According to Gallycat, the students riled up by the threat of Random House’s publication of the Jewel of Medina were planning little more than a publicity campaign to e-mail the publisher and news outlets and so on. Perfectly innocuous stuff in a pluralistic society. Which makes Random House look like a bunch of wusses, and makes Professor Denise Spellberg’s frantic warnings about threats to Random House’s staff and property look even more like disingenuous bigotry, to put it kindly.
censorship
Vandalizing the Marketplace of Ideas
Everyone who’s been paying attention and has mere than a passing affection for freedom of speech knows that Internet culture is getting out of hand. Especially at times, it seems, in the little corner of Read more…
3 Comments
steve buchheit · August 8, 2008 at 12:17 pm
must beat stupid out of skull before it takes hold.
Ah, that’s better. Say, anybody at Random House ever hear of a book called “The Satanic Verses” by this wanker Salman Rushdie. Yeah, it was a real non-seller. Caused Viking to become a smoking hole in the ground. Just never went anywhere. Whole civilizations were overthrown because of it’s publication.
I guess I shouldn’t criticize as I removed some pejoratives (used by characters in dialog, dialog I researched to get the terms right) from a short story before submitting it recently. But that was because of the whole Helix kurfuffle.
S Andrew Swann · August 8, 2008 at 12:34 pm
The real stupidity is watching the whole internet game of telephone. This story is propagating like wildfire, and of course Spellberg’s alarmism is being taken at face value and most of the stories are assuming that there was some actual terrorist threat against Random House. Fact checking anyone? *headdesk*
Genrewonk: thoughts and opinions by author S. Andrew Swann » Blog Archive » Breaking news, Denise Spellberg is still an asshat · November 10, 2008 at 8:42 am
[…] wanted to write a follow-up to two other blog posts I wrote back last summer. The story at that point was as follows: Sherry Jones writes […]
Comments are closed.