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At least nine fliers promoting groups associated with the so-called alt-right were posted around campus on Tuesday. | Greg Fails/The Cougar

Several fliers promoting so-called alt-right groups were found Tuesday morning posted on bulletin boards and dropped in newsstands across the University of Houston campus.

Six of the nine fliers, which contain an image of a protester wearing a gas mask and carrying a shield and American flag instructing readers to report Antifa Activity to your Local Proud Boys or Alt-Knights #Maga, were found by members of The Cougar at the courtyard within the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication.

The other three fliers were found taped to the Cougar Postings board between Agnes Arnold Hall and the Science and Research 1 building and dropped in a newsstand in Philip Guthrie Hoffman Hall near Einstein Bros. Another was on a bulletin board at the Blaffer Art Museum taped to another flier which promoted an anti-fascism website.

According to the groups Facebook page, the Proud Boys valueminimal government, maximum freedom, anti-political correctness, anti-racial guilt, pro-gun rights, anti-Drug War, closed borders, anti-masturbation, venerating entrepreneurs, venerating housewives, and reinstating a spirit of Western chauvinism during an age of globalism and multiculturalism.

The Proud Boys group which was founded by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes in 2016 accompanied the recently formed Alt Knights during April protests at the University of California, Berkeley where the two organizations clashed with members of Antifa, aworldwide anti-fascist organization.

Whats been going on, until recently, is the communist group Antifa has been showing up in face masks to attack people on the right, said Alt Knights founder Kyle Chapman, 41, in an interview with The Cougar. Chapman goes by the moniker Based Stickman online, and he said the individual pictured on the fliers spread throughout campus is supposed to be him.

The organization, which Chapman called a grassroots movement led by people inspired by the battles at Berkeley, has no official structure. Its members purpose is to attend free speech events to protect protesters on the right from physical assault, he said.

Chapman said he didnt know who posted the fliers at UH, but he said active members of his group live in Houston.

The alt-right phenomenon is one that has been very difficult and odd for the conservative movement on campuses, said history senior Matt Wiltshire, former president of the College Republicans at UH. It takes certain aspects of the right and left and combines them into something that I dont think is a political philosophy.

Wiltshire said the College Republicans and Young Americans for Liberty were unaware of the fliers and both groups should not be associated with the alt-right. He said he believes the fliers may be connected to what he called a nasty feud between the YAL and the UH chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

The posting of fliers doesnt sound like tactics used by the alt-right. It sounds like that of the left like, say, the Students for a Democratic Society, Wiltshire said.

History senior and President of the YAL chapter Michael Anderson said he agrees with Wiltshires assertion that the fliers were planted by a left-wing group. He acknowledged the existence of a feud between the organization and Students for a Democratic Society, calling it kind of petty and kind of funny.

A spokesperson for the Students for a Democratic Society at UH denied the allegations. The group advocated for students to tear down similar fliers on sight.

They are full of s***, and we are confident that many students are well aware that white supremacism is on the rise and very real in Texas and across the United States, the group said in a message to The Cougar from its Facebook page.

These flyers were put up by groups organizing explicitly around the banner of white nationalism in an ongoing effort to intimidate and target oppressed communities, anti-racist organizers, and local progressive forces.

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Tags: alt-right, anti-fascism

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Fliers promoting alt-right groups found on campus - The Daily Cougar

Have libertariansand the broader right and/or classical-liberal movementreally lost the "culture wars"? Why are universities in the United States and other advanced nations so "constipated, stultified" when it comes not just to free speech but open inquiry and academic freedom?

While I was in Sydney, Australia a couple of weeks ago to speak at the 5th Annual Friedman Conference (organized by the Australian Libertarian Society), I was interviewed by Claire Lehmann, the founder of the great and essential site Quillette.com, about these topics.

The interview, which appears on Rebel Media, is below.

Spoiler alert: I think libertarians have already won the culture war in the most important ways possible. Whether it's businesses like Whole Foods, Overstock, and Amazon; the massive and ongoing proliferation of platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, and Twitter; or gig-economy titans such as Uber and Airbnb, capitalism and entrepreneurship has been recast as an innovative, disruptive, liberatory system that allows us all to produce and consume whatever we want under increasingly personalized and individualized circumstances. What we need to do next to nail down what Matt Welch and I have dubbed The Libertarian Moment is to articulate the ways in which our society's cultural, economic, and even political operating system has already bought into the idea that decentralization, individualism, innovation, and freedom to experiment.

If the medium is the message (all props to Marshall McLuhan)if an operating system is more important than any specific content generated within that systemwhat has been abjured as "late capitalism" for decades has effectively ended all debates about how libertarian policies and mind-sets have freed us from bland top-downism in all parts of our lives. This isn't to suggest that we are in any way living a utopian dream. It's simply to point out that even after 15 years of drowsy economic growth and a massive expansion of state (and in many ways, corporate) power, our living standards continue to rise. Add to that huge advances in tolerance and change when it comes to racial, ethnic, and gender disparities and transformative shifts on topics as varied as drug policy, sexual orientation, criminal-justice reform, and gun rights too.

Cultural and political pessimism isn't just a losing strategy, it's a misimpression. Again, that's not to say that massive problems don't exist and need to be confronted. Will we ever see an actual federal budget again, much less that cuts government spending? U.S. foreign policy remains a shameful, disastrous, and destructive hodgepodge of hubris and stupidity. Speech and expression are under attacks from the right and the left, and the bipartisan turn against free trade and the easy movement of people across borders needs to be beaten back. As the late, great Arthur Ekirch explained in his neglected masterpiece The Decline of American Liberalism, forces of decentralization and centralizationof liberation and authoritarianism, of individualism and collectivism, of choice and coercionhave been slugging out in the United States since before there was a United States. The question is whether we are moving generally in a direction of more autonomy and less restriction on how we live our lives.

But...well, watch the interview already.

The rest is here:
Nick Gillespie: Libertarians Have Won the Culture Wars, Even Though Universities Are "Constipated, Stultified" - Reason (blog)

Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia is appealing to a top Turkish court to overturn a government order that blocks access to its website for users in Turkey, broadcaster CNN Turk reported Tuesday.

The website appealed to Turkeys constitutional court, the countrys highest legal body. The ban on access to Wikipedia, which came down from the Turkeys telecommunications watchdog on April 29, followed two entries on the site that linked the Turkish government to Islamist militant groups.

The watchdog justified the decision by using a law that allows it to ban sites it deems to be a threat to national security. The communications ministry has accused the site of a smear campaign against the government, Reuters reported.

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The appeal to the top Turkish court comes after an Ankara court rejected an earlier appeal by the Wikimedia Foundation against the decision on Friday. The site, in its petition to the court, referred to freedom of expression clauses in the European Court of Human Rights and Turkeys constitutional court.

It said banning the entire site because of several pieces of content was not a legal basis for the decision. But, in rejecting the appeal, the local court said such sites could be restricted in some cases, referring to the countrys state of emergency, which remains in place since the failed military coup attempt last July.

Read more: Turkey lifts brief ban on Twitter as site takes down hostage pictures

Wikipedias block has resurfaced concerns about internet censorship in the country. The government has previously banned social media platforms including Twitter and YouTube because of content on those sites.

A laptop computer displays Wikipedia's front page showing a darkened logo on January 18, 2012 in London, England. Turkey has blocked access to the internet encyclopedia. Peter Macdiarmid/Getty

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also previously censured the constitutional courts decisions, pressuring the institution to tow the governments line on censorship and national security.

In March 2016, he slammed the court for freeing two newspaper editors critical of his leadership as a move against the country. Turkish authorities detained Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, then editor-in-chief and Ankara bureau chief of opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, in November 2015 for allegedly publishing state secrets. They held the pair for three months, until the court ruled that their jailing was unlawful because it violated their freedoms.

It subsequently ordered their release in February 2016. Erdogan said further actions by the court that opposed the governments position would bring into question the need for the courts existence.

Read more here:
Wikipedia Appeals to Top Turkish Court Over Access Ban - Newsweek - Newsweek

Known as theChinese Encyclopedia, the countrys national encyclopedia was first published in book form in 1993. The new online edition will go live for the first time in 2018 and will be the largest and most comprehensive version so far in the series.

The Chinese Encyclopedia will however, not be open to editing by the army of volunteers that currently add and edit articles like they do on Wikipedia.Instead, Chinese officials have said that the articles will be written by a team of scholars and experts from universities and research institutes.More than 20,000 people have allegedly been hired to work on the project, and the Chinese encyclopedia will feature some 300,000 articles, each about 1,000 words in length.

At over 720 million users, China has the worlds largest internet user base, but it also has some of the worlds most restrictive internet laws. Content on Wikipedia is routinely blocked by Chinas Great Firewall, a highly sophisticated system that blocks content critical of the ruling Chinese Communist party.

The Chinese Encyclopedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture, said Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the Chinese Encyclopedia, in April. He went on to say that China was under pressure internationally to commit to producing an online encyclopedia that would guide and lead the public and society.

Chinese internet companies like Qihoo 360 and Baidu currently have their own online encyclopedias, but are small in comparison to Wikipedia. China is also not the first country to create a rival to Wikipedia. In 2014, Russiaalso announced plans for an alternative version of Wikipedia, with the stated aim of providing better information about the country than was available on the platform, but which has been criticized for its pro Putin stance and revisionist view of history.

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China To Launch Own Version Of Wikipedia In 2018 - FileHippo News

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Berkeley Professor Michel Gelobter has faced a backlash in the Wikipedia communityafter his students labeled Trump racist and sexist in edits that were eventually removed. Gelobeter has since been blocked indefinitely from Wikipedia.

Acourse description for Gelobters course on environmental justice activism at UC Berkeley posted on Wikipediaargued that the first few months of the Trump administration have been uniquely anti-environmental, sexist, and racist.

This semester represents a unique moment in historythe first few months of a historically unique U.S. President whose agenda has been explicitly anti-environmental, sexist, and racist. This course will use this moment in two ways: First, as a learning opportunity for students to engage with critical issues as they emerge on the social, economic, policy, and political landscape; Second, to be of service by documenting key developments and creating a neutral source of information about them.

The post was ultimately removed, as Wikipedia prevents unsourced negative claims about living people. A Wikipedia editor said that the line about the Trump administration was a blatant BLP [Biography of Living Person] violation,which means that commentary on a living person does not come from a neutral point of view.

As part of Gelobters course, students created Wikipedia articles that advanced an anti-Trump agenda, containing in-depth critiques of Trumps EPA policy among others.

Wikipedia edit projects are now common in the social justice sectors of academia. Feminists at Oberlin, Bucknell, and Temple University hosted Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon events during the 2016-2017 academic year.

Commenting on this trend, Wikipedia user Jytdog argued that academia does not have the right to take over articles for the purpose of education.

Wikipedia is the commons and governed by community policies and guidelines. Just like companies dont have the right to dump things into public waters, classes dont have the right to take over space in the commons for classwork. Can you see that? he wrote.

Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com

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UC Berkeley Professor Banned From Wikipedia Over Anti-Trump Edit Project - Breitbart News