The Center for Inquiry has just announced a new campaign to help defend free speech--particularly speech critical of religion--from suppression. The Campaign for Free Expression includes a website designed as a forum to report and monitor censorship. The site also publishes the kind of religious (and political) criticism likely to find itself censored. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_launches_campaign_for_free_expression/
Joshua Green at The Atlantic thinks it's time to punish pundits who are consistently wrong in their opinions. They should be measured for accuracy and then there should be harsh consequences. Sounds good to me.
Last week I received my DVD of Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the new documentary about Harlan Ellison. I've watched it a couple of times now, thoroughly enjoying it. Neil Gaiman makes the observation in the film that Ellison has been engaged in a great big piece of performance art called "Harlan Ellison" and I think he's spot on. Harlan---he is one of the only writers who ever worked in the realm of fantastic literature to be known almost immediately by his first name---is very much part and parcel of his work. You don't get the one without the other. Which is not to say the work doesn't stand on its own. It does, very much so. No doubt there are many people who have read the occasional Ellison story and found it...well, however they found it. Anything, I imagine, but trivial. If they then go on to become fans of the stories, eventually they will become aware of the person, mainly by virtue of the extensive introductions Harlan writes to just about everything he does, secondarily by the stories told by those who know, or think they know, something about him, either through personal experience or by word of mouth. He's fascinating to watch. Sometimes it's like watching a tornado form. Harlan was born in 1934, which makes him 75 now. This seems incredible to me, sobering even. He will always seem to me to be about 40, even though I have seen him now for years with white hair and other attributes of age. The voice has gotten a bit rougher, but he's just as sharp as ever. I have been in his actual presence on two occasions. In 1986 he showed up in Atlanta at the world SF convention that year and I have a couple of autographed books as a result. He dominated a good part of one day for us. The second time was in 1999 or so, at a small convention called ReaderCon in Massachussetts, where he was guest of honor. On that occasion I had lunch with him and few others and that lunch remains memorable, because I got to see the man when he isn't On. That is, it was before the convention began and he was, so to speak, "off duty" and was more relaxed, less hyperbolic. And it was a great pleasure. It is easy to see why people are drawn to him. He is something of a contradiction.
I was watching TV recently. At the climax of one of my favorite shows a man was murdered. He was stabbed twice in the chest. I watched as the blade entered his chest two times, piercing his lungs and heart. The man fell to the ground and was kicked into a nearby fire where he burst into flames as he was dying. This was shown on television, during prime time, with no outcry from the public or the censors. And why would there be an outcry? One can witness murders of this kind and worse on TV many times a week. Now imagine this scenario... Prime time TV. A loving husband and wife wish to have children. They take off their clothes and get into bed, as married couples do. We then clearly watch his erect penis enter her vagina two times as he tells her he loves her. Cut to nine months later and she gives birth to a healthy baby boy. The couple rejoices. The husband kisses his wife on the forehead and we...Fade to Black. Can you imagine the outrage? Can you imagine the FCC fines and the righteous letters of condemnation? In the first case we see the brutal, senseless ending of a life, and we get to see it in great detail. In the second scenario we are witnessing the loving, natural creation of life between two married adults. Which one is obscene?
Farouk Hosny is Egypt's candidate to lead UNESCO (the UN's cultural arm). He once pledged to burn Israeli books that were part of Egyptian libraries, but that was way back in May of 2008. Now that he wants to head UNESCO, he is publicly apologizing for his anti-Israeli remarks. How convenient. See the full story at BBC News.