people who ran the site plan to invoke the First Amendment as a defence. They haven't gotten far enough to use it yet, because of all kinds of delays and prosecutorial misconduct (leading to mistrials).

So, it will be very interesting to see how that goes.

Did you know that until 2009, the United Kingdom's "supreme court" was a bunch of posh guys sitting in the House of Lords? The European Union didn't like that, so the U.K. moved those same lords over to a new "supreme court" and renamed them to "justices".

Apparently, bills of attainder are also a violation of the Australian Constitution, not just the U.S. one.

A bill of attainder is where someone declares someone or a group guilty of some crime and writes a bunch of punishments for them to receive in a bill. It's widely seen as a violation of due process.

For a more conventional example, one only needs to look at Russia (unfortunately, quite a few countries, they're just the first which comes to mind) and how they're scouring video games for instances of "promotion of homosexuality".

But, I wanted to show you how this idea has:

1) Been around for a while.

2) Gets used for all kinds of things (related to sexuality).

An infamous sex trafficking law tried to outlaw "promoting" prostitution, knowing full well that this could be construed as to cover advocacy for legalization, while pretending that it only covered running ads for specific instances of prostitution.

That interpretation got shot down in the end in the courts, although that threat was very real.

"promoting" or "normalizing" is also a particularly sinister form of language.

It's a stamp of approval for things which are not "promoting", therefore the only valid representation being a negative one (which can have very lethal consequences, and infringements of basic rights for minorities).

It is also a brazen attempt to silence voices of dissent (the lack of a dissenting view itself can lead to distorted views being "promoted"), because that could also be construed as "promoting". What a convenient tool.

As a rule of thumb, some facets of the religious right like to frame any rights for a sexual minority as a form of corruption of morals or "ideology". I.E. "normalizing", "promoting".

But, of course, as society has become more liberalized, the amount of sexual violence (and other social ills) appear to have gone down. It also doesn't seem that people are less honest or other forms of morality (in fact, every generation thinks the young ones are less moral than their predecessors).

While this isn't the strongest evidence, it also appears the amount of public intoxication coincidentally decreased right around the time sodomy laws were repealed.

There also appears to be a correlation between a discriminatory law (against a particular group) passing and the number of suicide related keywords in search engines.

Elon seems to think the reason people he hate him is because he supports "free speech" (I went over before how he is bad for free expression).

I'd say it's more takes like this which are indicative of why people dislike him.

Elon's idea of getting rid of the block function is absolutely terrible. Unfathomably terrible.

It's as if he lives in a completely different parallel universe.

Context: https://qoto.org/@olives/110516611122866387

I could understand a journalist though putting out a piece and it turning out wrong or poorly evidenced.

What I can't understand is how someone who calls themselves a scientist could cite these kinds of unreliable sources and ignore contrary opinions.

A media outlet is also not typically doing an exhaustive search.

They're doing a quick search on the premise of what sources they know of, and getting an article out the next / same day.

They also have to do this for a number of different subjects where these might differ.

This is particularly problematic, when their source might be a politician, or someone with a strong opinion (but little substance to that opinion), an opinion which might be very wrong.

One off cases and speculation off newspaper clippings is hardly science.

The media (and politicians) are not particularly known for portraying the state of science or statistics accurately, indeed, they veer towards sensationalism.

Some right-wing rags are known to spread rumor, hearsay, and to misrepresent things, particularly when it pertains to a "hot issue" political issue.

I've seen reaches which might even arguably be defamatory, in some countries, where they really toned up the paranoiac lens to try to demonize someone.

I've also seen very clever wording and strategic omissions which seem intended to mislead someone.

Then, there are outlets which only appear to read another's headline, or which quote another with even less context.

Even a media outlet operating in better faith might not be aware of details and might regurgitate things they might have "heard of".

There is also a bias involved where the media might pick up a matter or case, precisely because it is so unusual or grabs their interest.

Trying to generalize such sensational cases to what typically happens misses that point entirely.

In fact, Demonizing Sexual Minorities 101 is where you go through to dig for that one weird bizarre case, perhaps involving crime, air that out in a media outlet, and slap on a negative framing.

What that ignores is that every population has some degree of crime, and it doesn't logically follow that because there is some bizarre case, that an entire population should be demonized.

Even in that case, a media outlet can omit information which doesn't contribute to a particular frame, and might even contradict it.

Even they own up to it, expect it to happen in what is virtually a back channel, and to be discussed among a small group who follow such corrections closely.

Pure speculation based off newspaper clippings and a politician's ponderings is not science and any "paper" which pretends this is science should be retracted.

Especially, when it is clearly intended to stoke bigotry.

I will be speaking to the editor.

I'm not going to dignify them by naming them at this juncture.