The Tamora Pierce-Tim Liebe Disinformation Campaign

Tamora Pierce, the YA fantasy author initiated the boycott against Dark Horse Comics on July 15, 2007 for republishing John Norman's Chronicles of Gor series in omnibus editions, which torch was then picked up & carried forward by J.E. Remy in a three-part series on his Die Wachen blog in which he relentlessly slandered John Norman, characterized the novels as "hate speech," contacted the college where Norman teaches about the novels (which Norman wrote in his private capacity, under a pseudonym), attempting to compromise John Norman's academic freedom. This relentless attack was then featured & praised in the 16th Annual Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans (hosted, embarrassingly enough by a fellow librarian) on August 16, 2007.

I posted several times to Tamora Pierce's blog explaining that this boycott was a form of "private censorship" constituting a "public attack" on the Gor series, but she was evidently incapable of grasping the concept. In my posts to James Nicoll's blog on October 4, 2007, I indicated that I had better things to do with my time than to try to explain these concepts to those with hermetically sealed minds & turned my attention to more fruitful endeavors for a bit, until I noticed that - evidently thinking I was paying them no attention whatsoever anymore -- Tammy & her "spousal creature" Tim Liebe had descended into unrestrained slander against me & launched a disinformation campaign.

I replied to Tim Liebe today, as follows:

Hi, Tim, you wrote:

Yeah, that was kind of what I was wondering - sort of like this psycho librarian (no link, b/c I don't want her thinking her point has any legitimacy) who's threatening Tammy w/the ALA "censorship blacklist" for her opinion on the Gor books.

Ahem. Calling someone a “psycho librarian” meets your definition of good manners? I’m sure that will go over well with any other librarians looking through these threads!

I’d never said anything about a “blacklist” -- I’d said that Tammy’s actions constituted a “public attack” of the Gor series under the A.L.A.’s definition (not mine, which you keep ignoring), which made it a reportable event under the A.L.A.’s criteria. That is simply fact, not opinion. I even provided links to the A.L.A. webpages where Tammy could verify the accuracy of what I’d said, but clearly you & she prefer to distort & misrepresent my words, so this time I’ll provide everyone with pictures: screenshots of the relevant portions of the A.L.A. Challenge Database submission form, beginning with the header:



This next shot is of Section 4, in which the nature of the attacker is identified -- please note the last category, “Pressure Group”:



In Section 7 one is required to identify:



That section provided so many options it was too long to include as a whole, but you can see that at the bottom of the list there's a box to be checked for “Publisher.”



See, Tim? That’s straight from the A.L.A.’s form itself. You wrote:

Which isn't the case at all, as I found out the hard way in college the first time I called a boycott "censorship". A boycott, which you might be able to claim Tammy informally called for, is a way for a group of people to hit an organization doing something they don't approve of in the pocketbook.

MediaBistro certainly seemed to think it was a boycott.

You wrote:

You may not LIKE it that people are boycotting something, any more than I liked it that the Khrister Right boycotted Disney for ::gasp!:: being the last major film studio to provide "spousal benefits" for same-sex life partners - but disliking something and refusing to give it your sanction, even if you dislike it EXTREMELY, is not now nor has ever been "censorship".

The A.L.A. completely disagrees.

You might want to read this 1956 article from Time Magazine, too, Sex & Censors:

Is sex necessary on newsstands? Most U.S. citizens are content to leave the problem to the courts. But many an outraged parent is not inclined to wait for the slow-grinding mills of the law to protect his children from cheap and easy smut. The result may be a well-intentioned pressure group that tries to boycott and bully all available reading matter down to a soap-opera level. Writing in the current issue of Harper's, Editor John Fischer thinks he has found just that in what he calls "a little band of Catholics . . . conducting a shocking attack on the rights of their fellow citizens. They are engaged in an un-American activity . . . harming their country, their Church, and the cause of freedom."

You wrote:

It's a classic right-wing talk radio tactic - equate personal dislike with "censorship" when it's your enemy, but Defend to the Death YOUR right to call for the government or an organization with the power to hurt your enemy to censor anything you don't like

First, I’m not “right wing” politically, & second you’re describing yourself & Tammy, above, not me, & the supposed "right wing talk radio tactic" you're bemoaning is what the A.C.L.U. urges people to do when people like you try to get a publisher not to publish a book you disapprove of:

WHAT IS CENSORSHIP?

Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.

In contrast, when private individuals or groups organize boycotts against stores that sell magazines of which they disapprove, their actions are protected by the First Amendment, although they can become dangerous in the extreme. Private pressure groups, not the government, promulgated and enforced the infamous Hollywood blacklists during the McCarthy period. But these private censorship campaigns are best countered by groups and individuals speaking out and organizing in defense of the threatened expression.”

You wrote:

(like the ALA blacklisting a writer, say), b/c it's "just expressing an opinion"!

Again, no one said anything about a “blacklist” except you. You’re sounding just a tad, um, defensive, too. You wrote:

Pardon me, self-righteous belligerent psycho person - but that IS censorship, and you ARE a hypocrite,

Politely informing someone of facts is not “belligerence,” nor am I “psycho" nor a "hypocrite." I've never called anyone here insulting names, either, not once, despite repeated name-calling on your part, on your wife's & on the part of so many regular posters here. Don't think lots of silent readers aren't taking note of all that.

Charlotte

There may be updates to this....

UPDATE: Oh, woe am I -- Tammy's "banned" me from posting to her "private blog." She said:

"Enough. You have made your multitude of points. If you have an issue with my call for a boycott of the Gor books and the A.L.A. takes such complaints, then stop issuing threats and file your complaint. Do it and get it over with."

That'd been done awhile ago. I was never making any "threats;" I'd just been trying to drive the concept home that her boycott was a "public attack" under the A.L.A.'s criteria, not some personal criteria of my own. How hard a concept was that to grasp? Apparently it required pictures!

"If you post on my blog again, I will ban you. That's my right as a private citizen on my private live journal. I invite others here to share their opinions, but I can decide at any time to ask someone to leave, and you are that first (I hope only) someone."

Nope, there have been others, before me & there will undoubtedly be others after me, lol.

"I am warning you here rather than simply doing it outright out of politeness. I won't be polite when I ban you. I'll just do it."

"Politeness"? That would be quite a new experience from the Y.A. author who self-proclaims herself to be "a crude, rude, nasty, bawdy, mean-minded intellectual snob. It's time you figured this out, if you haven't already."

Oh, we have, Tamora Pierce, we have. Lots of us are now taking careful note....

Sock Puppets vs. the Herd of Hermetically Sealed Minds

After Greg Morrow of the Howling Curmudgeons board posted his dismissive comment to James Nicolls's blog, I responded with a three-part post attempting -- one last time & against the odds of addressing hermetically sealed minds -- to explain to people unwilling even to read my posts with any care (sometimes at all) or to verify the information I'd consistently provided links to in order to substantiate the veracity of my statements, that the First Amendment is not the only applicable measure of censorship & that boycotts distort & undermine the free marketplace of ideas. All they seemed to be concerned with, however, was the possibility that the few other posters to those blogs who've agreed with me might be my "sock puppets."

That would almost be too funny if it weren't so paranoid....


Here's my three-part post of October 4, 2007:

My sincere thanks to Greg Morrow for placing a link here to my posts to him on his Howling Curmudgeons board concerning his attack on Dark Horse's proposed republication of John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor!

For those who have mastered the essential methodological differences between effectively interpreting philosophical imaginative fiction & expository non-fiction (as classically explicated by Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren in How to Read a Book, briefly quoted in the second of my posts to Greg) as well as how to decode irony, & who possess sufficiently open minds, reading my so-called “apologetics” should suffice. And for those who’ve attained the requisite degree of such analytical reading skills who might stumble onto these threads in the future, it will doubtless be self-evident to them what the ferocity of the endless ridicule -- to which so many of the posters who’ve flocked here seem so reflexively prone when faced with an opinion materially contrary to their own -- signifies.

As the poet & abolitionist James Russell Lowell once insightfully observed, “The sneer is the weapon of the weak.”

These threads, however, have served as an excellent demonstration of why the annual observance of Banned Books Week remains so essential even into the 21st century. For that, on behalf of your many, if largely silent, readers over the last couple & coming weeks, I thank you all (especially Tamora Pierce & Jeremy Remy of Salt Lake Community College & his Die Wachen blog) for your very telling -- if largely unwitting -- contributions to this exercise since I first learned of your attacks!

Bellatrys, perhaps Jess Nevins, one of the other members of the Howling Curmudgeons board who’s also a librarian, possesses more patience than I do & will attempt to explain to you what my posts to Tamora’s blog (& the links therein to the A.L.A. materials that I’ve repeatedly provided) have evidently not yet succeeded in doing: that there is a critical, material difference between merely criticizing a book on the one hand, no matter how stridently, & on the other attempting in concert with others to pressure its publisher to withdraw it from publication, an effort which, if successful, precludes other people from being able to read the book to evaluate it for themselves. You might read up on the reaction of U.S. librarians when Harper-Collins had attempted to suppress the distribution of Michael Moore’s second book, Stupid White Men, in 2001.

The First Amendment addresses, first & foremost, state-sponsored censorship, but that doesn’t mean, in the U.S., either that there are or should be no limitations whatsoever on the non-violent suppression by “private censors” of the rights of others to free expression (e.g., as the late Justice White had noted in Red Lion v. the F.C.C, "Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests"), nor that such attempts at suppression by private citizens don’t harm civil discourse & constrict the marketplace of ideas, nor that they aren’t inherently & profoundly hypocritical when made by those who claim to champion free speech. As someone else had recently attempted to remind Bellatrys on her own board, Noam Chomsky once trenchantly commented, “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”

A writer whose novels are today considered masterpieces of political satire once wrote in the introduction to one of those works, whose publication had been attained only after several other publishers had turned the manuscript down, deterred by the tyranny of the then majority:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The year was 1946, the writer was George Orwell, & the book whose publication had by then been suppressed for years -- principally by the prevailing leftist orthodoxy of the time -- was Animal Farm.

Herman Melville is today widely considered perhaps the greatest of American authors, although his contemporaries, despite their earlier enthusiasm for Typee & Omoo, had almost uniformly been baffled & disgusted by Moby Dick, such as the one who infamously wrote,

We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book.... Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature -- since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.

After the publication the following year of Melville’s controversial, experimental philosophical novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, whose central characters were portrayed as engaging in a possibly incestuous relationship, he was attacked even more savagely & ruthlessly by contemporary critics, whose effectiveness was such that he found it increasingly difficult to find a publisher for his later works: indeed, he eventually ceased writing altogether & the critically-acclaimed Billy Budd was only published posthumously, decades after Melville’s death. The Penguin Press edition of Pierre notes, for example,

"Ambiguities indeed! One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville's style), like Melchisedeck without beginning or end - a labyrinth without a clue - an Irish bog without so much as a Jack o' th'-lantern to guide the wanderer's footsteps - the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." So judged the New York Herald when Pierre was first published in 1852, with most contemporary reviewers joining in the general condemnation: "a dead failure," "this crazy rigmarole," and "a literary mare's nest." Latter-day critics have recognized in the story of Melville's idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental-Gothic novel, and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques. As William Spengemann writes in his introduction to this edition, "For anyone who, being aware of the culture of modernity, is curious about its origins, Pierre ranks with Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, and the poems of Emily Dickinson as one of the privileged places where the dead past can be seen giving way inexorably to the living present.

The Northwestern University critical edition of Pierre similarly notes,

Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, Pierre, or The Ambiguities has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Ulysses. None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough [modern day] critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

However, Melville’s many censorious contemporaries could not grant him even the opportunity to write for the few who did appreciate him. Twentieth century critics such as Van Vechten later compared their relentless attacks to “the insipidly cacophonous cawing of so many crows.” Melville is now recognized as a titan of American literature; those who had attacked him so self-righteously & uncomprehendingly in his lifetime are now remembered principally or only for that.

Jonquil, my dear, of course Augustine wasn’t thinking of Tarl Cabot when he’d written dilige et quod vis fac, if only because Tarl Cabot was a fictitious character & in any case, if you’d perhaps read my so-called “apologetics” with greater care you would have noticed, perhaps, that I hadn’t claimed that Norman had premised his own philosophy directly on Augustine’s aphorism but rather had drawn on it in a form that had been mediated first by Rabelais, then by Aldous Huxley, for whom it was no longer premised on religious faith. Quod vis fac has long been considered by many to be a pithy summation of the essence of “virtue ethics.” I’d recommend to you philosopher Alastair McIntyre’s After Virtue, but if you're as unfamiliar with the history of philosophy & virtue ethics as your posts indicate you to be, I’d recommend that you begin instead with his A Brief History of Ethics.

It’s been fun everyone (the accusations of “sock puppetry” were just too funny), & most illuminating, of course, but there’re only so many hours in a day, I have my own students to get back to, &, in any case, the wise farmer sows his seed neither on barren ground, nor where it will be trampled.


Ciao!

Charlotte

Censorship of the Gor Novels

I posted the following comments earlier today to J.E. Remy concerning his "Speak Out" post on his Die Wachen blog, apparently justifying his attempted censorship of the republication of John Norman's Chronicles of Gor series:

There’s an enormous, absolutely critical distinction from a Free Speech perspective between merely “voicing concerns, protesting, rebutting, ridiculing, debating and scrutinizing” the content or aims one finds objectionable on the one hand, & attempting on the other to prevent others from having the same opportunity to evaluate the work of art for themselves, which is what censorship is.

You wrote: “The right to free speech allows the artist to present ideas in a public forum.”

But preventing the publication or re-publication of a work because one deems it to be objectionable in some manner entirely precludes the right of the artist to present his ideas in the public forum.

You also wrote: “Sometimes the audience uses a collective voice in an attempt to instigate change. This is not encouraging censorship or monitoring thought—quite the opposite.”

If using “a collective voice in an attempt to instigate change” involves precluding the right of the artist to be heard by others, that unquestionably constitutes “censorship” & “monitoring thought,” which is precisely what you’ve attempted to do in your Sexist, Degrading Bullshit II: Comic Book Edition post, wrapping yourself in the First Amendment’s legal protections, while at once perverting it aims.

As the American Library Association notes in its Intellectual Freedom and Censorship Q&A:

"What Is Censorship?

Censorship is the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, “Don’t let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it! ” Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone.

How Does Censorship Happen?

Censorship occurs when expressive materials, like books, magazines, films and videos, or works of art, are removed or kept from public access. Individuals and pressure groups identify materials to which they object. Sometimes they succeed in pressuring schools not to use them, libraries not to shelve them, book and video stores not to carry them, publishers not to publish them, or art galleries not to display them. Censorship also occurs when materials are restricted to particular audiences, based on their age or other characteristics.

Who Attempts Censorship?

In most instances, a censor is a sincerely concerned individual who believes that censorship can improve society, protect children, and restore what the censor sees as lost moral values. But under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, each of us has the right to read, view, listen to, and disseminate constitutionally protected ideas, even if a censor finds those ideas offensive.”
(emphasis mine)

What you & your supporters are attempting to do with respect to the Dark Horse edition of the Gor novels of John Norman is exactly the same thing that was done to Michael Moore in 2001, concerning his second book, Stupid White Men:

“Like a cyberspace Paul Revere, Sparanese sent word to various email lists including SRRT (Social Responsibilities Round Table) and Library Juice, explaining Moore's situation. She conveyed this battle wasn't just one man's struggle with a publishing house, but was a battle to preserve free speech and to stop censorship.

Two days later Harper Collins phoned Moore. "What did you tell the librarians?" they asked. "We're getting hundreds of letters a day from angry librarians. Do you know how much business we do with these people?"

Harper Collins eventually gave Stupid White Men the green light but not before informing Mr. Moore "you are out of touch with the American people." They handed him the list of cities for the book tour. There were only three listed: Ridgewood, NJ Arlington, VA and Denver, CO. The message was clear to him, Harper Collins wanted no association with his book: Moore was on his own.

On the first day of its release, all 50,000 copies were sold. The next day it was the number one seller on amazon.com. By the fifth day, the book was in its ninth printing. As of today, it is in its twenty-second printing and is selling faster than the latest works from Grisham and Clancy combined.”

I was one of those librarians who sent off an angry letter to Harper-Collins, & I’m not even a fan of Michael Moore's. I did it purely as a matter of principle, which is what I what I expect many, many others will now be doing in this case, too.

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from opposition: for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. ”— Thomas Paine, Dissertation On First Principles Of Government

Debate, even fierce disagreement, is central to the democratic marketplace of ideas, but censorship is the tool of totalitarian politics, a disease equally of the far left & the far right.

Given that you “screen”all comments to your blog, and given how deeply this issue concerns me, I’ve just set up a blog of my own and will be posting these comments there, with a link to this entry of yours, just in case you should decide to censor my comments, too.

Webbadge courtesy of the A.L.A.:

Banned Books Week -- September 29–October 6, 2007
Free People Read Freely