Agatha Christie classics latest to be rewritten for modern sensitivities
Agatha Christie classics latest to be rewritten for modern sensitivities
Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have original passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins.
By Craig Simpson
25 March 2023
Agatha Christie novels have been rewritten for modern sensitivities, The Telegraph can reveal.
Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have had original passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins.
The character of a British tourist venting her frustration at a group of children has been purged from a recent reissue, while a number of references to people smiling and comments on their teeth and physiques, have also been erased.
It comes after books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming were edited by modern publishers.
The new editions of Christie’s works are set to be released or have been released since 2020 by HarperCollins, which is said by insiders to use the services of sensitivity readers. It has created new editions of the entire run of Miss Marple mysteries and selected Poirot novels.
Digital versions of new editions seen by The Telegraph include scores of changes to texts written from 1920 to 1976, stripping them of numerous passages containing descriptions, insults or references to ethnicity, particularly for characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.
The author’s own narration, often through the inner monologue of Miss Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, has been altered in many instances. Sections of dialogue uttered by often unsympathetic characters within the mysteries have also been cut.
In the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.
This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children”.
Vocabulary has also been altered, with the term “Oriental” removed. Other descriptions have been altered in some instances, with a black servant, originally described as grinning as he understands the need to stay silent about an incident, described as neither black nor smiling but simply as “nodding”.
In a new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a West Indian hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, with similar references to “beautiful teeth” also taken out.
The same book described a prominent female character as having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed”, a description absent from the edited version.
References to the Nubian people – an ethnic group that has lived in Egypt for millennia – have been removed from Death on the Nile in many instances, resulting in “the Nubian boatman” becoming simply “the boatman”.
Dialogue in Christie’s 1920 debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles has been altered, so where Poirot once noted that another character is “a Jew, of course”, he now makes no such comment.
In the same book, a young woman described as being “of gypsy type” is now simply “a young woman”, and other references to gypsies have been removed from the text.
The 1979 collection Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories includes the character of an Indian judge who grows angry demanding his breakfast in the original text with “his Indian temper”, a phrase now changed to say “his temper”.
References to “natives” have also been removed or replaced with the word “local”.
Across the revised books, racial descriptions have been altered or removed, including, in A Caribbean Mystery, an entire passage where a character fails to see a black woman in some bushes at night as he walks to his hotel room.
The word “n—–” has been taken out of revised edition, both in Christie’s prose and the dialogue spoken by her characters.
It is not the first time Christie’s works have been altered. Her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term.
Agatha Christie Limited, a company run by the author’s great grandson James Prichard, is understood to handle licensing for her literary and film rights. The company and HarperCollins have been contacted for comment.
Woman Faces $13,000 Fine For Calling French President ‘Filth’ On Facebook
Woman Faces $13,000 Fine For Calling French President ‘Filth’ On Facebook
By Matt Novak
March 30, 2023
An unnamed woman in France is facing a fine of roughly $13,000 for referring to French President Emmanuel Macron “filth” in a Facebook post, according to a report from the AFP news service that cites local prosecutors. The woman was even arrested and reportedly asked police if her arrest was part of some joke.
The woman allegedly created a Facebook post on March 21 where she referred to Macron as “this piece of filth,” describing the French President as “filth” at least twice on social media. The post was reportedly about Macron’s controversial attempt to raise the retirement age for most workers from 62 to 64.
The proposed pension reforms have set off a wave of violent protests in the country. An estimated 740,000 protesters took to the streets on Tuesday in hundreds of rallies across the country, according to CNN.
While France has some constitutional protections for freedom of speech, they’re not nearly as robust as the First Amendment protections afforded to Americans, who are free to call any political leader they like a piece of filth without fear of arrest or fines.
The unnamed woman, who’s reportedly in her 50s, was arrested on Friday near the town of Saint Omer, France after a local administrative office apparently filed a complaint. The woman is being charged under a law that bans “insulting the president of the republic,” according to the AFP.
And the dumbing down of our educational system continues…
https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-principal-viewing-michelangelos-david-162441446.html
Florida Principal Out After Viewing Of Michelangelo’s ‘David’ Upsets Parents
Sara Boboltz
March 23, 2023
The principal of Florida’s Tallahassee Classical School is out of a job after parents complained that their sixth-grade children were shown Michelangelo’s 16th century “David” sculpture, with one parent calling it “pornographic,” the Tallahassee Democrat first reported.
The now-former principal, Hope Carrasquilla, told HuffPost the situation was also “a little more complicated than that,” noting that the usual protocol is to send parents a letter before students are shown such classical artwork.
Due to “a series of miscommunications,” the letter did not go out to the sixth-grade parents, and some complained, Carrasquilla said.
One parent was “point-blank upset,” Carrasquilla continued, and “felt her child should not be viewing those pieces.”
The board of the charter school decided Monday to give the principal the choice to resign or be fired after less than a year in the job. She was the school’s third principal since it opened in the fall of 2020, per the Tallahassee Democrat.
The move comes as conservatives in Florida and elsewhere battle to step up their input in primary education.
Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of the Biblical figure David was crafted between 1501 and 1504, originally commissioned for display inside an Italian cathedral. It now resides at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.
Carrasquilla said she had taught in classical education for a decade and knew that “once in a while you get a parent who gets upset about Renaissance art” — hence the letter. She was not surprised by the reaction from the school board chair, Barney Bishop, but the fact that other board members went along with him was unexpected.
In a call with HuffPost, Bishop emphasized that the nude sculpture incident was one of multiple issues with Carrasquilla. He declined to go into specifics, citing advice from the school’s employment lawyers.
Bishop explained he was lobbying for legislation that would give parents even more input in primary education.
“Parental rights trump everything else,” Bishop said. He added that the pandemic’s remote teaching gave parents a clearer window into their children’s education and prompted some to choose schools like Tallahassee Classical.
“They didn’t like the woke indoctrination that was going on,” he said.
Bishop accused Carrasquilla of trying to “gin up a lot of publicity” by sharing her experience.
Carrasquilla said many other parents and faculty members were upset about her ouster and have been reaching out with support.
The Tallahassee school is a public charter institution that focuses on classical learning, a teaching philosophy centered on a traditional Western liberal arts education that aims to impart critical thinking skills children can use throughout their lives. Classical learning is also popular within the Christian homeschooling movement.
The Tallahassee Classical School is affiliated with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution that has sought to expand its influence over the last decade by helping set up public charter schools. Hillsdale briefly cut ties with the Tallahassee school in early 2022 for not meeting improvement standards, but it later regained affiliation.
Hillsdale has raised funds for the charter school network by pledging to fight “leftist” and “distorted” teaching of American history, such as the lessons about slavery contained in The New York Times’ 1619 Project, the newspaper reported last year.
“We don’t use pronouns,” Bishop said. “We don’t teach CRT and we don’t ever mention 1619 — those are not appropriate subjects for our kids.”
Roald Dahl warned ‘politically correct’ publishers – ‘change one word and deal with my crocodile’
Roald Dahl warned ‘politically correct’ publishers – ‘change one word and deal with my crocodile’
Children’s author threatened to strike if editors changed ‘a single comma’ of his writing and claimed ‘Marx and Lenin’ were responsible
By Patrick Sawer
25 February 2023
Roald Dahl threatened to never write another word if his publishers ever changed his language, promising to send his “Enormous Crocodile” to gobble them up if they did so.
The writer’s fury at the prospect of publishers censoring his books has emerged in the wake of the row over Puffin altering several passages from his famous children’s stories.
Dahl made his comments 40 years ago, in a recorded conversation with his friend Francis Bacon, the painter, in which he anticipated the impact that “political correctness” might have on his work.
He told Bacon: “I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!”
In the recording, the writer, who had Norwegian roots, added: “When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the Enormous Crocodile to gobble them up.”
Dahl’s comments emerged after Puffin announced on Friday that it will reissue his books in their uncensored form, following the backlash over its decision to alter key sections.
The Telegraph revealed that hundreds of changes had been made to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and more than a dozen other titles, removing many descriptions relating to weight, mental health and gender to minimise offence.
The backlash saw the decision criticised by many, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Salman Rushide, along with an intervention by the Queen. She urged authors to write “unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression”.
In their conversation, recorded by Bacon’s friend Barry Joule in 1982 at Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, Bacon tells the children’s writer: “There must be no changes to an artist’s original work when he is dead for any reason whatsoever.”
Dahl, who died eight years later, aged 74, replies: “I just hope to God that will never happen to any of my writings as I am lying comfortably in my Viking grave.”
Joule regularly recorded his conversations with Bacon and had been fortunate enough to transcribe the one chronicling the encounter with Dahl shortly before the tape was inadvertently destroyed.
‘This political correctness rubbish’
The encounter at Great Missenden followed the publication of Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes and, during their conversation, he anticipates future rows over his colourful and evocative language.
Joule told The Guardian: “Fully puffed up on the subject, [Dahl] informed us, ‘You know, it was Marx and Lenin who commenced this political correctness rubbish way back in 1917, and by God it’s creeping into this country.’
“He suddenly grabbed my copy and roughly flipped through several pages to where the right-hand side featured a fine comical drawing by Quentin Blake of Miss Red Riding Hood wearing a heavy wolfskin coat.
“‘For instance, look here – knickers!’ he exclaimed [at the line ‘She whips a pistol from her knickers’] and pressed his forefinger fingernail under the eight letters so hard an imprint was left behind … noting, ‘I suppose if the Political Correctness Police could get a hold of that, they’d change in an instant the filthy word to “ladies underwear apparel”!’ Francis frowned, then grinned widely at such an outrageous possibility.”
The “Enormous Crocodile” mentioned by Dahl in his threat was a reference to one of his most famous characters, “a horrid greedy grumptious brute” who “wants to eat something juicy and delicious”.
Can’t say “queer” anymore! Authoritarians at Puffin just made hundreds of changes to Roald Dahl’s books. Here are some examples.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
February 19, 2023
This article from the Telegraph lists a huge numbers of the changes that publisher Puffin has recently made to Roald Dahl’s books.
Dahl himself has been dead for decades, so he had nothing to do with these changes. I’m certain that when he wrote his original text, he put a tremendous amount of thought into the words that he chose. I’m guessing that he would probably drop dead from a heart attack if he were still alive and could see how his art has been mutilated. Or perhaps the back of his head would have exploded. Certainly, he would have been furious, and would have felt very heavily violated.
Every famous and well loved author has their own unique writing style. The original text of Dahl’s books was written in a specific manner that makes it clearly identifiable as having been written by Dahl. His word choices were colorful and descriptive. The changes that Puffin has made vandalize Dahl’s writing. They also dumb it down. The new, replacement text is bland and drab.
This is exactly the kind of thing that George Orwell warned us about in his novel 1984.
Here are some examples of the recent changes to Dahl’s books, as reported in this Telegraph article:
Original text: “In her right hand she carried a walking stick. She used to tell people that this was because she had warts growing on her sole of her left foot and walking was painful.”
New text: “In her right hand she carried a walking stick. Not because she needed help walking.”
Original text: “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens”
New text: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that”
Original text: “But what about the rest of the world?’ I cried. “What about America and France and Holland and Germany?”
New text: “But what about the rest of the world?” I cried
Original text: “Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she’s learnt this term, has no hearing-organs at all”
New text: “Judging by what your daughter Vanessa has learnt this term, this fact alone is more interesting than anything I have taught in the classroom “
Original text: “They must be absolutely mad! the Centipede said”
New text: “What are they doing?! the Centipede said”
Original text: “Idiots!” he yelled
New text: “Oi!” he yelled
Original text: “Great flock of ladies”
New text: “Great group of ladies”
Original text: “Chambermaid”
New text: “Cleaner“
Original text: “Queer“
New text: “Strange”
Original text: “Foul bald-headed females”
New text: “Foul females”
Original text:”fatty folds of his flabby neck”
New text: “folds of his neck”
Original text: “Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman”
New text: “Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business”
Original text: “It nearly killed Ashton as well. Half the skin came away from his scalp”
New text: “It didn’t do Ashton much good”
Original text: “Dickens or Kipling”
New text: “Dickens or Austen”
Original text: “Wise old bird”
New text: “Wise teacher”
Original text: “You’re mad”
New text: “I don’t know why“
Original text: “Knock her flat”
New text: “Give her a right talking to”
Original text: “blow off the top of her head”
New text: “shoot sparks out the top of her head”
Original text: “Maybe that will brighten up those horrid brown teeth of hers”
New text: “Maybe that will brighten up her smile”
Original text: “The old hag opened her small wrinkled mouth, showing disgusting pale brown teeth”
New text: “The old lady opened her small wrinkled mouth.”
Original text: “I climbed up to their tree-house village and poked my head in through the door of the tree house belonging to the leader of the tribe”
New text: “I decided to speak to their leader”
Original text: “The poor little fellow, looking thin and starved, was sitting there…”
New text: “The fellow was sitting there…”
Original text: “So I shipped them all over here – every man, woman, and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe”
New text: “So, they all agreed to come over – each and every Oompa-Loompa”
Original text: “It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely… They all speak English now”
New text: “They’ve told me they love it here”
Orignal text: “But Augustus was deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach”
New text: “But Augustus was ignoring everything”
Orginal text: “She wants a good kick in the pants,” whispered Grandpa Joe
New text: “She needs to learn some manners,” whispered Grandpa Joe
Original text: “How long could we allow this beast/To gorge and guzzle, feed and feast/On everything he wanted to?/Great Scott! It simply wouldn’t do./However long this pig might live,/We’re positive he’d never give/Even the smallest bit of fun/Or happiness to anyone”
New text: “For one such child as vile as he/Bad things happen, wait and see!/We cannot say we are surprised,/Augustus Gloop had been advised./ But then he took another sip/And now he’s going on a trip.”
So those are some of the examples of original text being replaced with new text.
In many other cases, text has been completely removed, with nothing to replace it. Here are some examples of text that has been removed without being replaced:
“When an actress wears a wig, or if you or I were to wear a wig, we would be putting it on over our own hair, but a witch has to put it straight on to her naked scalp “
“How horrid!” “Disgusting,” my grandmother said
“Perhaps he had been forced to jam her thumb down the spout of a boiling kettle until it was steamed away”
“The gums were like raw meat”
“I simply cannot tell you how awful they were, and somehow the whole sight was made more grotesque because underneath those frightful scabby bald heads, the bodies were dressed in fashionable and rather pretty clothes. It was monstrous. It was unnatural”
“We could round them all up and put them in the meat-grinder“
“He needs to go on a diet”
“I was crazy”
“She wore heavy make-up and had one of those unfortunate bulging figures where the flesh appeas to be strapped in all around the body to prevent it from falling out”
“His wife recognised the signs immediately and made herself scarce”
“Matilda took the knife she had been eating with”
“He looked like a low-grade bookmaker dressed up for his daughter’s wedding”
“Bingo afternoons left her so exhausted both physically and emotionally that she never had enough energy left to cook an evening meal”
“Their children turned out to be delinquents and drop-outs”
“I was her slave”
“She looked as though she was going to faint.”
“Mr Kranky was a small man with bandy legs and a huge head.”
“That’s what happens to you if you’re grumpy and bad tempered,’ said Mr Kranky. ‘Great medicine of yours, George.’”
“But she calmed down quite quickly. And by lunchtime, she was saying, ‘Ah well, I suppose it’s all for the best, really. She was a bit of a nusiance around the house, wasn’t she?’ ‘Yes,’ Mr Kranky said. ‘She most certainly was.’”
“The man behind the counter looked fat and well-fed. He had big lips and fat cheeks and a very fat neck”
“The fat around his neck bulged out all around the top of his collar like a rubber ring”
“Look at their funny long hair!”
“But they can’t be real people,” Charlie said
“The Oompa-Loompas spent every moment of their days climbing through the treetops”
“You only had to mention the word “cacao” to an Oompa-Loompa and he would start dribbling at the mouth”
“Mr Wonka turned around and clicked his finger sharply, click, click, click, three times”
“The Oompa-Loompa bowed and smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. His skin was rosy-white, his hair was golden brown, and the top of his head came just above the height of Mr Wonka’s knee“
“He wore the usual deerskin slung over his shoulder”
“But this revolting boy, of course,/Was so unutterably vile,/So greedy, foul, and infantile,/He left a most disgusting taste/Inside our mouths, and so in haste/We chose a thing that, come what may./Would take the nasty taste away”
“Rather pretty young lady”
“That seemed to calm her down a bit”
“Immensely fat”
So, those are some of the examples that are listed at the Telegraph article. There are hundreds of others in the article that I did not include. You can read the Telegraph article at this link.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is ‘fat’ and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-woke-overhaul-offensive-words-removed/
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is ‘fat’ and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
Sensitivity readers were hired to scrutinise the text with parts rewritten for a modern audience
By Anita Singh
17 February 2023
Augustus Gloop is no longer fat, Mrs Twit is no longer fearfully ugly, and the Oompa-Loompas have gone gender-neutral in new editions of Roald Dahl’s beloved stories.
The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.
The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.
References to physical appearance have been heavily edited. The word “fat” has been removed from every book – Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may still look like a ball of dough, but can now only be described as “enormous”.
In the same story, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer “tiny”, “titchy” or “no higher than my knee” but merely small. And where once they were “small men”, they are now “small people”.
Passages not written by Dahl have also been added. In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat/And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire/And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the underwhelming rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute/And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same/And deserves half of the blame.”
References to “female” characters have disappeared – Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a “most formidable female”, is now a “most formidable woman”.
“Boys and girls” has been turned into “children”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People and Fantastic Mr Fox’s three sons have become daughters.
Matilda reads Jane Austen rather than Rudyard Kipling, and a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now works as “a top scientist”.
Mrs Twit’s “fearful ugliness” is reduced to “ugliness”, while Mrs Hoppy in Esio Trot is not an “attractive middle-aged lady” but a “kind middle-aged lady”.
One of Dahl’s most popular lines from The Twits is: “You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams.” It has been edited to take out the “double chin”.
An emphasis on mental health has led to the removal of “crazy” and “mad”, which Dahl used frequently in comic fashion. A mention in Esio Trot of tortoises being “backward” – the joke behind the book’s title – has been excised.
The words “black” and “white” have been removed: characters no longer turn “white with fear” and the Big Friendly Giant in The BFG cannot wear a black cloak.
The changes were made by the publisher, Puffin, and the Roald Dahl Story Company, now owned by Netflix, with sensitivity readers hired to scrutinise the text.
The review began in 2020, when the company was still run by the Dahl family. Netflix acquired the literary estate in 2021 for a reported £500 million.
Sensitivities over Dahl’s stories were heightened when a 2020 Hollywood version of The Witches led to a backlash over its depiction of the Grand Witch, played by Anne Hathaway, with fingers missing from each hand.
Warner Bros was forced to make an apology after Paralympians and charities said it was offensive to the limb difference community.
That same year, the Dahl family and the company apologised for the author’s past anti-Semitic statements.
Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, said that the author – who died in 1990 – chose his vocabulary with care. “I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children,” he said.
At Venice High School in Florida, an advanced placement and honors English teacher quit her job after the school ordered her to remove several books from her classroom shelves
Shame on the school for banning these books.
I trust the teacher to offer these books to her students.
This skilled and talented teacher is very brave to quit her job.
Atlas is shrugging.
Here’s the article:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-quit-sarasota-teachers-story-184654179.html
‘Why I quit’: a Sarasota teacher’s story
By Carrie Seidman
September 9, 2022
Janet Allen comes from a long line of educators. Her mother taught fourth grade, her father high school English. Her sister is a college professor and her brother was a teaching assistant before earning his MD.
“It’s sort of in my DNA,” says Allen, a national board-certified teacher rated “highly effective” during her time in the Sarasota County Schools district.
But this fall, for the first time in 16 years, Allen is not spending days in the classroom and nights grading papers. Last month – on the first day of the current academic year – Allen resigned from Venice High School, where she had taught Advanced Placement and Honors English since 2015.
“I didn’t quit until the last day for any other reason than hope,” Allen says. “Hope that something might change.”
Abruptly, she excuses herself to find some tissues.
“I might cry here,” Allen says apologetically. “It’s like a breakup. A very long, drawn-out breakup.”
Allen is among the teachers who felt so vilified, undermined and threatened by the legislative reforms instituted by Gov. Ron DeSantis that they chose to leave their jobs. The restrictions have not only hamstrung teachers, Allen says, but are harming students by undermining trust and depriving them of the education necessary to compete on a national level.
Allen, who recently shared her decision to leave with the blog Scary Mommy, says that in an effort to rile up his base for votes, DeSantis is “using the teachers and students as kindling and they are getting burned.”
“Education is about understanding as many different possibilities and perspectives as you can,” Allen says. You don’t have to agree with any of them. But to be exclusive with what kids learn is doing them such a great disservice.”
Allen began teaching in 2006 at an impoverished high school on Chicago’s north side with a largely minority and immigrant population. Her masters’ training at the University of Illinois at Chicago instilled a creative and experiential approach – for example, instead of a traditional report, Allen would ask students to create a commercial or a board game for the book they’d read – that proved highly successful.
When Allen and her husband moved to Florida in 2015 to be closer to her parents before the birth of their daughter, she was delighted to be hired at Venice High, a school where “nothing was dripping, I could use as much paper as I wanted – and there was air conditioning!”
The school seemed equally thrilled to have Allen. She says administrators often brought observers to her classroom to “show me off,” and that she was encouraged to “do my own thing.”
“I always branded myself as ‘teaching beyond the test,’” she says. “That I would teach critical thinking and that reading was not just for information, but interpretation. To get students to do something they didn’t think they could do and have it be a memorable thing for the rest of their lives . . . that’s the essence of learning.”
But Allen said she also “always treated my students as if their parents were in the room with me, as though anything was being recorded. I treated them with respect.”
When Allen discovered LGBTQ students at Venice High were being bullied, she volunteered to sponsor the school’s first GSA (Gender and Sexuality Alliance). From her years in Chicago, Allen knew that “sometimes the only place a kid feels safe is at school.” Almost immediately, she detected a shift.
“Whereas before I’d been seen as an asset,” Allen says, “now I was being seen as a liability.”
After the pandemic began – ostensibly for “practical reasons” — Allen says she was instructed to “get everyone on the same page” with standardized assessments. Last year administrations warned that teachers who taught anything outside of the pre-approved syllabus would not be “protected.” As mandates from the state increased and her autonomy dwindled, Allen struggled to maintain her standards.
Allen says she was pressured to change grades and forced to defend herself against lies spread when she became the GSA sponsor. She also says parental complaints were accepted without investigation, and that she was never asked for her side of the story in any conflict.
Allen had always gone above and beyond in her job, but now the stress, long hours and contentious atmosphere were taking a toll on her health and family.
The final straw came last spring when Allen says she was ordered to remove several books from her classroom shelves. One was Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a book Allen says changed her life after her own sophomore English teacher gave it to her when she was bored.
“Maybe for some people it doesn’t seem like such a big thing to just take it off the shelf,” Allen says. “But for me it became ‘How much can I take? How much can I be a part of something where I’m sacrificing my entire teaching philosophy? If this is happening, what’s next?’”
Allen says that when even fellow teachers urged her to stop teaching certain material for fear of parental reprisal, she had nowhere left to turn for support.
“The message I got was that if I continued to be true to myself and teach the truth about literature and historical context, to allow kids to pick books that interested them and reflected their own lives or explored other cultures and experiences, to not tell on kids who prefer different pronouns, that it would only continue to make life harder for those around me,” she says. “Which would only make me feel even more unwelcome.”
Today Allen is a “room mom” in her 6-year-old daughter’s classroom; she is considering substitute teaching, but has no plans to return full time. She knows she’s fortunate to be able to make that choice but also feels she can “do more to help educators and education as a voter, a writer and a parent, unencumbered by the restrictions of being a teacher.”
A self-described “rebel” whose father, an active teacher’s union member, taught her to “speak truth to power,” Allen scoffs at the suggestion that speaking out publicly about her departure could sabotage future employment. “If burning bridges is what it takes, I’d be happy to burn them all,” Allen says.
“If parents had any idea of what is going on in the schools and how it is affecting teachers, they’d do the same thing. These kids are not going to be prepared for anything on a nationwide scale. And what does that mean about their being prepared for life? I’m much more interested in standing up for kids and educators than in having the opportunity to apply for a job with Sarasota County Schools.”
In this video from 2005, Whoopi Goldberg explains why she’s against censoring old Looney Tunes cartoons that have racial stereotypes. I agree with her. And I’m against suspending her for her recent comments about the Holocaust. And I’m Jewish.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
February 2, 2022
Whoopi Goldberg has just been suspended from The View for her recent comments about the Holocaust.
I’m Jewish, and I’m against her suspension. I support free speech for everyone, and for all points of view.
In the past, Goldberg herself has defended free speech for old Looney Tunes cartoons that have racial stereotypes. This video is from The Looney Tunes Collection Vol. 3, which was released in 2005:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCT1clqci3I
Belgian surgeon sentenced to ten months in prison over sexist speech
Belgian surgeon sentenced to ten months in prison over sexist speech
Cosmetic surgeon Jeff Hoeyberghs insisted he was only speaking ‘the truth’ when he called women ‘hysterical, lazy, weak, stupid’
By Justin Stares
January 4, 2022
A cosmetic surgeon from Belgium has been handed a ten-month prison sentence for a lecture in which he complained that women were no longer willing to give sexual favours in exchange for protection and money from men.
Judges in Flanders said the speech by Jeff Hoeyberghs, 60, merited the prison sentence, half of which is suspended, on the grounds that he not only intended to incite discrimination, hatred and violence against women but also refused to apologise.
Hoeyberghs insisted he was only speaking the “truth”, while some politicians claimed his freedom of speech was being curtailed.
In his 2019 speech at Ghent University, Hoeyberghs called women “hysterical, lazy, weak, stupid” and “dirty creatures, who seek money and protection from men to whom they owe sex”.
Women served “to satisfy men sexually and perform household chores”, he said, but “don’t want to open their legs anymore”.
Women could be compared to “animals” with “udders”, the surgeon told his postgraduate audience.
Specific women, including students in the auditorium, a TV broadcaster, and green activist Greta Thunberg, were targeted with insults.
Women were “worthless” in the role of doctors, judges, teachers, scientists, journalists, and business executives, Hoeyberghs said.
‘Stupid and outrageous’
Hoeyberghs, who qualified as a cosmetic surgeon in the UK and is a frequent TV commentator in Belgium, was invited to speak by the university.
The speech, which was filmed by students and broadcast live on Facebook, resulted in more than 1,500 complaints.
In court, Hoeyberghs’ lawyer said none of those personally targeted had sued for defamation.
The accusations, the surgeon claimed, were evidence of a “well-oiled international machine of communist signature and with Western state subversion as the ultimate goal”.
Judges dismissed his arguments, ruling that Hoeyberghs’ “criminal behaviour threatens a peaceful society where there is room for all people, regardless of their gender.
“It creates a hostile atmosphere in society and contributes to even more strife, discord, conflict and violence”.
But Bart De Wever, mayor of Antwerp and leader of the nationalist New Flemish Alliance Party, said: “Hoeyberghs’ statements were stupid and outrageous. But reprehensible is different from punishable. Freedom cannot be protected by restricting it”.
Hoeyberghs has said he will appeal.
Amazon Prime Stops Streaming Clarence Thomas Documentary During Black History Month
Amazon Prime Stops Streaming Clarence Thomas Documentary During Black History Month
By Mark Paoletta
February 25, 2021
Amazon showed it has its limits when it comes to its dedication to diversity and inclusion when it failed to continue streaming a critically acclaimed and popular documentary on the only black Supreme Court justice during Black History Month.
Recently, Amazon Prime dropped Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, an acclaimed and popular PBS documentary on Justice Clarence Thomas, making it unavailable to stream during Black History Month. Thomas is our nation’s only black justice currently serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, and one would think that between Amazon’s claim to “building an inclusive culture” and the fact that it’s Black History Month, Amazon would want to stream this inspiring documentary on its platform.
In fact, Amazon Prime created an entire Amplify Black Voices page on its site that “feature[s] a curated collection of titles to honor Black History Month across four weekly themes (Black Love, Black Joy, Black History Makers, and Black Girl Magic).” There are scores of films available to stream, including four films available on the Amazon Prime site to stream (two docudramas and two documentaries) on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal icon and our nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. There are even two films (one docudrama and one documentary) on Anita Hill, who came forward during Thomas’ confirmation hearing to claim that Thomas had sexually harassed her. (Hill’s story never added up and, and as reflected in a NY Times/CBS News poll after the Senate confirmation hearings, American men and women believed Thomas by a 2-1 margin.)
Amazon has made a significant effort to celebrate black voices on its site during Black History Month, including films of Thurgood Marshall and even Anita Hill, but can’t find any space for a documentary on our only sitting black Supreme Court justice? This makes no sense at all, other than Amazon made a decision to not show this film because Justice Thomas is a black justice who has conservative views.
The Created Equal DVD is still available for purchase on Amazon, and it is in fact number 38 of all documentaries on that site. In contrast, the RBG documentary on liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not even in the top 100 but is still streaming on Amazon Prime.
Created Equal was nationally broadcast on PBS last April and has a 99 percent audience approval rating on the popular movie rating website Rotten Tomatoes. Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, wrote, “It is a marvel of filmmaking that two hours pass so quickly. At the end of a screening I recently attended, there weren’t many dry eyes in the room.” She added, “Thomas is an American hero.” On the Amazon website, the film has received a spectacular 4.9 star rating (out of 5 stars) from customer reviews, with 1,243 ratings.
According to news reports, Amazon has been taking down long-running documentaries from its site with little or no warning, and apparently it is almost impossible to receive a response as to why a documentary was taken down. And there may be some so-called liberal documentaries that have been taken down during this period. But it is very strange that Amazon could not find space on its website to stream a documentary on our longest-serving black Supreme Court justice in American history that ran on PBS in a national broadcast (no small feat) and is a top-selling DVD in its documentary section, while less popular documentaries on Justice Marshall are still streaming.
Justice Thomas’s incredible story is one that every American should know – and in particular, every black American. He was born in 1948 in deep poverty in the Deep South of segregated Georgia, living from birth under Jim Crow laws. His parents had almost no education, and his father left the family before he was two. Thomas’s life changed when he was 7 years old, when he and his younger brother went to live with his grandparents.
Despite being uneducated, his grandfather built a small business delivering oil, coal, firewood, and ice in Savannah. His grandfather was tough on Thomas and his younger brother, but they learned the values of hard work and perseverance. Thomas’s grandfather always said, “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.”
After being taught by Irish nuns in a segregated Catholic school and attending seminary for high school, Thomas broke away from the values his grandfather and the nuns instilled in him and rejected his Catholic faith, embracing the idea of the Black Panthers and radical left in the late 1960s. As Thomas wrote in his must-read and gripping memoirs My Grandfather’s Son, “[T]he more I read about the black power movement, the more I wanted to be part of it. What was the point of working within the system? Segregation, lynchings, black codes, slavery… Surely the time for politeness and nonviolent protest was over.”
Thomas came to reject that path, embracing a view that believed in individual rights, not group rights. Thomas believes that our most important principle is found in the Declaration of Independence: “All Men are Created Equal.”
In his nearly 30 years on the Supreme Court, Thomas has developed the most comprehensive and consistent originalist jurisprudence of any justice to serve on the Court. Leftwing legal writer Ian Millhiser wrote in 2018 that Thomas is “the most important legal thinker of his generation and the most significant appointment of the last forty years.” One well-regarded Supreme Court practitioner who founded the prominent SCOTUSblog noted that Thomas is “our greatest Justice.” CBS Supreme Court reporter Jan Crawford proved, based on internal Court documents, that Thomas was a force from the very first day he sat on the Court, pulling the Court in his direction.
But Thomas’s views are anathema to “civil rights” leaders and groups, such as Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter, who make their living and lots of money claiming that America is a systemically racist country and push policies that define individuals based only on the color of their skin. This groupthink also led the African American History Museum in 2016 to exclude any exhibit on Justice Thomas in its first year of existence, despite Thomas being the second and longest-serving black Supreme Court justice in history, only begrudgingly adding a section that still is unfair to the justice.
In a conversation a few years ago where I was present, Thomas pointed out the absurdity of the left’s progressivism by noting that everyone would agree that if a black man were barred from entering a library because of the color of his skin, that would universally and rightly be regarded as racist, but the left is fine with telling that same black man he can enter that library but he can never be allowed to agree with the content of certain books because of the color of his skin.
What is tragic is that Amazon Prime would not show this film during Black History Month, even a well-regarded PBS documentary about a conservative black Supreme Court justice, who may offer a different point of view to the black community than the accepted view enforced by the left.
Thomas Sowell and the late Walter Williams – two accomplished and well-regarded black conservative economists – have written for decades about how liberal social policies beginning with Great Society programs in the 1960s and continuing today have failed miserably. Can there be any doubt of failure for policies that have contributed to the black out-of-wedlock birthrate going from 11 percent in 1938 to more than 75 percent today? That 82 percent of black households were two-parent in 1950 and today more than 70 percent of black households are headed by a single mother? But to question these policies is racist?
More than twenty years ago and despite efforts to prevent him from speaking, Thomas spoke at the National Bar Association, the nation’s premier law association for black lawyers, and his words are even more striking today than they were 20 years ago:
I have come here today not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some. Nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I’m black. I come to state that I’m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please. I’ve come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.
But even more than that, I have come to say that isn’t it time to move on? Isn’t it time to realize that being angry with me solves no problems?
Isn’t it time to acknowledge that the problem of race has defied simple solutions and that not one of us, not a single one of us can lay claim to the solution?
Isn’t it time that we respect ourselves and each other as we have demanded respect from others?
Isn’t it time to ignore those whose sole occupation is sowing seeds of discord and animus? That is self-hatred.
Isn’t it time to continue diligently to search for lasting solutions?
I believe that the time has come today.
God bless each of you, and may God keep you.
As these words show, Clarence Thomas is a man who speaks his mind and does not bend to anyone. Created Equal covers Thomas’s amazing life story in a one-on-one interview with Thomas that is unprecedented in Supreme Court history.
This is a film that should be widely streamed by Amazon at all times – and particularly during Black History Month – to show the diversity of thought in the black community and to celebrate Thomas’s amazing life journey. Amazon does a great disservice to all Americans, and particularly black Americans, when it decides not to show an inspiring film about an incredible Black American during Black History Month.
I’m Jewish. I don’t feel “denigrated” by Gina Carano’s recent statement. Shame on Disney/Lucasfilm for firing her!
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
February 11, 2021
Gina Carano, actress on the TV series The Mandalorian, recently posted the following on TikTok:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors… even by children.”
“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Her employer, Disney/Lucasfilm, responded with the following:
“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
I’m Jewish.
I don’t feel “denigrated” by Carano’s statment.
I actually agree with what she said.
And even if I didn’t agree with what she said, I still support free speech for everyone.
I’ve seen every episode of The Mandalorian.
I think it was wrong for Disney/Lucasfilm to fire Carano.
This wonderful TV series can only be harmed by her firing.
Shame on Disney/Lucasfilm for firing her!
Crybaby Trump is against free speech and doesn’t have a sense of humor!
Here’s a skit from the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQlhWBvAwY
And here’s a tweet that Trump made in response: (original, archive)
The text states:
“Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”
So Trump wants “retribution,” against people who were peacefully and lawfully exercising their first amendment right to free speech. He also wants them to be “looked into.”
Trump took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the U.S. Constitution. He ought to be ashamed of himself for thinking that the people at Saturday Night Live are somehow exempt from the first amendment’s right to free speech.
43% of Republicans say Trump should be allowed to shut down media
These Republicans are the very definition of fascism.
https://nypost.com/2018/08/07/43-of-republicans-say-trump-should-be-allowed-to-shut-down-media/
43% of Republicans say Trump should be allowed to shut down media
August 7, 2018
President Trump’s repeated cries of “fake news” and attacks on journalists as “enemies of the American people” have resonated with his base, with 43 percent of Republicans saying he “should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”
The results — suggesting that a plurality of Republicans would have no problem trashing the First Amendment — came from a stunning new poll conducted by Ipsos and reported Tuesday by the Daily Beast.
The survey also showed that just 36 percent of GOP voters disagreed with that statement.
When asked if Trump should close down specific news organizations, such as CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times — all frequent Trump targets — 23 percent of GOP voters agreed while 49 percent did not.
Overall, Republicans were more likely to take a dim view of the media, the website reported.
Forty-eight percent said they believed “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” with only 28 percent disagreeing.
Nearly four out of five — 79 percent — said that they believed “the mainstream media treats President Trump unfairly.”
The commander-in-chief — who as recently as January called existing US libel laws “a sham and a disgrace” — has routinely accused journalists of lying, making up sources and knowingly reporting false information to make him look bad.
“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!” he ranted Sunday in a typical media-bashing tweet.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently refused to respond when she was asked if she thought journalists were the enemies of the people — though first daughter Ivanka Trump said she disagreed with the characterization.
But it’s not only Republicans who think the president should have the power to muzzle the media, a common practice in dictatorships and authoritarian states like Russia, North Korea and China.
According to the survey, 12 percent of Democrats and 21 percent of independents agreed that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.”
Conversely, 74 percent of Dems and 55 percent of independents disagreed with the statement.
But 12 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of independents agreed that “the news media is the enemy of the American people,” while 74 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents disagreed.
But there were kernels of positive news for the press in the survey as well.
Overall, 57 percent of those surveyed said they believed the news media and reporters were “necessary to keep the Trump administration honest” — including a 39 percent plurality of Republicans.
And a large majority — 85 percent — believed that “freedom of the press is essential for American democracy,” compared to 4 percent who opposed that statement.
The 43 percent figure roughly corresponds to the president’s loyal base.
Gallup’s most recent weekly tracking poll showed that 41 percent of voters approved of the job Trump is doing while 54 percent disapproved.
The reason Facebook said Diamond and Silk were “unsafe” is because Facebook is run by social justice warriors who demanded “safe spaces” when they were in college
According to this article from the Washington Post, Facebook recently sent the following message to Diamond and Silk: (the bolding is mine)
“The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community… This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way.”
The same Washington Post article went on to say:
“Facebook has not explained what, if anything, the sisters have done to violate its terms of service or be considered ‘unsafe’… their videos are not violent or especially incendiary.”
When regular people use the word “unsafe,” they are referring to things that are physically dangerous, such as falling off a 500 foot cliff and landing on the jagged rocks below, or riding a motorcycle at 200 mph without a helmet, or getting one’s arms chopped off by a maniac with a machete.
But Facebook is not run by regular people.
Facebook is run by social justice warriors who – when they were in college just a few years ago – demanded “safe spaces.” But these “safe spaces” that they demanded had nothing whatsoever to do with physical safety. Instead, they wanted to be “protected” from ideas that did not conform to their own social justice warrior beliefs.
And that is why Facebook labeled Diamond and Silk as being “unsafe.”
University of Texas at San Antonio department chair Eve Browning threatened a bisexual philosophy grad student with possible “academic dismissal” because he truthfully said there were Muslim-majority countries that executed people for being gay
A bisexual philosophy grad student has left the University of Texas at San Antonio and transferred to another school after department chair Eve Browning threatened him with possible “academic dismissal” for truthfully saying that there were Muslim-majority countries that executed people for being gay.
And the student has this threat on tape. (In Texas, it’s legal for one party to record another party without their knowledge, which is exactly what the student did.)
The recording can be heard at https://vid.me/eKq2l
The transcript of the recording can be read at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xCjOb-ysUAo7nqhKng1Rgeo3FxvvMRg1Cx0OtspmTAI/pub
What this means, in addition to its assault on freedom of speech, is that in the hierarchy of political correctness, Muslims are higher up than gays.
Donald Trump threatens to shut down NBC and other TV news networks that criticise him
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-threatens-shut-down-150300346.html
Donald Trump threatens to shut down NBC and other TV news networks that criticise him
October 11, 2017
Donald Trump has threatened to shut down NBC and other American networks, saying that they peddle fake news.
“With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” Mr Trump wrote in a tweet.
(more…)
Black Lives Matter’s newest phrase: “Liberalism is white supremacy”
According to the student newspaper at the College of William and Mary, the ACLU recently tried to host an event called “Students and the First Amendment.”
However, five minutes after the event began, Black Lives Matter protestors started shouting loud enough to prevent the ACLU from being heard.
The ACLU suggested that both Black Lives Matter and the ACLU be allowed to speak. But the Black Lives Matter protestors would not allow the ACLU to be heard. After 30 minutes of not being allowed to speak, the ACLU canceled the event.
Statements shouted by Black Lives Matter protestors included
“liberalism is white supremacy”
and
“the revolution will not uphold the constitution”
Afterward, the college’s Black Lives Matter chapter posted the following on its Facebook page:
“Tonight, we shut down an event at William & Mary where Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, was speaking. In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in.”
I’d like to thank social justice warriors for drawing my attention to Ben Shapiro’s excellent speech at UC Berkeley
Although I’ve watched plenty of brief clips of Ben Shapiro at YouTube in the past, I’d never before watched an entire speech of his.
However, after social justice warriors tried to prevent him from speaking at UC Berkeley, I decided to watch the entire thing.
And here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP_9cRUzqMw
The speech itself makes up only the first 28 minutes of the video. I watched the entire 28 minutes. And I loved it. (The rest of the video is a Q&A, which I did not watch.)
So thanks to all the people who drew my attention to the speech by trying to ban it.
In the speech, Shapiro repeatedly condemns white supremacy. He criticizes the alt-right for being against western civilization. And he cites statistics which prove that having a baby out of wedlock, not racism, is the biggest cause of poverty.
UC Berkeley is offering counseling for anyone who was traumatized by Shapiro’s speech.
Sweden prosecutes woman for truthfully saying that immigrants were pooping in the streets
Sweden: 70-Year-Old Woman Prosecuted For Complaining About Migrants Defecating In The Streets
May 2017
A 70-year-old Swedish woman is facing up to four years in prison for complaining on Facebook about migrants defecating in the streets.
From Fria Tider (translated from Swedish with Google):
A 70 year old woman in Dalarna prosecuted for hate speech after writing on Facebook that immigrants are defecating in the streets, writes DT.se.
According to the prosecution, the woman via Facebook wrote disparagingly of people with a foreign background.
In a post from 2015, she has written that immigrants “set cars on fire and urinate and defecate in the streets.”
This violates the law on incitement to racial hatred, according to the prosecutor.
The accused woman in police interrogation admitted that she wrote the post, but denied that she committed a criminal act.
The evidence against the 70-year-old woman is a screenshot from Facebook.
The penalty for incitement to racial hatred is imprisonment not exceeding two years or, for petty offenses, fines. If the offense is considered to be grave sentenced the defendants to prison terms of between six months and four years.
She’s being dragged into court and threatened with jail for a two year old Facebook post which is factually correct.
While the Western media and leftist “human rights” groups will whine about attacks on free speech in places like China and Russia, in Sweden and Germany they’re throwing people in prison for writing “anti-migrant” Facebook posts.
Here’s the “hate speech” video (i.e., speech against Islamic terrorism) that got a U.S. tourist arrested in Canada
Here are two videos by a YouTuber who calls himself “Wild Bill for America.”
The first video is a speech that he gave when he was in the U.S. In the speech, he criticizes Islamic terrorism.
In the second video, he explains how he was arrested for “smuggling hate speech” in Canada because he was planning to give the exact same speech in Canada, and he had the text of the speech on his IPAD that he was carrying with him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZUmYQYDaw8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwaMpTLUmX0
Here’s the 1996 clip from “Bill Nye the Science Guy” which is currently being censored on Netflix
During the original 1996 broadcast of the “Probability” episode of the TV program “Bill Nye the Science Guy,” there was a segment that explained how a person’s gender is determined by genetics.
In 2017, Netflix aired a version of this episode in which this segment had been removed.
I don’t know if it was Netflix, Nye himself, or some other party that instigated this censorship.
Since YouTube has a nasty habit of removing politically incorrect videos, I’m including links to four videos, all of which have the clip.
The censored footage consists entirely and exclusively of the part where the young lady is talking about how gender is determined by genetics. Some of these videos also contain additional content which was not censored:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5z9s_bimnw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PArom6CRB0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNpac2TYX5Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sV_W5nFmjA
Oregon fines man $500 because he used math to criticize red light cameras without having an engineering license
Oregon Man Claims State Muzzles Red Light Camera Critique
April 26, 2017
An Oregon man’s public criticism of the mathematical formula used by red light cameras got him in trouble — not with the police but with the state engineering board.
So he’s suing, claiming a violation of free speech.
After his wife got a ticket based on a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon, Mats Järlström, a Swedish-born electronics engineer, studied the calculations used to determine the length of the yellow light cycle. He concluded it was too short, because it failed to account for the longer time a driver needed to turn a corner, rather than go straight through the intersection.
Convinced the cameras were using an out-of-date formula, he took his message to practically anyone who would listen — local TV stations, a conference of traffic engineers, and even the state board of engineer examiners.
That’s what got him in trouble.
The board fined him $500 and said he was violating a state law by speaking about engineering issues without a license.
“By providing the public with his traffic engineering calculations,” the board said, “Järlström engaged in the practice of engineering.” And since he didn’t have a license issued by the state, he was violating the law, it said.
Now he’s suing in federal court, accusing the state of violating his First Amendment right to speak about a public issue.
“Criticizing the government’s engineering isn’t a crime. It’s a constitutional right,” said Samuel Gedge of the Institute for Justice, a conservative public interest law firm representing Järlström. “You don’t need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights.”
As many states do, Oregon prohibits a person from practicing engineering without a license. But the state’s board of engineering examiners equates publicly talking about engineering issues with practicing engineering.
“I was fined simply for speaking out and was told that I can’t truthfully call myself an engineer. People should be free to debate any topic, including technical topics like math and traffic lights,” Järlström said.
A spokesman for the state engineering board had no comment on the lawsuit, and the state has not yet responded in court.
Järlström paid the $500 fine. But he isn’t suing to get his money back.
Another Institute for Justice lawyer on his legal team, Wesley Hottot, said the state is essentially requiring a permission slip to debate government policy. “This board and licensing boards across the country think the First Amendment doesn’t apply to them. They couldn’t be more wrong.”
The hypocrites at the ACLU called the police because they didn’t like an opinion that someone expressed
Woman Crashes ACLU Stop Trump Meeting and Urges Snowflakes to Think for Themselves – Cops Are Called
March 11, 2017
Activist Ginger McQueen crashed the local ACLU Stop Trump training session today and began to lecture the indoctrinated leftists.
Ginger urged the snowflakes to think for themselves.
So they called the police on her.
When the officer got there he shook her hand and laughed.
“I crashed the ACLU’s Stop Trump meeting. They called the police on me. The cop shook my hand and laughed.”
– Ginger McQueen
“Yes, the police actually showed up because the snowflakes can’t handle having their ideas challenged or their pictures taken in a public.”
– Ginger McQueen
“The ACLU sued for citizens to be able to film police, but citizens can’t film the ACLU.”
Ginger McQueen
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 