"The sculptures were meant to be provocative: 'Miss Mao' shows Mao as a topless woman with distorted, babyish features..."

"... while 'the execution of Christ' depicted a firing squad of life-size Mao statues aiming rifles at Jesus. But Gao denies they were defamatory.... Gao is accused of breaking a law that wasn’t even enacted until nearly a decade after these artworks were first exhibited. In 2018, China criminalized acts that 'distort, smear, desecrate' or otherwise 'damage the reputation and honor of heroes and martyrs.'... Gao, who is a Christian, maintains that his artwork was not intended to defame Mao but rather to explore, through cartoonish depictions of a symbolic figure, the concepts of original sin and repentance.... For [his wife] Zhao, who was not married to Gao when he made the statues, it makes no sense for authorities to claim her leaving with her child would 'endanger state security,' as officials claimed...."

From "Seven-year-old New Yorker stuck in China over father’s political art/Gao Jia, the American-born son of a well-known Chinese dissident artist, has missed first grade because his parents have been stopped from leaving China" (WaPo).

"They said the film ['Barbie'] promoted homosexuality and insulted the image of women."

Said the mayor of Noisy-le-Sec, France, quoted in "Muslim youths shut down Barbie screening for ‘promoting homosexuality’/The incident in a Paris suburb plays into anxiety about cultural conflict in France, whose government says Islamists may be trying to undermine society." 

This article is in the London Times, which I subscribe to and would like to trust to report the relevant facts, but I can't figure out what the "Muslim youths" did that shut down the Barbie screening. We're told there was an "incident" but not what it was and why it was enough to shut down what was to have been a free outdoor screening. The article quickly moves to the topic of "widespread anxiety" about Muslims "impos[ing] their traditions on French life."

The mayor is quoted saying "An incident at Noisy has been taken over by the far-right fringe to stigmatise a neighbourhood." If the "far-right" is spinning the incident, tell us what is the left-wing or moderate spin? Is not detailing what happened the best you can do? As for the mayor, he made a point of saying that "he had not mentioned the religion of the youths."

With 2 great search terms — Noisy-le-Sec and Barbie — I easily found an article in the Brussels Signal – which some sources identify as right wing — "French mayor cancels Barbie film screening due to threats of 'disruption.'" Here, we find more details, but word "Muslim" does not even appear:

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

"We want diversity of opinion. We don't want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things?"

"That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that's consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence...."

Said Barack Obama, in a conversation with a historian a few days ago. Video at the link.

So it seems he thinks it's "the big task of social media" to teach children to distinguish between fact and opinion. But what does it mean to say "We don't want diversity of facts"? Does it mean you don't want differences of opinion about what the facts are?

It must, because facts are facts. There is no diversity of facts. Whatever is true is true, even if not one human being knows the truth. The facts are out there, to be found, and you can think you've found the facts and be wrong. There's a sense in which to say "We don't want diversity of facts" is to say we want to be able to be able to cling to mistaken findings of fact and even to silence those who want to continue to search for the truth.

I'm irritated by how casually Obama dropped in "By the way, it will require some government." Perhaps he knew his audience at the event was eager to hear about a role for government. But he did not say that government should enforce an official version of the facts — e.g., the covid vaccine is safe and effective, the 2020 election was fair and square. Instead of content-based regulation of speech, he's talking about the manner of the speech. Is it "hateful," "polarizing," or "dangerous"? He adds the phrase "in the sense of inciting violence" to gesture at some concern for the First Amendment.

Obama's speech is incredibly convoluted and mushy. That sentence that begins "By the way" — what is he proposing? Government control of the social media algorithm to suppress the voices it deems polarizing? Yeah, I think we know what that means: Suppress my political opponents, like you did before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Can we agree about that fact or is that an opinion?

***

I'm giving this post my old "alternative facts" tag. Remember "alternative facts"?

"I know for some people, a joke can be a cure and awaken good feelings, while for others, it can be a trigger and bring bad feelings."

"But I think it’s very unjust and even arrogant that someone’s optional pain could serve as a justification to impede the smile of others."

Said the Brazilian comedian, Leo Lins, quoted in "Brazilian comedian sentenced to 8 years in prison for ‘bigoted’ jokes/The ruling against comedian Leo Lins for jokes told in 2022 is shaping up as the next front in Brazil’s escalating struggle over freedom of expression" (WaP0).

From the judge who imposed that 8-year sentence: "Freedom of expression is not absolute nor unlimited.... When there is a confrontation between the fundamental precept of liberty of expression and the principles of human dignity and judicial equality, the latter should win out."

"Your post titled 'Is the news of Biden's advanced cancer news of a terrible scandal?' was flagged to us for review."

"We have determined that it violates our guidelines and deleted the post, previously at https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/05/is-news-of-bidens-advance-cancer-news.html. Why was your blog post deleted? Your content has been evaluated according to our Hate Speech policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page... to learn more.... We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in termination of your blog."

So I got that email from Blogger this morning.

I'm following the review procedure, and I fully expect the post to be restored, but what jackassery! Was I "inciting hatred against" Joe Biden "on the basis of" his "disability"?!

I'd linked to something titled "This is the Most Dangerous Cover-up in the History of the Presidency...."

Is "the most dangerous cover-up" something that must be... covered up?

A post that belongs at this time stamp was taken down by Blogger.

 Go here to read about what happened.

The continuity of my 20+ year archive is important to me. I know I'm vulnerable to this outside intrusion, and it hurts. The post you are reading — put up on the morning of June 4, 2025 — is a monument to my dismay. I want to be clear that this post is going up at a time that is different from the time stamp you see below, because it is central to blogging, as I understand it, that the posts go up when the time stamp says they go up. 

Even more important to my concept of blogging: I don't delete posts. 

"Once the song was finished, we tried to get on television and the radio. But the BBC banned it."

"I think the people who banned it were intelligent people. They were just being protective. I don’t think it was because they felt it would create a revolution. It wasn’t about politics. There were no musicians or artists speaking about politics. There was nobody suggesting who you vote for. It was considered to be passé to even have a political stance then."

Writes Pete Townshend, in "'It Came From a Place of Resentment’/Pete Townshend began writing ‘My Generation’ as an anthem for his disaffected peers. Then the queen got involved" (NY Magazine).

Yes, my generation is passé. We're the ones who considered it passé to even have a political stance.

"President Barack Obama... claimed the right to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and expanded domestic counterterrorism."

"He helped perfect the arsenal that Trump would later inherit. It was the left, not the right, that normalized censoring disfavored online speech during the pandemic, often using intelligence-linked partners to do so. It was establishment liberals who applauded when the FBI investigated Trump-world operatives — not on the basis of principle, but because they liked the target. Now the weapon is back in circulation, only in different hands.... That’s how weapons work.... Power, once created and normalized, rarely stays dormant — and never stays partisan...."

From "Trump is using weapons that liberals helped build," by Vinnie Rotondaro (at The Hill).

ADDED: It's as though Trump is saying: I am your mirror image — don't you hate it?

"It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate may have started."

"Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries, they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy. That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials, or the organizations they represent, to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they may have withheld relevant information and even misled the public.... We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps...."

Writes Zeynep Tufekci, in "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives" (NYT).

"The vice president singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans...."

"He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by name, but directly referred to the longstanding agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence. 'There is no room for firewalls,' Mr. Vance said, bringing some gasps in the hall.... The billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year... [and] publicly interviewed [Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election].... Mr. Vance’s remarks drew a furious response from German leaders across most party lines. They immediately rejected Mr. Vance’s suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by the party’s members in support of the National Socialists, or Nazis.... The AfD and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government. The party has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration. Mr. Vance did not note that baggage...."

From "Vance Tells Europeans to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme/His comments shocked attendees at the Munich Security Conference and seemed to target efforts to sideline the hard-right party the Alternative for Germany" (NYT).

What is that "history of use of Nazi language"? The link on that phrase goes to another NYT article, from last May, "German Court Fines Far-Right Leader for Using Nazi Phrase/Björn Höcke, a state leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, used the phrase 'Everything for Germany,' a slogan of the Nazi paramilitary wing, during a campaign stop." Excerpt:

What gets the deep six at DeepSeek?

DeepSeek seems great. pic.twitter.com/WFDFBri2an

— Kyle Glen (@KyleJGlen) January 27, 2025

"If they ever invent a pill where they could say, 'OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,' I wouldn’t take the pill."

"Maybe I am forgetting how painful it was, but I needed my neuro diversity to write that software; I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration."

Said Bill Gates, quoted in "Bill Gates: 'I would be diagnosed with autism if I were a kid today'" (Yahoo News).

Just because there's a treatment doesn't mean you need to take it. There's a balance between eradicating symptoms and unleashing side effects, and we should be careful not to pathologize human behavior.

Where the treatment doesn't yet exist — like Gates's anti-autism pill — it's easier to decide I wouldn't want it anyway. The unreachable grapes looked sour to the fox in the old fable. It's harder to think critically when the pill is right there — the pill or the surgery. Is effeminacy in a young boy a condition that ought to be treated, or can we embrace human diversity and discourage medical treatment? There might be something parallel to "I needed my neuro diversity to write that software." I needed my effeminate maleness to.... What? What is lost in the pathologizing? What sort of highly valuable person are we medicalizing out of existence?

This made me think of that classic of Critical Race Theory, "The Michael Jackson Pill: Equality, Race, and Culture" by Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. (Michigan Law Review, 1994). I tried to get Grok to talk about it, and it engaged in blatant censorship: "There is no well-known or credible critical race theory article that discusses or imagines a pill to turn black people white...."

Taking down TikTok punched a hundred holes in my blog.

Where I had embedded video yesterday, it now looks like this:

Every post that had an embedded TikTok video now looks empty like that and is missing its point. Every post where I linked to anything on TikTok has been turned — forcibly, by our government — into something that would not be posted.

I watched a lot of TikTok yesterday, so I saw how many many TikTok creators were saying goodbye to the audience they had drawn in over the years, and now, this morning, I'm seeing mainstream media articles about how these last goodbyes sounded. The NYT has the headline "In TikTok’s Final Hours, a Mix of Silliness and Sadness." And that headline made me angry, because I didn't see "silliness." I saw sadness, but the other thing I saw was outright anger — anger at the American government for shutting down a medium of free individual speech that was an important part of life for tens of millions of Americans. Even if much of TikTok could be labeled "silly," even silly speech matters — seriously — when the government comes and takes it away.

"I don't like being told what to do. I don't like being told what I can think or what I can say."

"The courts may think there's an exemption to the First Amendment. I don't. I'm joining TikTok today as a form of civil disobedience."

"You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex...."

"Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power."

Said President Joe Biden, in his farewell address last night. 

There's a big difference between "military-industrial complex" and "tech-industrial complex." Eisenhower's phrase warns about the government and not merely private business. Biden's phrase only warns about private business. The "abuse of power" Biden identifies takes place outside of government, and he looks to government as a victim of abuse by private actors — citizens, speaking — and, potentially, as a cure — government, regulating speech.

The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.

What about all the lies you told for power and for profit?! 

We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.

What about your abuse of power squeezing the "social platforms" to follow the narrative that served your interests?

MEANWHILE: On the NYT home page, we see Trump swooping in as the savior of TikTok:

Absurd prank.

I'm reading "State Department Defies Congress, Revives Infamous Censorship Office in Absurd Prank" by Matt Taibbi.

Live argument in the TikTok case is about to begin.

You can stream it here.

LII has a good, easy-to-read summary of the arguments here. 

ADDED: The NYT live blogged it, here, wherethe headline is now: "Supreme Court Seems Poised to Uphold Law That Could Shut Down TikTok" (free access link). From the conclusion:

Even as several justices expressed concerns that the law was in tension with the First Amendment, a majority appeared satisfied that it was aimed at TikTok’s ownership rather than its speech.

The government offered two rationales for the law: combating covert disinformation from China and barring it from harvesting private information from Americans. The court was divided over whether the first justification was sufficient to justify it. But several justices seemed troubled by the possibility that China could use data culled from the app for espionage or blackmail....

Arguing on behalf of the government: Elizabeth B. Prelogar, the solicitor general, countered that the act does not violate the First Amendment. “All of the same speech that’s happening on TikTok could happen post-divestiture,” she said, adding, “All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.” ...

"But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"

Asks Nate Silver, at Silver Bulletin:

In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center.... 

"This shows how Mark Zuckerberg is feeling that society is more accepting of those libertarian and right-leaning viewpoints that he’s always had. This is an evolved return to his political origins."

Said Katie Harbath, "chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook."

Quoted in "Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution, From Apologies to No More Apologies/Meta’s chief executive has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to issues on his platforms and has told people that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech" (NYT).

Mr. Zuckerberg has long been a pragmatist who has gone where the political winds have blown. He has flip-flopped on how much political content should be shown to Facebook and Instagram users, previously saying social networks should be about fun, relatable content from family and friends but then on Tuesday saying Meta would show more personalized political content.... 

Mr. Zuckerberg was never comfortable with the involvement of outside fact-checkers, academics or researchers in his company, one of the executives said. He now sees many of the steps taken after the 2016 election as a mistake... two executives said.... Those who have known Mr. Zuckerberg for decades describe him as a natural libertarian, who enjoyed reading books extolling free expression and the free market system after he dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook in 2004....

I'd like to think that the idea of freedom of speech won out in the marketplace of ideas, but I can understand how the speech controllers gravitate toward the idea that Zuckerberg was always a right-winger and he's just regressing after faking aspirations to higher values.