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This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.

During a recent hearing on his bill to establish the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, state Rep. Jeff Coleman repeatedly referenced experts sitting behind him in the audience who would be better able to address questions about the legislations legality.

The first of these experts to testify was Chris Sevier, an Iraqi war veteran, Tennessee attorney and advocate who has pushed anti-LGBTQ and anti-porn legislation in statehouses across the country and was deemed a security concern in the Missouri Capitol two years ago.

Sevier may be best known for suing states that wouldnt recognize his marriage to his laptop a move to protest gay marriage. Hes also made headlines for past legal issues, including being charged with stalking and harassing country music singer John Rich and a 17-year-old girl.

Sevier later pleaded guilty to reduced charges of misdemeanor harassment.

In 2011, Seviers Tennessee law license was moved to disability inactive status due to being presently incapacitated from continuing to practice law by reason of mental infirmity or illness.

Meanwhile, Sevier has been connected to controversial legislative efforts across the country for years often leaving uneasy interactions in his wake.

Last month, Sevier was escorted by security out of the Oklahoma Capitol after an altercation with a lawmaker. Three years ago in Rhode Island, a state senator withdrew a bill pushed by Sevier, citing its dubious origins.

After Missouri Senate Administrator Patrick Baker sent an email to senators and staff with a photo of Sevier and the subject line security concern in 2019, Sevier filed a federal lawsuit against him alleging defamation. The lawsuit was dismissed the same month.

The Stop Social Media Censorship Act is the latest of his legislative initiatives to find its way to Missouri.

Social media posts and draft legislation uploaded online indicate Sevier has crafted versions of the bill, in addition to a handful of others, for all 50 states. Hes also been working to find lawmakers to sponsor his bills since the fall.

Coleman, R-Grain Valley, said Sevier first approached him in late October or early November after seeing Colemans public complaints about social media censorship.

The bill would allow Missourians whose political or religious speech is censored on large social media platforms to bring lawsuits against those companies. Opponents argue the legislation is unconstitutional and would impede platforms ability to remove objectionable content, while supporters say its necessary to give users a voice.

He asked me to carry that bill, and I agreed to it, Coleman said, later adding: In general, I think its a very good bill, because we have to figure out something in order to stop whats going on.

When reached by phone by The Independent Tuesday afternoon, Sevier said, You can kiss my ass, before hanging up.

Coleman, who was elected in 2018, said he had previously never heard of Sevier.

As a legislator, youve got so many things going on, so many bills youre trying to keep up with, you really dont have time to do a background check on someone, Coleman said.

But after learning of Seviers past following his testimony at last months committee hearing, Coleman said he is moving forward without Seviers input and working to refine the bill.

He seems like a nice enough guy. But theres enough out there thats a concern that we dont have him helping us anymore, Coleman said, later adding: We dont need those distractions, because this is an important issue. We want to make sure that thats the issue, not him.

Rep. Dottie Bailey, R-Eureka, is also sponsoring a version of the Stop Social Media Censorship Act. Bailey could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

Read more here:
Man Who Tried to Marry His Laptop Wrote 'Censorship' Bill for Missouri Rep - Riverfront Times

Dr. Oksana Kis is a researcher specialising in Ukrainian women's history. She is also the author of 'Survival as Victory', which tells the story of Ukrainian women's resilience in the Gulag. Olena Anhelova

Bodies in captivity. Survival prostitution. Motherhood behind bars. Even in poorly-lit, insufficiently ventilated, freezing-cold barracks, a society of women somehow managed to sing, to write poetry, and to keep it all together. They ultimately formed national solidarity, brewing an impenetrable camp sisterhood.

These scenes portray the lives of women in the Gulag forced labour camps during Stalins reign in 1940-50s Ukraine. Only half of these women survived, and only a fraction of them lived on to tell their stories today.

Dr. Oksana Kis, President of the Ukrainian Association for Research in Womens History, is an academic who devotes her scholarship to the retelling of the female experience in recent Ukrainian history. Having studied a history degree from the late 80s to the early 90s, Kis was disillusioned by the limited theoretical frameworks of history studies in Soviet times. We had no access to western scholarship, she recounted, so we had no idea that anything like womens history or gender studies existed.

There are many universal patterns in womens experiences, across different cultures, and across different historical periods.

But things took a turn when Kis moved on to study her Masters degree in psychology, where she became inspired to pursue the concept of gender. Under the encouragement of her father, she became a pioneering academic force, unspooling the deeper meaning of femininity in post-industrial Ukraine. Her most recent book, Survival as Victory, has been released by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. From descriptions of camp leisure to heavy discussions of dehumanisation resistance, this book encapsulates engagingly-told episodes of females imprisoned in the Ukrainian Gulag.

Collecting these episodes together and placing them side by side brought Kis to conclude: There are many universal patterns in womens experiences, across different cultures, and across different historical periods. The women we encounter in Kis book lack legal avenues to protect themselves and therefore pursue informal, often illegal methods such as bribery and manipulation to gain access to food, resources and security for their families. It is this caregiving role as well as the flexible, informal methods used to achieve it, which characterise womens responses to extreme hardship whether it be political persecution, famine, war, or genocide.

It was forbidden to embroider, to sing, and to pray, but all of these things women did every day adding up to the mass-scale, barely detectable, yet ubiquitous transgressions that undermined the very totality of the Gulag.

For a long time, though, historians of the Gulag remained gender-blind. The past decades embedded gender deeply into scholarship on mass violence and genocide, yet Kis says that until recently, the only gender differences noted in Gulag histories were related to womens sexuality and reproductive function. Survival as Victory explores how women used their sexuality as a resource and their bodies as exchangeable goods, but Kis also pushes beyond this to argue that women have used a variety of gender-based resources. Gendered socialisation gave women knowledge of nursing and nutrition, traditions of storytelling and practices of housekeeping, all skills, beliefs, and behaviours which they actually turned into the tools of survival in the Gulag. Paradoxically, normative femininity could be empowering, providing a transferable skill set and the stable identity of a good Ukrainian woman to hold onto.

This book, then, does not reduce female experience to the body, but uncovers the cultural, spiritual and political identities of women in the Gulag. A good Ukrainian woman was a caregiver, but also typically a Christian and a nationalist. By maintaining these identities, Kis argues, women broke the rules at every step. It was forbidden to embroider, to sing, and to pray, but all of these things women did every day adding up to the mass-scale, barely detectable, yet ubiquitous transgressions that undermined the very totality of the Gulag.

But ubiquitous as transgressions were, surviving records of them are scarce. Thousands of Ukrainian women went through the Gulag system, but often only handwritten memoirs were produced which were left to family and friends and, over time, forgotten. Pain is still vivid in the testimonies that the book uses, though, and this presented a methodological and moral dilemma to Kis. Pointing out that she was just two generations away from these women, Kis said that she felt connected by gender, by ethnicity to these women, as if they were her foremothers. Yet a historian is schooled to keep emotional distance, and Kis also wanted to avoid the common victimisation of womens historical experience. Emotionally loaded though these narratives are, the women were speaking of their experience from the point of view of the winners; they saw themselves as those who overcame. Rather than digging into their suffering and pain, Kis decided to focus on their survival strategies and resistance methods in order to preserve their human dignity. Even those who died, she says, deserve to be respected, not just presented as victims.

When women are limited in their rights and resources, they are stronger if they protect their interests together.

Despite focusing on a particular population in a specific time in history, the book is not exclusively directed to academics. Kis presents memoirs in a style that could captivate readers within and beyond the circle of history buffs, and further, her work serves as a critical reminder that generalisations stand weak when researching socially complex phenomena. Although Russians did constitute the majority of Gulag prisoners, Kis maintains that Ukrainians also made up 20% of the inmates, so we cannot just discard that group and neglect their specific experiences. This argument stands solid if we consider Ukrainian womens particular oppositions of the Soviet regime a theme that, according to Kis, was virtually non-existent in Russian Gulag memoirs.

Ultimately, Kis wrote this book not to victimise women nor to incriminate men, but quite the contrary to celebrate those who overcame, who made it through. Her work recognises female adaptability, strength, rebellion, and solidarity during extreme hardships a perspective that has arguably been undermined in history. In light of International Womens Day, Kis message has the power to inspire womanhood beyond Ukrainian borders: when women are limited in their rights and resources, they are stronger if they protect their interests together.

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.

We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding, and during this unprecedented global crisis, we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead.

In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too.

Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as 1, to help with our running costs at least until this global crisis ends and things begin to return to normal.

Many thanks, all of us here at Varsity would like to wish you, your friends, families and all of your loved ones a safe and healthy few months ahead.

Continued here:
Female Resilience in the Gulag: Rethinking Ukrainian Women's History with Dr. Oksana Kis - Varsity Online

To The Eagle:

Excuse me sir, I did not suggest restricting free speech. I advocated separating the wheat from the chaff. I prefer to see printed here, items of quality. Naturally, what one considers trash, another might consider to be treasure.

Our opinion forum has limited space. Only so many words will fit. When the editor sets my opinion aside so that anothers might be published instead, that is not censorship. That is editorial discretion. Ive suggested that our editors discretion should favor civility over derision and facts over fantasy.

Websters more accurate definition of Fascism is A political movement, philosophy or regime that exalts nation and race above the individual, in a centralized autocratic form of government, headed by a dictatorial leader, with suppression of any opposition. That also sounds like Trumpism to me.

Having tasted the power of the presidency and faced with losing it, Trump made a desperate fascist grab for unlimited power, but his attempted White House coup failed. God bless America.

Grace Ling

Puget Island

Read the original here:
Not censorship but editorial discretion - The Wahkiakum County Eagle - The Wahkiakum County Eagle

Censorship and surveillance in Tibet have reached unprecedented levels further escalating the violation of the Tibetan peoples fundamental rights, president of Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) Lobsang Sangay said on Wednesday.

Sixty-two years ago, on this day (Tibetan National Uprising Day), thousands of Tibetans in Lhasa rose in unison to protest against occupying Chinese regime.

Heavily fortified in a digital cage, Sangay said, it is near impossible to get information out of Tibet.

This past January, we received news of the self-immolation protest by 26-year-old Shurmo from Driru Shagchukha village, five years after the event. This sheds light on the extent of information control and surveillance being carried out in Tibet, he said.

Sangay said that on December 24, 2020, authorities in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) announced criminal prosecutions against individuals who use online communication tools to split the country and undermine national unity.

It is not surprising, the 52-year-old exiled leader said, that China has been listed as the worst internet abuser in the world in Freedom Houses 2020 report on internet freedom.

Similarly, China is ranked at the near bottom at 177th in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), he said.

Today, Chinas tentacles have reached beyond Tibet by using its growing economic clout to jeopardise global democracy, according to Freedom House, added Sangay.

The political heir of the Dalai Lama said China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. It highlights the CCPs efforts to control and pressure Chinese citizens, he said, political dissidents and minority communities such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Hong Kong beyond its borders. The democracies around the globe must come together to thwart such assaults on global democracy.

Over a million Tibetans have lost their lives in the past six decades under Chinese rule. Today, we have come together to collectively mourn this loss, said the Tibetan leader.

But we are also here to mark the undaunted resilience of people in Tibet. Even under the threat of losing their lives, they continue to protest by protecting and preserving our language, our religion, our land, and our identity, he added.

View original post here:
China violating Tibetans rights with heightened censorship, surveillance: CTA - Hindustan Times

DoctorsfightingCOVID-19 should be supported by their profession and their government, not suppressed. Yet today physicians are smothered under a wave of censorship. With coronavirus variants and vaccine hesitancythreatening a prolongedpandemic, the National Institutes of Health and the broader U.S. medical establishment shouldfreedoctors to treat this terrible disease with effective medicines.

For centuries, doctors haveaddressedemerging health threats by prescribing existing drugs for new uses, observing the results, and communicating to their peers and the public what seems to work. In a pandemic, precious time and lives can be lost by an insistence on excessive data and review. But in the current crisis,many in positions of authority havedone just that, stubbornly refusingtoallowany repurposed treatments. This departure from traditional medical practice risks catastrophe.When doctors on the front lines try to bring awareness of and use such medicines,they get silenced.

Ive experiencedsuchcensorship firsthand. Early in the pandemic,my research led me to testify in theSenatethat corticosteroids were life-savingagainstCOVID-19, when all national and international health care agencies recommended againstthem. My recommendations were criticized, ignored and resisted such that I felt forced to resign my faculty position. Only later did a large studyfrom Oxford Universityfindthey were indeed life-saving. Overnight, theybecame the standard of care worldwide. More recently, we identifiedthrough dozens of trialsthat the drug ivermectin leads to large reductions in transmission, mortality,and time to clinical recovery. After testifying to this fact ina second Senate appearance the video of which wasremoved by YouTubeafter garnering over 8 million views I was forced to leave another position.

I was delighted when our paper on ivermectin passed a rigorous peer review and was accepted byFrontiers in Pharmacology. The abstractwas viewedover 102,000times bypeople hungry for answers. Sixweeks later, the journalsuddenlyrejected the paper, based on an unnamed external expertwho stated that our conclusions were unsupported, contradicting the four senior, expert peer reviewers who hadearlieracceptedthem.I cant help but interpret thisin contextas censorship.

The science shows thativermectinworks. Over 40 randomized trials and observational studies from around the worldattestto its efficacy against the novel coronavirus. Meta-analyses by four separate research groups, includingours, found an average reduction in mortality of between 68%-75%. And 10 of 13 randomized controlled trials found statistically significant reductions in time to viral clearance, an effect not associated with any other COVID-19 therapeutic. Furthermore, ivermectin has an unparalleled safety record and low cost, which should negate any fears or resistance to immediate adoption.

Our manuscript conclusions were further supported bytheBritish Ivermectin Recommendation Development (BIRD) Panel. Following the World Health Organization Handbook of Guideline Development, it voted to strongly recommend the use of ivermectin in the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, and opined that further placebo controlled trials are unlikely to be ethical.

Even prior to the BIRD Panel recommendations, many countries have approved the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 or formally incorporated it into national treatment guidelines. Several have gone further and initiated large-scale importation and distribution efforts. In the last month alone, such European Union members as Bulgaria and Slovakia have approved its use nationwide. India, Egypt, Peru, Zimbabwe, and Bolivia are distributing it in many regions and observingrapid decreases in excess deaths. Increasing numbers of regional health authorities have advocated for or adopted it across Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa. And it is now the standard of care inMexico City,one of the worlds largest cities.

Its time to stop the foot-dragging. People are dying. The responsible physicians of this country, and their patients, need to be able to rely on their government institutions to quickly identify effective treatments, rather than waiting for pristine, massive Phase III trials before acting. At minimum, the NIH should immediately recommend ivermectin for treating and preventing COVID-19, and then work with professional associations, institutions, and the media to publicize its use. If it doesnt, the organization will lose credibility as a public institution charged with acting in the national interest and doctors will ignore its guidance in the future.

My story is not unique. Physicians across the country are fighting a pernicious campaign to denigrate all potential treatments not first championed by the authorities, and others have faced retaliation for speaking up. Sadly, too many of our institutions are using the pandemic as a pretext to centralize control over the practice of medicine, persecuting and canceling doctors who follow their clinical judgment and expertise.

Actually following the science means listening to practitioners and considering the entirety and diversity of clinical studies. Thats exactly what my colleagues and I have done. We wont be cowed. We will speak up for our patients and do whats right.

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Censorship Kills: The Shunning of a COVID Therapeutic - Fairfield Sun Times