It was surprising to me just how many of the banned books have immense literary value. The Color Purple, The Handmaid's Tale, The Kite Runner, etc. aren't random books that may be a little obscene, they're literary classics. In my opinion this is what makes it obvious that these bans were made in bad faith.
There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
The people supporting this political wave tend to be extremely triumphalist in their personal religious zeal, unwilling to make compromises, and are iconoclastic and disrespectful to most outside their in-group.
Much like other iconoclasts and zealots, they rely on the pluralistic principle of toleration to force the paradox of tolerance to bend their way.
It's shame - pluralism is much more invigorating and no one forces lifestyles they disagree with onto dominionists.
> There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
Reading your comment, I feel like the word religion is misleading. You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology, despite it not having to do with a god, has been introduced into many layers of government and other institutions. All the things said here can be demonstrated for the religious right but also the non religious left. It’s less about religion in my opinions, and more about how politics is about winning by controlling institutions instead of supporting individual freedoms.
I challenge you to make a point-for-point, truly apples-to-apples comparison.
Fundamentally, there are a lot of Republican policies which attempt to force Christianity or at least Christian morals down our throats, whether it be forcing women to have children, or posting the ten commandments in schools and government buildings, banning pornography, or preventing gay marriage.
I'm rather curious what Democrat policies are equivalent in your mind that would make you try and "both sides" this. And I mean actual passed or proposed policies -- not just bullshit you see from Hollywood and other media.
Should successful policy examples be a prerequisite for observations of similarities? Must the government necessarily be involved?
At minimum I feel like cancel culture ought to count.
What would the application of your test to the Chinese Cultural Revolution look like? That's a genuine question - I really am curious what your reasoning would be.
> You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology
No, this is incorrect.
The cold reality is that the adherents pushing Dominionism push an unsustainable ideology, such that they would rather throw the US into religious-based fascism rather than recognize that when people are free they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants.
That seems less an observation about the dynamics and more about particular aspects of the targeted end state. As such I don't feel such a confident claim of non-correctness is justified.
Even then, the statement "they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants" seems to apply in equal measure. The core issue here is that both major groups have ideologies that seek to impose on others.
I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
> they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants
A bit reductionist, but critically, and because you asked for clarity, Dominionists want to force others to stop doing what they don't like even though it has no impact on their life.
Easily understood if you look at the standard of medical care for many miscarriages. They are abortions.
Today in the US, abortion is mostly illegal in many states, and people have died due to liability and uncertainty that would otherwise not have died should the standard of care been followed. This is before you consider the harassment of women after receiving care.
Yet, Dominionists want it banned because their theology changed with political winds conveniently in the 1970s and they now feel strongly, even more so than your feelings-based opinion that the factual claim of non correctness is unjustified despite clear justification, that life is absolutely defined as a zygote. This is before we consider that they are also equally unwilling to help children post-birth or to adopt sound economic policies to encourage household and family formation.
Tell me, what polity or power is forcing Dominionists to receive abortions unwillingly?
Or is it that they forget that their rights end at my nose?
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> I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
You know, I hear conservatives say this all the time, but me being an old school minarchist Libertarian, I just want people to leave each other alone.
I'll note that now several times in this discussion you implicitly assert that anyone contrary to Dominionism is "progressive" (strawman designation by rightwing propaganda for outgroup, or actual political group, hard to say), and that if a specific behavior is called out, well, there must be some behavior the other party feels should be imposed on them.
No one cares about someone worshiping at their house of worship and engaging in their rituals. Not a bit. But come in and force someone else to hold their particular social club in high regard in order to engage in commerce, education, or careers? That's what Dominionists want. And it's an egregious violation of everything the US stands for to everyone outside the Dominionist camp.
------
Now, please specify what progressive philosophy or policy planks that you think Dominionists find so unappealing that they'd be willing to sacrifice the freedoms so many US service members have died for, and how that is _imposed_ on said Dominionists?
If they are, or consider themselves, libertarian they are royal libertarians (not georgists) and therefore "might makes right" and "live free" means violence. A belief in "four legs good, two legs better".
There is a lot of evidence that engaging emotionally with literature will shift people's values. In a way that engaging with intellectual ideas does not.
These are not just literary classics, they carry a specific culture forward. People whose values are threatened by that culture need to not engage with them. They do so by finding things to be offended by in the books. In many cases the offence is perfectly genuine. It is caused by cognitive dissonance, and not cynical manipulation.
That doesn't make it less frustrating. But understanding why people have trouble with these works helps build empathy for them. And empathy is necessary to present your points in a way that is persuasive to their views. Yelling in anger at them is easy. Actually changing their minds is far harder. And it does require trying to understand.
Well, it's both. You need to ban book bans so that you can have the conversation in the first place, but you also need to change people's mind so that book bans never come up in the first place. It's a guardrail, and ideally we're not leaning on the guardrail
You have to change their minds about what legitimates a ban, and about these specific things they don’t like not having the necessary legitimation. And that’s not an easy change, it needs to be grounded emotionally.
They aren’t banning anything. You can still freely buy any of those books. They’re just changing what content public libraries spend money on. Not really much different from states deciding school curriculum.
Sorry for the vocabulary here but this is bullshit. The people submitting the banned books here have stated multiple times they have never read most/all the books they have asked for banning and are being driven by lists built by political entities like Moms for America.
There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
Yes. All that they know about these books is propaganda leading to outrage, and a protection that keeps their world-view from being exposed to contrary ideas.
As I said, their identity is such that they need to avoid engaging with these works to maintain it.
That doesn't mean that their outrage isn't genuine.
While I can understand the side that you are coming from. One of the biggest failures I have seen from my friends is demonizing anyone that may have voted for tump and these people, and refusing to have a conversation. Immediately labeling them as racist for example (which I don't think is necessarily untrue for many of them, but when we know there are black people that voted for Trump that argument as a blanket statement gets harder to make).
I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.
There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.
While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.
That being said...
It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.
So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.
I can totally understand that they are being manipulated. I still have no interest in trying to de-program them. Cut them off, and let them live with their choices. They'll either figure it out eventually, or they won't.
People who are trying to harm my friends and family don't deserve any of my time and effort.
I completely respect a personal choice of doing that, I mean I don't particularly want to engage with many of them either. Especially not when I can expect that I am going to likely be called a particular F word (I am a gay man).
My biggest issue is not the lack of contact, it is the demonizing. Using blanket terms like "if you voted for trump your racist, homophobic, sexist, etc" when I just simply don't think that is a valid blanket statement and is really just a "feel good" statement for us to justify not hearing why they might have done something.
I do think that we are actively pushing them to be more extreme with blanket statements like this and it isn't not actually helping.
We can keep calling them names all we want but the fact is they are still voters that are enabling what we all have to deal with. Either we acknowledge that or we just keep repeating the same pattern we have been repeating since at least the 70's. A little bit of progress followed by a regression.
It's a prisoner's dilemma, or tragedy of the commons, or whatever-scenario-where-the-best-plan-is-coordinated-action-but-it's-difficult-for-individuals-to-do-so. Yeah a gay man shouldn't have to go to court to defend his marriage, but society's made up of individuals and their actions, and somebody's got to perform that action
They might not deserve it, but they will take rather more of your time and effort if you don't try to exert it until after ICE is breaking down doors and disappearing your friends and family without due process.
I agree. I had this argument here previously, that I supposedly "owe" it to "the other side" to listen to their arguments (in this case on abortion).
No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
They're not discussing things in even a modicum of good faith. Saying that I have some moral imperative to engage with them as if they are is horseshit.
>No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
Absolutely. Although I'd point out that in many states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, those on the "other side" (you know, our fellow Americans), often by large majorities, rejected abortion bans in their states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So it's not really as cut and dried as you make it out to be. Yes, there are absolutely those who despise the idea of the agency of women, and there are absolutely those who exploit that for monetary and political gain.
But a majority of Americans don't and even many of those who aren't on board could be persuaded to a live and let live position.
Politics is, after all, "the art of the possible." If we just demonize and "other" anyone who doesn't specifically agree with us, then nothing is possible -- only dysfunction and hate. That's not a world I want to live in.
Authoritarianism, whether Nazism, Soviet Communism, or French Revolutionary Government, is the belief that some group knows best and everyone else should allow them to make decisions, and that furthermore incorrect beliefs should be stamped out. Not engaging with authoritarian beliefs only reinforces the belief that they're correct and everyone else is wrong; after all, from their perspective nobody's ever proved them wrong.
Related to that though is the fact that authoritarianism has slowly become more prevalent over the past few decades, and it's easier than ever for people to get into cliques and echo chambers that never challenge their beliefs. That's resulted in a decrease in skills in truly changing people's minds about things, since in an echo chamber it's easier to just kick out anyone who disagrees, and if you're kicked out it's easier to just create your own echo chamber that espouses your belief than to convince people in the other echo chamber. This naturally leads to authoritarianism where an echo chamber believes that they're right and everyone else's incorrect opinions should be suppressed. When that community pops out of their echo chamber and tries to change everyone else's beliefs, it's only natural for people to respond with the best way they've learned how: refuse to engage.
I absolutely understand the desire not to engage with Nazis. But, ignoring Nazis is definitionally not going to do anything to fix the root of the problem
> Authoritarianism, whether Nazism, Soviet Communism, or French Revolutionary Governmentr any
or any monarchy, or any theocracy, or any oligarchy.
I understand why you cite Nazism, or Soviet communism (or Mao Communism), but the French Revolutionary Government lasted less than 3 years, was at war with half of europe because their King decided to declare war for no reason, and had to find who fed intel to half their enemies (and even when the King's letters to his brother in law describing eastern troops movement were discovered, 10% of the parliament voted against his destitution and 40% against killing him for treachery). I'd say that they stopped the violence and decided to free all slaves once the war ended should be a point in their favor.
I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
You can't possibly complain that any ideals you stand for get suppressed then, surely?
You are refusing democratic process and arguing that media deems people unable to partake in it. This is not even Nazi ideology, this goes way, way beyond Nazism in terms of authoritarianism.
With all due respect, this is gibberish. Refusing to engage a nazi in conversation is hardly suppressing them in any way, shape, or form. Nor is it refusing any kind of "democratic process." It's also preferable you don't yell fire in a crowded theater or bomb on an airplane.
To me, it's disheartening to see this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent posting (and to see that post be down-voted). What btilly wrote is not a defense, it's reasonable and, more importantly, practical advice in combating tyranny. Moreover, IMO, if you actually want to reduce or put an end to tyranny, you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy. Empathy is not agreement, it's not sympathy, it is understanding. Screaming at others that they're bad people will not change anything. If anything, IMO, it causes them to dig their heels and makes change harder.
It is rare for that message to be delivered to either side, for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad. It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJX28l54YxE for an hour-long interview between a well-known conservative Christian and a liberal atheist exactly on the topic of the importance of having conservative Christians treating those they disagree with with empathy.
> It is rare for that message to be delivered to either side,
Not true, I see it constantly deployed to the not-right-wing side. Constantly and pretty much everywhere where left of center and center mix.
> It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
I did read conservative writings, forums and what not. It is indeed rare in that space. Center is simply not invested in telling conservatives to have empathy as much as they are invested in promoting empathy toward conservatives.
> for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad.
I do agree that overall in aggregate it is increasingly clear it was bad advice. And the one sided application did not helped.
>> you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy.
> Um, what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
This is the important part. Understanding "the root causes for the desires of your opponents" is not empathy. It's understanding something.
Empathy is a relating to anothers plight. If you only understand it then there is nothing to cause pause before using that understanding to your advantage. It's a core part manipulation and deception. If the only thing that happened with that understanding is seeing what you can get from it or that there is nothing you want there or have use for, then that doesn't really help bring two sides together.
Having the ability to relate to this understanding of another is when empathy happens. It's the empathy that gives one pause long enough to see there are other options that are not zero-sum.
> No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
Disagree. Just because someone else can not relate -- now -- does not mean they can not later. I personally don't care for tit-for-tat games, thats simply a race to the bottom. Boundaries are the things missing here; one can have empathy for another that does not have it for them, that doesn't mean you also have to have a bleeding heart for them and let them walk all over you.
You can have radical empathy with somebody while standing against and fighting every single thing they stand for. Indeed empathy /helps/ you fight better, because you can begin to fight root causes rather than fighting symptoms, and help people heal rather than just shouting them down.
You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.
Indeed. But demanding empathy as the only valid a counter-strategy is, which is what the GP was doing. Appeasement doesn't work if your opponent isn't following the rulebook.
From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.
The sort of understanding the GP is promoting doesn't have to be used empathetically.
It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.
Correct: but giving them a thousand timeouts doesn't help, if you still need to give the thousand-and-first. It mitigates the immediate problem, but it also ties up your resources. Eliminating the problem at its root, if that's possible, is a more effective strategy: if we can take away the ability for the real bad actors to get loyal followers, by learning how to change those followers' minds, they won't have anywhere near as much power.
Exactly. The distal cause is that the Compromise of 1877 halted an unfinished Reconstruction. What I'm calling for is simple - the natural and final conclusion of Reconstruction. It might be 148 years late, but it's the antidote to the disease.
We live in a democracy. In a democracy, you don't get to deny people the vote simply because you view them as children. And, sadly, these "children" have around half the votes.
If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.
I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.
Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.
Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
> a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success
A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.
We live in a democracy. If the majority does something stupid, you have to convince them to stop doing that stupid thing. This means understanding how they came to do the stupid thing to begin with.
But the GP didn't even identify the enemy correctly, so all that effort would be wasted. The people they're describing are mere tools, only required because of the existing democratic processes in the country. The enemy are the (insert your favourite label here) at the top of the media and political landscape pulling the strings. And I guarantee you, they aren't quite so bothered by the imagery in those books as they are bothered by freedom of thought in general. They are bothered by people that dare to speak truth to power. They are not bothered by appeasement strategies such as we people trying to understand the other people they've pitted against us.
The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.
I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
I understand where you're coming from. But I also think that you're wasting a lot of effort in talking to those useful fools while they're still drinking from the social media and faux news firehose. And that's by design -- you are meant to expend your energy on that asymmetric (and in my view unwinnable) battle, so that you leave the actual policymakers alone.
(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).
edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.
>Did the people pursuing these bans consider having empathy with the people who value these books, and try to understand why they value them?
>Stop defending tyranny.
I think you miss GP's point. It's not that they support such book bans or the ideology that encourages that and other anti-democratic (small 'd') nastiness. Rather it's the old saw that 'you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (balsamic vinegar excepted).'
While there are many who are callous, cruel pieces of shit, there are more who live (without their knowledge or consent -- cf. rural broadcast media landscape, online bubbles, etc.) in an "information" environment that promotes such stuff as "godly" and "American" and "freedom", when that's not even close to the truth.
Which is clear from the book bans, the ridiculous "anchor babies" trope, the Democrats are all communists and on and on and on.
Yes, folks who actively foment this stuff and cynically (or even genuinely) fight to reduce liberty need to be resisted. Strongly and loudly.
But if you adopt those folks' "othering" tactics, you devalue everyone who doesn't specifically agree with you and everything you believe as evil and unredeemable, you remove a key opportunity for education, positive experience and persuasion.
Will that work for everyone? Absolutely not. But we don't need everyone, just the ones who are honest and fair-minded. And those can certainly be those who disagree with you.
If you exclude the radical reactionaries, bigots and cynical scum who seek to profit from promoting such ideas, the majority of all of us agree about much more than we disagree.
Perhaps that's something we all should ruminate on.
It’s… just the common name for this way of getting things done (as far as I know at least). Propose something preposterous, so drama ensues and it gets watered down, but in the end you still get more than you would’ve otherwise.
I believe the term got popular around the time Trump got his wall by saying he was going to make Mexico pay for it. Suddenly nobody questioned the sanity of building a wall anymore, the entire narrative was about whether or not he’d get Mexico to pay.
> They've been transparent about their desires to censor media.
100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".
I don't really know who to vote for to stop stuff like this. No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. Instead it's always about censoring your opponents and their ideas while you're in power.
Note one massive difference: nobody was trying to make a law that Dahl’s books be sanitized or running around to libraries and getting his books banned. That was a publisher taking unilateral action changing works they own (for better or worse). I see a massive difference between the two things.
Additionally, a lot of the language was very out of date with racists and discriminatory undertones so parents had stopped buying the books. It was driven by the market because if they didn't adjust the content to adhere to what parents expect in children's literature today the stories and moral lessons would be lost to the dustbin of history and merely interesting historical artifacts.
I would regularly see stories on Reddit where someone was gifted one of the more borderline Dahl novels and they binned it rather than giving it their child. I'm sure their internal metrics were painting a similar picture.
That's bad for business. It wasn't change for social justice. It was change or watch your IP die and everyone involved still wanted the money.
The problem with censorship is in general never about any specific application of it, but rather the principle. When censorship becomes culturally acceptable, self censorship and political polarization follows as a natural consequence.
The massive difference between government censorship and private cooperation censorship is unlikely to effect how people feel and react to it.
This argument strikes me as fairly textbook "whataboutism."
TFA shows a clear and present case of a particular action taken by one political faction. Your argument, that the opposing faction is equivalent to a greater or lesser degree and would follow the same course of action, rests entirely on a hypothetical; it isn't supported by any concrete evidence or cited examples.
I'm certainly not asserting that any one faction/party holds a monopoly on moral high-ground, just highlighting that this kind of argument is frequently used as a tactic to deflect discussion away from ground truth considerations and shift the debate towards (artificially) neutral conditions.
I certainly don't think it qualifies as whataboutism. I'm neither preaching inaction nor attempting to refute any prior claims. Neither do I attempt to claim a broad general equivalence.
It seems to me that you are disregarding the context? From up thread:
> No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech.
I did cite an example, at least indirectly, when I mentioned other countries. Consider the online speech measures in the UK as but one example. Not the same political party to be sure but the underlying ideology is shared. The only significant difference (IMO) is the presence or absence of first amendment protections.
What is far left in US? From what you are saying i got impression there is only far right and far left in US to vote. I am not from US but that doesn't seem right.
> I don't doubt for a second that the far left would create such laws if they could.
I mean, they could as much as the fringe actors this article is about. I'm not sure what you think is stopping them from going for it in the same fashion.
As already mentioned, the support for it appearing somewhat less uniform as far as I can tell. Plus I would expect the knowledge that it will be swiftly struck down to discourage efforts.
Of course I would have expected the second point to apply to the GOP as well, yet here we are, so clearly my world model has some inaccuracies in this regard.
TIL that giving book buyers the choice between the classic uncensored version of a book and a revised version of a book with blatant antisemitism removed, a choice provided by a book publisher, is an example of the Democrats being almost as bad as Republicans.
Don't forget one is state censorship and other is independent private entity that (in the land of the free) can do absolutely what it wants if it holds the copyright.
> 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".
You realize that's significantly better, right? Like at least two orders of magnitude better?
In one case, the copyright holder of Roald Dahl's books decided to censor (incorrectly, I agree) their own books which they own the copyright to. That's a private organization doing a stupid thing, making their own content worse. A private organization censoring their own words. No elected officials or persons appointed by elected officials were involved.
In the other case, the government is unilaterally deciding to withhold information from the public. The government is censoring other people's words.
You realize how that's not even remotely similar, right? "The left" is way better on this one.
Without commenting on what's better or worse, note that the copyright holders are not censoring their own words. They're censoring the words of someone who died decades ago in books that are several generations old, and it's the government that says no one else is allowed to publish the originals. Granting exclusive rights to publish and modify the works several generations after they were written is government censorship. In this case the censored books become completely illegal to publish as well rather than simply unavailable in government libraries.
(Feel free to substitute the situation with Dr Seuss books if Dahl isn't a fit because that organization also publishes originals, but even if the originals were still available, derived works are also censored)
Anything not aligned and christened by the MAGA movement is considered left/woke/Democratic Party/etc. which means it's bad until they change their minds and adopt it, if they ever do.
It does matter and it is not a minor detail that the left is acting to help people and the right is acting to hurt people. You can always disagree with what the left does, but the left and the right are nowhere near equivalent in the big picture that actually matters.
It's not indicative of a "broken world view" at all. There are already laws against defamation, running afoul of those would lead to your speech being censored to help the victim of defamation, for example. This logic can be extended with care.
That apparent problem goes away once you recognize that you’re using the word “censor” incorrectly in one case to draw a false equivalency. In the case of the right-wing behaviour discussed here, “censor” is the correct word because the term refers to an official use of power to prevent something considered politically incorrect or obscene from being available even though the publisher, librarians, and reader all thought they should be accessible.
In the case of the Dahl revisions, there is no official power being used to suppress individual preference. The publisher decided they wanted better sales for an older item, realized that things like anti-Semitism were unappealing to modern audiences, and created a new edition of their own property. Every part of that process was entirely voluntary and nobody’s purchased property is affected in any way – quite unlike the right-wing telling libraries to remove books with significant literary value which their patrons want to read.
Yeah, both parties are becoming more authoritarian. IMO the solution is a different voting system than first-past-the-post that allows multiple parties to exist to force different political factions to interact with each other and compromise. But until then though I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, since under FPTP not voting at all would not be acting against the greater of two evils.
Evidence for the Republican party becoming more authoritarian:
- attempted illegal book bans
- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare
- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings
- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally
- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)
Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:
- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.
Surely the Dahl's family censoring their own books is on progressives, and it's equally as bad as Republicans trying to overthrow an election, send the troops after protesters, build concentration camps on national territory, ban books, revoke women's rights to abortion, revoke civil rights...
I've been saying since Clinton when it started to become clear, that liberals and conservatives will eventually kill the ideals of this Republic. (And not only the ideals expressed in the First.) They've been chipping away for long enough that they now believe it is safe for them to chop.
These people are all dangerous in the extreme. It's just that the conservatives have unmasked themselves and displayed the extreme danger they represent to our ideals in the US in a far more open fashion than liberals.
I might have given a shred of charitability to you if you said "far more open fashion than the left." but the fact that you said "liberals" tells me I shouldn't take your political perspective seriously
So “I would take your politics seriously if it aligned with mine”? I am afraid that whole point of politics is finding compromise with people who you don't agree.
It’s more about good versus bad faith: you can compromise with people who are willing to be honest, but that isn’t possible when someone is redefining terms or contradicting all available evidence to make their position work. That commenter was conflating two very different sets of activities to smear liberals, implying that they somehow know someone else’s true intention even though that contrasts with their actions and public statements.
"If you're in a grossly generic way referring to hispanics, african americans, Indian Americans and many distinct and complex others"
-> Exactly. It refers to all of them.
It isn't a secret that white nationalist, kkk, are Republican, and have been at least since the 80's.
So as venn diagrams go, there are not many KKK in the Democratic party, and they are in the Republican party, so... who's ideas do you think align the most?
I think lending credence to the idea that their politics are nuanced and complex is disingenuous. If you are going to make the claim that there is nuance, at least provide an example.
I’m sorry but singling out the “brown people” comment is a bit of a straw man in this case, as a “brown” person it kind of is really that simple. There really isn’t anything else to it, it is literally about the colour of the skin. Does it reduce countless cultures and experiences to nothing? Yes. But that’s sort of the point isn’t it.
> A surprising number of people from these and other groups support conservative causes too.
Plenty of people (including the vast majority of Republican voters) vote against their interests, yes. Whether it's single issue voting, misinformation, or a variety of causes, "some X vote for this group" does not mean that the overall group does not hate or work against X.
Republicans pass tax cuts which increase the burden on the poor and the middle class for the benefits of the ultrarich (not the majority of their voters).
They destroy government programs that benefit the majority of the population - health care, antitrust enforcement, free tax filing, environmental protections, tax audits of rich tax cheats.
They oppose any programs which provide benefits to the public - broadband standards, net neutrality, social services, cybersecurity, weather satellites, libraries, public schools, so many more.
The vast majority of their voters are hurt by these policies and are quite literally voting against their interests.
ASOF now, your comment is no longer flagged, and I just upvoted it, so maybe it will recover.
I wouldn't underestimate the role of bots, or bot assisted socks, rather than the HN community. You last sentence just sounds like sour grapes in this context.
> What a simplistic take on a much more nuanced set of issues and ideas than that from the Republicans and conservatives in general. "brown people"? What the hell does that generic, i'd say even coddlingly racist, label means specifically mean?
It's cut and dry. Plain racism, broadly and slowly applied. Don't try to notice, they hate that.
> All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses.
Ah yes, the foolish "state policy don't matter because you can get it somewhere else". Treating the issue lightly, is part of the problem. Now there's 1 less source BY POLICY and the noose tightens. Weaponizing policy is something politicians are prone to do.
I don't buy the whole "it's not illegal, just buy it from a bookstore yourself if it's banned from the library" argument after what happened with Steam and payment processors. What's next? "Just buy these books from a physical bookstore (not online) that is cash only because payment processors have booted the store off their platforms. Also, only old/used editions are available because publishers are afraid to print new runs. But it's not illegal so stop crying"
The latter often leverages the former to work around having to legislate things that are unpopular or unconstitutional. A great example is government agencies buying data from data brokers or the Twitter files where the government leaned on Twitter to downrank "wrong" ideas. With the proliferation of powerful near-monopolies - especially in tech - "the market" has little way to work around these kinds of problems, especially in the short term.
I guess my point is that both are dangerous to freedom, and ideally the government would do something to curtail corporate censorship instead of encouraging it. That's the whole idea of a "common carrier"[1].
I am not equating the two, I am pointing out the flaw in the logic of viewing each in isolation and rationalizing. Excusing state-level book bans in libraries with "you can just buy it yourself with your money instead" clearly ignores what has been happening in the private sector.
While I agree that no one should have their identity defined by their ethnicity, that does not describe many of these books. Perhaps none, it's presumptuous to say that an author writing about oppression wants to increase divisiveness.
Beyond that, there is no shortage of people in favor of book bans that absolutely believe in ethnically-defined identity.
If you’re in a room full of white people and you’re reading a book about Chinese railroad workers, then you’re correct that’s not divisive. If you add some asian kids, and then treat the Asian kids indistinguishable from the white kids—everyone is a modern american reading about history—that’s also not divisive.
But what you have in schools today is an additional layer on top of that, where the non-white kids are treated differently than the white kids. The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t. At my kids school, they have racially segregated “affinity” groups to facilitate this. My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid). I know that sounds like something I just made up but it’s absolutely true.
This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity. Specifically, they generalize african american racial identity and solidarity and politics to all non-whites. If you walk into a book reading for some of this stuff, you’ll find way more people promoting “brown people” ethnic identity and solidarity than you will find people promoting “white people” ethnic identity and solidarity at a Trump rally. The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
It's not an ideal situation for sure. Some want their heritage to be their identity. Some do not. Academia tries to accommodate both. Meanwhile we are slowly trying to fix the lingering effects of centuries of injustice where solidarity is one of the few tools to fight people in power who want to return to unjust times.
I'm not sure the best option is to vote for the country club guy whose public statements strongly indicate reports of his private statements on race are accurate. The guy who has kept Stephen Miller around for a decade and talked the proud boys into being the armed second wave of Jan 6. Then pardoned them.
Speaking for myself, even if Trump is somehow the shining light of a post-discrimination society (after failing to do so in his first term), it can't possibly offset the damage he wants to do the economy, consumer protection, and national security.
> My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid).
> This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity.
Beverly Bond, who holds the trademark, was an influencer avant la lettre. She wanted to make a brand—looks line like a clothing line, followed by a TV show, then a podcast.
I get that it’s tempting to blame everything on radical leftist academics or whatever but that’s not what happened here. This is simply capitalism.
Most people who aren't radical Leftists aren't going to agree with you that radical Leftists aren't primarily responsible for the experience described by Rayiner just because a personal profit motive was involved in addition to the ideological motive.
You might believe that if an ideological Leftist motive can be kept separate from motives of personal enrichment, then it cannot do significant harm. But most US voters would disagree with you about that: they believe that it can be harmful to believe that there is an oppressive structure at the center of American society if in fact there is not an oppressive structure at the center of American society.
When people say “radical leftists caused my gout” or “fascists gave me arthritis” I think they should stop for a second and consider where lies the proximate cause of their inconvenience, instead of clinging to convenient, if emotionally satisfying, myths.
I don’t think the issue is radical leftist academics. For the most part, it’s overly empathetic normie liberals who feel distress when they hear what the radical leftists are saying and lack discernment to sort through what minority kids really need to succeed.
> The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t.
Well, um, yeah. That's because white people just aren't oppressed.
Its the same way I don't identify with feminist literature. I can read it, understand it, enjoy it - but I can never fully relate, because I'm not a woman and the way I experience the patriachy will always be different.
Of course black people identify with or relate more to something like the color purple. That doesn't mean the color purple is racist.
The same way I evaluate my doctor to be doing a good job - trust.
Your experience in life will always represent a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of all experiences. If you require a "see it to believe it" approach, you will live and die closed-minded.
That does not mean I need to blindly trust feminists, however.
I truly cannot fathom how anybody can listen to Trump talk for more than 5 minutes and read more than one of his moronic truth social posts and his constant lies and then still be a supporter.
Is your example here a bit oblique to the point? I see this more of a failing of the people to properly appreciate and discuss/process the contents of the book, and as well as, in my opinion, socially overcompensating for the diversity in the room?
I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist. But I see this more of a lack of proper cultural empathy/education -- go figure, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere all the time. But as you said,
> This law is about what books are in public libraries.
So why would we ban the books, rather than encourage reading them and having the more meaningful discussions focusing on heritage rather than identity?
As a slightly more abstract aside, identity anything to me is a slippery slope because it will always automatically encourage one to make assumptions; it's a mental shortcut to say Person A == Person B iff PersonA.identity == PersonB.identity. Given that education is hard, learning is hard, and life is hard, I think we need to at least emphathize and appreciate that teachers and the the education system in general need to often fall back on these sorts of mental shortcuts. But that's we need to really invoke our right, privilege, and duty of grassroots participation. Why not walk into that book club that's overcompensating and help them learn what is making you uncomfortable? You might be surprised at how ignorant they were of their own mistakes and that they're willing to learn from your perspective.
> I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist.
But it’s not inclusiveness at all, it’s a caste system. In academic liberal spaces, non-whites are not “included” on the same terms as whites. We are bucketed into a separate caste subject to different standards and expectations. And that caste system plays out in routine social interactions, because white people afraid of being called “racist” will not treat you the same.
Calling it “heritage” instead of identity doesn’t change anything. Your average second-generation non-white American has weak ties to any non-american society. My kids have no meaningful ties to Bangladeshi society, only superficial ones. They can’t, and they wouldn’t even like it if they did. So the only outcome of talking to them about their “heritage” would be to encourage them to see themselves differently from their peers based on connections that are at best superficial.
As to your point about “banning”—we’re not banning the book club. This law is about school libraries. People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
> People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
Wait, I thought you were all about how Western society has gone too far in the direction of individual rights?
And assuming your "fundamental rights as a parent" premise (purely for the sake of argument): The rest of us have a pretty-compelling interest in how each other's kids — our future fellow adults — are being raised.
I agree the community has a strong interest in how children are socialized. That’s exactly what’s happening here: Florida voters have exercised their power over government schools to vindicate the community’s right to decide how children should be socialized.
You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community. Once people are allowed into the community, they get to participate in deciding how the community collectively socializes children. That means communities have a strong interest in excluding people who aren’t like minded.
> You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community.
"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....
Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.
Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:
<quote>
“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”
Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)
I can’t quite read this without feeling there some significant over-generalizations and assumptions being made. My experience with people of various races, cultures, and backgrounds has not exhibited any unilateral caste system mentality. I’ve spent plenty of time in academia and, while it certainly has issues, has not been quite so dystopian.
In the end, if we’re just comparing anecdata, this isn’t going to be productive.
JD Vance had a comment about his Appalachian ancestors who “built this country with their bare hands.” Find a white person to say something similar in one of your liberal places. Then find a black or mexican american person to say something similar. You know what the reaction would be even if you’ve never experienced it first hand. That’s the caste system: among other things, ethnic identity is condemned for one caste, while being lauded in the other caste.
There’s dozens of other examples, of course. Admissions, hiring, and promotions are often subject to explicit or implicit racial considerations. It’s naive to believe that the same people who are required by institutional policies to think about your skin color when they hired you or admitted you or when they decided to promote you or give your a research grant aren’t thinking about it in daily interactions as well.
I hear what you're saying, and agree with large parts of it. Ethnic background shouldn't override individual autonomy. But...
> The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
It'd be nice if the reasonable people from both parties could ignore their extremist wings, get to together, and realize they have more in common than different.
>... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
Actually, it's back to 1868[0] at least that they'd like[1] (rolling back birthright citizenship) to go.
> there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
This is a relatively small number in comparison to the chunk of Harris supporters who would call color blindness “racist.” In my own experience, “brown” ethno-narcissism and ethnic tribalism is more accepted, and even encouraged, among liberals than white ethno-nationalism is tolerated among conservatives.
This is a result of the political incentives of the respective parties. Republicans don’t need white nationalism, they can win when minorities are assimilated into the what the dominant Anglo-American culture (what the left might call “multiracial whiteness”). That’s basically what’s happened in Florida: Hispanics retain their culture in the way Irish and Italian Americans do, but don’t have a strong ethnic identity that is politically motivating.
Republican's don't need white nationalism, and it undoubtedly hurts them on the whole, which is why it's surprising they continue to let those voices speak for them.
E.g. it's hard to get more racist than Stephen Miller, but I suppose that's normalized when you're on Jeff Sessions' staff.
White nationalists are people who dislike Usha Vance because she’s Indian. Stephen Miller is an ordinary nationalist who wants to slow down immigration enough so that everyone assimilates into Anglo-American culture and norms, instead of of changing U.S. culture.
Let me ask you this: you acknowledge that India is different from Vermont, right? And you acknowledge that ethnic enclaves of recent Indian immigrants (say in New York), are culturally different from Vermont? Is there any way in your world view for someone to say that they think the culture of Vermont is better, and they oppose immigration that would change the culture and make it more like India (or Latin America)?
Put differently, what could a non-racist version of Stephen Miller do while seeking to maintain the Anglo-American character of the U.S.? Or do you think that race and culture are so intertwined that non-racism requires us to accept Vermont becoming more like India or Latin America?
Stephen Miller is an ordinary nationalist who wants to slow down immigration enough so that everyone assimilated into Anglo-American culture and norms, instead of of changing U.S. culture.
Those articles are all sourced from the same SPLC hit piece, and are laundering someone’s accusations of “racism” without defining the term, or engaging in guilt by association.
The folks at SPLC are cultural relativists. They think culture is just superficial things like food, and doesn’t contribute to material circumstances. The only reason India or Mexico are poorer and more disorderly, in their view, is oppression from whites. In that worldview, any opposition to immigration can only be based on skin-color “racism.” Is that your view?
Each of those articles is sourced from the same SPLC hit piece, and SPLC embraces cultural relativism.
I’m curious why you won’t answer my question. Does non-racism, in your view, require people to accept immigration that changes America’s culture? Is there a non-racist lane for people who want Vermont or Salt Lake City to remain culturally Anglo-American (regardless of ethnicity)?
This whole line of reasoning is underpinned by such a fundamentally dim view of American[1] culture that it's hard to believe you and others who espouse it think yourselves its advocates. The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.
The consistent lane you're looking for is "let come those that will. give them all the freedoms and all the burdens of being American, and that's what they'll become. The character of our places might change, as they have in the past and as they will again in the future, but they will be no less American as long as they're full of people seeking liberty, justice, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families."
[1] and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
> The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.
First, you're conflating America's effectiveness in Anglicizing immigrants with absorbing foreign cultures, which has happened surprisingly little. Our national institutions remain quite Anglo, even though there's pockets of different cultures all over the country.
Second, most good things about American culture trace back to its Anglo roots: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/book/Albio.... Legalism, orderliness, disposition towards freedom and free markets, entrepreneurialism, egalitarianism, etc.
Areas where we've seen cultural change have been negative. For example, one thing we've lost is the WASP austerity. I know some older folks from New England who grew up learning that "food is for fuel, not enjoyment." Amazing! It's a downgrade that we lost that!
> and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
No, it's Anglo-American culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tINJhf1Zs1Q&t=618s. The Anglo countries remain incredibly similar to each other culturally and economically despite the U.S. breaking off from England almost 250 years ago. America is different from England in many ways, but in more or less the same ways it was always different from England.
All immigration changes culture. And the United States is probably the best proof of that that you could possibly wish for. Anglo-American culture is a very tiny slice of American culture. Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it. But the world evolves and it does so on a timescale that that is noticeable on a single human life span. Like that whole groups of people have to sit at the back of the bus (if they're allowed on in the first place), write books on how to survive while driving in certain parts of the country and like that they suddenly have rights. And the countries they were forcibly imported from had cultures noticeably different from the one where the Anglo-American (and Dutch, and German and other countries besides) owners (or so they claimed) people came from.
If you want to emigrate to a place that is static then you will quickly find out that you can't, not really. Switzerland has been trying to do this since forever and is failing badly at it, other experiments in the same direction have led to civil wars and ugly offshoots like apartheid. You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
> And the United States is probably the best proof of that that you could possibly wish for. Anglo-American culture is a very tiny slice of American culture.
On one hand, this isn't true. At the national level, our laws and institutions are still predominantly Anglo, because all the Dutch, Germans, Irish, and to a lesser extent, Italians and Eastern Europeans, assimilated into that culture. On the other hand, the places where that is the least true, like Chicago and New York City, only underscore my point. Governance in those cities is terrible because much of the political bandwidth is consumed on issues of fairness and redistribution between groups that are at odds with each other instead of building subway lines or cleaning the streets.
> Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it
Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States, instead of doing a massive "git pull" from the cultures that produced India or Mexico. If you worked at Google, would you hire tens of thousands of Kodak or GE lifers en bloc? Of course not.
> You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
If that’s the choice, I’d choose the latter.
But I don’t quite agree with the dichotomy. Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people. If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence. High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
> Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
Putting aside that this reads like a right-wing parody of WEF talking points, do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950? (Or your own homeland of the Netherlands prior to its experiment with mass immigration?)
Ask the native Americans whether or not this isn't true.
> Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States
That culture is built on violence, slavery, racism and oppression. Iterating on it seems to have brought out its worst elements rather than its best elements. Half the country, including you, voted for a caricature of what a decent human being should be like as president. And you are now 200 days into an assault on your economy and freedoms and you still refuse to see what the end game looks like. That culture? The 1950's are not coming back. And that's not a bad thing.
> Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people.
That's just one form of immigration, why stop there? What about refugees? Oh, right, the USA is good at waging war but then ignores the refugees that inevitably are created, that's for the rest of the world. Handy, being a continent sized country an ocean away.
> If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence.
Foreign influence is minimized by limiting the use of money in politics which is an easy avenue into the heart of the political system. Immigrants - as a rule - do not have the vote.
> High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
Small town America is a lot more racist than you think. They didn't so much end up assimilated, they ended up scared to go out of their houses. If you think you are assimilated and that small town America is accepting and nice you should try to live in the places with < 10,000 inhabitants where the White Master Race is the dominant majority. You'll see - very quickly - how they look at you.
Your USA experience is for the most part informed by living in the larger cities. I've spent a lot of time in rural America (~ a year in total) , easy for me to do since I'm white. What people say in private is hair raising, and really opened my eyes to how deeply embedded racism is in the United States.
> do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950?
I don't know about that. But I also don't think that the current political mainstream in the United States cares about orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic elements of the USA unless it benefits the 'in-group' to the exclusion of everybody else.
This whole discussion reminds me of a guy sitting on a branch cutting the live side with a saw while sitting on the dead side. All of those elements that you wish for have been put in place against massive pressure from the people that you support. And they'd love to go back to Massachusetts, 1950. But without you, and your kids. Your wife is - probably - safe. But you can bet that ICE showing up at your door - or your parents, for that matter - at 4 am is going to be very bad news. And they won't care who you voted for either.
As for that 'Dutch Experiment': it isn't limited to the Netherlands, and by and large the Surinam immigrants have disappeared into background noise on account of their relatively low numbers. But when they first came here (just before Surinam became independent) there was a lot of outcry about this. Now, so many years later there is still a fairly large number of people that identify as such here, most of them live in the three big cities, because of small town racism.
The predominantly Turkish and Moroccan immigrants have set up their own regional presence, some of them have held very strongly to their original identity and stepping into their homes is like stepping into a time/space displacement machine. But they - as a rule - are friendly, incredibly hard working and because they value family a lot more than the original inhabitants and their offspring tend to do, have a fantastic social network around them. Again, due to racism and very overt discrimination their kids have - for some fraction anyway - grown up frustrated. They see all this wealth around them and the skin color based ceiling is so strong that only very few of them manage to break through. The end result of this is that a fraction of them rather than being 'kept in their place' by the whites here - who think these people will never be successful and who deserve to work in crap jobs no matter how intelligent or capable they are. It will take many generations until this has reduced, but there is some - very slow - progress over time. I see more and more people with such backgrounds in positions of influence and some power and wealth and they are the beacons that the next generation will hopefully set course by. It will take many more decades until they are no longer pushed down as a group, and, unfortunately, they are not usually helping and neither are their parents. Intermarriage is rare, which would be one way to reduce the barriers between the various groups.
Romanians, Poles and other people from Eastern Europe have moved here in fairly large numbers. As a rule they are doing fine, even though the newspapers love to magnify the few cases where they are involved in legal or traffic issues.
Syrians and other refugees have not integrated well at all. They have been here only a very short time and are slowly displacing the older immigrant groups for the lowest income jobs. I've had very little interaction with them. But the various asylum seeker places that are dotted across the country are best compared with open air prisons where our bureaucratic engine driven by overt hatred tries to discourage them from staying here. There are far better ways of dealing with this but unfortunately my vote is only just as heavy as that of the racists. It will be decades more before these people too have made this place our home.
Ukrainians, who are here in surprisingly large numbers have integrated in record time. They have learned the language and have assimilated very quickly, to the point that you have to have an ear for it to spot them. They are everywhere and they seem to love it here. It helps that their culture and ours was already closely parallel, besides the Orthodox Church component which quite a few still formally subscribe to (religion, in NL, was on the way out until immigrants brought it back).
You're (arguably correctly) nit-picking OP's choice of the phrase "brown people." We can debate whether it makes sense to lump "brown people" together or not for the purpose of describing Republicans' attitudes toward human rights, but it would probably be more accurate to just reword OP's statement in more general terms: "Republicans have been transparent that they want to dehumanize out-groups." The point would still stand, and we avoid the distraction of whether "brown people" exist as a distinct group.
I would argue that most Republicans don't give a flying fuck what race someone is, and doesn't feel it should make a difference in terms of political opinion or approach to solving issues. All the struggle sessions in the world won't actually change or fix anything other than to foster divide that has only increased in the past couple decades. A lot of it straight out of communist doctrine in order to tear down society.
This isn't to say that racism doesn't exist, but it's not nearly as big as most make it out to be, and there's far more anti-white hate than there is white racism today. White racism is absolutely outcast as a rule today and the typical Republican wants and has nothing to do with it.
To your first point, I'll just say this isn't the first time in history various groups of people (however you want to group them) have by a wide margin voted for a politician who is actually antagonistic towards them. This behavior seems to rhyme all throughout history.
Weird to have to define dehumanization but OK. Dehumanization is to deprive people of their positive human qualities. We're about to get political so this is likely way off topic at this point.
A common, recurring theme in Republican "culture war" rhetoric and policy is to carve out and target various groups (however they/we want to define that group), ignore those groups' positive qualities, amplify their negative qualities, and portray those groups as "lesser humans than us," ultimately for the purpose of depriving them of rights/freedoms/wealth/livelihoods/etc. Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.
Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting already-vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down. I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.
> I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.
The only way to get there is to go there.
I remember back when I was a kid and realized anti-discrimination was the feel-good message hiding the real message to continue discriminating but now with the correct standards. I sat all day wondering what people 100 years from today would think of our current standards. I reasoned they'll be as forgiving to us as we are to people from 100 years ago.
The person from 1925 would argue they're better than someone from 1825. Ok, sure, but that doesn't make Jim Crow a good thing.
The contemporary standards on how to discriminate will always be justified in the contemporary social context. That's how the cycle perpetuates. The only way to get to the world where nobody does the grouping is to live that life as much as possible today.
> Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.
We don’t agree on this. Republican efforts are focused on preserving the dominant American culture and norms, which we think are good. At least in the race context, what engenders backlash is not minorities having rights, but them coming together to assert distinct interests as a group to seek changes in the dominant culture.
> Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down.
We agree on this. But I would submit that intent matters less than effect. For one thing, these “vulnerable groups” are less vulnerable than assumed. For example, Hispanics are economically assimilating with whites at about the same rate as Italians or Irish.
For another, the well-intentioned divisiveness itself harms minorities. Ethnic identity and solidarity is a toxic force minority communities. It hinders economic and social assimilation, and empowers bad actors within the community. I want to live in a community where, if a Bangladeshi commits a crime, the other Bangladeshis have more solidarity with the white police who come to arrest the criminal than with their co-ethnic. I think this is one reason why even poor Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in America have so much better economic mobility than their counterparts in Europe or Canada.
I'd like to see more group identity and solidarity along economic class lines than ethnic/racial lines. It feels like this is where the real war is happening, and the racial, ethnic and nationality blamed problems are distractions and mere first order derivatives of the actual problem which is unequal economic power.
Unfortunately, neither side seems to be acknowledging or addressing that problem.
> The problem with that rephrasing is that OP certainly meant to include hispanics (who are the largest group of “brown people”) in the country
OP didn't say anything about non-white Hispanics and other non-white people as a group. He is not suggesting anything about a group identity there. He is simply stating the fact that Trump treats them differently because Trump sees them as a group, including removing books and history about these people.
Do we need the government to write a law and ban the color purple, and similar, from being taught in second grade? I am not a fan of the government doing that level of micromanagement in most circumstances.
Are you okay putting Penthouse magazine (or similar) in elementary schools?
I'm guessing you aren't... people have to draw lines somewhere on this. There's a difference between restricting by age, making available to all and actually assigning material to children. Not all materials are appropriate for elementary school libraries. And I'm not even talking about The Color Purple specifically.
Also, none of this stops a parent from buying a book for their children they feel is appropriate for their child.
> Are you okay putting Penthouse magazine (or similar) in elementary schools?
I think the law that the judge is ruling on here does not effect a ban of penthouse or similar material in elementary schools. The preexisting laws already had that kind of material banned in elementary schools.
Can you clarify what the difference between policy or law is at a given level?
Not everyone agrees as to where the line is for "common sense" and will definitely push boundaries beyond what a community would generally agree to. Laws at a higher level are just "common sense" codified.
There is so much in life that is deferred to someones best judgement that if we stopped just to annotate and attempt to codify all these 100 such actions each person in positions of power or authority might take a given workday, it would take a century.
Not all mountain out of molehill arguments need to be engaged with I think is the broader lesson we need for our times.
If I understand, you're saying that you support banning common literary books in libraries? And likely so do most of Florida constituents, even Asians and Hispanic?
But I'm not able to square that with what you said about ethnic identity.
Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries. It’s a response to a trend in education, which has embraced teaching non-white kids to embrace ethnic identity and think of themselves as oppressed.
Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”
> Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries
Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't look into the details. But it appeared to be a ban to me.
If all they did was say: "these are the books that must be made available at school libraries"
That would be very different, and we wouldn't be talking about a ban.
But if they specifically targeted certain books (who might have not even been at all the school libraries to begin with), and said here are the books that are not allowed to be made available... I mean, that's called a ban.
I support your desire to make sure your kids feel at home and are able to, like everyone else, consider themselves American. I'm from an immigrant family, and it bothers me when people ask "what am I", I'm American, and they're always like... Come on! What are you really? And it's like, dude, you're also 'not really" American, you're German, you're British, etc. Except we're all really American, born and raised.
So I'm with you on that point, and the "born and raise" part, yes it means you should be raised the same as well, raised American.
Where I'll have to disagree with you, is that the books made available and the school curriculum isn't about any of this. It should focus on education, kids shouldn't be dumb, they need to learn history and it's effects, they should engage with hard topics and real problems, they should be exposed to well reasoned and intelligent diverse opinions from all sides, etc. You don't achieve that by selectively banning books whose narrative you personally don't like.
If you came at me complaining that the current selection of books and curriculum goes against that, that it's pigeonholing kids into "brown" and "not brown", and so on, I'd be like, damn right that's a problem, and I'd put forward the same argument I'm making now for why it's an issue that needs addressed.
But like I said, banning books just feels like pigeonholing and propaganda the same that you're trying to avoid just someone else's agenda.
Any which words we choose about it, we're still talking about a government mandate which books are not ok to read. I don't doubt your personal experiences, but the leap to blacklisting literature is a huge one and doesn't follow logically at all.
While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?
Again, this is about school libraries. You can’t retreat to the libertarian bailey. Educating and socializing children necessarily requires the government to pick a viewpoint. Especially against the backdrop of librarians, who are certainly have embraced a particular viewpoint and are pushing it on kids.
You're talking about the guy and party that believe slavery was a good job training program. FFS, this isn't hard - they don't even bother with the dog whistles any more!
No offense, there’s conservatives who want to ban books because they understand the value of literature and education… you’re not it, you should try reading the books they’re trying to ban, because it’s you they’re trying to keep away from reading those books.
> Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year.
I can't find a single exit poll that says Trump won over 40% of the Asian American vote.
> I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They're only saying that on the narrow topic of racism, Trump and many (though certainly not all) of his supporters will treat your daughter differently than they do a random light-skinned Appalachian.
Your point about hypothetical racist Trump supporters is wrong for two different reasons. First, I’ve been to Appalachia, and my wife is from rural Oregon, and nobody has ever treated me differently. My brother in law (part black, part Samoan, looks like the Rock) went to a Trump rally and Marjorie Taylor Green came to him to introduce herself. In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Second, building a “brown people” identity around the possibility that someone will occasionally treat you differently is bizarre. I don’t claim that my experience as a brown guy (who has spent a lot of time in the rural south and rural west coast) is universal. But if my family and I haven’t noticed it, that suggests a ceiling on how pervasive it could be. It’s positively grotesque to encourage kids to construct an identity that doesn’t reflect them as individuals, because someone, somewhere, might occasionally treat them differently based on skin color.
You sound like you're old enough to have lived through the aftermath of 9/11, I'm glad to hear you didn't experience any racism due to your skin color.
There was no “aftermath of 9/11.” I was in high school after 9/11 and went to college in the south (which was full of white guys from Georgia/Alabama/Tennessee) when we went to war in Iraq.
For you there wasn't, and like you said earlier, there's no representative "brown person" experience. I have first-hand experience that's the definitely included an aftermath, one person stopped wearing hijab after being taunted, another started going by "Mo", and yet another - who's not even muslim - started dyeing her hair a color much lighter that its natural color to better pass as white.
You’re just proving my point. Three thousand americans were killed in an attack by Muslims and that’s all that happened. If that had happened in India there would have been ethnic cleansing.
Your country did gleefully kill millions of innocent brown people in response to 9/11, it's just that they mostly lived in the middle east. You've apparently dehumanized them to the point where their deaths just… slipped your mind.
Your "extensive" Pew analysis has error bars of +/- 10% for the Asian groups and certainly doesn't show "over 40%" but something that rounds to 40%. Other exit polls all show less than 40%.
It's great that you haven't experienced racial discrimination. This hasn't been the experience of people applying for housing at Trump properties.
> In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Explain to me how putting up Confederate monuments is so we don't "erase history" but removing historical notes about Native Americans, not mentioning a holiday celebrating freedom for all Americans except to disparage it, and removing information about Trump's impeachment is not. I'd like to understand any other explanation than that Trump and his supporters don't see Native Americans or black Americans as "real" Americans, which is what people mean when they use the word "dehumanizing." Is there any other way to explain it than by using skin color? That is why "white liberals" (why are you bringing their skin color into it) bring it up — the only reasonable explanation involves skin color. Nobody in this thread is suggesting that anybody build an identity around it.
> Your "extensive" Pew analysis has error bars of +/- 10% for the Asian groups and certainly doesn't show "over 40%" but something that rounds to 40%. Other exit polls all show less than 40%
That means it could be 50%. “Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting. Pew isn’t an exit poll, it uses massive surveys. That’s consistent with other data points. Blue Rose Research found that Trump probably narrowly won naturalized citizens: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
Another data point: lots of majority asian precincts in new york and new jersey flipped to Trump. Trump outright won Flushing, Queens. Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
A cursory search didn't really reveal this breakdown in the handful of articles I looked at. There is mention that black turnout was a bit lower than other racial groups though. Without specifics, most likely carried more black men than previous elections, while losing with more black women. This seems to be the overall trend in general regarding Republican and Democrat voting from what I've observed.
> These books are upsetting, and show a very ugly side of humanity
Funnily enough, that's exactly what "obscene" means in popular parlance. On the other hand, the legal standard for what should be considered obscene is so inherently uncertain and varies so much across time and place that it's just meaningless to say anything that purports to be definitive about that.
No, it isn't. The modern standard of obscenity in US federal law, the "Miller test," derives from a 1973 Supreme Court ruling in the eponymous Miller v. California.
I realize you're referring to some universal abstract theoretical concept of obscenity that doesn't apply or exist. The one I describe does, and I think that makes it more useful here.
I'm frankly surprised that kids read books at all. With video games and smartphones and all this attention-draining junk, I would like to see how many books are actually read per 100 kids per month. I would be surprised if it even runs into the double digits.
Flood the zone with christofascist, orthodoxy propaganda in almost every public and private distribution channel people interact with since birth, and no compliant rule-followers will dare to read those "filthy", "un-Christian" books. The problem of opposition will be reduced to a small cadre of intelligent and curious people who dare to question approved ideas.. they are usually the first to be lined up against the wall when totalitarian regimes come to power. At some point in the past, I would've been half joking, but this doesn't seem so unfathomable anymore.
To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.
Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.
Most good books are subversive towards the goals of education. I couldn't believe when they unironically asked me to read "Pedegogy of the Oppressed" and than tried to give grades on it.
Trying to give grades to kids for Oscar Wilde's work is fully against the spirit of his thinking. Trying to grade kids for a whole lot of modern "classics" also goes against the spirit of their thinking. Joyce was too busy writing horny smut to be a supporter of literary analysis of his work.
But more seriously, most young adult fiction is pretty low quality. I cringe pretty hard when I look back at what that genre had us reading at the time. Percy Jackson and Eoin Colfer are poster children for the millennial brain rot that ended our collective love of YAF. We are a far cry from the high point it hit under the excellent writing of a certain Brian Jacques
I got an A for reading Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. I turned out ok, I read proper historians writing about horrific events, and my writing abilities are above average.
Properly defining how we educate children is tough.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you seem unfamiliar with Wilde's work or his stated position on criticism - i.e. that only critical faculty enables any artistic creation at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Critic_as_Artist
Joyce's penchant for scatology in no way diminishes his canon's suitability for engagement via critical theory. If anything, the poststructuralist interdisciplinary approach is as natural a bedfellow for the interpretation of Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake as one could hope for.
To demean Eoin Colfer is another interesting hill to die on (Darren Shan?). Benny and Omar is a fantastic debut novel and a great introduction to class and cultural distinctions in the Islamic world as viewed through the eyes of a surly western teenager. The Artemis Fowl debut as well is a perfectly inoffensive fresh IP with an interesting take on putting a cyberpunk spin on Irish Mythology - although marred somewhat by an appalling cinematic adaptation.
To then cite Brian Jacques as a high-point, ploughing a furrow as he does in the foothills of mid-brow K-12 readership, only suggests to me somebody completely unfamiliar with the canons of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman. In any case, you seem to be conflating Young Adult Fantasy with the rich and well populated canon of Young Adult Fiction.
It's possible that the worst of these bans were done in strategic bad faith in partnership with the plaintiffs: to provide standing and legal cause for the plaintiffs to sue.
There may have been bans made that were reasonable but politically one-sided (perhaps an illustrated kamasutra, just to give an example), and the strategy to re-establish them was a sort of reverse motte-and-bailey -- get things that are far more innocent banned in a bid to sue and reverse all bans.
Nothing specific. But generally, recent politics makes me believe that any "possible" version of events is an acceptable hypothesis to consider, no matter how egregious (and I mean this regardless of someone's political leaning).
Those with any form of power in very large measure (money, fame, political power, influence) ought not to be trusted implicitly.
It's shocking how little opposition laws like get this from people who call themselves "free speech absolutists." Here we have straightforward censorship, by the government, yet it all flies under the radar.
The people who fight for free speech in these cases, devoting time and money to it, and have real meaningful effect, self-describe in more ordinary ways.
Same thing the far left does on college campuses. They just do it under the guise of victimhood with terms like "assault" being used to describe someone speaking an unpopular opinion. If the school book wars said the kids were "assaulted" by this "hate speech" would that make it okay? Is that what they are missing is someone feigning victimhood?
Yes, the same people that need the 2A right to guns to protect themselves from government tyranny also are totally fine with other forms of government tyranny.
I'm not really a fan of either party, so I tend to dwell on the most glaring irrefutable examples that shine through groupthink biasing.
Government agents summarily executed Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker exercising his natural right to night time home defense. This was the exact scenario the 2A enthusiasts always grandstand about - "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away", "From my cold, dead hands", etc. Any yet the response from the sheer majority of supposed 2A enthusiasts? Utter fucking silence, if not outright support for the jackboots.
"From my cold, dead hands... unless you're at an NRA convention, in which case, please use these convenient lockers we've provided, or consider leaving your firearms at home."
I would point out how great of a place that would be for the government to start their supposedly planned "gun confiscation", but why would they even need to do that?
They are the tyranny. They're literally attacking Americans with the military now. GOP has fully descended into whatever Tr*mp wants and he seems to want to destroy America.
By your logic, the government should be forced to purchase firearms and make them freely available to the citizens.
The government deciding standards for content it purchase is neither tyranny nor fascism. You are free to purchase as much controversial or sexually explicit material as you see fit.
Public schools have librarians who are trained in pedagogy. The librarians and teachers already know what books are appropriate for kids. This is state legislators and the governor trying to prevent kids being exposed to ideas they don't personal like.
> Public schools have librarians who are trained in pedagogy. The librarians and teachers already know what books are appropriate for kids.
This training means nothing. Critical pedagogy is just code for biasing the books in libraries towards the left. It isn’t even a hidden agenda - the ALA has been open about it. This “pedagogy” isn’t about what’s appropriate for kids. It’s about using a public institution and its funds to push one side’s ideas.
So sure, the state may be trying to prevent kids from being exposed to ideas they don't personally like. But it is to counter the librarians and their organizations, who are trying to only expose kids to ideas they personally like.
Pedagogy and critical pedagogy are two very different things. And critical pedagogy seems to be a very rare thing, why are you bringing it up and then adding a hyper-political slant to it?
Substituting one term for another and railing against the substituted term is a very weak argument.
Critical pedagogy is not rare, but very common. I am bringing it up because the ALA pushes and practices it, as do most individual librarians in cities, whose personal politics aligns with the ALA, and whose libraries are members of ALA. That’s why public libraries in cities have a disproportionate amount of progressive biased books visible when you walk in, and virtually nothing from other ideologies.
Almost without exception, people who loudly proclaim to be one thing: free speech absolutist, anti-tax, heterosexual, small government, "tough on crime" are exactly the opposite.
Well, maybe in practice. You could consider it an example of the law of unintended consequences.
Although I would apply it equally to the other political side as well. “Diversity” = everyone has to think like me, “inclusion” = exclude certain groups and so on
i don’t support this law at all, but i think it is pretty obvious that there is a difference between free speech and governmental discretion in what is taught in school. free speech doesn’t require that schools stock the “Bell Curve” or Mein Kampf for instance
This is a strange framing. These laws are neither about what is taught in schools nor what books schools are required to stock, but rather restrictions on what books schools may chose to make available to the children. The government is not limiting the free speech of the authors, but these laws are the government limiting access to the authors' free speech, which is at least related to free speech, even if you don't buy that it is an restriction of free speech per se.
I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.
You’re motte-baileying to ‘related to free speech’. By the standard you are setting, any curriculum-setting is free speech related, so clearly not an impermissible state action.
Curriculum-setting neither limits anyones free speech nor does it restrict their access to the free speech of others. Teachers are generally allowed to expand on the curriculum and students are given access to literature with information beyond that in the curriculum. These laws do effectively restrict access to information and ideas.
I am contrasting the difference between 1) those who paid attention and took action, the normal type of free speech defenders, and 2) self-described "absolutists" who have no problem with this sort of vaguely defined restriction on speech.
Arguments about concepts like hate speech tend to pull out a large number of self-identified free speech absolutists, arguments about restricting access to books in libraries ends to draw out very few. You might find it intresting to dig through the history of past discussions right here on HN.
The judicial system is a wreck and obviously works for rich people only. This sort of obstruction of every day life by people seeking to destroy democracy should be filtered out of the system otherwise they can get their way or keep filing lawsuits. How? It starts with education which is why they're attacking it.
Especially with the new Tr*mpian ethos of rules for thee, not for me.
I don't think courts should be where laws are decided. The main reason is that every obvious case like this undermines their power in future. Soon you will have people who start to question if courts don't have too much power. When you finally get to some important politically dividing case, all these secondary rulings in the past would be used against the courts.
Would be preferable to not see administrations repeatedly try obviously blatantly unconstitutional moves. Don't need to be a constitutional law expert to see the problem here.
Is driving 100mph down the highway OK as long as you slow down right before the known speed trap? The system worked?
My highschool had banned books. That's what got me into the free speech thing in the first place. But sure, make me republican in your mind because whatever.
It's attitudes like yours that discourage me from wanting to show up for the cause anymore.
You seem to be making a bunch of unwarranted assumptions about what's in my mind, and getting upset about that, but I can't even imagine what your assumptions are. Your only stated assumption, about me thinking you are "Republican," is false, and not at all contained in my comment.
If you are motivated towards free speech action because of banned books don't you think I would suppprt you in that?! That's the entire thrust of my comment, I think people fighting for free speech are great, and based on the information you provided you seem to be doing that!
Remember the part of the book where "love" is really "war" and "freedom" is really "slavery"? It's like that. "Absolute free speech" is really "only party-approved speech".
Aaaagh! I feel your frustration but I myself am frustrated at this dance Americans still play at that there are constitutionalists there, or people interested in "maintaining the institutions" or "free speech." There are only two kinds of politicians in America: neoliberals who are looking for opportunities to commodify the State or people in it, and fascists (or baby fascists) interested in achieving Christian nationalist or white nationalist goals by any means necessary.
Even the word "libertarian" doesn't mean "anarchist" in America as it does everywhere else, to refer to the most far-left you take take political ideology. Instead it refers to a deeply right-wing ideology obsessed with corporatocracy.
liberal commodification and Christian nationalism are both contradictions in terms.
In the UK and I understand libertarianism to mean an extreme free market position, usually in the belief that markets will fix problems unregulated. I think the UK definition is less extreme than the US one but on similar lines.
Are they really extreme free market though? Do they want to get rid of limited liability so that the owners of a business are actually responsible for the harms they cause?
Depends what you mean by extreme free market. I mean anti-regulation, particularly anti-competition regulation, and opposition to state funding or anything.
There are plenty of constitutionalists, and reducing the entire polity to either neoliberal or fascists ignores the reality of the country. Further, by trying to ignore the existence of the large number of us who do want to defend the constitution, you hasten it's demise by emboldening those who are seeking to destroy it.
I don't agree with calling anarchy the most far-left ideology, just as I don't agree with calling Marxism the most far-left ideology, because this isn't a one-dimensional axis. The meaning of words is continuously shifting in language, especially with something as slippery as political ideologies, which themselves are continually changing. We must make the words the tools of our communication, instead of our communication the tool of the words.
There is no philosophical difference between libertarianism and anarchism, only a difference in how they predict people will behave in the absence of centralized authority.
There's a huge philosophical difference! American libertarians are highly focused on individualism and zero-sum behavior and thinking, whereas anarchism is a collective ideology focused on mutual aid or even communism (e.g. Kropotkin's Anarchist Communism).
Libertarianism is an application of right-wing ideology subtracting the State. Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies, but for another example, just because Nazism advocated for nationalizing industries doesn't mean it has anything beyond that in common with Marxist Leninist Communism which advocates for the same.
You are thinking only of one type of anarchism, ie the socialist type. There is also individualist anarchism. Which would be closer to libertarianism (although libertarians would support some state activity so it’s somewhat different).
Hence why the "individualist" strain of thought essentially died out as all other anarchist philosophers moved to anarchist communism.
It was revived only recently with "anarchist capitalism" which is of course a contradiction.
If we were having this conversation in the 1820s before such abominations were dreamed this distinction would be worth making. Nowadays, when people want to talk about "social anarchism," they say, "anarchism," and when they want to say "individualist anarchism," which as been identified for the right wing ideology it is, they say "American libertarianism."
> Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies
Yes, that's the philosophy. All the rest of what you said is just listing different predictions of what will happen after you get rid of the state. Once you get rid of the state, there is no authority to enforce the "mutual aid or communism" so that isn't a political philosophy. It's just a prediction of what will people will do under their own free will in the absence of a compelling authority.
Ah, I think I understand what's happening here, you're operating off an understanding of "anarchism" as literally just, "no state."
In reality Anarchism describes a political ideology that people have been writing about for a couple hundred years. There are a lot of disagreements, but generally all anarchic philosophies agree on a couple things: opposition to coercion, opposition to hierarchy, opposition to state, opposition to capitalism, promotion of mutual aid, promotion of community strength. The majority of anarchist philosophy resolved first around collectivist anarchism, and then around anarcho-communism.
That's why we don't call American libertarians "Anarchists," that's why we have a different word to describe them. Usually it works fine because American libertarians typically want nothing to do with anarchists, often for culture war reasons, but sometimes some American libertarians, such as those leaning "anarcho-capitalist," try to borrow anarchist terms, leading to confusion such as what we're having here.
Anarchist philosophy isn't a prediction, though sometimes anarchist philosophers make predictions. It's a collection of criticisms, values, strategies, and analyses, like any political philosophy.
> opposition to coercion, opposition to hierarchy, opposition to state
But herein lies the problem. You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion. Whether or not you define the authority applying that coercion a "state" is debatable, but that hardly seems like the important distinction here.
Sure I'm happy to debate aspects of anarchic philosophy itself, but the fact of the matter is that essentially all anarchist philosophy has moved in a collectivist (now communist) direction and any remaining "individualist anarchist" strains are no longer considered anarchist (such as "anarcho capitalism"), since one of the few things anarchists seem to agree upon is the critical importance of mutual aid. You're absolutely right to question authority as it surrounds mutualism - that's what anarchists do all the time!
> You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion.
I disagree, and so do many writers, and so does history.
First off, the "free rider" problem is a problem under capitalism, not anarchism. We have ample evidence of "free riders" being supported even in ancient societies with high scarcity, such as highly genetically deformed people who lived to a remarkably old age, which means despite their inability to labor, someone was feeding them. Same for people who had traumatic injuries. The idea of a "free rider" is only a problem in a society that believes everyone needs to justify their existence through labor, such as capitalism. Mutualist anarchist societies don't have this problem. Especially a modern day one, now that we've achieved post-scarcity (all scarcity today is artificially enforced).
Second, no human coercion is necessary to ensure collective bounty. Humans are intrinsically motivated to create bounty, if nothing else by hunger. And, being social creatures, we are also intrinsically motivated towards collectivism - ample anthropological evidence for this throughout every continent humans have lived on.
My proposition to you is that capitalist society is motivated by self-preservation to convince you that what I'm telling you is silly and impossible. The system has glaring faults that we all feel, so it can only continue if it can convince everyone that it's The Only Way.
A great resource that covers these historical facts in detail is Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything." If that's too lengthy, the founder of Food Not Bombs wrote a new version of The Anarchist Cookbook that's available as a free PDF https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html . Ignore the recipes, they're genuinely terrible. The first couple chapters are a good short introduction to the history of anarchy, and as I recall include ancient examples.
In my experience, it's easy to find major philosophical differences between libertarianism and anarchism. For example, you could ask people if they believe that private property is an authoritarian idea.
I'm not saying you couldn't find philosophical differences between individuals who call themselves "libertarian" or "anarchist." But those differences are irrelevant. Absent a state all property is private property, and who owns what is down to might makes right. Whether you call that "authoritarian" or not just comes down to whether or not you still consider a man with a gun robbing you an "authoritarian" if he's not acting on behalf of a formal government.
But this is, of course, only if you take their claims that they want to abolish the state seriously, which I don't on either side. In reality these people do nothing but describe the state that they want when asked to go into detail. The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous because we are a social animal that when left to our own devices, forms states. The concept of a stateless human society makes about as much sense as cows forming a republic.
I think if you read some anarchist philosophy you might be surprised at what you find.
Property can be owned in common. Then it's not private property whose ownership rights are enforced by a State. We have that here in Taiwan with indigenous people and it causes issues with the bureaucracy all the time, which is desperate for a name to put down as landowner. Many societies throughout history have common ownership aka no private property.
Before you ridicule the idea of anarchy perhaps take a look at history - humans as a social animal tend to form societies, not states.
It's marketing. Usually free speech absolutists just want to be able to say bigoted things. Often, they're simply racist.
People are very volatile and polarized because of their social media's marketing. GOP marketing is insane. They're marketed as fiscally responsible, good for the economy, conservative, pro free speech, pro liberty, capitalist, and recently anti-war. And somehow people believe that despite reality. I can't grasp how anyone could ever support someone so awful as Trump. The man is a pathetic spoiled rotten bully in clown face who can barely string together a coherent sentence. Not to mention all the (sex) crime.
It is notably weird to react to this article by criticizing "free speech absolutists". Who are the people you're criticizing? Be specific. Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties while getting flak from the right and left.
An example of this is FIRE -- which was massively criticized by progressives for suing colleges over anti-conservative speech codes, DEI statements, etc. But FIRE has behavred in a princicpled manner and has sued conservatives and the Trump administration over civil liberties violations.
FIRE is still spending the bulk of their media outreach complaining about the left. Yes, they aren't totally without principle but it is very clear that they treat threats to speech from the left and right very very differently.
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties
If this were true, where were they on this clear case of government censorship?
Check out this thread, and the single person admitting to be an "absolutist" seems to have no opposition to this law at all, and merely wants to defend limits to speech.
Free speech "absolutists" are the least principled defenders of free speech, but they may have extremely right-wing principles they are trying to defend. Others here have given examples of high-profile "absolutists" but I'm talking about those I encounter online mostly, such as in this thread.
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties
I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.
I want to keep my hangouts pleasant, and sometimes that means looking at the unpleasant parts so that you can put a wall between them and myself and my friends.
I completely disagree with this law, but I don't understand how this is a free speech issue. AFAIK the law isn't restricting anyone's right to freedom of speech because under this law anyone in FL is free to own, publish, buy, sell, read, or stock any book in any privately owned library.
It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free. It seems to me like compelled speech to require the government to stock certain books. As this pertains to schools, I don't understand how the government doesn't have the same right to control the curriculum as it does in any other case. e.g. it is not a violation of a teacher's right to free speech to order them not to teach flat earth theory in public schools because that teacher is an employee and not on their own time. Same as my employer can restrict my speech while on the job without violating my rights.
Yes. Obviously there are books that are inappropriate in elementary school libraries. Different criteria may apply to high-school libraries. But the point is these are curated collections no matter what. Nobody is prevented from reading what they want to read outside of that.
My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.
School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.
I think the issue is your framing of libraries as "the government's own libraries".
Those libraries are to the people and paid by the people.
Similarly, the school curriculum is not to be controlled by the government, public schools are also to the people and paid by the people.
In both cases, the criteria for school curriculum and the books to stock are pedagogy. What will best prepare and educate students so they can innovate, thrive and improve our society later in life.
Attempts at seizing control of the school curriculum or the material made available to students for their pedagogy (like books they can research) by the government in a way that appears to be for some political or value setting agenda and not the criteria of offering the best pedagogy for students feels like propaganda and information control for political gain.
Your first and second paragraphs are in opposition to each other. The government is setting strict rules about what sort of books are allowed with this law. It's not a mere selection of the many books, but a strict ban of certain types of books based on their content. When the government establishes laws like this, they must be in accordance with our constitution above all, and that sort of strict criteria on banning certain types of books disagrees with the first amendment and the legal tradition around it.
Similarly, you are also wrong about this compelling the government to stock certain books, that's not on the table at all.
But no books are banned. The government is allowed to set school curriculum in every other case, so why not this one? If you don't like government school rules set by the government, then who gets to set them? I don't think you have a good answer to this.
You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question, which in this case is the state whose budget and laws are controlled by the legislature.
> The government is allowed to set school curriculum in every other case, so why not this one? If you don't like government school rules set by the government, then who gets to set them? I don't think you have a good answer to this.
There is a very very good answer here: the constitution.
You are not even responding to the constitutionality claim here, and have refused to even acknowledge the core aspect of this entire case! It seems a bit rude to say "you don't have an answer" when you ignore the point again and again.
The government can set laws, curriculum, etc. But it must be in accordance with the constitution.
It seems that in the last year or so, many people think that the government can do whatever it wants, that there's no constitution, that there's no limits on government power. This is fundamentally anti-American, and against everything that the entire country was founded on.
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library.
I'm not dancing around that fact at all. It's a government employee, the school librarian. Guess what, government employees are also subject to restrictions in how they act, as set by the constitution and other laws. When the "other laws" conflict with the constitution, like the one that's the subject of this post, the constitution wins.
Budgetary power is not the ultimate law of the land, it's the constitution. This also seems to have been forgotten in the past year.
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be?
It's the school librarian, who purchases books from their vendor lists. Depending on the school, the school board might vote to put a selection policy in place for the librarian. A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
That may be your preference as to how it should be done, and I see no problem with that. But if your approach is constitutional, so is Florida's. The librarian is an agent of the same government that is controlled by the legislature. If he can decide what books get in and which don't, so can the legislature.
> A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
I'm not saying I agree with it, just listing all of the methods of selection (that I'm aware of) for accuracy. Personally I prefer the school board approach, so that the community can assert local control over the process rather than politicians trying to score points with national parties.
Banning the books takes a stance against the books themselves. It's like an attack to the speech of the authors by the government. The government is openly opposing and calling them obscene.
Simply recommending or mandating that a particular set of books should be made available is very different, that's in line with the role they should play here, which is to make sure that a good selection of books for pedagogy is made available to students.
What's funny is, the "banned books" might have not even been available in any of the libraries to begin with. That shows the distinction.
And finally, even the set of books they make available, it should reasonably look like an effort was made to select them based on an objective criteria of offering the best education. If it starts to feel like it wasn't done so in good faith, it's leaning on propaganda. The librarian, school board, governor, this applies to all of them, it's not their own personal selection of what they want the kids to learn. It's a set of books of their good faith effort at objectively offering the material that benefits the kids education best.
For these kinds of matters we we tend to set community-approved guidelines and then allow the community to enforce them. This is because we trust our community to best uphold the standards of the community.
What's being done here is a top-down effort by certain political forces to insert themselves into this community-lead governance. They don't want the community to set local standards; they would rather those standards be dictated by the governor, or by some party-approved commission appointed by him.
> Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question
Agreed, but Republicans think this person should be the governor of the state, and Democrats think this person should be someone local from the community. Ironically, it's Republicans who are styled as the party of small government.
What you are saying makes sense, but I am only commenting on this in relation to freedom of speech. The government is the government whether it is local or state. So in terms of freedom of speech this is the same thing. In terms of the constitution, local governments are completely subject to the authority of the state government. There is no sharing of power like at the federal/state level.
I think it all has to do with impact. The point of the first amendment is so that the government cannot create policy to chill speech it doesn't like. That's why we all appreciate it.
A small branch library making autonomous choices about what books to store behind its walls with backing of the local community doesn't stand to chill speech across the state or nation, so the first amendment protection to free speech isn't really implicated. If some podunk town doesn't want to put books about trans kids on the shelves, that's not going to chill speech about trans people across the state or nation.
But when the governor sets policy that no libraries shall have books about trans people, then that's going to chill speech and the first amendment is implicated. Therefore it's unconstitutional, despite flowing from the same derived power source. That's my view anyway, I'm not a lawyer.
Community norms are not laws, and are much more flexible, have no government enforcement mechanisms, and don't have the weight of the legal system behind them.
These are very different things when it comes to freedom of speech!
That looks like the mother of all slippery slopes to me. I'd be very, very careful around the idea that some workers of the government don't have to abide by the constitution.
"I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to increase it to the size where it can go into your bathroom and drown you in the bathtub" - Grover Norquist, via translation from effective results.
> It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free.
The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't kosher is that taken to its extreme, the government could ban all books that aren't the King James Bible without explicitly adopting a pro-King James Bible policy. And if that's the only kind of book they stock in the library, then children who want to check out books are going to be reading literature with a certain kind of slant to it.
Replace the King James Bible with whatever you personally wouldn't want kids to be reading, e.g. the Quran or the Kama Sutra.
> The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't
But there isn't any other choice except to not have school libraries at all. The library is owned by the government and the books are paid for by government funds. Somebody has to decide what goes in the library and what doesn't. Who would that be other than the government?
The government can decide what to teach in its curriculum – it already does that. But the school library doesn't exist solely to deliver curriculum materials directly into the heads of students; it's one of the places where students are supposed to be able to explore ideas and concepts beyond their official lesson plans. The courts have ruled over and over that removing books from school libraries based on the ideas or viewpoints within is a First Amendment violation.
So to answer your question: the government can stock the libraries, or the school board can stock them, or the librarian can stock them. The courts have even said they can select books based on age-appropriateness, accuracy and educational value. But if anyone selecting books is making a judgement call about which books go in the libraries based on the ideas/viewpoints within the books, it's a violation of the students' First Amendment rights.
"The government" isn't necessary some monolithic centrally-commanded actor, like this vision the neofascists have been pushing. Rather, it's made up of individual people making decisions and being held accountable if those decisions are disagreeable. In this case the local librarians, who are accountable to city councils (etc), and thereby the communities they serve.
if the government is running a library it shouldn't be able to engage in view point discrimination. for example it shouldn't be able to remove all books by Democratic presidents while keeping books by Republican presidents or vice versa. the weird thing is the state via an accidental conspiracy between librarians has arguably been engaging in view point discrimination. even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
>the weird thing is the state via an accidental conspiracy between librarians has arguably been engaging in view point discrimination.
What conspiracy are you talking about? Who are the members of this "conspiracy"?
>even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
Huh? IIUC, Florida House Bill 1069 (you know, the law we're discussing) was passed by the Florida Legislature and signed intolaw by the Governor of Florida.
So yes, it was "legislated" and approved by the current executive in 2023.
Libraries are already engaging in viewpoint discrimination though. That’s what this change to policy is trying to correct (whether it is effective at that or not). Librarians and their activist organizations are choosing to disproportionately stock and feature books aligned to progressive ideology, to bolster their personal political goals. This isn’t an accidental conspiracy - it’s literally what the ALA pushes libraries and librarians to do. They just label it in ways that make it sound academic, like “critical pedagogy”.
A government cannot function if every person who doesn't like something gets veto on spending. Pick any topic and you'll be able to find half a dozen special interest groups against spending money on it.
There's a large population in this country that are emphatically not Christian, but i've never seen any organized undertaking or even a serious proposal to get rid of Bible story books from school or public libraries. Occasionally you see people submitting the Bible to a list of books to be reviewed for removal, usually in response to the establishment of such a list by law or a school district.
The amount of public money lost litigating the losing side of this lawsuit surely dwarfs the costs of the books involved? I say again, losing side, because this failed law was very clearly unconstitutional all along—the proponents went out of their way to transfer this taxpayer money to law firms, for a stunt.
I think it's not a stunt but a strategy. They probably always planned to bring this case all the way to beef supreme court, so that they can neuter the First Amendment entirely.
I think the problem with these laws is that they're too general. I think we can all agree that there are topics that should not be in elementary school libraries -- I don't think my 7 year old needs to be reading about oral sex for instance, regardless of the gender or sexuality of the participants. The real problem is the nature of the wording of "pornographic", which is poorly defined as "I know it when i see it", and stretched by disingenuous people with an agenda.
As a "Free Speech Absolutionist", I think as much material as possible should be in public libraries, including material that some people object to. I also think that school libraries should be curated to what is appropriate for the audience. The rub here is defining what is "appropriate". Silencing minority literature is bad. Also allowing my elementary school kids to check out "the turner diaries" is bad. There needs to be a balance.
Topics? No, I don't agree with that. Almost any subject can be treated in an age-appropriate manner.
A 7-year-old doesn't need to read about nearly any topic. Excluding any mention of all of those subjects from the school library leaves a nearly empty library.
For that heavy-handed of a response to be _legally mandated_ requires not just "no need", but some strong evidence of harm. Mentions of sex, oral or otherwise, doesn't actually have much evidence of harm. Certain treatments of it might -- but that's not what the law targets, nor can effectively target. It covers mere mentions or small bits of explicit language, even where that is necessary for the effect of the book. These can and do make parents profoundly uncomfortable, though, and that is worth taking into consideration.
I would think that the usual approach of professional librarians curating based on their own judgement, subject to some oversight from the local school boards to take into account these valid discomforts, but largely baseless fears would be a far better approach.
Let's take the opposite approach -- should schools stock back-issues of "Hustler" magazine? What about the "Anarchists Cookbook"? should we print it and put it on the shelf of a middle school?
You can say whatever you want, that doesn't make it a good idea to stock a school with it.
I'm asking about "absolutist" and it's meaning. You replied with something different, about which books should or should not be in a school library.
What does "absolutist" mean to you if you think that limits to what's in a library are a "good idea"?
Remember, I'm not talking about whether there should be limits or not, I'm asking about your self-description of "absolutist" and why absolutism still has fuzzy definitions of what is allowed or not.
You are allowed to say absolutely whatever you want, Write it down, and sell that material without fear of repercussion. I don't know how to be more clear about this.
You are both completely clear yet not understanding one another.
Let me try to break the deadlock: epistasis is getting at the fact that you can't call yourself an "absolutist" on free speech because your position is not absolute, but qualified -- all speech is free except speech you find problematic, which shall be regulated. That's pretty much everyone's definition of free speech, not an absolutist take.
An absolutist would say there should be absolutely no content-based restrictions on what is in the library regardless of the ages of the patrons. Hustler, Anarchist Cookbook, whatever. They might justify that by saying "free speech is so important we can't place any limits on it. If you as a parent find the idea your child might access speech you find distasteful, it's up to you to prevent your child from seeing it, not the library or the government".
> without fear of repercussion
Let's say you write a book about being a kid and finding it uncomfortable to grow up who you are. You're free to write it, free to talk about it, free to to sell it. But then the government adds your book to a list of books they deem "pedophilic and a danger to children."
Do you think you would be free from repercussions from the government publishing your book on the harmful to kids list? Can free speech thrive in such an environment?
The government banning your book from a school library is clearly a repercussion. That's what free speech has always been about, limit the ability of the government to enact repercussions.
What is "absolute" about this?
Do you want your own speech to be absolutely free of repercussions to you, be they government or not? Is that it? I really have trouble trying to put some sort of consistent framework in this, unless it's dividing the world into two classes of people: those who will not experience repercussions and those who will experience repercussions for their speech.
My (completely inadequate) test... would the people banning books in FL (or wherever else) apply those same rules to the Bible? If not, they're not interested in protecting the children from explicit, but rather forcing their religious ideology on the rest of us.
The point I'm trying to make is that panicing about book bans is not how you combat these bad-faith actors. It's defining rules to satiate their stated aims, and force them to bring their other motives to light, thus nullifying their arguments.
Aren't public schools part of government? This looks like a bizarre state of affairs to me if the government can't regulate speech from the government.
Say someone in the police department takes the public stance, as a police officer, that black people are subhuman degenerates, is any pushback from the government a first amendment issue? Note this is an ideological stance and doesn't involve any of their duties.
EDIT: I should have done better than to comment this without the very relevant input from the article. Better late than never I guess:
>A second key component of this ruling is on whether or not regulating books in school libraries constituted “government speech.” Officials for the state argued that they were empowered to make decisions about the materials in those collections because it constituted “government speech” and thus, was not subject to the First Amendment.
>Judge Mendoza disagreed.
>“*A blanket content-based prohibition on materials, rather than one based on individualized curation, hardly expresses any intentional government message at all.* Slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints,” he wrote. While parents have the right to object to “direct the upbringing and education of children,” the government cannot then “repackage their speech and pass it off as its own.”
Emphasis mine. This is frankly even weirder to me. If the government made a blanket, content-based prohibition of any material with a black character, that wouldn't express any intentional government message at all? Really?
Any individual decision, no. A systematic bias over many decisions could be a restriction on speech. (Edit: some systematic biases over the decisions are restrictions on speech that are unconstitutional, but not all.)
A law of the sort that was struck down is clearly an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
It seems more and more that the elephant in the room here is that schools are part of government, but they overwhelmingly lean the opposite side of the administration and they want to exercise their speech through their positions, but the government doesn't want to allow that.
Private individuals would of course enjoy first amendment protections on speech, but if you are government you don't get your speech restricted by government, that's just government. You can't eat your cake and have it too.
Yes but we're talking about books for school libraries. IMO you're still restricting kids' freedoms by forcing them to pay for something that was previously free. Especially impoverished and/or neglected kids.
This story doesn’t have anything to do with free speech, because it isn’t a book ban. It’s about what public libraries spend money on and put on their shelves. You can still buy these books yourself, so clearly they aren’t banned or censored. Why can’t the state decide what to keep in libraries they fund?
Let’s not pretend the default situation is uncensored. Librarians are mostly politically skewed to the left, as is their organization (ALA). Walk into libraries in most cities and you’ll find books on the main shelves pushing political ideas from one side, associated with movements like DEI, BLM, LGBTQ, etc. But you won’t find the other side on those shelves.
And that’s the issue. Public money is being used by activist librarians, who practice “critical librarianship”, to basically censor the other side. Changes to public libraries are intended to correct that bias.
Don't forget the story in Judges where a Hebrew assasin stabs an obese Canaanite king in the gut and he shits himself but his guards outside the room were already used to him shitting himself so ignored the smell.
Judges 19–21. The account of the Levite and his concubine:
A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim goes to retrieve his concubine from her father’s house in Bethlehem.
On their return journey, they stop for the night in Gibeah, a Benjamite town.
The townsmen surround the house, demanding to “know” the man (sexual violence implied, similar to Genesis 19 with Lot).
The host refuses and offers his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead.
The mob abuses the concubine all night; she collapses at the doorway and dies by morning.
The Levite tells her to get up, sees she’s dead, then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel to rally the tribes against Benjamin.
These are okay, because it's not explicit and in your face. "unto her" is such outdated language that it is rather tame by modern standards. Actual reasoning I've been told by people that support banning of books.
Also, anytime you are to the point of asking if the words from the bible are 'ok', you've already lost the argument with the person you are talking to. The bible is infallible, so of course it is okay. You cannot use it as evidence against their point. Ever. It is a waste of breath on your part.
Kite Runner and the Handmaids Tale talk about child sexual abuse. I'm not condoning the ban, just pointing out that these two are not the same thing.
Worth adding: Making the Bible available to common folk was also hotly contested at the time. The Puritans lost that fight and I suspect they will eventually lose this one too.
I don't think the bible is in public school libraries -- if it is (as historical literature), it's probably unconstitutional to teach from it or promote it.
> This is the key to everything in the US right now I feel. Laws exist, but they're not being enforced or are difficult to enforce legally.
My hope is that this situation wakes Americans up to the fact that laws were always this way. I'm hoping this breaks the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice. In reality the legal system of the USA is enforced at the whim of incredibly biased cops, judges, and politicians. I really think a day in a county courthouse should be a requirement for all American kids so they can see just how arbitrarily sentencing is applied or how whether someone ends up in trial at all can hinge on whether a judge agrees or disagrees there was probable cause, and the judge will do like 20 of these hearings one after another.
Not to mention the fact that any black American can tell you that there's two justice systems in the USA: the one for white people, and the one for everyone else. Hence why so many black kids can tell you about when their parents gave them "The Talk," and no, it's not the birds and bees one, it's the one about how your white friends can get up to mischief that you can't and there's nothing you can do about it so don't bother getting mad about it, just keep your head down and never backtalk the cops.
I think it really matters how you talk bad. Telling the police ACAB won't fly anywhere. Asking them to inform you about the law (which you think is different than there interpretation of it), might be a start of a conversation. They are also just humans who do their job and want to be treated nicely like everyone else.
> I think it really matters how you talk bad. Telling the police ACAB won't fly anywhere. Asking them to inform you about the law (which you think is different than there interpretation of it), might be a start of a conversation. They are also just humans who do their job and want to be treated nicely like everyone else.
One of the goals of ACAB folks is to help people understand that this isn't true. Yes, police are humans, but no, you can't reason with them. You as an individual aren't going to overcome the might of the state's propagandizing and training of them to treat you like a potential threat to their life, or at best, a criminal.
Modern police training revolves heavily around hyper paranoia around how any interaction could lead to their sudden death. For whatever reason, the apparatus has chosen to create an army of armed, nervous, below-a-defined-level IQ thugs.
I personally believe all humans deserve a minimum of respect, but ACAB isn't just a statement of ideology, it's a warning: All bears are hungry, all cops are bastards. You wouldn't try to reason with a bear, you wouldn't make sudden movements around a bear, nor should you do that with a cop. With a cop you should simply say nothing other than wanting to maintain your 5th amendment right to remain silent, and then try to leave an interaction with them or wait for them to take you to jail. ACAB is a warning against attempting for any other outcome, because no other outcome is statistically probable enough to justify taking a risk to achieve.
The moment a cop engages with you, you are dealing with a potentially hungry bear.
So it isn't just an insult, it is a propaganda to treat the representation of your fellow citizens like wild animals, which will cause harm for the believers of the propaganda. That is even more concerning than the literal meaning I took it to mean.
I basically disagree with you on all fronts there. You essentially wage civil war. "You know, those guys that come when you are in a live threatening situation (fire, assault), those guys who are regulating your daily activity so that not too much people die by doing dangerous and stupid stuff (speed limit penalties, vehicle checks), those who tell your 'corporate slave master' that you also have rights (workers rights, minimal wage, cartel breakup), yeah they are aliens, enemies. They are merely wild animals not really humans at all, so you can treat them like shit. When they are friendly, don't trust them, don't trust you eyes. When they will fight back, now you see how they truly are."
Seriously how can you expect such a society to work? No wonder when you don't have pleasant police encounters. You are actively sabotaging your society. How can you expect it to stay peaceful with your behaviour?
So today I learned that the social struggles of the United States are not solely due to politicians and corruption. You guys have way bigger issues there. I can only hope that this is a minority opinion, otherwise civil war will be inevitable.
> it is a propaganda to treat the representation of your fellow citizens like wild animals
Cops treat Americans like wild animals. I'm not sure how this is news to someone in 2025, when we've had countless stories of police brutality come out and had breaking stories about e.g. the California county sheriff department gangs.
I'm warning people about this reality that cops are not what the copaganda would lead us to believe in elementary school. "Just don't resist," how about I send you a video of a cop gleefully pepper spraying not violent protesters sitting on the ground? Shooting into a house during a no knock raid on the wrong house and murdering a woman in her bed? Shooting a man with a rifle as he crawls towards them per their screamed contradictory orders? Shooting blindly into a residential neighborhood because an acorn fell on a squad car?
> You know, those guys that come when you are in a live threatening situation (fire, assault), those guys who are regulating your daily activity so that not too much people die by doing dangerous and stupid stuff (speed limit penalties, vehicle checks), those who tell your 'corporate slave master' that you also have rights (workers rights, minimal wage, cartel breakup),
Please, no. I checked your post history, you are a smart and informed individual, this gap in your knowledge could be resolved with a single afternoon of Wikipedia. Cops don't save people from fires, they arrest firemen that hurt their fragile egos. Cops don't enforce labor protections, they violently break up strikes. Cops don't save you from assault, they assault you for the crime of recording them, or they watch you get stabbed to death from the other side of a subway carriage door. They don't save you from active shooters, they prevent you from entering the school to rescue your child while they stand around terrified, waiting for the shooter to kill himself.
Treat them like shit, my foot. America's most well funded gang deserves my respect? The government already gives them every toy they ask for so they can unleash their depraved need for violence on unarmed people. The Austin Texas cops have a honest to God APC.
> Seriously how can you expect such a society to work?
I just don't want armed, well funded gangs running amok with no accountability, robbing people blind and beating them with no recourse. That's all. Too much to ask? Little bit of law and order and civility? Cops escalate every situation they arrive at.
Yes truly horrendous. I wonder how that could become that worse. It sounds like you got the repressive state police earlier than the commanding dictator.
> I'm not sure how this is news to someone in 2025.
I have of course heard about that. However for me the USA is a "far"-away country somewhat about the ocean(, that still affects me negatively).
As anything reported I expect this to be somewhat exaggerated. Surely not every policeman will be like that. I would expect them to be a very "vocal" (/active) minority.
I just don't see how your advice helps the victims here. When you encounter that gang, you basically have already lost? When you fight back won't you just bring the state against you, so that also the non-gang policeman are against you? And on the (rare?) chance that you meet a decent policeman, you will also turn him against you, which will make the current encounter unpleasant for both of you, might expose you to the "gang" and also serves as a justification for their barbaric behaviour.
> I checked your post history, you are a smart and informed individual
Thank you very much. :-)
> this gap in your knowledge
This "gap in my knowledge" is mostly me failing to see some idiotic US men with guns as the pinnacle of a policeman.
> I just don't want armed, well funded gangs running amok with no accountability, robbing people blind and beating them with no recourse. That's all. Too much to ask?
Yes and no. No, I'm with you on that wish; yes, because the majority of people live not in a first-world country. Sadly this also (now?) applies also to the US-citizens.
I seriously think your only chance at improving the situation is becoming a policeman. Ideally the judicative would hold them accountable, but this is messed up in your country as well. Being a policeman protects you from the fate and also lets you be a better civil servant.
Yes, my warning is that once you're interacting with a cop in the USA, you're in a hopeless situation, because this is sound advice and the one least likely to lead to your death, and also most likely to, after you go to jail, keep you out of jail on a bogus conviction. Plead the 5th and wait.
The nicest cop is indistinguishable from the one leveraging his training to seem nice to get any info out of you he can use for probable cause. He gets you to joke around, talks about how he used to smoke weed in college, didn't you as well? You don't answer, he takes that as tacit admission (unless you verbally plead the 5th, silence is admissable), now he has predisposition to drug use, probable cause to search, oops he's found "shake" in your car (fuzzy leftover bits of weed, I've seen cops rip up a bit of carpet and call it shake first hand), now you're spending the weekend in jail because it's Friday and he'll fail to finish your paperwork before 5.
Your suggestion to try to fix it from the inside comes from a good place but a naive one, you say you aren't American so I'll share with you what happens to "good" American cops.
Or look up Sean Gannon or Joe Crystal. Joe was fired for reporting an incident of police brutality. Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.
I thought about filling this post with cases. I could probably find 50 more, I've a large collection over the years.
The point is, the system selects for bad cops. To us, a good cop reports abuse and doesn't do it. That good cop makes less arrests. A bad cop is abusive and lies. That's the opposite of what the system selects for. A good cop follows orders and meets their arrest quotas, a bad cop blows the whistle and empathizes with the people on their beat.
Because of this fact you are safe to assume every cop you encounter is a bad one.
We didn't arrive at abolition out of nowhere. The policing in America is completely rotten from top to bottom. It works in some other countries that have much better policies and regulations. We arrived at abolition because the only cops left are the ones that would wiggle their way around such regulations. It needs to be completely cleaned out in the USA.
It seams we have a bit of different images in mind, what it means to treat someone nicely and maybe have a pleasant conversation.
Especially when you know how dangerous they can be, you shouldn't treat them as brutal animals. When you give them the opportunity to follow orders and still be seen as loyal to the people and the constitution, why shouldn't they take that opportunity?
Of-course you wouldn't say anything compromising, that would be really dumb. But why would you talk to a policeman about anything personal? You can have a conversation about politics, the economy global/nation/local, tax-policy, etc. . You can talk about their uniform, their new car, (because you are in HN) their encounters with software, the recent trend in UI. You can talk about the road quality, the new highway, where he thinks should be a new highway, what he thinks about public infrastructure, public transport (when that exists), the new park in town, the littering of the park in town. You can rant about the idiots going over the speed limit, the idiots parking everywhere, those modifying their cars, about issues with water, electricity, garbage disposal, regulatory overreach, those idiots in the EU, the idiots in near and far East, the idiots in Africa.
When a policeman jokes about talking drugs, I would expect you to deflect and tell him that taking drugs is forbidden, or how you held a lecture about the effects of drugs in school, how you always avoided the regions were it smells so bad. Nothing of that must be true.
I'm sure you can show me hundreds of cases, when there are millions of policeman it still wouldn't show that a majority of policeman is corrupt and commits crimes.
> Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.
I can't really wrap my mind about that, because in my experience a superior that thinks a rape here and there is a good thing, still will kick subordinates out, to save his own reputation.
You are lucky, you must live in a nice country with normal laws and normal cops. I can't imagine any other reason why you'd just offer this up... Even an American with a thin blue line flag on their house would warn against talking politics with a cop. Check out the videos of the statsi troops going door to door in DC, fawning to locals about how they're there on trump's orders to "keep them safe." Armed to the teeth. You think it's a good idea to try to have a polite political conversation with men like that? You are blessed! For your own safety, never come to America, stay in peace and comfort elsewhere, I genuinely fear how your kind hearted openness will land you into awful trouble in the USA.
If you do come, enjoy a day sitting in a courtroom. Watch how the simplest, most meaningless conversation with a cop is read out by the court in a toneless transcript without any context and how a judge will grant probable cause on it, or consider it in sentencing to their detriment.
Bon homanie about the slow construction of a local freeway? In court that's lack of attachment and local loyalty, disaffected personality, antisocial tendencies.
Complaints about the EU? General disrespect of authority, likelihood to stir up trouble, lack of respect for law and order.
> I'm sure you can show me hundreds of cases, when there are millions of policeman it still wouldn't show that a majority of policeman is corrupt and commits crimes.
The most likely outcome of an encounter with a bear is it runs away. Sometimes though, it's lost its discomfort around humans, is rabid, or just hungry enough to give it a shot. You should treat every bear like that bear. So too for the police. If the police want to be liked and treated with respect, they can become firemen instead. There's no song called "fuck the fire department."
> I can't really wrap my mind about that, because in my experience a superior that thinks a rape here and there is a good thing, still will kick subordinates out, to save his own reputation.
Untold such cases. It doesn't have to be logical to you, police departments in the USA reject candidates that are too smart.
That's a notion I have read several times now on HN by seemingly US Americans. While it might or might not be true that your judicial system has always worked like that, when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it. No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.
> the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice
That is NOT a myth. That is what it is supposed to be.
When you start to say "yeah, that's just how it always has been", that IS when radical ideologies start to rise.
How public opinion treats thinks that is how they tend to become. That is true with humans and that is true with systems. I heard it is quite less regulated to become a police man and there are quite a lot of black police mans* already. I heard you have a system where there is a jury that can overrule the judge. Why isn't there a massive influx of black/other-wise-suppressed people into the judicial or executive branch?
> when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it
I strongly disagree.
> No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.
I believe we have enough evidence now to indicate that it is in fact normal.
Americans believe their constitution is written about this - aggregation of power inevitably leading to tyranny, thus such aggregations must be prevented. The contradiction is believing a bureaucratized aggregation of power (the United States government or individual state governments) would function as an effective regulation. We have 250 years of evidence now that it does not. 250 years, and a significant portion of the time a large portion of the population was enslaved. Half the time, more than half the population couldn't even vote. In living memory, portions of the population were marched into concentration camps. Actually, that's happening again. 250 years and the largest per capita prison population.
The experiment was successful - now we know these systems don't work.
Time to trust the American instinct's true origins, in an enlightenment triggered by Western confrontation with indigenous American ideology, best described as "anarchism." Most values Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding can be traced back to this root of American history, when colonists were intermingling with indigenous Americans.
> aggregation of power inevitably leading to tyranny, thus such aggregations must be prevented
Yeah true, aggregation of power makes that easier, bureaucracy makes it still possible, in fact large bureaucracy makes it easier to oppress people by a majority who doesn't want oppression, because everyone is "just doing it's job". That's how Nazi Germany operated.
> We have 250 years of evidence
So you had 250 years to address this and are still complaining? /s
> In living memory, portions of the population were marched into concentration camps.
Why doesn't this lead to a social stigma against it and strong opposition against it? As an outsider it seams more like a large majority doesn't have this in memory at all.
Does the whole society has stockholm syndrome?
> The experiment was successful - now we know these systems don't work.
Now you know YOUR system doesn't work. The same you already knew when you rejected the idea that your state is just (Did you?). In fact the United States of America are not the only existing society.
> Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding
So you think:
- I am not endorsing the current system.
- The current (judical) system is moral.
- The current system does not work and did not for 250 years.
- The core values (constitution) are against tyranny.
- The institutions are upholding the core values.
- The core values being uphold is wrong.
What are you arguing for? Your whole country has some cognitive dissonance (from an outsider view). But it fits that a majority seams to claim they are and want to be apolitical, yet isn't happy with the current state or actively distrust it. Or is the intersection of these circles empty?
I'm an anarchist. I'm completely opposed to the current judicial system in the USA. Im not quite clear what I can change about my previous message to make that more clear but perhaps with this message my previous can be ready in the correct light.
Normal doesn't mean good... Wage slavery and people killing themselves to make iphones is also normal.
Yeah we will disagree on that really much, but I only find that tangentially to my point here, except if you think that this ideas is only promoted by anarchists. When this attitude is only promoted by the rare anarchist, then I find that somewhat "okish". My concern is when that attitude becomes commonplace.
> Normal doesn't mean good.
A Norm is a subjective society-wide agreed moral stance. What you seam to mean is what I would expect to be called common.
That's basically my point treating it normal means endorsing it.
> I'm completely opposed to the current judicial system in the USA.
Yet this will also be the judicial system of next year. These things seem to stay constant even across civil wars and revolutions.
That's why I think you should think of it as THE judicial system. It will be also the judicative of your aspired state (unless you disagree that there needs to be a judicative), if you want it to act differently you need to expect it to act differently, while of course still not being surprised when it doesn't.
Somebody on HN recently claimed, that you can't treat your child as a "X" and expect it to not become "X". I think that applies also the state branches.
When you give up and say it has always been like this, then you endorse the current regime.
---
Oh, and I parsed
> Most values Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding
as
(Most values Americans falsely believe) (their institutions are upholding)
instead of
Most values Americans (falsely believe) their institutions are upholding
> Yet this will also be the judicial system of next year. These things seem to stay constant even across civil wars and revolutions.
That's a shame then, because that means we anarchists are correct that it is a lost cause and must be completely dismantled, a process which will probably result in short term suffering for some.
I'm not sure where belief comes into it. The fact is that the judicial system is wildly inconsistent and arbitrary in the USA. That Americans trust it and anarchists (and other leftists) don't just means many people are ignorant of reality. Pursuing further ignorance seems the wrong strategy. Ostrich, head in sand.
Expectations are nothing without action. Unless people acknowledge the reality that the judicial system is unsalvageable, they'll just accept it for what it is.
Or if you want to be a liberal democrat about it (in the actual meaning of those words, not the Americanized versions), you still need to be aware of the system's rot to cut it out. I don't mind if libs take a crack at fixing it but historically they reallllllly prefer not to.
The bible is a crucial piece of literature reference. Pretty much every literary piece written before the middle of the 20th century assumed that their reader was also intimately familiar with the bible.
For example, a writer could call a woman a "Jezebel" without any expository context, assuming that the reader would know what that meant.
Thus the bible should be in every high school and higher education library.
It should be commonly taught as a work of literature. Ideally the KJV which has largely fallen out of favour (except with certain groups) as a religious translation because more recent translations are so much better (advances in scholarship, more discoveries of early manuscripts...) but which is beautiful as a work.
It’s a sign of the times that the powers that be might make KJV, a labour of love and the apple of the author’s eye, come forth to fight the good fight and rake in some filthy lucre!
By the skin of their teeth, these wolves in sheep’s clothing’s days must be numbered, but if they keep on the straight and narrow, live by the sword, and go the extra mile, then lo and behold the first shall be last and every salt of the earth will be made a scapegoat from here to the ends of the earth!
after KJV, possibly with thanks to Bill (Shakespeare) also.
any Western literary piece. for translated novels from China you might want some other foundational texts on hand, or the Quran to complement Persian literature, or etc
But I don't see any reason a library can't have various books from antiquity, for reference at least. Probably multiple editions or translations of each too.
Without the bible, people still have dictionaries if they don't understand words or references. Or they could use Google. I don't see why some books would be "too crucial" not to ban in a law banning books intended to protect kids.
If anything, I find it easier to defend a ban on religious books in (public) schools.
> The bible is a crucial piece of literature reference.
We no longer live in the middle of the 20th century. Based on your bandwagon logic, we should also require the Quran, Torah, Shruti, Smriti, The Book of Mormon and associated volumes, the apocrypha, Watchhouse volumes from JWs, NIV, NRSV-CE, The Good Book [0], Buddhist texts, Holy Piby.
No. We don't need that. This is a misapplication of Chesteron's Fence to the late 18th century US culture. We all survived the 1950s to now and culture has, dramatically and mostly for the better, evolved.
The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature. Thus, while I think they should certainly be available in school libraries as they are important works, they need not be required reading.
On the other hand, in different areas with different cultural traditions, each of those books should be required reading as they were central to their literary tradition. And, one assumes, are.
To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny reality. And honestly, it mystifies me why so many seem to want to be ignorant of their own cultural roots.
> The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature.
Incorrect.
> To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny [my] reality
FTFY, otherwise an ignorant and frankly naive take. There are dozens to hundreds of cultures that have influenced and rooted American culture, and you'd do kindly to remember that:
- The American Southwest is __heavily__ influenced by Spain and Mexican culture
- Louisiana is __heavily__ influenced by French and African culture
- Oklahoma, Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, much of New England, and many others are __heavily__ influenced by Native American culture (Way down on the Chatahoochee, anyone?)
- The Black belt and most of cities are __heavily__ influenced and rooted in the reformation of Black culture after being ripped out of their homelands by slavery
- Blues, Rock, and Jazz all stem from African
- What you call "European" is probably English (so, wrong) or a confusing and tangled mess of different cultures that get grouped as "European/Western" and assumed to be one strand of "Christian" or another (I note you missed the Torah being listed, Catholic scripture being listed, etc.).
I strongly, strongly recommend that, if you are a citizen of the US, that you take pride in your own culture and learn where it _actually_ sources from -- of which you clearly care, given that you have chosen to make it _the_ supporting argument for why book bannings are okay and why an irrelevant text should be standard, non-optional reading in high school. The roots matter much less than what the culture currently is.
What's the secular reading of "You shall have no other gods before me" ? What?
I can understand that Christmas has mutated into a family reunion, a time for gathering with loved ones etc, even Santa Claus, name and all, has turned into the figure that brings presents, but even if I can understand "You shall not murder" as a secular rule, the ten commandments as a whole are really hard to take as such no?
They are common to all Abrahamic religions, in spirit if not word-for-word. Hinduism also has its 5 principles and 10 disciplines which are broadly similar.
Perhaps "secular" is not the best description, but for anyone faithful to any of the major religions, these are going to be broadly shared principles, in addition to being the basis for most of our laws and social norms regarding individual behavior (don't kill, don't steal, etc.)
It's kind of like having "In God We Trust" printed on our currency. It's not a specific (i.e. Christian) God, at least that is the justification, and it's not seen as "respecting an establishment of religion" in the Constitutional sense.
The ten commandments are definitely not secular, but it is funny how up until the 1950s christmas was deemed a pagan religious holiday and was even listed this way in encyclopedias from that time. Then suddenly, it was listed as a christian holiday, except there is no reference about it in the bible with new testament references specifying to not keep that holiday. How these can be deemed the same is beyond rational thinking.
> but it is funny how up until the 1950s christmas was deemed a pagan religious holiday and was even listed this way in encyclopedias from that time
Deemed by whom and in what encyclopedias? There are certainly religious groups who are historically recent offshoots of Western Christianity that viewed it that way in the 1950s, but the same groups do so today, nothing substantial has changed on that front since the 1950s. For the rest of Christianity, well, it was adopted as a Christian feast in the 4th century and has been treated as one since pretty consistently by most of Christianity. Certainly so in the largest branches of Christian in the US in the 1950s, which constituted between them the great majority of the population.
Christian leaders realized they're losing a fight against folk traditions and went into damage control mode. Other "Christian" special dates were similarly specifically picked to match an older special date.
This is one of the stupidest things I've read all year, and I fear that we're still only in August. I really have no words. They're by definition a set of religious directives from a claimed god.
You mean like the new Texas state law going into effect Sept 1 that says each class room must display the ten commandments and specifies the minimum size of the display would be unconstitutional. Also, unconstitutional by what definition? I'm guessing the current SCOTUS would not agree with your assessment.
My public school library had several Bible versions, a couple Quran versions, and probably some Buddhist and Hindu texts of interest, though I didn't look for them. Why shouldn't they have these in the library?
Surely not, while it would be unconstitutional to present it as the correct religious view it is totally fine to teach it as part of a general literary overview. It’s been far too important to Western literature to omit entirely.
from the article:
>Since its passage in 2023, Florida schools have removed hundreds of books under House Bill 1069 (HB 1069). HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
Lol, of course the Bible is always OK, but you can find much worse.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. – Genesis 19:33–36.
And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my sister. And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly. And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee. Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her. – 2 Samuel 13:11–14
Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. - Isaiah 13:16.
And when her sister Aholibah saw this, she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she, and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms. She doted upon the Assyrians her neighbours, captains and rulers clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men. Then I saw that she was defiled, that they took both one way, And that she increased her whoredoms: for when she saw men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with vermilion, Girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity: And as soon as she saw them with her eyes, she doted upon them, and sent messengers unto them into Chaldea. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them. So she discovered her whoredoms, and discovered her nakedness: then my mind was alienated from her, like as my mind was alienated from her sister. Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth. - Ezekiel 23:11-21
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. – Numbers 31:18
It's OK because there's no gay stuff. Just good old fashioned heterosexual rape and incest, as God intended.
“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.”
Rapin' is ok if she doesn't belong to someone else (theft) and you have $50. Also HIS penalty is that HE has to marry HER.
So for LOT. Is it ok if the daughters initiate it? What is the lessen here? Is it trying to make some point about, better to keep the family going if there aren't any other men around?
No, it does not endorse it, mere recounts it. Claiming it is endorsing incest is a bit like saying Agatha Christie endorses murder.
There does not seem to be a clear interpretation of this AFAIK. A lot of the other bits of Genesis have clear messages (e.g. the creation myth, the near sacrifice of Isaac, etc.) but not all necessarily. It might be that there were no other men and they were desperate for children.
Endorsing or not doesn't matter if it's still "sexual content".
Re-quoting:
> Since its passage in 2023, Florida schools have removed hundreds of books under House Bill 1069 (HB 1069). HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
No, it's not ok. Contextually the daughters believe the world just ended because Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed so they think they need to re-seed the world, which one might consider a justification, but the etiological purpose is to describe the origin of the Moabites and the Ammonites, who are the historical enemies of Israel, and is supposed to show how these two enemy tribes have a shameful beginning (incest). So, it's bad what they did and ew look how gross the Moabites and Ammonites are.
For real. For Lot, was wondering about if there was supposed to be some message here.
Others noted. It was more anti-propaganda. Lot was part of adversaries of Israel so this was painting them in a bad light. Just funny how we are still reading this holy book, and here is really some very local, very time specific propaganda that we are still reading.
Well... it is nice to get some good news on this front but I can't shake that this is likely short lived given the federal government right now...
There is less and less any reason for them to try to hide their true intentions and can just be more open with their blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc.
Side note: was quite surprised to see a reference to Cloud Atlas. While not surprised given the entire point of that book, it makes me wonder how much these people are actually reading these books and what that looks like.
Well it’s not over yet, this will likely go through many rounds of back and forth appeals since it’s not clear what obligation Florida has to the public in policing content it purchases. It’s not as if they banned you from buying the books, after all.
Seems like they could rely on the librarian to make decisions, then if there's a problem have the administration deal with it, and escalate as normal...
Rather than big government via vague laws that allow random people to control everything in schools.
They could do that. That would be an effective way to protect children while also respecting the children's First Amendment rights. Instead, well...
"Foreseeable consequences are intended consequences."
Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools. One would argue at least banning (often recently written) books with adult content/porn makes sense, saying a classic is "culturally insensitive" and banning it is just another word for political indoctrination
>Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools
Source? I was an adult alive 20 years ago, that wasn't a thing.
> Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library
We already don't do this though, between state laws, federal laws, and the department of education. I am fine getting rid of the department of education though since it seems you're opposed to it too.
And it was 20 years ago, you'd have to look up the specific policies. The point is acting like this is the first time people have tried banning books from young children in school is ignorant of all recent history
Making a claim and supporting it by effectively saying "go look it up yourself" is hardly compelling. It might be accurate, or perhaps not incorrect but misleading.
This smells a lot like the old "both sides do bad stuff" argument, which often gets over applied to pretend there is no difference in magnitude of the egregiousness when two sides do similar bad stuff.
And even if we did it would still go to shit because "educators" is not an representative cross section of the population and their choices would be ideologically skewed and/or subject to industry circle jerks and fads.
Generally institutions have more Democrats serving in them (I suppose it’s a culture fit thing) so it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
> it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
But issuing organizational memos is not illegal, whereas passing explicit laws is banned by the Constitution. Probably because one is a really bad idea that chills free speech for the whole nation, while the other is just how any community organization operates.
Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.
It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.
> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"
And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.
It seems like every side wants to ban content nowadays. It’s really quite sad. One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.
With these "both sides" arguments why is it always "heres thing one, which is definitely happening and has been for decades. And here's thing two, which could hypothetically happen but never has and almost certainly never will"
I mean, it's absurd. It feels like a psyop. Is this a targeted propaganda campaign?
Stop trying to both sides. I see crazed MAGAs banning books here and I would bet if we look at numbers the crazies censor at least an order of magnitude more than whatever you're referencing. I can't think of an example of books being banned by non rightwingers, but will look into it now to learn.
I feel like there are a lot of conservatives who are unaware about what sex and gender actually are, and rather than looking for understanding they prefer to mock because they are lazy and chose the easy route rather than understanding other people.
Real rough to have a society when one side just wants to openly mock the other.
You're making the same sort of mistake I make in situations like this. You assume they're good people because you're a decent person. You project that onto them. You don't consider they actually are bigots, and lacking curiosity :)
I mean, if there really was a book that was too harmful to allow at all and it was successfully banned, we likely wouldn't know about it at this point.
I am extremely against book banning, but the possibility of some time in history where they really needed to disallow access to a book seems at least _possible_.
Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.
It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.
It actually was forbidden in other countries. But that's not the point. I do not consider banning this particular book bad, nor on the wrong side of history. Do you?
Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.
Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.
The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.
I'm surprised at the books mentioned in the article. While potentially inappropriate for elementary aged children are probably more than okay for teens and high school aged. The restrictions themselves without context, review requirements or any rigorous standards is likely excessive.
That said, there are definitely examples of books that have been put into school libraries that can be considered obscene, that you can't post screenshots of on Facebook or other social media platforms, or quote or otherwise read into a school board or city council meeting. Such as graphically depicting a minor student giving fellatio to a teacher. That are wholly inappropriate in any school setting.
And that isn't to restrict a parent who decides to allow their child access to this kind of material, if deemed mature enough to handle it. Only in that it doesn't belong in a public or school library. They simply aren't meant for children. Aside, I'm even open to an "adult" section of libraries that do offer mature content access/storage for adults, such as Playboy, which has a history of decent journalism.
i was a voracious reader as a child (and still largely am) and can’t remember ever touching a school library (most of the books stocked were stupid). wonder if this is different in Florida
There is a high likelihood this ruling gets overturned. The title and the article use the term “book ban” but gloss over what’s actually happening which is legally significant:
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book
Florida cannot ban private libraries from stocking books with sexual content. But librarians are government employees buying books and maintaining libraries with government money. The state can direct its employees what kinds of books to make available for the same reason any private entity can do so.
This might be different if libraries were neutral venues for authors to come present about their books. In that case you might have a case about viewpoint discrimination. But the first amendment can’t force the government to buy particular books and make them available to the public.
> Florida cannot ban private libraries from stocking books with sexual content.
From the statute, "As used in this subsection, the term “school property” means the grounds or facility of any kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, junior high school, or secondary school, whether public or nonpublic."
This isn't an unlimited loophole in the constitution (at least not so far).
As the article you link to points out, "It is not always clear when the government is speaking for itself instead of unconstitutionally restricting others’ speech...The Supreme Court has not yet provided a clear standard for this type of case."
Also, "...even though government speech is not regulated by the Free Speech Clause, it is still subject to the Establishment Clause."
No that’s not how the first amendment works. You’re thinking of situations where the government offers a platform to the public and can only impose viewpoint-neutral restrictions on access to the public forum. So the government couldn’t operate a government-owned sales platform for books and discriminate based on viewpoint.
I assumed by “First Amendment” you were talking about the Free Speech clause, since that’s what the article is about.
Government speech of course remains subject to other constitutional provisions. But the standards for these provisions are quite different. Your hypothetical raises the possibility of an Establishment Clause violation. But to prove that, it’s not enough to show that the government is discriminating as to view point. It has to be enough to amount to an establishment of religion.
And of course the Free Speech Clause covers basically any subject, while other constitutional provisions are much narrower. For example, a government-run book selling platform probably couldn’t exclude people from trading books on Brutalist architecture. But a school library could have such a policy.
This is not just a few rogue FL citizens trying to ban books. This is spearheaded by the Florida government itself. The education commissioner is Anastasios Kamoutsas, appointed by DeSantis. Given that a culture war is a great way to market yourself to voters, expect appeals.
Maybe, but at the same time there is a serious issue with adult/sexual content in fictional books with no real historical or scientific value. Saying kids have to have access to books about how to perform bj's is a losing argument. If a parent wants their kid to have access to such books they should buy them themselves (although I'd like to think CPS would give them a ring), and we shouldn't conflate what's obscene for an 6 year old to what's obscene for a 30 year old
> Saying kids have to have access to books about how to perform bj's is a losing argument.
This isn't the argument, which is why it didn't lose. The argument is that the law was too broad and banned books that have long been considered to have great literary value. Did you see the list of books that have been banned as a result of this bill in the article? The bill does not allow consideration of literary value (a.k.a. the rest of the book, and its role in history), it only considers some sexual content in the book in isolation. It also applied to the entire school system, these books were being banned from high school libraries.
Ignore the insanity of banning books for a second. What about the Victorian-era insanity of preventing children from being exposed to the mere concept of sex and labeling it 'obscenity'?
On one hand we want kids to learn about consent, what 'normal sex' is like and all that, but simultaneously there is this idiotic push to prevent them from encountering any of it until they are 18. If we don't want kids to see bad porn, we need to ensure that there is lots of good porn available, and not just some boring sex ed bullshit. I mean actual benign everyday sex that kids can safely watch and learn from because otherwise they will never see it anywhere else (it's not like they regularly watch their parents or other people do it).
You have to be incredibly regressive to think 18 is somehow a good cutoff for this.
What I've come to realize (despite avoiding such a negative conclusion) is that the dominant culture's experience with sex seems to be mostly limited to that which includes problematic power dynamics (e.g. mainstream porn, captive housewives as an ideal). They do not have a solid concept of consent. Sex is shameful to them because their concept of sex is, literally, shameful and exploitation is at the core of it.
Concrete and overt examples being unable to imagine someone being sexually liberated, a woman, and a feminist all at the same time (they see sex as inherently demeaning to women), or seeing male sexual success on a "nice guy virgin" (unsuccessful through insufficient exploitation) or "man-slut womanizer" (success through excessive exploitation) spectrum. (Even the word "womanizer" bakes this assumption in, to be made a woman, woman-ized, is to be exploited?)
It appears in popular discourse around trans individuals (choosing to present as a woman means you must have a sexual fantasy about being exploited, we can't expose that idea to children). Around homosexuality (so which one of you is the exploitative one). And around polyamory (you must have a cuckold kink because nobody would let someone exploit their partner otherwise).
But this same dynamic also appears in a more subtle form in daily interactions in the culture and shuts down sexual topics or behavior. It's somewhat analogous to the situation of shushing a white toddler that points out the race of a non-white person because it's "rude" - you've made it apparent that you think non-whiteness is something inherently uncomfortable for a non-white person to have pointed out so you try to "spare" them this.
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
... So, that would be approximately every great work of literature, every important religious text... I mean, what does this leave? This seems _incredibly_ broad; even when censorship of books for obscenity was routine, there was pretty much always a getout for "yeah, but it's Proper Serious Literature".
Like, what books are on the curriculum for English students in Florida? Just the Very Hungry Caterpillar?
> It also allowed parents or county residents to raise objections to material, which then would need to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable until the book was formally reviewed.
Again, wtf? Surely this would allow anyone sufficiently motivated to just run a DOS attack.
Very few people that I talk to are truly in favor of free speech as a principle. They are either in favor of free speech in cases like this, where christians are banning books that they like, and not in favor when it’s about political correctness (misgendering, banning words, hate speech etc) or vice versa.
Free speech for me and not for thee seems to order of the day.
Excellent use of false equivalency. The people banning books are pretty much the same as the people who prefer that you use pronouns they see themselves as! One side actually getting these resolutions in place in writing in law versus people complaining online about being misgendered! It seems like you aren't truly in favor of free speech as a principle after all. You don't seem to want people to have the right to complain about being misgendered or about hateful speech. Why do you want to silence people who espouse these things?
Or do you actually have some delusion that Democrats have banned words and hate speech?
Banning books is not something new, but I think Florida has some 'unique' criteria when banning certain books. One example I know is Jackson County, FL. once banned 1984 for being "pro-communist". In most places of the world, 1984 is considered anti-totalitarian, and anti-communist in quite a few countries (not China, where people can buy the book without any hassle). I totally get it, but Jackson County seems to be the only place that sees the book to be procommuist.
I, for one, am shocked — shocked! — that the Florida Legislature and the DeSantis administration would violate the Constitution of the United States of America. Clearly some rogue agent in the library deep state must be to blame.
They didn't violate the constitution. There was no ban on books, there was an exclusion of specific titles from school libraries (which is nothing new), which are run by the State of Florida. There is no obligation that schools carry any particular book at all. If I write a book, I cannot compel my book to be carried by the state in school libraries.
It was surprising to me just how many of the banned books have immense literary value. The Color Purple, The Handmaid's Tale, The Kite Runner, etc. aren't random books that may be a little obscene, they're literary classics. In my opinion this is what makes it obvious that these bans were made in bad faith.
Absolutely.
There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
The people supporting this political wave tend to be extremely triumphalist in their personal religious zeal, unwilling to make compromises, and are iconoclastic and disrespectful to most outside their in-group.
Much like other iconoclasts and zealots, they rely on the pluralistic principle of toleration to force the paradox of tolerance to bend their way.
It's shame - pluralism is much more invigorating and no one forces lifestyles they disagree with onto dominionists.
> There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
Reading your comment, I feel like the word religion is misleading. You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology, despite it not having to do with a god, has been introduced into many layers of government and other institutions. All the things said here can be demonstrated for the religious right but also the non religious left. It’s less about religion in my opinions, and more about how politics is about winning by controlling institutions instead of supporting individual freedoms.
I challenge you to make a point-for-point, truly apples-to-apples comparison.
Fundamentally, there are a lot of Republican policies which attempt to force Christianity or at least Christian morals down our throats, whether it be forcing women to have children, or posting the ten commandments in schools and government buildings, banning pornography, or preventing gay marriage.
I'm rather curious what Democrat policies are equivalent in your mind that would make you try and "both sides" this. And I mean actual passed or proposed policies -- not just bullshit you see from Hollywood and other media.
Should successful policy examples be a prerequisite for observations of similarities? Must the government necessarily be involved?
At minimum I feel like cancel culture ought to count.
What would the application of your test to the Chinese Cultural Revolution look like? That's a genuine question - I really am curious what your reasoning would be.
If by "progressive ideology" you mean "tolerance for people not in the in-group", then sure, but that's not a bad thing.
> You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology
No, this is incorrect.
The cold reality is that the adherents pushing Dominionism push an unsustainable ideology, such that they would rather throw the US into religious-based fascism rather than recognize that when people are free they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants.
That seems less an observation about the dynamics and more about particular aspects of the targeted end state. As such I don't feel such a confident claim of non-correctness is justified.
Even then, the statement "they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants" seems to apply in equal measure. The core issue here is that both major groups have ideologies that seek to impose on others.
I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
> they don't typically choose to live the precepts the adherents wants
A bit reductionist, but critically, and because you asked for clarity, Dominionists want to force others to stop doing what they don't like even though it has no impact on their life.
Easily understood if you look at the standard of medical care for many miscarriages. They are abortions.
Today in the US, abortion is mostly illegal in many states, and people have died due to liability and uncertainty that would otherwise not have died should the standard of care been followed. This is before you consider the harassment of women after receiving care.
Yet, Dominionists want it banned because their theology changed with political winds conveniently in the 1970s and they now feel strongly, even more so than your feelings-based opinion that the factual claim of non correctness is unjustified despite clear justification, that life is absolutely defined as a zygote. This is before we consider that they are also equally unwilling to help children post-birth or to adopt sound economic policies to encourage household and family formation.
Tell me, what polity or power is forcing Dominionists to receive abortions unwillingly?
Or is it that they forget that their rights end at my nose?
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> I'll also note that your response of "no these two things are obviously different and one is not okay while the other is" is shared by the opposition. When you agree with the behaviors being imposed and the justifications for doing so it becomes difficult to understand why anyone would object.
You know, I hear conservatives say this all the time, but me being an old school minarchist Libertarian, I just want people to leave each other alone.
I'll note that now several times in this discussion you implicitly assert that anyone contrary to Dominionism is "progressive" (strawman designation by rightwing propaganda for outgroup, or actual political group, hard to say), and that if a specific behavior is called out, well, there must be some behavior the other party feels should be imposed on them.
No one cares about someone worshiping at their house of worship and engaging in their rituals. Not a bit. But come in and force someone else to hold their particular social club in high regard in order to engage in commerce, education, or careers? That's what Dominionists want. And it's an egregious violation of everything the US stands for to everyone outside the Dominionist camp.
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Now, please specify what progressive philosophy or policy planks that you think Dominionists find so unappealing that they'd be willing to sacrifice the freedoms so many US service members have died for, and how that is _imposed_ on said Dominionists?
Thank you. Well said.
If they are, or consider themselves, libertarian they are royal libertarians (not georgists) and therefore "might makes right" and "live free" means violence. A belief in "four legs good, two legs better".
There is a lot of evidence that engaging emotionally with literature will shift people's values. In a way that engaging with intellectual ideas does not.
These are not just literary classics, they carry a specific culture forward. People whose values are threatened by that culture need to not engage with them. They do so by finding things to be offended by in the books. In many cases the offence is perfectly genuine. It is caused by cognitive dissonance, and not cynical manipulation.
That doesn't make it less frustrating. But understanding why people have trouble with these works helps build empathy for them. And empathy is necessary to present your points in a way that is persuasive to their views. Yelling in anger at them is easy. Actually changing their minds is far harder. And it does require trying to understand.
I don't think changing their minds is a requirement. They are allowed to not like something, but they shouldn't be able to ban it.
Well, it's both. You need to ban book bans so that you can have the conversation in the first place, but you also need to change people's mind so that book bans never come up in the first place. It's a guardrail, and ideally we're not leaning on the guardrail
You have to change their minds about what legitimates a ban, and about these specific things they don’t like not having the necessary legitimation. And that’s not an easy change, it needs to be grounded emotionally.
They aren’t banning anything. You can still freely buy any of those books. They’re just changing what content public libraries spend money on. Not really much different from states deciding school curriculum.
> You can still freely buy any of those books.
And if you can’t afford to buy them, then what?
Public libraries exist to serve a public good and are not just quaint anachronistic equivalents of amazon.com
Sorry for the vocabulary here but this is bullshit. The people submitting the banned books here have stated multiple times they have never read most/all the books they have asked for banning and are being driven by lists built by political entities like Moms for America.
There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
Yes. All that they know about these books is propaganda leading to outrage, and a protection that keeps their world-view from being exposed to contrary ideas.
As I said, their identity is such that they need to avoid engaging with these works to maintain it.
That doesn't mean that their outrage isn't genuine.
While I can understand the side that you are coming from. One of the biggest failures I have seen from my friends is demonizing anyone that may have voted for tump and these people, and refusing to have a conversation. Immediately labeling them as racist for example (which I don't think is necessarily untrue for many of them, but when we know there are black people that voted for Trump that argument as a blanket statement gets harder to make).
I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.
There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.
While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.
That being said...
It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.
So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.
I can totally understand that they are being manipulated. I still have no interest in trying to de-program them. Cut them off, and let them live with their choices. They'll either figure it out eventually, or they won't.
People who are trying to harm my friends and family don't deserve any of my time and effort.
I completely respect a personal choice of doing that, I mean I don't particularly want to engage with many of them either. Especially not when I can expect that I am going to likely be called a particular F word (I am a gay man).
My biggest issue is not the lack of contact, it is the demonizing. Using blanket terms like "if you voted for trump your racist, homophobic, sexist, etc" when I just simply don't think that is a valid blanket statement and is really just a "feel good" statement for us to justify not hearing why they might have done something.
I do think that we are actively pushing them to be more extreme with blanket statements like this and it isn't not actually helping.
We can keep calling them names all we want but the fact is they are still voters that are enabling what we all have to deal with. Either we acknowledge that or we just keep repeating the same pattern we have been repeating since at least the 70's. A little bit of progress followed by a regression.
It's a prisoner's dilemma, or tragedy of the commons, or whatever-scenario-where-the-best-plan-is-coordinated-action-but-it's-difficult-for-individuals-to-do-so. Yeah a gay man shouldn't have to go to court to defend his marriage, but society's made up of individuals and their actions, and somebody's got to perform that action
They might not deserve it, but they will take rather more of your time and effort if you don't try to exert it until after ICE is breaking down doors and disappearing your friends and family without due process.
I agree. I had this argument here previously, that I supposedly "owe" it to "the other side" to listen to their arguments (in this case on abortion).
No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
They're not discussing things in even a modicum of good faith. Saying that I have some moral imperative to engage with them as if they are is horseshit.
>No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
Absolutely. Although I'd point out that in many states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, those on the "other side" (you know, our fellow Americans), often by large majorities, rejected abortion bans in their states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So it's not really as cut and dried as you make it out to be. Yes, there are absolutely those who despise the idea of the agency of women, and there are absolutely those who exploit that for monetary and political gain.
But a majority of Americans don't and even many of those who aren't on board could be persuaded to a live and let live position.
Politics is, after all, "the art of the possible." If we just demonize and "other" anyone who doesn't specifically agree with us, then nothing is possible -- only dysfunction and hate. That's not a world I want to live in.
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Authoritarianism, whether Nazism, Soviet Communism, or French Revolutionary Government, is the belief that some group knows best and everyone else should allow them to make decisions, and that furthermore incorrect beliefs should be stamped out. Not engaging with authoritarian beliefs only reinforces the belief that they're correct and everyone else is wrong; after all, from their perspective nobody's ever proved them wrong.
Related to that though is the fact that authoritarianism has slowly become more prevalent over the past few decades, and it's easier than ever for people to get into cliques and echo chambers that never challenge their beliefs. That's resulted in a decrease in skills in truly changing people's minds about things, since in an echo chamber it's easier to just kick out anyone who disagrees, and if you're kicked out it's easier to just create your own echo chamber that espouses your belief than to convince people in the other echo chamber. This naturally leads to authoritarianism where an echo chamber believes that they're right and everyone else's incorrect opinions should be suppressed. When that community pops out of their echo chamber and tries to change everyone else's beliefs, it's only natural for people to respond with the best way they've learned how: refuse to engage.
I absolutely understand the desire not to engage with Nazis. But, ignoring Nazis is definitionally not going to do anything to fix the root of the problem
> Authoritarianism, whether Nazism, Soviet Communism, or French Revolutionary Governmentr any
or any monarchy, or any theocracy, or any oligarchy.
I understand why you cite Nazism, or Soviet communism (or Mao Communism), but the French Revolutionary Government lasted less than 3 years, was at war with half of europe because their King decided to declare war for no reason, and had to find who fed intel to half their enemies (and even when the King's letters to his brother in law describing eastern troops movement were discovered, 10% of the parliament voted against his destitution and 40% against killing him for treachery). I'd say that they stopped the violence and decided to free all slaves once the war ended should be a point in their favor.
There are quite a few ex-nazi types who stand as a testament to this statement being false. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_white_supremac... for some relatively well-known ones.
I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
You can't possibly complain that any ideals you stand for get suppressed then, surely?
You are refusing democratic process and arguing that media deems people unable to partake in it. This is not even Nazi ideology, this goes way, way beyond Nazism in terms of authoritarianism.
With all due respect, this is gibberish. Refusing to engage a nazi in conversation is hardly suppressing them in any way, shape, or form. Nor is it refusing any kind of "democratic process." It's also preferable you don't yell fire in a crowded theater or bomb on an airplane.
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To me, it's disheartening to see this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent posting (and to see that post be down-voted). What btilly wrote is not a defense, it's reasonable and, more importantly, practical advice in combating tyranny. Moreover, IMO, if you actually want to reduce or put an end to tyranny, you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy. Empathy is not agreement, it's not sympathy, it is understanding. Screaming at others that they're bad people will not change anything. If anything, IMO, it causes them to dig their heels and makes change harder.
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You seem to be confusing empathy with acceptance or tolerance.
It is rare for that message to be delivered to either side, for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad. It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJX28l54YxE for an hour-long interview between a well-known conservative Christian and a liberal atheist exactly on the topic of the importance of having conservative Christians treating those they disagree with with empathy.
> It is rare for that message to be delivered to either side,
Not true, I see it constantly deployed to the not-right-wing side. Constantly and pretty much everywhere where left of center and center mix.
> It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
I did read conservative writings, forums and what not. It is indeed rare in that space. Center is simply not invested in telling conservatives to have empathy as much as they are invested in promoting empathy toward conservatives.
> for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad.
I do agree that overall in aggregate it is increasingly clear it was bad advice. And the one sided application did not helped.
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>> you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy.
> Um, what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
This is the important part. Understanding "the root causes for the desires of your opponents" is not empathy. It's understanding something.
Empathy is a relating to anothers plight. If you only understand it then there is nothing to cause pause before using that understanding to your advantage. It's a core part manipulation and deception. If the only thing that happened with that understanding is seeing what you can get from it or that there is nothing you want there or have use for, then that doesn't really help bring two sides together.
Having the ability to relate to this understanding of another is when empathy happens. It's the empathy that gives one pause long enough to see there are other options that are not zero-sum.
> No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
Disagree. Just because someone else can not relate -- now -- does not mean they can not later. I personally don't care for tit-for-tat games, thats simply a race to the bottom. Boundaries are the things missing here; one can have empathy for another that does not have it for them, that doesn't mean you also have to have a bleeding heart for them and let them walk all over you.
You can have radical empathy with somebody while standing against and fighting every single thing they stand for. Indeed empathy /helps/ you fight better, because you can begin to fight root causes rather than fighting symptoms, and help people heal rather than just shouting them down.
You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.
To have empathy with a view is not condoning it
Indeed. But demanding empathy as the only valid a counter-strategy is, which is what the GP was doing. Appeasement doesn't work if your opponent isn't following the rulebook.
From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.
The sort of understanding the GP is promoting doesn't have to be used empathetically.
It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.
Correct: but giving them a thousand timeouts doesn't help, if you still need to give the thousand-and-first. It mitigates the immediate problem, but it also ties up your resources. Eliminating the problem at its root, if that's possible, is a more effective strategy: if we can take away the ability for the real bad actors to get loyal followers, by learning how to change those followers' minds, they won't have anywhere near as much power.
Exactly. The distal cause is that the Compromise of 1877 halted an unfinished Reconstruction. What I'm calling for is simple - the natural and final conclusion of Reconstruction. It might be 148 years late, but it's the antidote to the disease.
damn. fucking. straight. pussyfooting with racist traitors has kept us paying for the original sin of slavery into another goddamn century.
popular vote for president
nonpartisan redistricting of every state
ranked-choice-voting everywhere
limits on corporate money in politics
end the filibuster
strictly define supreme court size, terms, and appointment rules
age limits for congress
finish reconstruction
mess with texas
there is a lot of technical debt in this project
We live in a democracy. In a democracy, you don't get to deny people the vote simply because you view them as children. And, sadly, these "children" have around half the votes.
If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.
I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.
Is that outcome really what you think is best?
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Didn’t they ban the books using democratically elected representatives that legally passed a valid law?
If anything we actually have the 1st amendment to stop democracies from going too far!
Reading exercise for you.
Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.
Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
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> a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success
A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.
We live in a democracy. If the majority does something stupid, you have to convince them to stop doing that stupid thing. This means understanding how they came to do the stupid thing to begin with.
he's proposing that outrage is not the best way to oppose them - that we can be more clever and effective by knowing the enemy
But the GP didn't even identify the enemy correctly, so all that effort would be wasted. The people they're describing are mere tools, only required because of the existing democratic processes in the country. The enemy are the (insert your favourite label here) at the top of the media and political landscape pulling the strings. And I guarantee you, they aren't quite so bothered by the imagery in those books as they are bothered by freedom of thought in general. They are bothered by people that dare to speak truth to power. They are not bothered by appeasement strategies such as we people trying to understand the other people they've pitted against us.
No, I've identified the enemy perfectly well.
The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.
I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
I understand where you're coming from. But I also think that you're wasting a lot of effort in talking to those useful fools while they're still drinking from the social media and faux news firehose. And that's by design -- you are meant to expend your energy on that asymmetric (and in my view unwinnable) battle, so that you leave the actual policymakers alone.
(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).
edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.
>Did the people pursuing these bans consider having empathy with the people who value these books, and try to understand why they value them?
>Stop defending tyranny.
I think you miss GP's point. It's not that they support such book bans or the ideology that encourages that and other anti-democratic (small 'd') nastiness. Rather it's the old saw that 'you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (balsamic vinegar excepted).'
While there are many who are callous, cruel pieces of shit, there are more who live (without their knowledge or consent -- cf. rural broadcast media landscape, online bubbles, etc.) in an "information" environment that promotes such stuff as "godly" and "American" and "freedom", when that's not even close to the truth.
Which is clear from the book bans, the ridiculous "anchor babies" trope, the Democrats are all communists and on and on and on.
Yes, folks who actively foment this stuff and cynically (or even genuinely) fight to reduce liberty need to be resisted. Strongly and loudly.
But if you adopt those folks' "othering" tactics, you devalue everyone who doesn't specifically agree with you and everything you believe as evil and unredeemable, you remove a key opportunity for education, positive experience and persuasion.
Will that work for everyone? Absolutely not. But we don't need everyone, just the ones who are honest and fair-minded. And those can certainly be those who disagree with you.
If you exclude the radical reactionaries, bigots and cynical scum who seek to profit from promoting such ideas, the majority of all of us agree about much more than we disagree.
Perhaps that's something we all should ruminate on.
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I don't know if this was bad faith or not, but honestly, you need to be a bigoted retard to ban Slaughterhouse-Five of all the things.
The side effect of this is that some literary classics will enjoy a brief surge in popularity among young people.
Sometimes I kind of wonder if putting important books on the list would be a measured way to overturn broken or unjust laws.
Sort of like adding "Common Sense", "The Grapes of Wrath" or "The Pentagon Papers", etc.
Wow, I can't believe The Handmaid’s Tale was on the list. That book is excellent and not offensive at all
> they're literary classics
Reasonable people wouldn't ask to get these book banned. What if people colluding with the publishers got them banned as part of a larger strategy?
I have no evidence to support that hypothesis; it's just very odd for literary classics to have been banned.
Those three were banned? wtaf
It's standard Trumpian negotiation. Ban lots of books, outrage ensues, courts get involved, some books get unbanned. But not all!
Also par for the course: lots of wasted taxpayer money.
I don’t think Trump was directly involved in this law? We don’t need to invoke his name merely as an epithet.
It’s… just the common name for this way of getting things done (as far as I know at least). Propose something preposterous, so drama ensues and it gets watered down, but in the end you still get more than you would’ve otherwise.
I believe the term got popular around the time Trump got his wall by saying he was going to make Mexico pay for it. Suddenly nobody questioned the sanity of building a wall anymore, the entire narrative was about whether or not he’d get Mexico to pay.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-usaid-evang...
https://archive.ph/dNYYv
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They don't want to have to pay royalties to Margaret Atwood when they implement the handmaids headgear.
> They've been transparent about their desires to censor media.
100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".
I don't really know who to vote for to stop stuff like this. No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. Instead it's always about censoring your opponents and their ideas while you're in power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controvers...
Note one massive difference: nobody was trying to make a law that Dahl’s books be sanitized or running around to libraries and getting his books banned. That was a publisher taking unilateral action changing works they own (for better or worse). I see a massive difference between the two things.
Additionally, a lot of the language was very out of date with racists and discriminatory undertones so parents had stopped buying the books. It was driven by the market because if they didn't adjust the content to adhere to what parents expect in children's literature today the stories and moral lessons would be lost to the dustbin of history and merely interesting historical artifacts.
I would regularly see stories on Reddit where someone was gifted one of the more borderline Dahl novels and they binned it rather than giving it their child. I'm sure their internal metrics were painting a similar picture.
That's bad for business. It wasn't change for social justice. It was change or watch your IP die and everyone involved still wanted the money.
It was even done in consultation with the Dahl estate/family, although they choose to ignore Roald Dahl's professed opinions about editing his works.
The problem with censorship is in general never about any specific application of it, but rather the principle. When censorship becomes culturally acceptable, self censorship and political polarization follows as a natural consequence.
The massive difference between government censorship and private cooperation censorship is unlikely to effect how people feel and react to it.
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This argument strikes me as fairly textbook "whataboutism."
TFA shows a clear and present case of a particular action taken by one political faction. Your argument, that the opposing faction is equivalent to a greater or lesser degree and would follow the same course of action, rests entirely on a hypothetical; it isn't supported by any concrete evidence or cited examples.
I'm certainly not asserting that any one faction/party holds a monopoly on moral high-ground, just highlighting that this kind of argument is frequently used as a tactic to deflect discussion away from ground truth considerations and shift the debate towards (artificially) neutral conditions.
I certainly don't think it qualifies as whataboutism. I'm neither preaching inaction nor attempting to refute any prior claims. Neither do I attempt to claim a broad general equivalence.
It seems to me that you are disregarding the context? From up thread:
> No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech.
I did cite an example, at least indirectly, when I mentioned other countries. Consider the online speech measures in the UK as but one example. Not the same political party to be sure but the underlying ideology is shared. The only significant difference (IMO) is the presence or absence of first amendment protections.
What is far left in US? From what you are saying i got impression there is only far right and far left in US to vote. I am not from US but that doesn't seem right.
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> I don't doubt for a second that the far left would create such laws if they could.
I mean, they could as much as the fringe actors this article is about. I'm not sure what you think is stopping them from going for it in the same fashion.
As already mentioned, the support for it appearing somewhat less uniform as far as I can tell. Plus I would expect the knowledge that it will be swiftly struck down to discourage efforts.
Of course I would have expected the second point to apply to the GOP as well, yet here we are, so clearly my world model has some inaccuracies in this regard.
That’s a really exhausting, long-winded, bloviating way of saying you are wrong.
TIL that giving book buyers the choice between the classic uncensored version of a book and a revised version of a book with blatant antisemitism removed, a choice provided by a book publisher, is an example of the Democrats being almost as bad as Republicans.
Don't forget one is state censorship and other is independent private entity that (in the land of the free) can do absolutely what it wants if it holds the copyright.
> 100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".
You realize that's significantly better, right? Like at least two orders of magnitude better?
In one case, the copyright holder of Roald Dahl's books decided to censor (incorrectly, I agree) their own books which they own the copyright to. That's a private organization doing a stupid thing, making their own content worse. A private organization censoring their own words. No elected officials or persons appointed by elected officials were involved.
In the other case, the government is unilaterally deciding to withhold information from the public. The government is censoring other people's words.
You realize how that's not even remotely similar, right? "The left" is way better on this one.
Without commenting on what's better or worse, note that the copyright holders are not censoring their own words. They're censoring the words of someone who died decades ago in books that are several generations old, and it's the government that says no one else is allowed to publish the originals. Granting exclusive rights to publish and modify the works several generations after they were written is government censorship. In this case the censored books become completely illegal to publish as well rather than simply unavailable in government libraries.
(Feel free to substitute the situation with Dr Seuss books if Dahl isn't a fit because that organization also publishes originals, but even if the originals were still available, derived works are also censored)
Except these revisions were driven by the publisher and not the Democratic party, as far as I can tell. An entirely different scenario.
Anything not aligned and christened by the MAGA movement is considered left/woke/Democratic Party/etc. which means it's bad until they change their minds and adopt it, if they ever do.
It does matter and it is not a minor detail that the left is acting to help people and the right is acting to hurt people. You can always disagree with what the left does, but the left and the right are nowhere near equivalent in the big picture that actually matters.
It's indicative of a broken world view if you believe you can help people by censoring speech.
It's not indicative of a "broken world view" at all. There are already laws against defamation, running afoul of those would lead to your speech being censored to help the victim of defamation, for example. This logic can be extended with care.
That apparent problem goes away once you recognize that you’re using the word “censor” incorrectly in one case to draw a false equivalency. In the case of the right-wing behaviour discussed here, “censor” is the correct word because the term refers to an official use of power to prevent something considered politically incorrect or obscene from being available even though the publisher, librarians, and reader all thought they should be accessible.
In the case of the Dahl revisions, there is no official power being used to suppress individual preference. The publisher decided they wanted better sales for an older item, realized that things like anti-Semitism were unappealing to modern audiences, and created a new edition of their own property. Every part of that process was entirely voluntary and nobody’s purchased property is affected in any way – quite unlike the right-wing telling libraries to remove books with significant literary value which their patrons want to read.
Yeah, both parties are becoming more authoritarian. IMO the solution is a different voting system than first-past-the-post that allows multiple parties to exist to force different political factions to interact with each other and compromise. But until then though I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, since under FPTP not voting at all would not be acting against the greater of two evils.
Evidence for the Republican party becoming more authoritarian:
- attempted illegal book bans
- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare
- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings
- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally
- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)
Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:
- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.
More stupid bothseideism.
Surely the Dahl's family censoring their own books is on progressives, and it's equally as bad as Republicans trying to overthrow an election, send the troops after protesters, build concentration camps on national territory, ban books, revoke women's rights to abortion, revoke civil rights...
I've been saying since Clinton when it started to become clear, that liberals and conservatives will eventually kill the ideals of this Republic. (And not only the ideals expressed in the First.) They've been chipping away for long enough that they now believe it is safe for them to chop.
These people are all dangerous in the extreme. It's just that the conservatives have unmasked themselves and displayed the extreme danger they represent to our ideals in the US in a far more open fashion than liberals.
I might have given a shred of charitability to you if you said "far more open fashion than the left." but the fact that you said "liberals" tells me I shouldn't take your political perspective seriously
So “I would take your politics seriously if it aligned with mine”? I am afraid that whole point of politics is finding compromise with people who you don't agree.
it has nothing to do with alignment of politics, it's that your description of reality is so wrong that it would be difficult to seriously engage
It’s more about good versus bad faith: you can compromise with people who are willing to be honest, but that isn’t possible when someone is redefining terms or contradicting all available evidence to make their position work. That commenter was conflating two very different sets of activities to smear liberals, implying that they somehow know someone else’s true intention even though that contrasts with their actions and public statements.
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"If you're in a grossly generic way referring to hispanics, african americans, Indian Americans and many distinct and complex others"
-> Exactly. It refers to all of them.
It isn't a secret that white nationalist, kkk, are Republican, and have been at least since the 80's.
So as venn diagrams go, there are not many KKK in the Democratic party, and they are in the Republican party, so... who's ideas do you think align the most?
I think lending credence to the idea that their politics are nuanced and complex is disingenuous. If you are going to make the claim that there is nuance, at least provide an example.
I’m sorry but singling out the “brown people” comment is a bit of a straw man in this case, as a “brown” person it kind of is really that simple. There really isn’t anything else to it, it is literally about the colour of the skin. Does it reduce countless cultures and experiences to nothing? Yes. But that’s sort of the point isn’t it.
> at least provide an example
No examples are given in original post..
> A surprising number of people from these and other groups support conservative causes too.
Plenty of people (including the vast majority of Republican voters) vote against their interests, yes. Whether it's single issue voting, misinformation, or a variety of causes, "some X vote for this group" does not mean that the overall group does not hate or work against X.
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It's objectively true.
Republicans pass tax cuts which increase the burden on the poor and the middle class for the benefits of the ultrarich (not the majority of their voters).
They destroy government programs that benefit the majority of the population - health care, antitrust enforcement, free tax filing, environmental protections, tax audits of rich tax cheats.
They oppose any programs which provide benefits to the public - broadband standards, net neutrality, social services, cybersecurity, weather satellites, libraries, public schools, so many more.
The vast majority of their voters are hurt by these policies and are quite literally voting against their interests.
ASOF now, your comment is no longer flagged, and I just upvoted it, so maybe it will recover.
I wouldn't underestimate the role of bots, or bot assisted socks, rather than the HN community. You last sentence just sounds like sour grapes in this context.
FYI, this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901875
"Yes, conservative Latin American men like the male supremacy aspect of it"
is currently flagged. There is indeed a difference of opinion on HN, but also, sadly, rampant abuse of the flagging system.
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> What a simplistic take on a much more nuanced set of issues and ideas than that from the Republicans and conservatives in general. "brown people"? What the hell does that generic, i'd say even coddlingly racist, label means specifically mean?
It's cut and dry. Plain racism, broadly and slowly applied. Don't try to notice, they hate that.
> All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses.
Ah yes, the foolish "state policy don't matter because you can get it somewhere else". Treating the issue lightly, is part of the problem. Now there's 1 less source BY POLICY and the noose tightens. Weaponizing policy is something politicians are prone to do.
I don't buy the whole "it's not illegal, just buy it from a bookstore yourself if it's banned from the library" argument after what happened with Steam and payment processors. What's next? "Just buy these books from a physical bookstore (not online) that is cash only because payment processors have booted the store off their platforms. Also, only old/used editions are available because publishers are afraid to print new runs. But it's not illegal so stop crying"
I don’t think it’s fair to equate private action with state action. The latter is much more dangerous to freedom
The latter often leverages the former to work around having to legislate things that are unpopular or unconstitutional. A great example is government agencies buying data from data brokers or the Twitter files where the government leaned on Twitter to downrank "wrong" ideas. With the proliferation of powerful near-monopolies - especially in tech - "the market" has little way to work around these kinds of problems, especially in the short term.
I guess my point is that both are dangerous to freedom, and ideally the government would do something to curtail corporate censorship instead of encouraging it. That's the whole idea of a "common carrier"[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
I am not equating the two, I am pointing out the flaw in the logic of viewing each in isolation and rationalizing. Excusing state-level book bans in libraries with "you can just buy it yourself with your money instead" clearly ignores what has been happening in the private sector.
Gov inaction is just as important, especially when it comes to regulating monopolies. Net Neutrality is a similar issue.
“X is worse than Y” is not on its own an argument against “not Y.”
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While I agree that no one should have their identity defined by their ethnicity, that does not describe many of these books. Perhaps none, it's presumptuous to say that an author writing about oppression wants to increase divisiveness.
Beyond that, there is no shortage of people in favor of book bans that absolutely believe in ethnically-defined identity.
If you’re in a room full of white people and you’re reading a book about Chinese railroad workers, then you’re correct that’s not divisive. If you add some asian kids, and then treat the Asian kids indistinguishable from the white kids—everyone is a modern american reading about history—that’s also not divisive.
But what you have in schools today is an additional layer on top of that, where the non-white kids are treated differently than the white kids. The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t. At my kids school, they have racially segregated “affinity” groups to facilitate this. My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid). I know that sounds like something I just made up but it’s absolutely true.
This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity. Specifically, they generalize african american racial identity and solidarity and politics to all non-whites. If you walk into a book reading for some of this stuff, you’ll find way more people promoting “brown people” ethnic identity and solidarity than you will find people promoting “white people” ethnic identity and solidarity at a Trump rally. The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
> [90s] didn’t talk about the race
“April 26 1992. There was a riot in the streets tell me where were you”
How does banning the handmaid's tail fix any of these problems exactly?
It's not an ideal situation for sure. Some want their heritage to be their identity. Some do not. Academia tries to accommodate both. Meanwhile we are slowly trying to fix the lingering effects of centuries of injustice where solidarity is one of the few tools to fight people in power who want to return to unjust times.
I'm not sure the best option is to vote for the country club guy whose public statements strongly indicate reports of his private statements on race are accurate. The guy who has kept Stephen Miller around for a decade and talked the proud boys into being the armed second wave of Jan 6. Then pardoned them.
Speaking for myself, even if Trump is somehow the shining light of a post-discrimination society (after failing to do so in his first term), it can't possibly offset the damage he wants to do the economy, consumer protection, and national security.
> My daughter was invited to the weekly “black girl magic” lunch once a month (because I guess that’s the math for a half white half south asian kid).
> This is because academics and authors who write this stuff really do believe in racial identity and solidarity.
Beverly Bond, who holds the trademark, was an influencer avant la lettre. She wanted to make a brand—looks line like a clothing line, followed by a TV show, then a podcast.
I get that it’s tempting to blame everything on radical leftist academics or whatever but that’s not what happened here. This is simply capitalism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Girl_Magic
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Bond
Most people who aren't radical Leftists aren't going to agree with you that radical Leftists aren't primarily responsible for the experience described by Rayiner just because a personal profit motive was involved in addition to the ideological motive.
You might believe that if an ideological Leftist motive can be kept separate from motives of personal enrichment, then it cannot do significant harm. But most US voters would disagree with you about that: they believe that it can be harmful to believe that there is an oppressive structure at the center of American society if in fact there is not an oppressive structure at the center of American society.
When people say “radical leftists caused my gout” or “fascists gave me arthritis” I think they should stop for a second and consider where lies the proximate cause of their inconvenience, instead of clinging to convenient, if emotionally satisfying, myths.
Your assumptions about my motives are incorrect.
What is the ridiculous effect attributed to "radical leftists" you are responding to that you believe is the same as "caused my gout"?
I don’t think the issue is radical leftist academics. For the most part, it’s overly empathetic normie liberals who feel distress when they hear what the radical leftists are saying and lack discernment to sort through what minority kids really need to succeed.
> The non-white kids are encouraged in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to identify with the oppressed people in the books in a way the white aren’t.
Well, um, yeah. That's because white people just aren't oppressed.
Its the same way I don't identify with feminist literature. I can read it, understand it, enjoy it - but I can never fully relate, because I'm not a woman and the way I experience the patriachy will always be different.
Of course black people identify with or relate more to something like the color purple. That doesn't mean the color purple is racist.
> the way I experience the patriarchy will always be different
Then how can you evaluate feminist literature to be accurate?
The same way I evaluate my doctor to be doing a good job - trust.
Your experience in life will always represent a tiny tiny fraction of one percent of all experiences. If you require a "see it to believe it" approach, you will live and die closed-minded.
That does not mean I need to blindly trust feminists, however.
I truly cannot fathom how anybody can listen to Trump talk for more than 5 minutes and read more than one of his moronic truth social posts and his constant lies and then still be a supporter.
Is your example here a bit oblique to the point? I see this more of a failing of the people to properly appreciate and discuss/process the contents of the book, and as well as, in my opinion, socially overcompensating for the diversity in the room?
I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist. But I see this more of a lack of proper cultural empathy/education -- go figure, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere all the time. But as you said,
> This law is about what books are in public libraries.
So why would we ban the books, rather than encourage reading them and having the more meaningful discussions focusing on heritage rather than identity?
As a slightly more abstract aside, identity anything to me is a slippery slope because it will always automatically encourage one to make assumptions; it's a mental shortcut to say Person A == Person B iff PersonA.identity == PersonB.identity. Given that education is hard, learning is hard, and life is hard, I think we need to at least emphathize and appreciate that teachers and the the education system in general need to often fall back on these sorts of mental shortcuts. But that's we need to really invoke our right, privilege, and duty of grassroots participation. Why not walk into that book club that's overcompensating and help them learn what is making you uncomfortable? You might be surprised at how ignorant they were of their own mistakes and that they're willing to learn from your perspective.
> I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist.
But it’s not inclusiveness at all, it’s a caste system. In academic liberal spaces, non-whites are not “included” on the same terms as whites. We are bucketed into a separate caste subject to different standards and expectations. And that caste system plays out in routine social interactions, because white people afraid of being called “racist” will not treat you the same.
Calling it “heritage” instead of identity doesn’t change anything. Your average second-generation non-white American has weak ties to any non-american society. My kids have no meaningful ties to Bangladeshi society, only superficial ones. They can’t, and they wouldn’t even like it if they did. So the only outcome of talking to them about their “heritage” would be to encourage them to see themselves differently from their peers based on connections that are at best superficial.
As to your point about “banning”—we’re not banning the book club. This law is about school libraries. People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
> People are voting for what kind of ideas their children are socialized into, which is one of the fundamental rights as a parent.
Wait, I thought you were all about how Western society has gone too far in the direction of individual rights?
And assuming your "fundamental rights as a parent" premise (purely for the sake of argument): The rest of us have a pretty-compelling interest in how each other's kids — our future fellow adults — are being raised.
I agree the community has a strong interest in how children are socialized. That’s exactly what’s happening here: Florida voters have exercised their power over government schools to vindicate the community’s right to decide how children should be socialized.
You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community. Once people are allowed into the community, they get to participate in deciding how the community collectively socializes children. That means communities have a strong interest in excluding people who aren’t like minded.
> You’re also proving my point about why it’s so critical to strictly control who is allowed into your community.
"Strictly control[led]" is a line-drawing function — and needs to remember that life is a movie, not a snapshot, and so patience is needed. EDIT: Growing a society seems not unlike raising children: Society needs kids to grow into adults, and sometimes that means gritting your teeth and being patient ....
Example: Many of my own immigrant ancestors, those on the non-Aryan branches of our family tree, probably wouldn't have been let in under today's MAGA criteria. (Even my German-immigrant ancestors faced hostility from the "real Americans.") Yet each successive generation in this country has done just a bit better, thank you very much.
Example: In this morning's home-delivery Times, Cardinal Dolan is quoted as recalling about the decades-long progress of the Irish migration to America — who were definitely considered ubermenschen by many American nativists of the time:
<quote>
“He [19th-century Archbishop John Hughes] was frustrated about raising money,” remarked [Cardinal] Dolan, who wore Hughes’ pectoral cross on a cord around his neck as he described the new artistic addition. “He said, ‘This cathedral will be built on the pennies of immigrants.’”
Dolan noted that by contrast, raising $3 million to underwrite the creation, installation, lighting and conservation of the Cvijanovic mural took less than a day — paid for, he added with a chuckle, by “the big checks of the grandchildren of the immigrants.”
</quote>
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added; my first-generation Irish-American grandmother told of seeing signs here and there: No Irish need apply.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/arts/design/st-patricks-c...
I can’t quite read this without feeling there some significant over-generalizations and assumptions being made. My experience with people of various races, cultures, and backgrounds has not exhibited any unilateral caste system mentality. I’ve spent plenty of time in academia and, while it certainly has issues, has not been quite so dystopian.
In the end, if we’re just comparing anecdata, this isn’t going to be productive.
JD Vance had a comment about his Appalachian ancestors who “built this country with their bare hands.” Find a white person to say something similar in one of your liberal places. Then find a black or mexican american person to say something similar. You know what the reaction would be even if you’ve never experienced it first hand. That’s the caste system: among other things, ethnic identity is condemned for one caste, while being lauded in the other caste.
There’s dozens of other examples, of course. Admissions, hiring, and promotions are often subject to explicit or implicit racial considerations. It’s naive to believe that the same people who are required by institutional policies to think about your skin color when they hired you or admitted you or when they decided to promote you or give your a research grant aren’t thinking about it in daily interactions as well.
I hear what you're saying, and agree with large parts of it. Ethnic background shouldn't override individual autonomy. But...
> The vast majority of both white and “brown” Trump supporters just want to go back to the 1990s where we didn’t “talk about race.”
... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
It'd be nice if the reasonable people from both parties could ignore their extremist wings, get to together, and realize they have more in common than different.
>... there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
Actually, it's back to 1868[0] at least that they'd like[1] (rolling back birthright citizenship) to go.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14160
> there's certainly a chunk of Trump supporters who would like to go back to the 40s and 50s version of US "not talking about race" (or the 1910s for not talking about women).
This is a relatively small number in comparison to the chunk of Harris supporters who would call color blindness “racist.” In my own experience, “brown” ethno-narcissism and ethnic tribalism is more accepted, and even encouraged, among liberals than white ethno-nationalism is tolerated among conservatives.
This is a result of the political incentives of the respective parties. Republicans don’t need white nationalism, they can win when minorities are assimilated into the what the dominant Anglo-American culture (what the left might call “multiracial whiteness”). That’s basically what’s happened in Florida: Hispanics retain their culture in the way Irish and Italian Americans do, but don’t have a strong ethnic identity that is politically motivating.
Republican's don't need white nationalism, and it undoubtedly hurts them on the whole, which is why it's surprising they continue to let those voices speak for them.
E.g. it's hard to get more racist than Stephen Miller, but I suppose that's normalized when you're on Jeff Sessions' staff.
White nationalists are people who dislike Usha Vance because she’s Indian. Stephen Miller is an ordinary nationalist who wants to slow down immigration enough so that everyone assimilates into Anglo-American culture and norms, instead of of changing U.S. culture.
Let me ask you this: you acknowledge that India is different from Vermont, right? And you acknowledge that ethnic enclaves of recent Indian immigrants (say in New York), are culturally different from Vermont? Is there any way in your world view for someone to say that they think the culture of Vermont is better, and they oppose immigration that would change the culture and make it more like India (or Latin America)?
Put differently, what could a non-racist version of Stephen Miller do while seeking to maintain the Anglo-American character of the U.S.? Or do you think that race and culture are so intertwined that non-racism requires us to accept Vermont becoming more like India or Latin America?
Stephen Miller is an ordinary nationalist who wants to slow down immigration enough so that everyone assimilated into Anglo-American culture and norms, instead of of changing U.S. culture.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stephen-mi...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-is-what-we-thou...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/stephen-millers-racist-email...
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/stephen-miller...
There are dozens of similar articles.
Those articles are all sourced from the same SPLC hit piece, and are laundering someone’s accusations of “racism” without defining the term, or engaging in guilt by association.
The folks at SPLC are cultural relativists. They think culture is just superficial things like food, and doesn’t contribute to material circumstances. The only reason India or Mexico are poorer and more disorderly, in their view, is oppression from whites. In that worldview, any opposition to immigration can only be based on skin-color “racism.” Is that your view?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/us/politics/stephen-mille...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/politics/stephen-mille...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/after-stephen-miller-s-w...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/stephen-mi...
Each of those articles is sourced from the same SPLC hit piece, and SPLC embraces cultural relativism.
I’m curious why you won’t answer my question. Does non-racism, in your view, require people to accept immigration that changes America’s culture? Is there a non-racist lane for people who want Vermont or Salt Lake City to remain culturally Anglo-American (regardless of ethnicity)?
This whole line of reasoning is underpinned by such a fundamentally dim view of American[1] culture that it's hard to believe you and others who espouse it think yourselves its advocates. The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.
The consistent lane you're looking for is "let come those that will. give them all the freedoms and all the burdens of being American, and that's what they'll become. The character of our places might change, as they have in the past and as they will again in the future, but they will be no less American as long as they're full of people seeking liberty, justice, and the opportunity to better themselves and their families."
[1] and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
> The unique, defining feature of our culture is precisely its ability to incorporate every other, and reproduce itself among them and their children.
First, you're conflating America's effectiveness in Anglicizing immigrants with absorbing foreign cultures, which has happened surprisingly little. Our national institutions remain quite Anglo, even though there's pockets of different cultures all over the country.
Second, most good things about American culture trace back to its Anglo roots: https://scholarworks.brandeis.edu/esploro/outputs/book/Albio.... Legalism, orderliness, disposition towards freedom and free markets, entrepreneurialism, egalitarianism, etc.
Areas where we've seen cultural change have been negative. For example, one thing we've lost is the WASP austerity. I know some older folks from New England who grew up learning that "food is for fuel, not enjoyment." Amazing! It's a downgrade that we lost that!
> and it is _American_ culture, not Anglo-American.
No, it's Anglo-American culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tINJhf1Zs1Q&t=618s. The Anglo countries remain incredibly similar to each other culturally and economically despite the U.S. breaking off from England almost 250 years ago. America is different from England in many ways, but in more or less the same ways it was always different from England.
All immigration changes culture. And the United States is probably the best proof of that that you could possibly wish for. Anglo-American culture is a very tiny slice of American culture. Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it. But the world evolves and it does so on a timescale that that is noticeable on a single human life span. Like that whole groups of people have to sit at the back of the bus (if they're allowed on in the first place), write books on how to survive while driving in certain parts of the country and like that they suddenly have rights. And the countries they were forcibly imported from had cultures noticeably different from the one where the Anglo-American (and Dutch, and German and other countries besides) owners (or so they claimed) people came from.
If you want to emigrate to a place that is static then you will quickly find out that you can't, not really. Switzerland has been trying to do this since forever and is failing badly at it, other experiments in the same direction have led to civil wars and ugly offshoots like apartheid. You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
> And the United States is probably the best proof of that that you could possibly wish for. Anglo-American culture is a very tiny slice of American culture.
On one hand, this isn't true. At the national level, our laws and institutions are still predominantly Anglo, because all the Dutch, Germans, Irish, and to a lesser extent, Italians and Eastern Europeans, assimilated into that culture. On the other hand, the places where that is the least true, like Chicago and New York City, only underscore my point. Governance in those cities is terrible because much of the political bandwidth is consumed on issues of fairness and redistribution between groups that are at odds with each other instead of building subway lines or cleaning the streets.
> Your position is essentially statist: you want the world to stay the way you found it
Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States, instead of doing a massive "git pull" from the cultures that produced India or Mexico. If you worked at Google, would you hire tens of thousands of Kodak or GE lifers en bloc? Of course not.
> You either accept that any immigration at all will change culture or you will have to drastically reduce your exposure to the world around you to maintain the illusion.
If that’s the choice, I’d choose the latter.
But I don’t quite agree with the dichotomy. Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people. If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence. High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
> Capital loves immigration: it provides for cheap labor. That's the end of your static culture. And good thing too.
Putting aside that this reads like a right-wing parody of WEF talking points, do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950? (Or your own homeland of the Netherlands prior to its experiment with mass immigration?)
> On one hand, this isn't true.
Ask the native Americans whether or not this isn't true.
> Not at all, I want to iterate on the culture that produced the United States
That culture is built on violence, slavery, racism and oppression. Iterating on it seems to have brought out its worst elements rather than its best elements. Half the country, including you, voted for a caricature of what a decent human being should be like as president. And you are now 200 days into an assault on your economy and freedoms and you still refuse to see what the end game looks like. That culture? The 1950's are not coming back. And that's not a bad thing.
> Our H1B cap is just 65,000 people.
That's just one form of immigration, why stop there? What about refugees? Oh, right, the USA is good at waging war but then ignores the refugees that inevitably are created, that's for the rest of the world. Handy, being a continent sized country an ocean away.
> If you spread them around the country, we could maintain an economic edge while minimizing foreign influence.
Foreign influence is minimized by limiting the use of money in politics which is an easy avenue into the heart of the political system. Immigrants - as a rule - do not have the vote.
> High-skill immigrants who came to the U.S. pre-H1B, and ended up by the handful in small town america here there was a nuclear research lab or whatever ended up highly assimilated.
Small town America is a lot more racist than you think. They didn't so much end up assimilated, they ended up scared to go out of their houses. If you think you are assimilated and that small town America is accepting and nice you should try to live in the places with < 10,000 inhabitants where the White Master Race is the dominant majority. You'll see - very quickly - how they look at you.
Your USA experience is for the most part informed by living in the larger cities. I've spent a lot of time in rural America (~ a year in total) , easy for me to do since I'm white. What people say in private is hair raising, and really opened my eyes to how deeply embedded racism is in the United States.
> do you really believe that the result of these changes will make American culture more orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic than say Massachusetts in 1950?
I don't know about that. But I also don't think that the current political mainstream in the United States cares about orderly, efficient, functional, and democratic elements of the USA unless it benefits the 'in-group' to the exclusion of everybody else.
This whole discussion reminds me of a guy sitting on a branch cutting the live side with a saw while sitting on the dead side. All of those elements that you wish for have been put in place against massive pressure from the people that you support. And they'd love to go back to Massachusetts, 1950. But without you, and your kids. Your wife is - probably - safe. But you can bet that ICE showing up at your door - or your parents, for that matter - at 4 am is going to be very bad news. And they won't care who you voted for either.
As for that 'Dutch Experiment': it isn't limited to the Netherlands, and by and large the Surinam immigrants have disappeared into background noise on account of their relatively low numbers. But when they first came here (just before Surinam became independent) there was a lot of outcry about this. Now, so many years later there is still a fairly large number of people that identify as such here, most of them live in the three big cities, because of small town racism.
The predominantly Turkish and Moroccan immigrants have set up their own regional presence, some of them have held very strongly to their original identity and stepping into their homes is like stepping into a time/space displacement machine. But they - as a rule - are friendly, incredibly hard working and because they value family a lot more than the original inhabitants and their offspring tend to do, have a fantastic social network around them. Again, due to racism and very overt discrimination their kids have - for some fraction anyway - grown up frustrated. They see all this wealth around them and the skin color based ceiling is so strong that only very few of them manage to break through. The end result of this is that a fraction of them rather than being 'kept in their place' by the whites here - who think these people will never be successful and who deserve to work in crap jobs no matter how intelligent or capable they are. It will take many generations until this has reduced, but there is some - very slow - progress over time. I see more and more people with such backgrounds in positions of influence and some power and wealth and they are the beacons that the next generation will hopefully set course by. It will take many more decades until they are no longer pushed down as a group, and, unfortunately, they are not usually helping and neither are their parents. Intermarriage is rare, which would be one way to reduce the barriers between the various groups.
Romanians, Poles and other people from Eastern Europe have moved here in fairly large numbers. As a rule they are doing fine, even though the newspapers love to magnify the few cases where they are involved in legal or traffic issues.
Syrians and other refugees have not integrated well at all. They have been here only a very short time and are slowly displacing the older immigrant groups for the lowest income jobs. I've had very little interaction with them. But the various asylum seeker places that are dotted across the country are best compared with open air prisons where our bureaucratic engine driven by overt hatred tries to discourage them from staying here. There are far better ways of dealing with this but unfortunately my vote is only just as heavy as that of the racists. It will be decades more before these people too have made this place our home.
Ukrainians, who are here in surprisingly large numbers have integrated in record time. They have learned the language and have assimilated very quickly, to the point that you have to have an ear for it to spot them. They are everywhere and they seem to love it here. It helps that their culture and ours was already closely parallel, besides the Orthodox Church component which quite a few still formally subscribe to (religion, in NL, was on the way out until immigrants brought it back).
You're (arguably correctly) nit-picking OP's choice of the phrase "brown people." We can debate whether it makes sense to lump "brown people" together or not for the purpose of describing Republicans' attitudes toward human rights, but it would probably be more accurate to just reword OP's statement in more general terms: "Republicans have been transparent that they want to dehumanize out-groups." The point would still stand, and we avoid the distraction of whether "brown people" exist as a distinct group.
I would argue that most Republicans don't give a flying fuck what race someone is, and doesn't feel it should make a difference in terms of political opinion or approach to solving issues. All the struggle sessions in the world won't actually change or fix anything other than to foster divide that has only increased in the past couple decades. A lot of it straight out of communist doctrine in order to tear down society.
This isn't to say that racism doesn't exist, but it's not nearly as big as most make it out to be, and there's far more anti-white hate than there is white racism today. White racism is absolutely outcast as a rule today and the typical Republican wants and has nothing to do with it.
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To your first point, I'll just say this isn't the first time in history various groups of people (however you want to group them) have by a wide margin voted for a politician who is actually antagonistic towards them. This behavior seems to rhyme all throughout history.
Weird to have to define dehumanization but OK. Dehumanization is to deprive people of their positive human qualities. We're about to get political so this is likely way off topic at this point.
A common, recurring theme in Republican "culture war" rhetoric and policy is to carve out and target various groups (however they/we want to define that group), ignore those groups' positive qualities, amplify their negative qualities, and portray those groups as "lesser humans than us," ultimately for the purpose of depriving them of rights/freedoms/wealth/livelihoods/etc. Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.
Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting already-vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down. I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.
> I'd love to live in a world where nobody does this grouping, but we're obviously not there yet.
The only way to get there is to go there.
I remember back when I was a kid and realized anti-discrimination was the feel-good message hiding the real message to continue discriminating but now with the correct standards. I sat all day wondering what people 100 years from today would think of our current standards. I reasoned they'll be as forgiving to us as we are to people from 100 years ago.
The person from 1925 would argue they're better than someone from 1825. Ok, sure, but that doesn't make Jim Crow a good thing.
The contemporary standards on how to discriminate will always be justified in the contemporary social context. That's how the cycle perpetuates. The only way to get to the world where nobody does the grouping is to live that life as much as possible today.
> Evidence of this target -> dehumanize -> disenfranchise cycle abounds. If we can't agree on at least that baseline, then there's probably no productive way to proceed with a discussion.
We don’t agree on this. Republican efforts are focused on preserving the dominant American culture and norms, which we think are good. At least in the race context, what engenders backlash is not minorities having rights, but them coming together to assert distinct interests as a group to seek changes in the dominant culture.
> Yes, the other side divides and groups people, too, and we might not like that. But I'd argue it's for the purpose of uplifting vulnerable groups rather than knocking them down.
We agree on this. But I would submit that intent matters less than effect. For one thing, these “vulnerable groups” are less vulnerable than assumed. For example, Hispanics are economically assimilating with whites at about the same rate as Italians or Irish.
For another, the well-intentioned divisiveness itself harms minorities. Ethnic identity and solidarity is a toxic force minority communities. It hinders economic and social assimilation, and empowers bad actors within the community. I want to live in a community where, if a Bangladeshi commits a crime, the other Bangladeshis have more solidarity with the white police who come to arrest the criminal than with their co-ethnic. I think this is one reason why even poor Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in America have so much better economic mobility than their counterparts in Europe or Canada.
I'd like to see more group identity and solidarity along economic class lines than ethnic/racial lines. It feels like this is where the real war is happening, and the racial, ethnic and nationality blamed problems are distractions and mere first order derivatives of the actual problem which is unequal economic power.
Unfortunately, neither side seems to be acknowledging or addressing that problem.
> The problem with that rephrasing is that OP certainly meant to include hispanics (who are the largest group of “brown people”) in the country
OP didn't say anything about non-white Hispanics and other non-white people as a group. He is not suggesting anything about a group identity there. He is simply stating the fact that Trump treats them differently because Trump sees them as a group, including removing books and history about these people.
Do you think the colour purple and the bluest eye should be banned from schools?
Surely it depends on the grade, right? I wouldn’t want my 2nd grader reading them
Do we need the government to write a law and ban the color purple, and similar, from being taught in second grade? I am not a fan of the government doing that level of micromanagement in most circumstances.
Are you okay putting Penthouse magazine (or similar) in elementary schools?
I'm guessing you aren't... people have to draw lines somewhere on this. There's a difference between restricting by age, making available to all and actually assigning material to children. Not all materials are appropriate for elementary school libraries. And I'm not even talking about The Color Purple specifically.
Also, none of this stops a parent from buying a book for their children they feel is appropriate for their child.
> Are you okay putting Penthouse magazine (or similar) in elementary schools?
I think the law that the judge is ruling on here does not effect a ban of penthouse or similar material in elementary schools. The preexisting laws already had that kind of material banned in elementary schools.
Is the reason there is no Penthouse magazine in the school library from a law though? No, it is from common sense.
Can you clarify what the difference between policy or law is at a given level?
Not everyone agrees as to where the line is for "common sense" and will definitely push boundaries beyond what a community would generally agree to. Laws at a higher level are just "common sense" codified.
There is so much in life that is deferred to someones best judgement that if we stopped just to annotate and attempt to codify all these 100 such actions each person in positions of power or authority might take a given workday, it would take a century.
Not all mountain out of molehill arguments need to be engaged with I think is the broader lesson we need for our times.
If I understand, you're saying that you support banning common literary books in libraries? And likely so do most of Florida constituents, even Asians and Hispanic?
But I'm not able to square that with what you said about ethnic identity.
Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries. It’s a response to a trend in education, which has embraced teaching non-white kids to embrace ethnic identity and think of themselves as oppressed.
Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”
> Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries
Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't look into the details. But it appeared to be a ban to me.
If all they did was say: "these are the books that must be made available at school libraries"
That would be very different, and we wouldn't be talking about a ban.
But if they specifically targeted certain books (who might have not even been at all the school libraries to begin with), and said here are the books that are not allowed to be made available... I mean, that's called a ban.
I support your desire to make sure your kids feel at home and are able to, like everyone else, consider themselves American. I'm from an immigrant family, and it bothers me when people ask "what am I", I'm American, and they're always like... Come on! What are you really? And it's like, dude, you're also 'not really" American, you're German, you're British, etc. Except we're all really American, born and raised.
So I'm with you on that point, and the "born and raise" part, yes it means you should be raised the same as well, raised American.
Where I'll have to disagree with you, is that the books made available and the school curriculum isn't about any of this. It should focus on education, kids shouldn't be dumb, they need to learn history and it's effects, they should engage with hard topics and real problems, they should be exposed to well reasoned and intelligent diverse opinions from all sides, etc. You don't achieve that by selectively banning books whose narrative you personally don't like.
If you came at me complaining that the current selection of books and curriculum goes against that, that it's pigeonholing kids into "brown" and "not brown", and so on, I'd be like, damn right that's a problem, and I'd put forward the same argument I'm making now for why it's an issue that needs addressed.
But like I said, banning books just feels like pigeonholing and propaganda the same that you're trying to avoid just someone else's agenda.
Any which words we choose about it, we're still talking about a government mandate which books are not ok to read. I don't doubt your personal experiences, but the leap to blacklisting literature is a huge one and doesn't follow logically at all.
While this is a ground one should tread most carefully, surely you can see the historical precedents?
Again, this is about school libraries. You can’t retreat to the libertarian bailey. Educating and socializing children necessarily requires the government to pick a viewpoint. Especially against the backdrop of librarians, who are certainly have embraced a particular viewpoint and are pushing it on kids.
> If my kids want to understand her roots, they can read a book about the Mughal Empire.
Do you really believe history books are immune from book bans? Historically speaking, they’re usually first against the wall.
I wonder what PragerU has to say about it.
They like book bans:
https://www.prageru.com/search?q=Book+ban
Curious why you removed "sexual identity" after racial identity.
Because I edited the post to make a more specific point with respect to what’s happening in Florida.
Because their argument will be immediately defeated with the current push to remove gay-marriage from law.
You're talking about the guy and party that believe slavery was a good job training program. FFS, this isn't hard - they don't even bother with the dog whistles any more!
No offense, there’s conservatives who want to ban books because they understand the value of literature and education… you’re not it, you should try reading the books they’re trying to ban, because it’s you they’re trying to keep away from reading those books.
> Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year.
I can't find a single exit poll that says Trump won over 40% of the Asian American vote.
> I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia.
Nobody is claiming otherwise. They're only saying that on the narrow topic of racism, Trump and many (though certainly not all) of his supporters will treat your daughter differently than they do a random light-skinned Appalachian.
Pew’s extensive analysis of the 2024 election results has Trump winning 40% of asian voters and 48% of hispanic voters: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...
Your point about hypothetical racist Trump supporters is wrong for two different reasons. First, I’ve been to Appalachia, and my wife is from rural Oregon, and nobody has ever treated me differently. My brother in law (part black, part Samoan, looks like the Rock) went to a Trump rally and Marjorie Taylor Green came to him to introduce herself. In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Second, building a “brown people” identity around the possibility that someone will occasionally treat you differently is bizarre. I don’t claim that my experience as a brown guy (who has spent a lot of time in the rural south and rural west coast) is universal. But if my family and I haven’t noticed it, that suggests a ceiling on how pervasive it could be. It’s positively grotesque to encourage kids to construct an identity that doesn’t reflect them as individuals, because someone, somewhere, might occasionally treat them differently based on skin color.
You sound like you're old enough to have lived through the aftermath of 9/11, I'm glad to hear you didn't experience any racism due to your skin color.
There was no “aftermath of 9/11.” I was in high school after 9/11 and went to college in the south (which was full of white guys from Georgia/Alabama/Tennessee) when we went to war in Iraq.
> There was no “aftermath of 9/11.”
For you there wasn't, and like you said earlier, there's no representative "brown person" experience. I have first-hand experience that's the definitely included an aftermath, one person stopped wearing hijab after being taunted, another started going by "Mo", and yet another - who's not even muslim - started dyeing her hair a color much lighter that its natural color to better pass as white.
You’re just proving my point. Three thousand americans were killed in an attack by Muslims and that’s all that happened. If that had happened in India there would have been ethnic cleansing.
Your country did gleefully kill millions of innocent brown people in response to 9/11, it's just that they mostly lived in the middle east. You've apparently dehumanized them to the point where their deaths just… slipped your mind.
Your "extensive" Pew analysis has error bars of +/- 10% for the Asian groups and certainly doesn't show "over 40%" but something that rounds to 40%. Other exit polls all show less than 40%.
It's great that you haven't experienced racial discrimination. This hasn't been the experience of people applying for housing at Trump properties.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117470/documents/...
> In practice, the people who draw attention to my skin color in embarrassing and demeaning ways are white liberals.
Explain to me how putting up Confederate monuments is so we don't "erase history" but removing historical notes about Native Americans, not mentioning a holiday celebrating freedom for all Americans except to disparage it, and removing information about Trump's impeachment is not. I'd like to understand any other explanation than that Trump and his supporters don't see Native Americans or black Americans as "real" Americans, which is what people mean when they use the word "dehumanizing." Is there any other way to explain it than by using skin color? That is why "white liberals" (why are you bringing their skin color into it) bring it up — the only reasonable explanation involves skin color. Nobody in this thread is suggesting that anybody build an identity around it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-restoring-confederate-nam...
https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/5444429-racist-monu...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/juneteenth-trump-too-many-non-w...
https://www.kqed.org/news/12049405/muir-woods-national-monum...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/11/smit...
> Your "extensive" Pew analysis has error bars of +/- 10% for the Asian groups and certainly doesn't show "over 40%" but something that rounds to 40%. Other exit polls all show less than 40%
That means it could be 50%. “Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting. Pew isn’t an exit poll, it uses massive surveys. That’s consistent with other data points. Blue Rose Research found that Trump probably narrowly won naturalized citizens: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2.... Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
Another data point: lots of majority asian precincts in new york and new jersey flipped to Trump. Trump outright won Flushing, Queens. Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
> That means it could be 50%.
And it could be 30, but you said for sure it is over 40.
> "Exit” polls in general aren’t reliable, especially with the mail in voting.
That's why all of them also do phone interviews, and that's how they're consistent with each other.
> Most of those folks are hispanic or asian.
We're talking about Asians. They are not even close to comprising most naturalized citizens.
> Jamaica, which has a heavy Bangladeshi population, shifted from D+83 to D+31 (which would mean roughly 35% Trump).
35 is less than 40.
> won reelection (by 20 points) among both white and hispanics and one of the diverse states in the country
How did he do with African Americans?
A cursory search didn't really reveal this breakdown in the handful of articles I looked at. There is mention that black turnout was a bit lower than other racial groups though. Without specifics, most likely carried more black men than previous elections, while losing with more black women. This seems to be the overall trend in general regarding Republican and Democrat voting from what I've observed.
Yes, extremely bad faith. These books are upsetting, and show a very ugly side of humanity, but they're not obscene.
> These books are upsetting, and show a very ugly side of humanity
Funnily enough, that's exactly what "obscene" means in popular parlance. On the other hand, the legal standard for what should be considered obscene is so inherently uncertain and varies so much across time and place that it's just meaningless to say anything that purports to be definitive about that.
No, it isn't. The modern standard of obscenity in US federal law, the "Miller test," derives from a 1973 Supreme Court ruling in the eponymous Miller v. California.
I realize you're referring to some universal abstract theoretical concept of obscenity that doesn't apply or exist. The one I describe does, and I think that makes it more useful here.
The Miller test doesn’t apply to content for minors though. So even here you are oversimplifying. Especially considering this post is about school.
You're quite correct that the Miller test makes no such provision, because as another commenter here has noted, it is too general to require one.
Here is the text of the relevant decision, in case anyone would like to discuss that. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/413/15
Why not? All three parts of the Miller test can be tailored to average reader age.
I'm frankly surprised that kids read books at all. With video games and smartphones and all this attention-draining junk, I would like to see how many books are actually read per 100 kids per month. I would be surprised if it even runs into the double digits.
No bans are needed at all then. If "nobody" reads, then "bad" books can't hurt anyone.
Flood the zone with christofascist, orthodoxy propaganda in almost every public and private distribution channel people interact with since birth, and no compliant rule-followers will dare to read those "filthy", "un-Christian" books. The problem of opposition will be reduced to a small cadre of intelligent and curious people who dare to question approved ideas.. they are usually the first to be lined up against the wall when totalitarian regimes come to power. At some point in the past, I would've been half joking, but this doesn't seem so unfathomable anymore.
Thank you for seeing my point. This is about leftist ideological worship vs christian spiritual worship. Two tribes trying to one-up each other.
Outliers skew averages. I know a couple of kids that read dozens of books per month.
it doesn’t matter whether kids read books, all that matters is parents and how they vote.
also stats on book reading are notoriously cooked, look at how many books publishers claim the median American reads.
[flagged]
? Do you even know what my ideology is? All I'm saying is that these changes are pandering to voters.
> attention-draining junk
To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.
Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.
Why limit it to kids? My brain and attention span is so rotted from the internet that I find it immensely difficult these days too.
Most good books are subversive towards the goals of education. I couldn't believe when they unironically asked me to read "Pedegogy of the Oppressed" and than tried to give grades on it.
Trying to give grades to kids for Oscar Wilde's work is fully against the spirit of his thinking. Trying to grade kids for a whole lot of modern "classics" also goes against the spirit of their thinking. Joyce was too busy writing horny smut to be a supporter of literary analysis of his work.
But more seriously, most young adult fiction is pretty low quality. I cringe pretty hard when I look back at what that genre had us reading at the time. Percy Jackson and Eoin Colfer are poster children for the millennial brain rot that ended our collective love of YAF. We are a far cry from the high point it hit under the excellent writing of a certain Brian Jacques
I got an A for reading Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. I turned out ok, I read proper historians writing about horrific events, and my writing abilities are above average.
Properly defining how we educate children is tough.
What's wrong with Percy Jackson? What YA books can you recommend?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you seem unfamiliar with Wilde's work or his stated position on criticism - i.e. that only critical faculty enables any artistic creation at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Critic_as_Artist
Joyce's penchant for scatology in no way diminishes his canon's suitability for engagement via critical theory. If anything, the poststructuralist interdisciplinary approach is as natural a bedfellow for the interpretation of Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake as one could hope for.
To demean Eoin Colfer is another interesting hill to die on (Darren Shan?). Benny and Omar is a fantastic debut novel and a great introduction to class and cultural distinctions in the Islamic world as viewed through the eyes of a surly western teenager. The Artemis Fowl debut as well is a perfectly inoffensive fresh IP with an interesting take on putting a cyberpunk spin on Irish Mythology - although marred somewhat by an appalling cinematic adaptation.
To then cite Brian Jacques as a high-point, ploughing a furrow as he does in the foothills of mid-brow K-12 readership, only suggests to me somebody completely unfamiliar with the canons of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman. In any case, you seem to be conflating Young Adult Fantasy with the rich and well populated canon of Young Adult Fiction.
> these bans were made in bad faith
It's possible that the worst of these bans were done in strategic bad faith in partnership with the plaintiffs: to provide standing and legal cause for the plaintiffs to sue.
There may have been bans made that were reasonable but politically one-sided (perhaps an illustrated kamasutra, just to give an example), and the strategy to re-establish them was a sort of reverse motte-and-bailey -- get things that are far more innocent banned in a bid to sue and reverse all bans.
A lot of things are "possible." Do you have any evidence to support this version of events?
Nothing specific. But generally, recent politics makes me believe that any "possible" version of events is an acceptable hypothesis to consider, no matter how egregious (and I mean this regardless of someone's political leaning).
Those with any form of power in very large measure (money, fame, political power, influence) ought not to be trusted implicitly.
A simple "no" would have sufficed.
It's shocking how little opposition laws like get this from people who call themselves "free speech absolutists." Here we have straightforward censorship, by the government, yet it all flies under the radar.
The people who fight for free speech in these cases, devoting time and money to it, and have real meaningful effect, self-describe in more ordinary ways.
That's because they're not "free speech absolutists", they're fascists that want to force their own idea of what valid speech is on everyone else.
If true they fit the exact definition of doublespeak.
Same thing the far left does on college campuses. They just do it under the guise of victimhood with terms like "assault" being used to describe someone speaking an unpopular opinion. If the school book wars said the kids were "assaulted" by this "hate speech" would that make it okay? Is that what they are missing is someone feigning victimhood?
False equivalence - I don't see lefty culture warriors burning books/removing them from libraries.
They are fighting to get different books (less Eurocentric, for the most part) into the curriculum, but they're not removing them from the library.
I can't think of any explicitly right wing books that are even in libraries anyway.
Is this comment sarcastic?
Speaking an unpopular opinion on campus might mean you hear other people saying things that you don't like, as well?
In what way do you consider this similar to laws enforced by courts and police and the full legal system?
Yes, the same people that need the 2A right to guns to protect themselves from government tyranny also are totally fine with other forms of government tyranny.
As long as the tyrants are on "their" "side" , 2A gun nuts love government tyranny, and the right to commit tyranny.
I'm not really a fan of either party, so I tend to dwell on the most glaring irrefutable examples that shine through groupthink biasing.
Government agents summarily executed Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker exercising his natural right to night time home defense. This was the exact scenario the 2A enthusiasts always grandstand about - "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away", "From my cold, dead hands", etc. Any yet the response from the sheer majority of supposed 2A enthusiasts? Utter fucking silence, if not outright support for the jackboots.
This is shown throughout history too. When the Black Panthers were around the NRA was strongly in support of gun control.
"From my cold, dead hands... unless you're at an NRA convention, in which case, please use these convenient lockers we've provided, or consider leaving your firearms at home."
I would point out how great of a place that would be for the government to start their supposedly planned "gun confiscation", but why would they even need to do that?
Huge Venn diagram overlap between 2A gun nuts and those who are totally fine with calling in the NG to police "out of control" cities like DC
many such cases
They are the tyranny. They're literally attacking Americans with the military now. GOP has fully descended into whatever Tr*mp wants and he seems to want to destroy America.
By your logic, the government should be forced to purchase firearms and make them freely available to the citizens.
The government deciding standards for content it purchase is neither tyranny nor fascism. You are free to purchase as much controversial or sexually explicit material as you see fit.
Public schools have librarians who are trained in pedagogy. The librarians and teachers already know what books are appropriate for kids. This is state legislators and the governor trying to prevent kids being exposed to ideas they don't personal like.
> Public schools have librarians who are trained in pedagogy. The librarians and teachers already know what books are appropriate for kids.
This training means nothing. Critical pedagogy is just code for biasing the books in libraries towards the left. It isn’t even a hidden agenda - the ALA has been open about it. This “pedagogy” isn’t about what’s appropriate for kids. It’s about using a public institution and its funds to push one side’s ideas.
So sure, the state may be trying to prevent kids from being exposed to ideas they don't personally like. But it is to counter the librarians and their organizations, who are trying to only expose kids to ideas they personally like.
Pedagogy and critical pedagogy are two very different things. And critical pedagogy seems to be a very rare thing, why are you bringing it up and then adding a hyper-political slant to it?
Substituting one term for another and railing against the substituted term is a very weak argument.
Critical pedagogy is not rare, but very common. I am bringing it up because the ALA pushes and practices it, as do most individual librarians in cities, whose personal politics aligns with the ALA, and whose libraries are members of ALA. That’s why public libraries in cities have a disproportionate amount of progressive biased books visible when you walk in, and virtually nothing from other ideologies.
Almost without exception, people who loudly proclaim to be one thing: free speech absolutist, anti-tax, heterosexual, small government, "tough on crime" are exactly the opposite.
Well, maybe in practice. You could consider it an example of the law of unintended consequences.
Although I would apply it equally to the other political side as well. “Diversity” = everyone has to think like me, “inclusion” = exclude certain groups and so on
Universities saying they're "diverse" until some students started promoting terrorist and acting anti-Semitic.
"Free speech absolutist" is a self-described label for partisan censors. Honest people understand that there's no such thing as absolute free speech.
i don’t support this law at all, but i think it is pretty obvious that there is a difference between free speech and governmental discretion in what is taught in school. free speech doesn’t require that schools stock the “Bell Curve” or Mein Kampf for instance
This is a strange framing. These laws are neither about what is taught in schools nor what books schools are required to stock, but rather restrictions on what books schools may chose to make available to the children. The government is not limiting the free speech of the authors, but these laws are the government limiting access to the authors' free speech, which is at least related to free speech, even if you don't buy that it is an restriction of free speech per se.
I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.
You’re motte-baileying to ‘related to free speech’. By the standard you are setting, any curriculum-setting is free speech related, so clearly not an impermissible state action.
Curriculum-setting neither limits anyones free speech nor does it restrict their access to the free speech of others. Teachers are generally allowed to expand on the curriculum and students are given access to literature with information beyond that in the curriculum. These laws do effectively restrict access to information and ideas.
What flew under the radar? It was challenged in court and struck down. The system seems to work no? How else should it work?
I am contrasting the difference between 1) those who paid attention and took action, the normal type of free speech defenders, and 2) self-described "absolutists" who have no problem with this sort of vaguely defined restriction on speech.
Why do you think absolutists have no problem with this law? Did you just make that up?
I for one do not support the law and I would consider myself 99% an absolutist.
Arguments about concepts like hate speech tend to pull out a large number of self-identified free speech absolutists, arguments about restricting access to books in libraries ends to draw out very few. You might find it intresting to dig through the history of past discussions right here on HN.
The judicial system is a wreck and obviously works for rich people only. This sort of obstruction of every day life by people seeking to destroy democracy should be filtered out of the system otherwise they can get their way or keep filing lawsuits. How? It starts with education which is why they're attacking it.
Especially with the new Tr*mpian ethos of rules for thee, not for me.
I don't think courts should be where laws are decided. The main reason is that every obvious case like this undermines their power in future. Soon you will have people who start to question if courts don't have too much power. When you finally get to some important politically dividing case, all these secondary rulings in the past would be used against the courts.
Would be preferable to not see administrations repeatedly try obviously blatantly unconstitutional moves. Don't need to be a constitutional law expert to see the problem here.
Is driving 100mph down the highway OK as long as you slow down right before the known speed trap? The system worked?
My highschool had banned books. That's what got me into the free speech thing in the first place. But sure, make me republican in your mind because whatever.
It's attitudes like yours that discourage me from wanting to show up for the cause anymore.
You seem to be making a bunch of unwarranted assumptions about what's in my mind, and getting upset about that, but I can't even imagine what your assumptions are. Your only stated assumption, about me thinking you are "Republican," is false, and not at all contained in my comment.
If you are motivated towards free speech action because of banned books don't you think I would suppprt you in that?! That's the entire thrust of my comment, I think people fighting for free speech are great, and based on the information you provided you seem to be doing that!
Remember the part of the book where "love" is really "war" and "freedom" is really "slavery"? It's like that. "Absolute free speech" is really "only party-approved speech".
Aaaagh! I feel your frustration but I myself am frustrated at this dance Americans still play at that there are constitutionalists there, or people interested in "maintaining the institutions" or "free speech." There are only two kinds of politicians in America: neoliberals who are looking for opportunities to commodify the State or people in it, and fascists (or baby fascists) interested in achieving Christian nationalist or white nationalist goals by any means necessary.
Even the word "libertarian" doesn't mean "anarchist" in America as it does everywhere else, to refer to the most far-left you take take political ideology. Instead it refers to a deeply right-wing ideology obsessed with corporatocracy.
liberal commodification and Christian nationalism are both contradictions in terms.
In the UK and I understand libertarianism to mean an extreme free market position, usually in the belief that markets will fix problems unregulated. I think the UK definition is less extreme than the US one but on similar lines.
Are they really extreme free market though? Do they want to get rid of limited liability so that the owners of a business are actually responsible for the harms they cause?
Depends what you mean by extreme free market. I mean anti-regulation, particularly anti-competition regulation, and opposition to state funding or anything.
There are plenty of constitutionalists, and reducing the entire polity to either neoliberal or fascists ignores the reality of the country. Further, by trying to ignore the existence of the large number of us who do want to defend the constitution, you hasten it's demise by emboldening those who are seeking to destroy it.
I don't agree with calling anarchy the most far-left ideology, just as I don't agree with calling Marxism the most far-left ideology, because this isn't a one-dimensional axis. The meaning of words is continuously shifting in language, especially with something as slippery as political ideologies, which themselves are continually changing. We must make the words the tools of our communication, instead of our communication the tool of the words.
There is no philosophical difference between libertarianism and anarchism, only a difference in how they predict people will behave in the absence of centralized authority.
There's a huge philosophical difference! American libertarians are highly focused on individualism and zero-sum behavior and thinking, whereas anarchism is a collective ideology focused on mutual aid or even communism (e.g. Kropotkin's Anarchist Communism).
Libertarianism is an application of right-wing ideology subtracting the State. Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies, but for another example, just because Nazism advocated for nationalizing industries doesn't mean it has anything beyond that in common with Marxist Leninist Communism which advocates for the same.
You are thinking only of one type of anarchism, ie the socialist type. There is also individualist anarchism. Which would be closer to libertarianism (although libertarians would support some state activity so it’s somewhat different).
Hence why the "individualist" strain of thought essentially died out as all other anarchist philosophers moved to anarchist communism.
It was revived only recently with "anarchist capitalism" which is of course a contradiction.
If we were having this conversation in the 1820s before such abominations were dreamed this distinction would be worth making. Nowadays, when people want to talk about "social anarchism," they say, "anarchism," and when they want to say "individualist anarchism," which as been identified for the right wing ideology it is, they say "American libertarianism."
> Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies
Yes, that's the philosophy. All the rest of what you said is just listing different predictions of what will happen after you get rid of the state. Once you get rid of the state, there is no authority to enforce the "mutual aid or communism" so that isn't a political philosophy. It's just a prediction of what will people will do under their own free will in the absence of a compelling authority.
Ah, I think I understand what's happening here, you're operating off an understanding of "anarchism" as literally just, "no state."
In reality Anarchism describes a political ideology that people have been writing about for a couple hundred years. There are a lot of disagreements, but generally all anarchic philosophies agree on a couple things: opposition to coercion, opposition to hierarchy, opposition to state, opposition to capitalism, promotion of mutual aid, promotion of community strength. The majority of anarchist philosophy resolved first around collectivist anarchism, and then around anarcho-communism.
That's why we don't call American libertarians "Anarchists," that's why we have a different word to describe them. Usually it works fine because American libertarians typically want nothing to do with anarchists, often for culture war reasons, but sometimes some American libertarians, such as those leaning "anarcho-capitalist," try to borrow anarchist terms, leading to confusion such as what we're having here.
Anarchist philosophy isn't a prediction, though sometimes anarchist philosophers make predictions. It's a collection of criticisms, values, strategies, and analyses, like any political philosophy.
> opposition to coercion, opposition to hierarchy, opposition to state
But herein lies the problem. You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion. Whether or not you define the authority applying that coercion a "state" is debatable, but that hardly seems like the important distinction here.
Sure I'm happy to debate aspects of anarchic philosophy itself, but the fact of the matter is that essentially all anarchist philosophy has moved in a collectivist (now communist) direction and any remaining "individualist anarchist" strains are no longer considered anarchist (such as "anarcho capitalism"), since one of the few things anarchists seem to agree upon is the critical importance of mutual aid. You're absolutely right to question authority as it surrounds mutualism - that's what anarchists do all the time!
> You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion.
I disagree, and so do many writers, and so does history.
First off, the "free rider" problem is a problem under capitalism, not anarchism. We have ample evidence of "free riders" being supported even in ancient societies with high scarcity, such as highly genetically deformed people who lived to a remarkably old age, which means despite their inability to labor, someone was feeding them. Same for people who had traumatic injuries. The idea of a "free rider" is only a problem in a society that believes everyone needs to justify their existence through labor, such as capitalism. Mutualist anarchist societies don't have this problem. Especially a modern day one, now that we've achieved post-scarcity (all scarcity today is artificially enforced).
Second, no human coercion is necessary to ensure collective bounty. Humans are intrinsically motivated to create bounty, if nothing else by hunger. And, being social creatures, we are also intrinsically motivated towards collectivism - ample anthropological evidence for this throughout every continent humans have lived on.
My proposition to you is that capitalist society is motivated by self-preservation to convince you that what I'm telling you is silly and impossible. The system has glaring faults that we all feel, so it can only continue if it can convince everyone that it's The Only Way.
A great resource that covers these historical facts in detail is Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything." If that's too lengthy, the founder of Food Not Bombs wrote a new version of The Anarchist Cookbook that's available as a free PDF https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html . Ignore the recipes, they're genuinely terrible. The first couple chapters are a good short introduction to the history of anarchy, and as I recall include ancient examples.
In my experience, it's easy to find major philosophical differences between libertarianism and anarchism. For example, you could ask people if they believe that private property is an authoritarian idea.
I'm not saying you couldn't find philosophical differences between individuals who call themselves "libertarian" or "anarchist." But those differences are irrelevant. Absent a state all property is private property, and who owns what is down to might makes right. Whether you call that "authoritarian" or not just comes down to whether or not you still consider a man with a gun robbing you an "authoritarian" if he's not acting on behalf of a formal government.
But this is, of course, only if you take their claims that they want to abolish the state seriously, which I don't on either side. In reality these people do nothing but describe the state that they want when asked to go into detail. The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous because we are a social animal that when left to our own devices, forms states. The concept of a stateless human society makes about as much sense as cows forming a republic.
I think if you read some anarchist philosophy you might be surprised at what you find.
Property can be owned in common. Then it's not private property whose ownership rights are enforced by a State. We have that here in Taiwan with indigenous people and it causes issues with the bureaucracy all the time, which is desperate for a name to put down as landowner. Many societies throughout history have common ownership aka no private property.
Before you ridicule the idea of anarchy perhaps take a look at history - humans as a social animal tend to form societies, not states.
It's marketing. Usually free speech absolutists just want to be able to say bigoted things. Often, they're simply racist.
People are very volatile and polarized because of their social media's marketing. GOP marketing is insane. They're marketed as fiscally responsible, good for the economy, conservative, pro free speech, pro liberty, capitalist, and recently anti-war. And somehow people believe that despite reality. I can't grasp how anyone could ever support someone so awful as Trump. The man is a pathetic spoiled rotten bully in clown face who can barely string together a coherent sentence. Not to mention all the (sex) crime.
It is notably weird to react to this article by criticizing "free speech absolutists". Who are the people you're criticizing? Be specific. Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties while getting flak from the right and left.
An example of this is FIRE -- which was massively criticized by progressives for suing colleges over anti-conservative speech codes, DEI statements, etc. But FIRE has behavred in a princicpled manner and has sued conservatives and the Trump administration over civil liberties violations.
FIRE is still spending the bulk of their media outreach complaining about the left. Yes, they aren't totally without principle but it is very clear that they treat threats to speech from the left and right very very differently.
Scott alexander and Zvi were the saddest cases- had a lot of respect for them a while back.
Oh and musk of course but I think that's ketamine poisoning, not long-planned betrayal.
I don’t follow those people extensively but have they actually come out in favor of this Florida law? I would be surprised
I’m really happy FIRE still exists now that the ACLU has abandoned all semblance of principles. I can’t imagine them litigating the Skokie case today.
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties
If this were true, where were they on this clear case of government censorship?
Check out this thread, and the single person admitting to be an "absolutist" seems to have no opposition to this law at all, and merely wants to defend limits to speech.
Free speech "absolutists" are the least principled defenders of free speech, but they may have extremely right-wing principles they are trying to defend. Others here have given examples of high-profile "absolutists" but I'm talking about those I encounter online mostly, such as in this thread.
https://www.thefire.org/news/hundreds-books-removed-florida-...
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties
I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.
Every. Single. Time.
Seems like your worldview is a bit skewed by the places you choose to hang out online.
Never been a moderator, have ya?
I want to keep my hangouts pleasant, and sometimes that means looking at the unpleasant parts so that you can put a wall between them and myself and my friends.
I completely disagree with this law, but I don't understand how this is a free speech issue. AFAIK the law isn't restricting anyone's right to freedom of speech because under this law anyone in FL is free to own, publish, buy, sell, read, or stock any book in any privately owned library.
It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free. It seems to me like compelled speech to require the government to stock certain books. As this pertains to schools, I don't understand how the government doesn't have the same right to control the curriculum as it does in any other case. e.g. it is not a violation of a teacher's right to free speech to order them not to teach flat earth theory in public schools because that teacher is an employee and not on their own time. Same as my employer can restrict my speech while on the job without violating my rights.
Yes. Obviously there are books that are inappropriate in elementary school libraries. Different criteria may apply to high-school libraries. But the point is these are curated collections no matter what. Nobody is prevented from reading what they want to read outside of that.
My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.
School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.
I think the issue is your framing of libraries as "the government's own libraries".
Those libraries are to the people and paid by the people.
Similarly, the school curriculum is not to be controlled by the government, public schools are also to the people and paid by the people.
In both cases, the criteria for school curriculum and the books to stock are pedagogy. What will best prepare and educate students so they can innovate, thrive and improve our society later in life.
Attempts at seizing control of the school curriculum or the material made available to students for their pedagogy (like books they can research) by the government in a way that appears to be for some political or value setting agenda and not the criteria of offering the best pedagogy for students feels like propaganda and information control for political gain.
Your first and second paragraphs are in opposition to each other. The government is setting strict rules about what sort of books are allowed with this law. It's not a mere selection of the many books, but a strict ban of certain types of books based on their content. When the government establishes laws like this, they must be in accordance with our constitution above all, and that sort of strict criteria on banning certain types of books disagrees with the first amendment and the legal tradition around it.
Similarly, you are also wrong about this compelling the government to stock certain books, that's not on the table at all.
But no books are banned. The government is allowed to set school curriculum in every other case, so why not this one? If you don't like government school rules set by the government, then who gets to set them? I don't think you have a good answer to this.
You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question, which in this case is the state whose budget and laws are controlled by the legislature.
> The government is allowed to set school curriculum in every other case, so why not this one? If you don't like government school rules set by the government, then who gets to set them? I don't think you have a good answer to this.
There is a very very good answer here: the constitution.
You are not even responding to the constitutionality claim here, and have refused to even acknowledge the core aspect of this entire case! It seems a bit rude to say "you don't have an answer" when you ignore the point again and again.
The government can set laws, curriculum, etc. But it must be in accordance with the constitution.
It seems that in the last year or so, many people think that the government can do whatever it wants, that there's no constitution, that there's no limits on government power. This is fundamentally anti-American, and against everything that the entire country was founded on.
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library.
I'm not dancing around that fact at all. It's a government employee, the school librarian. Guess what, government employees are also subject to restrictions in how they act, as set by the constitution and other laws. When the "other laws" conflict with the constitution, like the one that's the subject of this post, the constitution wins.
Budgetary power is not the ultimate law of the land, it's the constitution. This also seems to have been forgotten in the past year.
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be?
It's the school librarian, who purchases books from their vendor lists. Depending on the school, the school board might vote to put a selection policy in place for the librarian. A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
That may be your preference as to how it should be done, and I see no problem with that. But if your approach is constitutional, so is Florida's. The librarian is an agent of the same government that is controlled by the legislature. If he can decide what books get in and which don't, so can the legislature.
> A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
> Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
I'm not saying I agree with it, just listing all of the methods of selection (that I'm aware of) for accuracy. Personally I prefer the school board approach, so that the community can assert local control over the process rather than politicians trying to score points with national parties.
> A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
No.
if (!banned_books.contains(book) { library.add(book) }
if (allowed_books.contains(book) { library.add(book) }
It's the same. (Well, not quite. Yours is much more restrictive.)
Banning the books takes a stance against the books themselves. It's like an attack to the speech of the authors by the government. The government is openly opposing and calling them obscene.
Simply recommending or mandating that a particular set of books should be made available is very different, that's in line with the role they should play here, which is to make sure that a good selection of books for pedagogy is made available to students.
What's funny is, the "banned books" might have not even been available in any of the libraries to begin with. That shows the distinction.
And finally, even the set of books they make available, it should reasonably look like an effort was made to select them based on an objective criteria of offering the best education. If it starts to feel like it wasn't done so in good faith, it's leaning on propaganda. The librarian, school board, governor, this applies to all of them, it's not their own personal selection of what they want the kids to learn. It's a set of books of their good faith effort at objectively offering the material that benefits the kids education best.
For these kinds of matters we we tend to set community-approved guidelines and then allow the community to enforce them. This is because we trust our community to best uphold the standards of the community.
What's being done here is a top-down effort by certain political forces to insert themselves into this community-lead governance. They don't want the community to set local standards; they would rather those standards be dictated by the governor, or by some party-approved commission appointed by him.
> Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question
Agreed, but Republicans think this person should be the governor of the state, and Democrats think this person should be someone local from the community. Ironically, it's Republicans who are styled as the party of small government.
What you are saying makes sense, but I am only commenting on this in relation to freedom of speech. The government is the government whether it is local or state. So in terms of freedom of speech this is the same thing. In terms of the constitution, local governments are completely subject to the authority of the state government. There is no sharing of power like at the federal/state level.
I think it all has to do with impact. The point of the first amendment is so that the government cannot create policy to chill speech it doesn't like. That's why we all appreciate it.
A small branch library making autonomous choices about what books to store behind its walls with backing of the local community doesn't stand to chill speech across the state or nation, so the first amendment protection to free speech isn't really implicated. If some podunk town doesn't want to put books about trans kids on the shelves, that's not going to chill speech about trans people across the state or nation.
But when the governor sets policy that no libraries shall have books about trans people, then that's going to chill speech and the first amendment is implicated. Therefore it's unconstitutional, despite flowing from the same derived power source. That's my view anyway, I'm not a lawyer.
A law must abide by the constitution.
Community norms are not laws, and are much more flexible, have no government enforcement mechanisms, and don't have the weight of the legal system behind them.
These are very different things when it comes to freedom of speech!
That looks like the mother of all slippery slopes to me. I'd be very, very careful around the idea that some workers of the government don't have to abide by the constitution.
I'm confused, who here is saying that some workers of the government don't have to abide by the constitution? Certainly I have never said that!
"I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to increase it to the size where it can go into your bathroom and drown you in the bathtub" - Grover Norquist, via translation from effective results.
> It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free.
The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't kosher is that taken to its extreme, the government could ban all books that aren't the King James Bible without explicitly adopting a pro-King James Bible policy. And if that's the only kind of book they stock in the library, then children who want to check out books are going to be reading literature with a certain kind of slant to it.
Replace the King James Bible with whatever you personally wouldn't want kids to be reading, e.g. the Quran or the Kama Sutra.
> The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't
But there isn't any other choice except to not have school libraries at all. The library is owned by the government and the books are paid for by government funds. Somebody has to decide what goes in the library and what doesn't. Who would that be other than the government?
The government can decide what to teach in its curriculum – it already does that. But the school library doesn't exist solely to deliver curriculum materials directly into the heads of students; it's one of the places where students are supposed to be able to explore ideas and concepts beyond their official lesson plans. The courts have ruled over and over that removing books from school libraries based on the ideas or viewpoints within is a First Amendment violation.
So to answer your question: the government can stock the libraries, or the school board can stock them, or the librarian can stock them. The courts have even said they can select books based on age-appropriateness, accuracy and educational value. But if anyone selecting books is making a judgement call about which books go in the libraries based on the ideas/viewpoints within the books, it's a violation of the students' First Amendment rights.
"The government" isn't necessary some monolithic centrally-commanded actor, like this vision the neofascists have been pushing. Rather, it's made up of individual people making decisions and being held accountable if those decisions are disagreeable. In this case the local librarians, who are accountable to city councils (etc), and thereby the communities they serve.
School is public sector, restricting free speech in the public sector is a free speech problem.
Private libraries banning books is perfectly fine and theyre allowed to do that. Public libraries aren't private.
if the government is running a library it shouldn't be able to engage in view point discrimination. for example it shouldn't be able to remove all books by Democratic presidents while keeping books by Republican presidents or vice versa. the weird thing is the state via an accidental conspiracy between librarians has arguably been engaging in view point discrimination. even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
>the weird thing is the state via an accidental conspiracy between librarians has arguably been engaging in view point discrimination.
What conspiracy are you talking about? Who are the members of this "conspiracy"?
>even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
Huh? IIUC, Florida House Bill 1069 (you know, the law we're discussing) was passed by the Florida Legislature and signed intolaw by the Governor of Florida.
So yes, it was "legislated" and approved by the current executive in 2023.
Libraries are already engaging in viewpoint discrimination though. That’s what this change to policy is trying to correct (whether it is effective at that or not). Librarians and their activist organizations are choosing to disproportionately stock and feature books aligned to progressive ideology, to bolster their personal political goals. This isn’t an accidental conspiracy - it’s literally what the ALA pushes libraries and librarians to do. They just label it in ways that make it sound academic, like “critical pedagogy”.
Using taxpayers money to corrupt minors is not "free speech".
Where is the "corruption" here? Be specific.
All of these books are freely available if you would like to spend your own money on them, as opposed to public funds.
Public funds are our money. They are literally our tax dollars.
Also, "removing" books means the money was already spent. So it's just about whether we should waste money or not by tossing items in good condition.
Public funds are your money, but also the money of those who don't agree with you.
This is why I'm ok with the fact that the library has some books I like and agree with and many that I don't care about, and some I don't agree with.
A government cannot function if every person who doesn't like something gets veto on spending. Pick any topic and you'll be able to find half a dozen special interest groups against spending money on it.
Our constitution is the first agreement we have on how to settle any disagreement. It can be changed, it enough people agree.
There's a large population in this country that are emphatically not Christian, but i've never seen any organized undertaking or even a serious proposal to get rid of Bible story books from school or public libraries. Occasionally you see people submitting the Bible to a list of books to be reviewed for removal, usually in response to the establishment of such a list by law or a school district.
I'm perfectly fine spending the money of people who don't agree with me.
The amount of public money lost litigating the losing side of this lawsuit surely dwarfs the costs of the books involved? I say again, losing side, because this failed law was very clearly unconstitutional all along—the proponents went out of their way to transfer this taxpayer money to law firms, for a stunt.
I think it's not a stunt but a strategy. They probably always planned to bring this case all the way to beef supreme court, so that they can neuter the First Amendment entirely.
They have been winning via attrition for decades. This shit is exhausting. If you ever stop paying attention, they'll fuck things up again.
What does that point have to do anything?
They are also available in schools, because the judge here enforced the US constitution.
The article is about Florida politicians trying to censor books in public schools, literal government censorship.
I think the problem with these laws is that they're too general. I think we can all agree that there are topics that should not be in elementary school libraries -- I don't think my 7 year old needs to be reading about oral sex for instance, regardless of the gender or sexuality of the participants. The real problem is the nature of the wording of "pornographic", which is poorly defined as "I know it when i see it", and stretched by disingenuous people with an agenda.
As a "Free Speech Absolutionist", I think as much material as possible should be in public libraries, including material that some people object to. I also think that school libraries should be curated to what is appropriate for the audience. The rub here is defining what is "appropriate". Silencing minority literature is bad. Also allowing my elementary school kids to check out "the turner diaries" is bad. There needs to be a balance.
Topics? No, I don't agree with that. Almost any subject can be treated in an age-appropriate manner.
A 7-year-old doesn't need to read about nearly any topic. Excluding any mention of all of those subjects from the school library leaves a nearly empty library.
For that heavy-handed of a response to be _legally mandated_ requires not just "no need", but some strong evidence of harm. Mentions of sex, oral or otherwise, doesn't actually have much evidence of harm. Certain treatments of it might -- but that's not what the law targets, nor can effectively target. It covers mere mentions or small bits of explicit language, even where that is necessary for the effect of the book. These can and do make parents profoundly uncomfortable, though, and that is worth taking into consideration.
I would think that the usual approach of professional librarians curating based on their own judgement, subject to some oversight from the local school boards to take into account these valid discomforts, but largely baseless fears would be a far better approach.
In what way would you consider yourself an "absolutist" with views like these? It seems that free speech has quite a few limitations in your view.
Let's take the opposite approach -- should schools stock back-issues of "Hustler" magazine? What about the "Anarchists Cookbook"? should we print it and put it on the shelf of a middle school?
You can say whatever you want, that doesn't make it a good idea to stock a school with it.
I'm asking about "absolutist" and it's meaning. You replied with something different, about which books should or should not be in a school library.
What does "absolutist" mean to you if you think that limits to what's in a library are a "good idea"?
Remember, I'm not talking about whether there should be limits or not, I'm asking about your self-description of "absolutist" and why absolutism still has fuzzy definitions of what is allowed or not.
There's a difference between allowing you to say something and hiring you to say it to my kids.
Got it, you have made that abundantly clear (and not that it matters but I agree.)
Again: how is your belief in this compatible with being an "absolutist"?
I don't know how I can phrase this more clearly, yet you repeatedly doge the question.
You are allowed to say absolutely whatever you want, Write it down, and sell that material without fear of repercussion. I don't know how to be more clear about this.
You are both completely clear yet not understanding one another.
Let me try to break the deadlock: epistasis is getting at the fact that you can't call yourself an "absolutist" on free speech because your position is not absolute, but qualified -- all speech is free except speech you find problematic, which shall be regulated. That's pretty much everyone's definition of free speech, not an absolutist take.
An absolutist would say there should be absolutely no content-based restrictions on what is in the library regardless of the ages of the patrons. Hustler, Anarchist Cookbook, whatever. They might justify that by saying "free speech is so important we can't place any limits on it. If you as a parent find the idea your child might access speech you find distasteful, it's up to you to prevent your child from seeing it, not the library or the government".
> without fear of repercussion
Let's say you write a book about being a kid and finding it uncomfortable to grow up who you are. You're free to write it, free to talk about it, free to to sell it. But then the government adds your book to a list of books they deem "pedophilic and a danger to children."
Do you think you would be free from repercussions from the government publishing your book on the harmful to kids list? Can free speech thrive in such an environment?
The government banning your book from a school library is clearly a repercussion. That's what free speech has always been about, limit the ability of the government to enact repercussions.
What is "absolute" about this?
Do you want your own speech to be absolutely free of repercussions to you, be they government or not? Is that it? I really have trouble trying to put some sort of consistent framework in this, unless it's dividing the world into two classes of people: those who will not experience repercussions and those who will experience repercussions for their speech.
There's not really anything in the anarchist cookbook that isn't everywhere on the internet at this point, or even youtube.
My (completely inadequate) test... would the people banning books in FL (or wherever else) apply those same rules to the Bible? If not, they're not interested in protecting the children from explicit, but rather forcing their religious ideology on the rest of us.
No worries, the Bible is safe in Florida schools.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/florida-school-board-vote...
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The point I'm trying to make is that panicing about book bans is not how you combat these bad-faith actors. It's defining rules to satiate their stated aims, and force them to bring their other motives to light, thus nullifying their arguments.
Their stated aims are banning any visibility of trans people in all media.
Aren't public schools part of government? This looks like a bizarre state of affairs to me if the government can't regulate speech from the government.
Say someone in the police department takes the public stance, as a police officer, that black people are subhuman degenerates, is any pushback from the government a first amendment issue? Note this is an ideological stance and doesn't involve any of their duties.
EDIT: I should have done better than to comment this without the very relevant input from the article. Better late than never I guess:
>A second key component of this ruling is on whether or not regulating books in school libraries constituted “government speech.” Officials for the state argued that they were empowered to make decisions about the materials in those collections because it constituted “government speech” and thus, was not subject to the First Amendment.
>Judge Mendoza disagreed.
>“*A blanket content-based prohibition on materials, rather than one based on individualized curation, hardly expresses any intentional government message at all.* Slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints,” he wrote. While parents have the right to object to “direct the upbringing and education of children,” the government cannot then “repackage their speech and pass it off as its own.”
Emphasis mine. This is frankly even weirder to me. If the government made a blanket, content-based prohibition of any material with a black character, that wouldn't express any intentional government message at all? Really?
Stocking a book in a library is not speech from the government. If it were, we couldn't have religious books in school libraries, but we do.
If stocking a book is not speech then it is not a restriction on speech to decide not to stock a book.
Any individual decision, no. A systematic bias over many decisions could be a restriction on speech. (Edit: some systematic biases over the decisions are restrictions on speech that are unconstitutional, but not all.)
A law of the sort that was struck down is clearly an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
On whose speech?
It seems more and more that the elephant in the room here is that schools are part of government, but they overwhelmingly lean the opposite side of the administration and they want to exercise their speech through their positions, but the government doesn't want to allow that.
Private individuals would of course enjoy first amendment protections on speech, but if you are government you don't get your speech restricted by government, that's just government. You can't eat your cake and have it too.
> freely ... spend your own money
Come on, now.
Freely as in freedom, not as in free beer.
Yes but we're talking about books for school libraries. IMO you're still restricting kids' freedoms by forcing them to pay for something that was previously free. Especially impoverished and/or neglected kids.
This story doesn’t have anything to do with free speech, because it isn’t a book ban. It’s about what public libraries spend money on and put on their shelves. You can still buy these books yourself, so clearly they aren’t banned or censored. Why can’t the state decide what to keep in libraries they fund?
Let’s not pretend the default situation is uncensored. Librarians are mostly politically skewed to the left, as is their organization (ALA). Walk into libraries in most cities and you’ll find books on the main shelves pushing political ideas from one side, associated with movements like DEI, BLM, LGBTQ, etc. But you won’t find the other side on those shelves.
And that’s the issue. Public money is being used by activist librarians, who practice “critical librarianship”, to basically censor the other side. Changes to public libraries are intended to correct that bias.
Is the Bible still ok???
--------------------
Genesis 16:4 – “And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived…” (Abram and Hagar)
Genesis 29:23 – “…and he went in unto her.” (Jacob and Leah)
Genesis 30:4 – “…and Jacob went in unto her.” (Jacob and Bilhah)
Ruth 4:13 – “…and he went in unto her, and the LORD gave her conception…” (Boaz and Ruth)
Variants & related euphemisms
Genesis 38:16 – “…he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee…” (Judah and Tamar)
2 Samuel 11:4 – “And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her…” (David and Bathsheba)
Leviticus 18:6+ – “uncover nakedness” is repeated as a sexual euphemism.
Genesis 38:9 – “…when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground…” (Onan; explicit ejaculation reference).
Ezekiel 23:20 - "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."
Now that would make a great Bible verse bumper sticker
Don't forget the story in Judges where a Hebrew assasin stabs an obese Canaanite king in the gut and he shits himself but his guards outside the room were already used to him shitting himself so ignored the smell.
Judges 19–21. The account of the Levite and his concubine:
A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim goes to retrieve his concubine from her father’s house in Bethlehem.
On their return journey, they stop for the night in Gibeah, a Benjamite town.
The townsmen surround the house, demanding to “know” the man (sexual violence implied, similar to Genesis 19 with Lot).
The host refuses and offers his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead.
The mob abuses the concubine all night; she collapses at the doorway and dies by morning.
The Levite tells her to get up, sees she’s dead, then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel to rally the tribes against Benjamin.
Yes, the story I'm referring to also features veiled homosexuality (the King is only alone with the assassin cause he thinks he's gonna fuck him)
These are okay, because it's not explicit and in your face. "unto her" is such outdated language that it is rather tame by modern standards. Actual reasoning I've been told by people that support banning of books.
Also, anytime you are to the point of asking if the words from the bible are 'ok', you've already lost the argument with the person you are talking to. The bible is infallible, so of course it is okay. You cannot use it as evidence against their point. Ever. It is a waste of breath on your part.
Oh, that's just the tame stuff.
Ezekiel 23:20: "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."
(Somehow I find the need to involve two different equines particularly off-putting.)
Don't forget Ezekiel 23:20!
"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."
The bible doesn't always use archaic language or euphemisms.
Kite Runner and the Handmaids Tale talk about child sexual abuse. I'm not condoning the ban, just pointing out that these two are not the same thing.
Worth adding: Making the Bible available to common folk was also hotly contested at the time. The Puritans lost that fight and I suspect they will eventually lose this one too.
I don't think the bible is in public school libraries -- if it is (as historical literature), it's probably unconstitutional to teach from it or promote it.
> it's probably unconstitutional to teach from it or promote it
https://oklahoma.gov/education/newsroom/2025/march/despite-c...
The Constitution only applies if there are people able and willing to enforce it.
This is the key to everything in the US right now I feel. Laws exist, but they're not being enforced or are difficult to enforce legally.
This lets people at the top do whatever now since the eventual consequences (if any) are way out in the future and punitive to the gains they get now.
Its like being a bank robber with a Ferrari when the cops are stuck using horse-and-buggies.
> This is the key to everything in the US right now I feel. Laws exist, but they're not being enforced or are difficult to enforce legally.
My hope is that this situation wakes Americans up to the fact that laws were always this way. I'm hoping this breaks the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice. In reality the legal system of the USA is enforced at the whim of incredibly biased cops, judges, and politicians. I really think a day in a county courthouse should be a requirement for all American kids so they can see just how arbitrarily sentencing is applied or how whether someone ends up in trial at all can hinge on whether a judge agrees or disagrees there was probable cause, and the judge will do like 20 of these hearings one after another.
Not to mention the fact that any black American can tell you that there's two justice systems in the USA: the one for white people, and the one for everyone else. Hence why so many black kids can tell you about when their parents gave them "The Talk," and no, it's not the birds and bees one, it's the one about how your white friends can get up to mischief that you can't and there's nothing you can do about it so don't bother getting mad about it, just keep your head down and never backtalk the cops.
> never backtalk the cops
This is advice my parents gave me too. It's generally sound advice.
I think it really matters how you talk bad. Telling the police ACAB won't fly anywhere. Asking them to inform you about the law (which you think is different than there interpretation of it), might be a start of a conversation. They are also just humans who do their job and want to be treated nicely like everyone else.
> I think it really matters how you talk bad. Telling the police ACAB won't fly anywhere. Asking them to inform you about the law (which you think is different than there interpretation of it), might be a start of a conversation. They are also just humans who do their job and want to be treated nicely like everyone else.
One of the goals of ACAB folks is to help people understand that this isn't true. Yes, police are humans, but no, you can't reason with them. You as an individual aren't going to overcome the might of the state's propagandizing and training of them to treat you like a potential threat to their life, or at best, a criminal.
Modern police training revolves heavily around hyper paranoia around how any interaction could lead to their sudden death. For whatever reason, the apparatus has chosen to create an army of armed, nervous, below-a-defined-level IQ thugs.
I personally believe all humans deserve a minimum of respect, but ACAB isn't just a statement of ideology, it's a warning: All bears are hungry, all cops are bastards. You wouldn't try to reason with a bear, you wouldn't make sudden movements around a bear, nor should you do that with a cop. With a cop you should simply say nothing other than wanting to maintain your 5th amendment right to remain silent, and then try to leave an interaction with them or wait for them to take you to jail. ACAB is a warning against attempting for any other outcome, because no other outcome is statistically probable enough to justify taking a risk to achieve.
The moment a cop engages with you, you are dealing with a potentially hungry bear.
So it isn't just an insult, it is a propaganda to treat the representation of your fellow citizens like wild animals, which will cause harm for the believers of the propaganda. That is even more concerning than the literal meaning I took it to mean.
I basically disagree with you on all fronts there. You essentially wage civil war. "You know, those guys that come when you are in a live threatening situation (fire, assault), those guys who are regulating your daily activity so that not too much people die by doing dangerous and stupid stuff (speed limit penalties, vehicle checks), those who tell your 'corporate slave master' that you also have rights (workers rights, minimal wage, cartel breakup), yeah they are aliens, enemies. They are merely wild animals not really humans at all, so you can treat them like shit. When they are friendly, don't trust them, don't trust you eyes. When they will fight back, now you see how they truly are."
Seriously how can you expect such a society to work? No wonder when you don't have pleasant police encounters. You are actively sabotaging your society. How can you expect it to stay peaceful with your behaviour?
So today I learned that the social struggles of the United States are not solely due to politicians and corruption. You guys have way bigger issues there. I can only hope that this is a minority opinion, otherwise civil war will be inevitable.
> it is a propaganda to treat the representation of your fellow citizens like wild animals
Cops treat Americans like wild animals. I'm not sure how this is news to someone in 2025, when we've had countless stories of police brutality come out and had breaking stories about e.g. the California county sheriff department gangs.
I'm warning people about this reality that cops are not what the copaganda would lead us to believe in elementary school. "Just don't resist," how about I send you a video of a cop gleefully pepper spraying not violent protesters sitting on the ground? Shooting into a house during a no knock raid on the wrong house and murdering a woman in her bed? Shooting a man with a rifle as he crawls towards them per their screamed contradictory orders? Shooting blindly into a residential neighborhood because an acorn fell on a squad car?
> You know, those guys that come when you are in a live threatening situation (fire, assault), those guys who are regulating your daily activity so that not too much people die by doing dangerous and stupid stuff (speed limit penalties, vehicle checks), those who tell your 'corporate slave master' that you also have rights (workers rights, minimal wage, cartel breakup),
Please, no. I checked your post history, you are a smart and informed individual, this gap in your knowledge could be resolved with a single afternoon of Wikipedia. Cops don't save people from fires, they arrest firemen that hurt their fragile egos. Cops don't enforce labor protections, they violently break up strikes. Cops don't save you from assault, they assault you for the crime of recording them, or they watch you get stabbed to death from the other side of a subway carriage door. They don't save you from active shooters, they prevent you from entering the school to rescue your child while they stand around terrified, waiting for the shooter to kill himself.
Treat them like shit, my foot. America's most well funded gang deserves my respect? The government already gives them every toy they ask for so they can unleash their depraved need for violence on unarmed people. The Austin Texas cops have a honest to God APC.
> Seriously how can you expect such a society to work?
I just don't want armed, well funded gangs running amok with no accountability, robbing people blind and beating them with no recourse. That's all. Too much to ask? Little bit of law and order and civility? Cops escalate every situation they arrive at.
> Cops treat Americans like wild animals. ...
Yes truly horrendous. I wonder how that could become that worse. It sounds like you got the repressive state police earlier than the commanding dictator.
> I'm not sure how this is news to someone in 2025.
I have of course heard about that. However for me the USA is a "far"-away country somewhat about the ocean(, that still affects me negatively).
As anything reported I expect this to be somewhat exaggerated. Surely not every policeman will be like that. I would expect them to be a very "vocal" (/active) minority.
I just don't see how your advice helps the victims here. When you encounter that gang, you basically have already lost? When you fight back won't you just bring the state against you, so that also the non-gang policeman are against you? And on the (rare?) chance that you meet a decent policeman, you will also turn him against you, which will make the current encounter unpleasant for both of you, might expose you to the "gang" and also serves as a justification for their barbaric behaviour.
> I checked your post history, you are a smart and informed individual
Thank you very much. :-)
> this gap in your knowledge
This "gap in my knowledge" is mostly me failing to see some idiotic US men with guns as the pinnacle of a policeman.
> I just don't want armed, well funded gangs running amok with no accountability, robbing people blind and beating them with no recourse. That's all. Too much to ask?
Yes and no. No, I'm with you on that wish; yes, because the majority of people live not in a first-world country. Sadly this also (now?) applies also to the US-citizens.
I seriously think your only chance at improving the situation is becoming a policeman. Ideally the judicative would hold them accountable, but this is messed up in your country as well. Being a policeman protects you from the fate and also lets you be a better civil servant.
Yes, my warning is that once you're interacting with a cop in the USA, you're in a hopeless situation, because this is sound advice and the one least likely to lead to your death, and also most likely to, after you go to jail, keep you out of jail on a bogus conviction. Plead the 5th and wait.
The nicest cop is indistinguishable from the one leveraging his training to seem nice to get any info out of you he can use for probable cause. He gets you to joke around, talks about how he used to smoke weed in college, didn't you as well? You don't answer, he takes that as tacit admission (unless you verbally plead the 5th, silence is admissable), now he has predisposition to drug use, probable cause to search, oops he's found "shake" in your car (fuzzy leftover bits of weed, I've seen cops rip up a bit of carpet and call it shake first hand), now you're spending the weekend in jail because it's Friday and he'll fail to finish your paperwork before 5.
Your suggestion to try to fix it from the inside comes from a good place but a naive one, you say you aren't American so I'll share with you what happens to "good" American cops.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
Adrian blew the whistle on NYPD abuse again black Brooklynites and in return they raided his home, kidnapped him, and institutionalized him.
In the best case, they get fired:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/west-virginia-cop-fired...
Or look up Sean Gannon or Joe Crystal. Joe was fired for reporting an incident of police brutality. Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.
I thought about filling this post with cases. I could probably find 50 more, I've a large collection over the years.
The point is, the system selects for bad cops. To us, a good cop reports abuse and doesn't do it. That good cop makes less arrests. A bad cop is abusive and lies. That's the opposite of what the system selects for. A good cop follows orders and meets their arrest quotas, a bad cop blows the whistle and empathizes with the people on their beat.
Because of this fact you are safe to assume every cop you encounter is a bad one.
We didn't arrive at abolition out of nowhere. The policing in America is completely rotten from top to bottom. It works in some other countries that have much better policies and regulations. We arrived at abolition because the only cops left are the ones that would wiggle their way around such regulations. It needs to be completely cleaned out in the USA.
It seams we have a bit of different images in mind, what it means to treat someone nicely and maybe have a pleasant conversation.
Especially when you know how dangerous they can be, you shouldn't treat them as brutal animals. When you give them the opportunity to follow orders and still be seen as loyal to the people and the constitution, why shouldn't they take that opportunity?
Of-course you wouldn't say anything compromising, that would be really dumb. But why would you talk to a policeman about anything personal? You can have a conversation about politics, the economy global/nation/local, tax-policy, etc. . You can talk about their uniform, their new car, (because you are in HN) their encounters with software, the recent trend in UI. You can talk about the road quality, the new highway, where he thinks should be a new highway, what he thinks about public infrastructure, public transport (when that exists), the new park in town, the littering of the park in town. You can rant about the idiots going over the speed limit, the idiots parking everywhere, those modifying their cars, about issues with water, electricity, garbage disposal, regulatory overreach, those idiots in the EU, the idiots in near and far East, the idiots in Africa.
When a policeman jokes about talking drugs, I would expect you to deflect and tell him that taking drugs is forbidden, or how you held a lecture about the effects of drugs in school, how you always avoided the regions were it smells so bad. Nothing of that must be true.
I'm sure you can show me hundreds of cases, when there are millions of policeman it still wouldn't show that a majority of policeman is corrupt and commits crimes.
> Sean for reporting when his partner raped someone.
I can't really wrap my mind about that, because in my experience a superior that thinks a rape here and there is a good thing, still will kick subordinates out, to save his own reputation.
> You can have a conversation about politics
You are lucky, you must live in a nice country with normal laws and normal cops. I can't imagine any other reason why you'd just offer this up... Even an American with a thin blue line flag on their house would warn against talking politics with a cop. Check out the videos of the statsi troops going door to door in DC, fawning to locals about how they're there on trump's orders to "keep them safe." Armed to the teeth. You think it's a good idea to try to have a polite political conversation with men like that? You are blessed! For your own safety, never come to America, stay in peace and comfort elsewhere, I genuinely fear how your kind hearted openness will land you into awful trouble in the USA.
If you do come, enjoy a day sitting in a courtroom. Watch how the simplest, most meaningless conversation with a cop is read out by the court in a toneless transcript without any context and how a judge will grant probable cause on it, or consider it in sentencing to their detriment.
Bon homanie about the slow construction of a local freeway? In court that's lack of attachment and local loyalty, disaffected personality, antisocial tendencies.
Complaints about the EU? General disrespect of authority, likelihood to stir up trouble, lack of respect for law and order.
I guess it's time to trudge out the classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
Anything you say will be used against you.
> I'm sure you can show me hundreds of cases, when there are millions of policeman it still wouldn't show that a majority of policeman is corrupt and commits crimes.
The most likely outcome of an encounter with a bear is it runs away. Sometimes though, it's lost its discomfort around humans, is rabid, or just hungry enough to give it a shot. You should treat every bear like that bear. So too for the police. If the police want to be liked and treated with respect, they can become firemen instead. There's no song called "fuck the fire department."
> I can't really wrap my mind about that, because in my experience a superior that thinks a rape here and there is a good thing, still will kick subordinates out, to save his own reputation.
Untold such cases. It doesn't have to be logical to you, police departments in the USA reject candidates that are too smart.
[dead]
That's a notion I have read several times now on HN by seemingly US Americans. While it might or might not be true that your judicial system has always worked like that, when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it. No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.
> the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice
That is NOT a myth. That is what it is supposed to be.
When you start to say "yeah, that's just how it always has been", that IS when radical ideologies start to rise.
How public opinion treats thinks that is how they tend to become. That is true with humans and that is true with systems. I heard it is quite less regulated to become a police man and there are quite a lot of black police mans* already. I heard you have a system where there is a jury that can overrule the judge. Why isn't there a massive influx of black/other-wise-suppressed people into the judicial or executive branch?
* yeah and woman of course
> when you just accept that as a fact, you are endorsing it
I strongly disagree.
> No I don't think that such a judicial system is normal.
I believe we have enough evidence now to indicate that it is in fact normal.
Americans believe their constitution is written about this - aggregation of power inevitably leading to tyranny, thus such aggregations must be prevented. The contradiction is believing a bureaucratized aggregation of power (the United States government or individual state governments) would function as an effective regulation. We have 250 years of evidence now that it does not. 250 years, and a significant portion of the time a large portion of the population was enslaved. Half the time, more than half the population couldn't even vote. In living memory, portions of the population were marched into concentration camps. Actually, that's happening again. 250 years and the largest per capita prison population.
The experiment was successful - now we know these systems don't work.
Time to trust the American instinct's true origins, in an enlightenment triggered by Western confrontation with indigenous American ideology, best described as "anarchism." Most values Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding can be traced back to this root of American history, when colonists were intermingling with indigenous Americans.
>> you are endorsing it
> I strongly disagree.
> [proceeds to claim this is moral and just]
> aggregation of power inevitably leading to tyranny, thus such aggregations must be prevented
Yeah true, aggregation of power makes that easier, bureaucracy makes it still possible, in fact large bureaucracy makes it easier to oppress people by a majority who doesn't want oppression, because everyone is "just doing it's job". That's how Nazi Germany operated.
> We have 250 years of evidence
So you had 250 years to address this and are still complaining? /s
> In living memory, portions of the population were marched into concentration camps.
Why doesn't this lead to a social stigma against it and strong opposition against it? As an outsider it seams more like a large majority doesn't have this in memory at all.
Does the whole society has stockholm syndrome?
> The experiment was successful - now we know these systems don't work.
Now you know YOUR system doesn't work. The same you already knew when you rejected the idea that your state is just (Did you?). In fact the United States of America are not the only existing society.
> Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding
So you think:
What are you arguing for? Your whole country has some cognitive dissonance (from an outsider view). But it fits that a majority seams to claim they are and want to be apolitical, yet isn't happy with the current state or actively distrust it. Or is the intersection of these circles empty?I'm an anarchist. I'm completely opposed to the current judicial system in the USA. Im not quite clear what I can change about my previous message to make that more clear but perhaps with this message my previous can be ready in the correct light.
Normal doesn't mean good... Wage slavery and people killing themselves to make iphones is also normal.
> I'm an anarchist.
Yeah we will disagree on that really much, but I only find that tangentially to my point here, except if you think that this ideas is only promoted by anarchists. When this attitude is only promoted by the rare anarchist, then I find that somewhat "okish". My concern is when that attitude becomes commonplace.
> Normal doesn't mean good.
A Norm is a subjective society-wide agreed moral stance. What you seam to mean is what I would expect to be called common.
That's basically my point treating it normal means endorsing it.
> I'm completely opposed to the current judicial system in the USA.
Yet this will also be the judicial system of next year. These things seem to stay constant even across civil wars and revolutions.
That's why I think you should think of it as THE judicial system. It will be also the judicative of your aspired state (unless you disagree that there needs to be a judicative), if you want it to act differently you need to expect it to act differently, while of course still not being surprised when it doesn't.
Somebody on HN recently claimed, that you can't treat your child as a "X" and expect it to not become "X". I think that applies also the state branches.
When you give up and say it has always been like this, then you endorse the current regime.
---
Oh, and I parsed
> Most values Americans falsely believe their institutions are upholding
as
instead of which totally changes meaning.> Yet this will also be the judicial system of next year. These things seem to stay constant even across civil wars and revolutions.
That's a shame then, because that means we anarchists are correct that it is a lost cause and must be completely dismantled, a process which will probably result in short term suffering for some.
I'm not sure where belief comes into it. The fact is that the judicial system is wildly inconsistent and arbitrary in the USA. That Americans trust it and anarchists (and other leftists) don't just means many people are ignorant of reality. Pursuing further ignorance seems the wrong strategy. Ostrich, head in sand.
Expectations are nothing without action. Unless people acknowledge the reality that the judicial system is unsalvageable, they'll just accept it for what it is.
Or if you want to be a liberal democrat about it (in the actual meaning of those words, not the Americanized versions), you still need to be aware of the system's rot to cut it out. I don't mind if libs take a crack at fixing it but historically they reallllllly prefer not to.
The bible is a crucial piece of literature reference. Pretty much every literary piece written before the middle of the 20th century assumed that their reader was also intimately familiar with the bible.
For example, a writer could call a woman a "Jezebel" without any expository context, assuming that the reader would know what that meant.
Thus the bible should be in every high school and higher education library.
It should be commonly taught as a work of literature. Ideally the KJV which has largely fallen out of favour (except with certain groups) as a religious translation because more recent translations are so much better (advances in scholarship, more discoveries of early manuscripts...) but which is beautiful as a work.
It’s a sign of the times that the powers that be might make KJV, a labour of love and the apple of the author’s eye, come forth to fight the good fight and rake in some filthy lucre!
By the skin of their teeth, these wolves in sheep’s clothing’s days must be numbered, but if they keep on the straight and narrow, live by the sword, and go the extra mile, then lo and behold the first shall be last and every salt of the earth will be made a scapegoat from here to the ends of the earth!
after KJV, possibly with thanks to Bill (Shakespeare) also.
any Western literary piece. for translated novels from China you might want some other foundational texts on hand, or the Quran to complement Persian literature, or etc
But I don't see any reason a library can't have various books from antiquity, for reference at least. Probably multiple editions or translations of each too.
TIL "Jezebel" is a reference to the bible.
Without the bible, people still have dictionaries if they don't understand words or references. Or they could use Google. I don't see why some books would be "too crucial" not to ban in a law banning books intended to protect kids.
If anything, I find it easier to defend a ban on religious books in (public) schools.
Typically biblical references are references to parables or lessons, not single words that can be easily looked up in a dictionary.
> The bible is a crucial piece of literature reference.
We no longer live in the middle of the 20th century. Based on your bandwagon logic, we should also require the Quran, Torah, Shruti, Smriti, The Book of Mormon and associated volumes, the apocrypha, Watchhouse volumes from JWs, NIV, NRSV-CE, The Good Book [0], Buddhist texts, Holy Piby.
No. We don't need that. This is a misapplication of Chesteron's Fence to the late 18th century US culture. We all survived the 1950s to now and culture has, dramatically and mostly for the better, evolved.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Book_(book)
The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature. Thus, while I think they should certainly be available in school libraries as they are important works, they need not be required reading.
On the other hand, in different areas with different cultural traditions, each of those books should be required reading as they were central to their literary tradition. And, one assumes, are.
To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny reality. And honestly, it mystifies me why so many seem to want to be ignorant of their own cultural roots.
> The other religious texts you mentioned are not part of the western civilization canon and did not have much effect on western literature.
Incorrect.
> To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny [my] reality
FTFY, otherwise an ignorant and frankly naive take. There are dozens to hundreds of cultures that have influenced and rooted American culture, and you'd do kindly to remember that:
- The American Southwest is __heavily__ influenced by Spain and Mexican culture
- Louisiana is __heavily__ influenced by French and African culture
- Oklahoma, Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, much of New England, and many others are __heavily__ influenced by Native American culture (Way down on the Chatahoochee, anyone?)
- The Black belt and most of cities are __heavily__ influenced and rooted in the reformation of Black culture after being ripped out of their homelands by slavery
- Blues, Rock, and Jazz all stem from African
- What you call "European" is probably English (so, wrong) or a confusing and tangled mess of different cultures that get grouped as "European/Western" and assumed to be one strand of "Christian" or another (I note you missed the Torah being listed, Catholic scripture being listed, etc.).
I strongly, strongly recommend that, if you are a citizen of the US, that you take pride in your own culture and learn where it _actually_ sources from -- of which you clearly care, given that you have chosen to make it _the_ supporting argument for why book bannings are okay and why an irrelevant text should be standard, non-optional reading in high school. The roots matter much less than what the culture currently is.
This is exactly what I meant when I said I was mystified.
Ah! I didn't realize that was said in you comment as a self-reference. I understand you now I think, though your phrasing was quite confusing.
The Ten Commandments are required to be posted on every public school wall in Texas. You would have guessed that that is also unconstitutional
They are deemed to be secular, like Christmas.
What's the secular reading of "You shall have no other gods before me" ? What?
I can understand that Christmas has mutated into a family reunion, a time for gathering with loved ones etc, even Santa Claus, name and all, has turned into the figure that brings presents, but even if I can understand "You shall not murder" as a secular rule, the ten commandments as a whole are really hard to take as such no?
They are common to all Abrahamic religions, in spirit if not word-for-word. Hinduism also has its 5 principles and 10 disciplines which are broadly similar.
Perhaps "secular" is not the best description, but for anyone faithful to any of the major religions, these are going to be broadly shared principles, in addition to being the basis for most of our laws and social norms regarding individual behavior (don't kill, don't steal, etc.)
It's kind of like having "In God We Trust" printed on our currency. It's not a specific (i.e. Christian) God, at least that is the justification, and it's not seen as "respecting an establishment of religion" in the Constitutional sense.
Even if you can find multiple religions that you claim agree on something that does *not* make that thing secular.
> Secularity [...] is the state of being unrelated to, or neutral in regard to, religion.
The ten commandments are definitely not secular, but it is funny how up until the 1950s christmas was deemed a pagan religious holiday and was even listed this way in encyclopedias from that time. Then suddenly, it was listed as a christian holiday, except there is no reference about it in the bible with new testament references specifying to not keep that holiday. How these can be deemed the same is beyond rational thinking.
> but it is funny how up until the 1950s christmas was deemed a pagan religious holiday and was even listed this way in encyclopedias from that time
Deemed by whom and in what encyclopedias? There are certainly religious groups who are historically recent offshoots of Western Christianity that viewed it that way in the 1950s, but the same groups do so today, nothing substantial has changed on that front since the 1950s. For the rest of Christianity, well, it was adopted as a Christian feast in the 4th century and has been treated as one since pretty consistently by most of Christianity. Certainly so in the largest branches of Christian in the US in the 1950s, which constituted between them the great majority of the population.
I had a copy of Britannica from the 50s that had this. It was picked up in one of those Books By The Yard for cheap.
Christian leaders realized they're losing a fight against folk traditions and went into damage control mode. Other "Christian" special dates were similarly specifically picked to match an older special date.
This is one of the stupidest things I've read all year, and I fear that we're still only in August. I really have no words. They're by definition a set of religious directives from a claimed god.
The Bible is commonly in public schools, as are other religious books.
Having a book available does not mean promoting it or establishing it as a religion.
I would be shocked if any library didn’t have bibles in its collection. It’s crucial reference material.
You mean like the new Texas state law going into effect Sept 1 that says each class room must display the ten commandments and specifies the minimum size of the display would be unconstitutional. Also, unconstitutional by what definition? I'm guessing the current SCOTUS would not agree with your assessment.
My public school library had several Bible versions, a couple Quran versions, and probably some Buddhist and Hindu texts of interest, though I didn't look for them. Why shouldn't they have these in the library?
Surely not, while it would be unconstitutional to present it as the correct religious view it is totally fine to teach it as part of a general literary overview. It’s been far too important to Western literature to omit entirely.
You thought wrong. Visit a library sometime to see otherwise. Various Bibles can be found in many public libraries.
It was totally in my library when I was in high school in the late 80s but I was in a small school in the midwest.
from the article: >Since its passage in 2023, Florida schools have removed hundreds of books under House Bill 1069 (HB 1069). HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
Did they remove the Christian bibles too?
Lol, of course the Bible is always OK, but you can find much worse.
It's OK because there's no gay stuff. Just good old fashioned heterosexual rape and incest, as God intended.Deuteronomy 22:28–29.
“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.”
Rapin' is ok if she doesn't belong to someone else (theft) and you have $50. Also HIS penalty is that HE has to marry HER.
So for LOT. Is it ok if the daughters initiate it? What is the lessen here? Is it trying to make some point about, better to keep the family going if there aren't any other men around?
No, it does not endorse it, mere recounts it. Claiming it is endorsing incest is a bit like saying Agatha Christie endorses murder.
There does not seem to be a clear interpretation of this AFAIK. A lot of the other bits of Genesis have clear messages (e.g. the creation myth, the near sacrifice of Isaac, etc.) but not all necessarily. It might be that there were no other men and they were desperate for children.
Endorsing or not doesn't matter if it's still "sexual content".
Re-quoting:
> Since its passage in 2023, Florida schools have removed hundreds of books under House Bill 1069 (HB 1069). HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
No, it's not ok. Contextually the daughters believe the world just ended because Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed so they think they need to re-seed the world, which one might consider a justification, but the etiological purpose is to describe the origin of the Moabites and the Ammonites, who are the historical enemies of Israel, and is supposed to show how these two enemy tribes have a shameful beginning (incest). So, it's bad what they did and ew look how gross the Moabites and Ammonites are.
"Lesson" SP.
For real. For Lot, was wondering about if there was supposed to be some message here.
Others noted. It was more anti-propaganda. Lot was part of adversaries of Israel so this was painting them in a bad light. Just funny how we are still reading this holy book, and here is really some very local, very time specific propaganda that we are still reading.
Well... it is nice to get some good news on this front but I can't shake that this is likely short lived given the federal government right now...
There is less and less any reason for them to try to hide their true intentions and can just be more open with their blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc.
Side note: was quite surprised to see a reference to Cloud Atlas. While not surprised given the entire point of that book, it makes me wonder how much these people are actually reading these books and what that looks like.
The other route, rather than ban books is to threaten librarians with prosecution so they do the job for legislators, perhaps just out of fear:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/north-dakota-books-obs...
Well it’s not over yet, this will likely go through many rounds of back and forth appeals since it’s not clear what obligation Florida has to the public in policing content it purchases. It’s not as if they banned you from buying the books, after all.
Seems like they could rely on the librarian to make decisions, then if there's a problem have the administration deal with it, and escalate as normal...
Rather than big government via vague laws that allow random people to control everything in schools.
They could do that. That would be an effective way to protect children while also respecting the children's First Amendment rights. Instead, well... "Foreseeable consequences are intended consequences."
At no time in human history have the people who banned books been on the good side.
You might want to look up how denazification efforts worked post ww2.
Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools. One would argue at least banning (often recently written) books with adult content/porn makes sense, saying a classic is "culturally insensitive" and banning it is just another word for political indoctrination
>Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools
Source? I was an adult alive 20 years ago, that wasn't a thing.
Political parties seem irrelevant here. Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library.
Which laws did Democrats pass calling for books to be removed from schools? I admit I'm not always paying attention, but I don't remember any.
> Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library
We already don't do this though, between state laws, federal laws, and the department of education. I am fine getting rid of the department of education though since it seems you're opposed to it too.
And it was 20 years ago, you'd have to look up the specific policies. The point is acting like this is the first time people have tried banning books from young children in school is ignorant of all recent history
Making a claim and supporting it by effectively saying "go look it up yourself" is hardly compelling. It might be accurate, or perhaps not incorrect but misleading.
This smells a lot like the old "both sides do bad stuff" argument, which often gets over applied to pretend there is no difference in magnitude of the egregiousness when two sides do similar bad stuff.
>We already don't do this though
And even if we did it would still go to shit because "educators" is not an representative cross section of the population and their choices would be ideologically skewed and/or subject to industry circle jerks and fads.
Educators are people that are trained in educating children. I'm not sure why they should be a representative cross section of anything.
Generally institutions have more Democrats serving in them (I suppose it’s a culture fit thing) so it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
> it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
But issuing organizational memos is not illegal, whereas passing explicit laws is banned by the Constitution. Probably because one is a really bad idea that chills free speech for the whole nation, while the other is just how any community organization operates.
Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.
It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.
Associating good vs evil with politics and perhaps worse, political party's themselves is a problem.
Why do people associate these disparate things? Because they've been trained to...
Sadly, this tribalism is at the root of most of our civil disagreements these days.
> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"
And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.
I mean you're comparing the color purple and fucking mein Kampf or the literary equivalent of song of the south.
Come on man. These aren't the same thing. Not everything is the same as everything else because you can torture the principle to vaguely fit both.
Can you be more specific? What books were being banned on the state level for being culturally insensitive?
It seems like every side wants to ban content nowadays. It’s really quite sad. One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.
Although if that’s what you meant then I agree.
> One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.
One of these things is happening and the other is not (no one is banning or endeavors to ban anyone from using the wrong pronouns).
Apparently, recently this is new and exclusively Republican policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
Republicans are seeking to ban thousands of books nationwide.
With these "both sides" arguments why is it always "heres thing one, which is definitely happening and has been for decades. And here's thing two, which could hypothetically happen but never has and almost certainly never will"
I mean, it's absurd. It feels like a psyop. Is this a targeted propaganda campaign?
Stop trying to both sides. I see crazed MAGAs banning books here and I would bet if we look at numbers the crazies censor at least an order of magnitude more than whatever you're referencing. I can't think of an example of books being banned by non rightwingers, but will look into it now to learn.
"Wrong" pronouns -- what does this even mean?
I feel like there are a lot of conservatives who are unaware about what sex and gender actually are, and rather than looking for understanding they prefer to mock because they are lazy and chose the easy route rather than understanding other people.
Real rough to have a society when one side just wants to openly mock the other.
You're making the same sort of mistake I make in situations like this. You assume they're good people because you're a decent person. You project that onto them. You don't consider they actually are bigots, and lacking curiosity :)
I mean, if there really was a book that was too harmful to allow at all and it was successfully banned, we likely wouldn't know about it at this point.
I am extremely against book banning, but the possibility of some time in history where they really needed to disallow access to a book seems at least _possible_.
Banning Mein Kampf was not on the bad side of history. It's rarely black and white.
Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.
It's not actually banned in Germany. Though I think the only edition you can buy here is annotated, which does seem like a good idea.
It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.
It actually was forbidden in other countries. But that's not the point. I do not consider banning this particular book bad, nor on the wrong side of history. Do you?
Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.
Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.
The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.
I'm surprised at the books mentioned in the article. While potentially inappropriate for elementary aged children are probably more than okay for teens and high school aged. The restrictions themselves without context, review requirements or any rigorous standards is likely excessive.
That said, there are definitely examples of books that have been put into school libraries that can be considered obscene, that you can't post screenshots of on Facebook or other social media platforms, or quote or otherwise read into a school board or city council meeting. Such as graphically depicting a minor student giving fellatio to a teacher. That are wholly inappropriate in any school setting.
And that isn't to restrict a parent who decides to allow their child access to this kind of material, if deemed mature enough to handle it. Only in that it doesn't belong in a public or school library. They simply aren't meant for children. Aside, I'm even open to an "adult" section of libraries that do offer mature content access/storage for adults, such as Playboy, which has a history of decent journalism.
This is very interesting.
The folks deciding to order the books and make them available are government employees.
The folks seeking to prevent those employees from doing that are also government employees.
AFAICT none of the parties are seeking to control what books private citizens procure themselves in their personal capacity.
If we accept that governments are going to run schools, some set of government employees is going to decide which books they buy, right?
The Bible has tons of sexual content, yet something tells me the same parents appealing to get these books removed take no issue with that one.
i was a voracious reader as a child (and still largely am) and can’t remember ever touching a school library (most of the books stocked were stupid). wonder if this is different in Florida
There is a high likelihood this ruling gets overturned. The title and the article use the term “book ban” but gloss over what’s actually happening which is legally significant:
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book
Florida cannot ban private libraries from stocking books with sexual content. But librarians are government employees buying books and maintaining libraries with government money. The state can direct its employees what kinds of books to make available for the same reason any private entity can do so.
This might be different if libraries were neutral venues for authors to come present about their books. In that case you might have a case about viewpoint discrimination. But the first amendment can’t force the government to buy particular books and make them available to the public.
> Florida cannot ban private libraries from stocking books with sexual content.
From the statute, "As used in this subsection, the term “school property” means the grounds or facility of any kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, junior high school, or secondary school, whether public or nonpublic."
> remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,”
Where "sexual content" includes the mere existence of LGBTQ people at all.
> The state can direct its employees what kinds of books to make available for the same reason any private entity can do so.
Not according to the constitution.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/government_speech
This isn't an unlimited loophole in the constitution (at least not so far).
As the article you link to points out, "It is not always clear when the government is speaking for itself instead of unconstitutionally restricting others’ speech...The Supreme Court has not yet provided a clear standard for this type of case."
Also, "...even though government speech is not regulated by the Free Speech Clause, it is still subject to the Establishment Clause."
The first amendment cannot force the government to buy specific books, but it can force the government not to not buy specific books.
And sure, that's weird, but it's just how the First Amendment works.
No that’s not how the first amendment works. You’re thinking of situations where the government offers a platform to the public and can only impose viewpoint-neutral restrictions on access to the public forum. So the government couldn’t operate a government-owned sales platform for books and discriminate based on viewpoint.
The books stocked in government libraries is more like the government speech doctrine: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/government_speech. The government itself is allowed to have a viewpoint.
Could the government direct librarians to purchase only Bibles, with explicit bans on purchasing the Quran?
I assumed by “First Amendment” you were talking about the Free Speech clause, since that’s what the article is about.
Government speech of course remains subject to other constitutional provisions. But the standards for these provisions are quite different. Your hypothetical raises the possibility of an Establishment Clause violation. But to prove that, it’s not enough to show that the government is discriminating as to view point. It has to be enough to amount to an establishment of religion.
And of course the Free Speech Clause covers basically any subject, while other constitutional provisions are much narrower. For example, a government-run book selling platform probably couldn’t exclude people from trading books on Brutalist architecture. But a school library could have such a policy.
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This is not just a few rogue FL citizens trying to ban books. This is spearheaded by the Florida government itself. The education commissioner is Anastasios Kamoutsas, appointed by DeSantis. Given that a culture war is a great way to market yourself to voters, expect appeals.
Maybe, but at the same time there is a serious issue with adult/sexual content in fictional books with no real historical or scientific value. Saying kids have to have access to books about how to perform bj's is a losing argument. If a parent wants their kid to have access to such books they should buy them themselves (although I'd like to think CPS would give them a ring), and we shouldn't conflate what's obscene for an 6 year old to what's obscene for a 30 year old
> Maybe, but at the same time there is a serious issue with adult/sexual content in fictional books with no real historical or scientific value.
Is there? Because I've heard this and everytime it's been an hallucination.
And also text on a page is not sexual. Its true that literary classics like "Kite Runner" include rape. But that's not a sexual book.
Is there actual, literal smut on school library shelves? Almost certainly not.
Its not a problem of sexual content, but rather a cultural problem of extreme prudism and purity culture, coupled with religious extremism.
> Saying kids have to have access to books about how to perform bj's is a losing argument.
This isn't the argument, which is why it didn't lose. The argument is that the law was too broad and banned books that have long been considered to have great literary value. Did you see the list of books that have been banned as a result of this bill in the article? The bill does not allow consideration of literary value (a.k.a. the rest of the book, and its role in history), it only considers some sexual content in the book in isolation. It also applied to the entire school system, these books were being banned from high school libraries.
Ignore the insanity of banning books for a second. What about the Victorian-era insanity of preventing children from being exposed to the mere concept of sex and labeling it 'obscenity'?
On one hand we want kids to learn about consent, what 'normal sex' is like and all that, but simultaneously there is this idiotic push to prevent them from encountering any of it until they are 18. If we don't want kids to see bad porn, we need to ensure that there is lots of good porn available, and not just some boring sex ed bullshit. I mean actual benign everyday sex that kids can safely watch and learn from because otherwise they will never see it anywhere else (it's not like they regularly watch their parents or other people do it).
You have to be incredibly regressive to think 18 is somehow a good cutoff for this.
What I've come to realize (despite avoiding such a negative conclusion) is that the dominant culture's experience with sex seems to be mostly limited to that which includes problematic power dynamics (e.g. mainstream porn, captive housewives as an ideal). They do not have a solid concept of consent. Sex is shameful to them because their concept of sex is, literally, shameful and exploitation is at the core of it.
Concrete and overt examples being unable to imagine someone being sexually liberated, a woman, and a feminist all at the same time (they see sex as inherently demeaning to women), or seeing male sexual success on a "nice guy virgin" (unsuccessful through insufficient exploitation) or "man-slut womanizer" (success through excessive exploitation) spectrum. (Even the word "womanizer" bakes this assumption in, to be made a woman, woman-ized, is to be exploited?)
It appears in popular discourse around trans individuals (choosing to present as a woman means you must have a sexual fantasy about being exploited, we can't expose that idea to children). Around homosexuality (so which one of you is the exploitative one). And around polyamory (you must have a cuckold kink because nobody would let someone exploit their partner otherwise).
But this same dynamic also appears in a more subtle form in daily interactions in the culture and shuts down sexual topics or behavior. It's somewhat analogous to the situation of shushing a white toddler that points out the race of a non-white person because it's "rude" - you've made it apparent that you think non-whiteness is something inherently uncomfortable for a non-white person to have pointed out so you try to "spare" them this.
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book.
... So, that would be approximately every great work of literature, every important religious text... I mean, what does this leave? This seems _incredibly_ broad; even when censorship of books for obscenity was routine, there was pretty much always a getout for "yeah, but it's Proper Serious Literature".
Like, what books are on the curriculum for English students in Florida? Just the Very Hungry Caterpillar?
> It also allowed parents or county residents to raise objections to material, which then would need to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable until the book was formally reviewed.
Again, wtf? Surely this would allow anyone sufficiently motivated to just run a DOS attack.
Very few people that I talk to are truly in favor of free speech as a principle. They are either in favor of free speech in cases like this, where christians are banning books that they like, and not in favor when it’s about political correctness (misgendering, banning words, hate speech etc) or vice versa. Free speech for me and not for thee seems to order of the day.
Excellent use of false equivalency. The people banning books are pretty much the same as the people who prefer that you use pronouns they see themselves as! One side actually getting these resolutions in place in writing in law versus people complaining online about being misgendered! It seems like you aren't truly in favor of free speech as a principle after all. You don't seem to want people to have the right to complain about being misgendered or about hateful speech. Why do you want to silence people who espouse these things?
Or do you actually have some delusion that Democrats have banned words and hate speech?
I presume FL banned the Bible too, which is full of sexual content (but they probably don't know that since Christians don't actually read the Bible).
Banning books is not something new, but I think Florida has some 'unique' criteria when banning certain books. One example I know is Jackson County, FL. once banned 1984 for being "pro-communist". In most places of the world, 1984 is considered anti-totalitarian, and anti-communist in quite a few countries (not China, where people can buy the book without any hassle). I totally get it, but Jackson County seems to be the only place that sees the book to be procommuist.
I, for one, am shocked — shocked! — that the Florida Legislature and the DeSantis administration would violate the Constitution of the United States of America. Clearly some rogue agent in the library deep state must be to blame.
They didn't violate the constitution. There was no ban on books, there was an exclusion of specific titles from school libraries (which is nothing new), which are run by the State of Florida. There is no obligation that schools carry any particular book at all. If I write a book, I cannot compel my book to be carried by the state in school libraries.
This judge just ruled that they did violate the Constitution. You are arguing a case that was already decided.
Maybe the judge was wrong. Let's see if this ruling gets appealed.
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Only fascists ban books.
This isn't a book ban, you can still buy these on Amazon, in Barnes & Nobles, borrow from local libraries, etc.
"You can just buy in to freedom of expression!"
Yes, this is not as bad as a making the books illegal.