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Motiv
i R e i n a l e M , t n e C Also Featuring 50 A Jamaican, an Irishman, and an Italian, walk into a bar in Miami – it sounds like the beginning of a lousy joke, but this is the story of three entrepreneurs who thought they had lost it all. These three guys were the founders of back\slash. Two of them were still students at the University of Miami; and just before walking into that bar, the Italian was informed that the University of Miami had banned back\slash from campus. It was April 17th, 2009, and the 4th issue of back\slash had just been printed. “This is absolute bullshit!” said the 34
Italian to the others, as he sat down at an outside table, “I know we can still distribute in businesses around UM, and at FIU and MDC, but damn; I guess we kinda’ shot ourselves in the foot by not letting UM read this issue before we went to print.” The Irishman then, leaning back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and responded, “I’ll be damned if we’re going to let the
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scumbags at UM read back\slash before it goes to print. I could care less that it gave them a reason to ban us; that’s better than letting them censor us! We deserve the right to express ourselves – we deserve the right to say whatever fuck we want, all students do…That’s the whole reason we started back\slash in the first place: to re-establish those freedoms, for us and for every single student in the US.”