Sarah McLaughlin @sarahemclaugh@masthead.social

Senior Scholar, Global Expression at FIRE. Writing about international censorship, higher ed, and the relationship between the two. Opinions mine. Posts about free expression, authoritarianism, and Philly sports. Go birds.

Substack sarahemclaugh.substack.com/

Twitter sarahemclaugh

Work www.thefire.org/about-us/our-t

Email sarah@thefire.org

26 posts

This is a member of another server. See their original profile ➔

27d

in honor of his birthday, my favorite Johnny Cash song: youtu.be/t_DSnfVNLwY

27d

@Popehat how have you gotten more snow than we have in Philly this winter

28d

“HB 999 would eliminate ‘any major or minor’ that ‘engenders beliefs in the concepts defined’ in the unconstitutional Stop WOKE Act, as well as any ‘major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality,’ or any ‘derivative major or minor of these belief systems.’

As we have said before, efforts to purge universities of gender studies because of the viewpoints they advance are reminiscent of attacks on academic freedom abroad.” www.thefire.org/news/thought-s

28d

@Popehat you’re always welcome to visit us in philadelphia, we’ll introduce you to the charming local jargon

28d

@Popehat @JacobRussell I wrote a message about Gritty on it lol

28d

@Popehat There is a Philadelphia themed bar there, you can let me know if the dollar bill I wrote a message on and put on the wall is still there. Obviously this will be at the top of your list.

29d

if you’re ever wondering what’s going on in the background of every zoom meeting I’m in

30d

Twitter appears to have stopped publishing transparency reports showing what takedown demands governments have issued and, importantly, which demands Twitter honored. This is a bad development for free speech and transparency — especially after the recent censorship demands India has been granted on Twitter. www.rollingstone.com/politics/

39d

"According to results collected on Jan. 5 using Shadow Bird, a website that analyzes accounts blocked from Twitter’s search results, tweets from 30 accounts of Chinese dissidents were not showing up in search results." www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/tec

33d

Hong Kong is, of course, arguing that its vague and murky definition of national security — used to punish political expression — is intentionally unclear to grant authorities the flexibility to redefine it at will. hongkongfp.com/2023/02/17/secu

40d

@Popehat Oh no the sarah McLachlan ad

40d

43d

this is 100% true, I swear: tonight a woman randomly showed up halfway through a workout class I was in with a small white dog, and she started benching it.

46d

@Popehat yeah I wouldn't personally take criticism from him to heart lol

46d

It's incredible to see some of the initial responses to the fatwa against Rushdie from people like Prince Charles, Roald Dahl, and Cat Stevens. I'd be curious to know how many of them later recanted. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202

For the next decade, Rushdie lived underground, guarded by officers of the Special Branch, a unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. The headlines and the threats were unceasing. People behaved well. People behaved disgracefully. There were friends of great constancy—Buford, Amis, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, many more —and yet some regarded the fatwa as a problem Rushdie had brought on himself. Prince Charles made his antipathy clear at a dinner party that Anmis attended: What should you expect if you insult people’s deepest convictions? John le Carré instructed Rushdie to withdraw his book “until a calmer time has come.” Roald Dahl branded him a “dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise.” The singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had a hit with “Peace Train” and converted to Islam, said, “The Quran makes it clear—if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die.” Germaine Greer, George Steiner, and Auberon Waugh all expressed their disapproval. So did Jimmy Carter, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

ALT

61d

India has banned a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in deadly riots more than 20 years ago from being shown in the country. One of Modi's advisers says YouTube and Twitter have complied with the order to block it: www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/busines

65d

@Popehat the whole time I read this I was picturing that “is there someone you forgot to ask” meme but instead of Jesus it was the ccp and two parents

66d

Maybe, just maybe, you can suggest Americans can learn things from other countries without defending the authoritarian governments oppressing the people who live there. Just an idea!

66d

There is just something so grating about seeing someone who isn't the target of oppression explain how it makes them feel freer. I doubt doing PR for the CCP was the author's intent here, I just wish she understood that it's possible to make her argument without including a defense of one of the most oppressive governments in the world.

66d

I missed this on the first read through. This "co-parenting" framing is just bizarre here. What a way to obscure what this actually is.

My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government co-parenting begins in the womb. Chinese citizens have faced limits on how many children they were allowed under birth control policies that have since been relaxed. People in China are still legally barred from determining the gender of their unborn babies unless medically necessary, because of a history of sex-selective abortions.

ALT

66d

What a foolish thing to say. Maybe oppression only feels like freedom to you because you're not the one bearing the brunt of it.

There's always someone admiring the boot when they're not the one being crushed under it.

www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/opi

Raising kids in China was a plus in other ways — such as the heavy censorship, which results in a kid-friendly internet, and national limits on how many hours young people can spend playing online video games. Ironically, the tight control of the Communist Party surveillance state results in its own kind of freedom: With crime and personal safety concerns virtually eliminated, our daughters were riding the subway unsupervised in a city of around 26 million people from the age of 11. A constant but benign (and mostly unarmed) police presence kept order; streets and the green spaces around every corner were kept immaculate, and the sense of civic pride was palpable.

ALT

71d

@Popehat @pebonilla when @adamsteinbaugh first moved to Philly I convinced him it was a local law that “shop” had to be spelled “shoppe” in store names

77d

@Popehat there was effort involved and I think we should celebrate that

77d

I always enjoy getting feedback.

78d

I'm in the Star Tribune with some thoughts about Hamline University's academic freedom violations and the very foolish idea of essentially instituting a blasphemy ban.

A blasphemy exception is not a narrow, reasonable cutout that protects students from "harm." Don't believe me? Just take a cursory look at what constitutes religious offense around the world.

www.startribune.com/banning-bl

A blasphemy exception to academic freedom, which this ultimately would be, isn't a reasonable and narrow cutout that would protect students from perceived harm. Rather, it would be a Pandora's box: Once opened, there would be no stopping the justifications to censor that would flow from it. Just take a cursory look at what constitutes religious offense around the world today.

Should professors in a sociology class be required to avoid suggesting religions are controlled by, and preferential to, men? In art courses, must faculty avoid showing images critical of the Catholic Church's religious positions and role in politics? Should instructors teaching physics be banned from suggesting to students that certain religions teach belief systems that contradict established scientific knowledge because it might cause them to doubt their faith?

These aren't just hypotheticals. Over just the past year, an activist in Oman was arrested for suggesting "religions are patriarchal," an artist in Poland was fined for displaying a painting critical of Catholicism at a rally, and Indonesia redefined the offense of blasphemy to include persuading someone to be a nonbeliever.

In legal systems around the world, such speech constitutes blasphemy that harms and disrespects believers and their faith. These are laws that should be criticized and rejected as unacceptable limits on the right to speak and think — not rules mirrored in an American university's policymaking.

ALT