[HN Gopher] Librarians are dangerous
___________________________________________________________________
Librarians are dangerous
Author : mooreds
Score : 331 points
Date : 2025-04-19 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bradmontague.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bradmontague.substack.com)
| lysace wrote:
| I really loved the local library in the 80s/very early 90s (as a
| kid without network access). I probably spent like 20-25 hours
| per week there.
|
| Now when I visit it's always meh. They have sacrificed breadth
| and density for "curation" and "experience spaces".
|
| The space between the book shelves seems to have almost doubled.
| Why?
|
| Bring back super high dense book shelving filled with interesting
| stuff.
| whatshisface wrote:
| My local library on the other hand got a lot better.
| revx wrote:
| Probably depends on if your local community - which includes
| you! - has valued (and funded) libraries. Ours is really well
| done.
| Goronmon wrote:
| My local library was much denser as a child as well.
|
| Except that's because the library was tiny. The denseness was a
| necessity and the library was constantly trying to get rid of
| books to make room for newer books.
|
| Thankfully they eventually replaced that tiny library with a
| much bigger one. And the one we live near now is also much
| bigger and much better. I think the kids section of the library
| is probably double the size of the entire library we had
| growing up, with more books as well.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Bring back super high dense book shelving filled with
| interesting stuff.
|
| Sure thing but your community would have to pay insignificantly
| more in local taxes
| lysace wrote:
| To be crude: Books and shelvings are very affordable compared
| to employees. Every part of each library doesn't need to
| curated by a _local_ librarian.
|
| The primary goal of libraries is to educate the public - not
| to employ librarians, right?
| toast0 wrote:
| > The space between the book shelves seems to have almost
| doubled. Why?
|
| Accessibility is probably a factor, narrow spaces are hard to
| navigate with a wheelchair.
| lysace wrote:
| I mean, they were never so narrow that a person in a
| wheelchair wouldn't fit. Or couldn't turn spin around.
|
| I guess the benefit is that now two people in wheelchairs can
| pass each other, thus avoiding one of them needing to spend a
| few seconds going backwards, were two people in wheelchairs
| to travel in opposite directions in the same lane.
|
| Yay. Totally worth halving the inventory for, not.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Yep. My local library when I was a kid I get to on my bike, and
| I looked for books on computing topics. I ended up with a book
| that was a compilation of articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal.
|
| In the late 90s, there was a cornucopia of amazing books
| available - one was on programming Windows, and came complete
| with a CD in the back with a fully working copy of Visual
| Studio C++ 1.52.
|
| I decided to poke into the library my kids go to for story time
| and see what computer books there were. It was truly bleak.
| There was really nothing that would bring back the sense of
| discovery I had as a kid going to the library.
| streptomycin wrote:
| When I was interested in programming as a kid in the late
| 90s, I too went to the library, but they only had books about
| computers from the 80s. idk whether my experience or yours is
| more representative. But today there are tons of free
| resources online, so idk if a kid would be looking for that
| stuff at the library these days.
| lightedman wrote:
| Librarians are wonderful. I married one.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, so did I as it happens.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Indeed
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_War
|
| Joking aside, librarians have always been facing so much. Kids
| and parents are a whole topic, but many adults coming to a public
| library aren't just there to spend some time, they can be at a
| pivotal time in their life with a specific need, and getting
| enough info or access to the proper resources is so critical.
|
| I still remember a clerk at our public library talking to an old
| lady who's husband was hositalized, and trying to guess what
| medical book covered the proper stuff.
| irrational wrote:
| I expected this to be about the Brandon Sanderson teen series
| that starts with Alcatraz vs The Evil Librarians.
| mrits wrote:
| I've been working in the space the last few years and what I've
| gathered is Librarians themselves often hate what libraries have
| become. The ones working in University libraries seem to enjoy
| their job a lot more than the ones in large cities that act as
| homeless shelters.
| jadar wrote:
| The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the
| attention span for good books. Libraries are getting rid of the
| classics to make room for new books, the majority of which are
| not worth the paper they're printed on. We would do well to heed
| C.S. Lewis' call to read more old books for every new book that
| we read.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| People don't even have the attention span for tweets. You see
| people asking grok to summarize the points of whoever they're
| fighting with.
|
| Try going back in time and explaining to Neil Postman that
| people today find watching TV to be a chore that needs
| abbreviation or summarization.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| "Grok summarize this comment"
|
| I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4
| tweet thread I posted.
| alganet wrote:
| 40 minutes or so? You guys are getting lazy. I expected an AI
| connection in less than 10 minutes after the post.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Are you being too passive aggressive to say directly that
| you're offended by commentary about AI that disagrees with
| your stance, or do you really keep track of these timings?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I personally think the focus on attention span is a red
| herring.
|
| Many good books don't require that much attention span, and
| putting the onus on the reader to like and focus on a book that
| is supposed to be good feels kinda backward. Given that people
| binge watch whole tv series and still read a ton online there
| is a desire, and probably ways to properly reach the audience.
|
| Not all classics need to be liked forever, tastes change, and
| the stories are retold in different manners anyway. I'd be fine
| with people reading Romeo and Juliet as a mastodon published
| space opera if it brings them joy and insights.
| mingus88 wrote:
| Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone
| to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text
|
| I have been online since the early web and have seen how much
| content has changed to engage people. It's all short form
| videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post
| anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about
| it.
|
| People may binge a series but they are still on their phones
| half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train
| my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and
| balance out the engagement bait.
|
| It's hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your
| attention
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > People may binge a series but they are still on their
| phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine.
|
| This. Both movies and series are now FAR less popular (and
| profitable) than video games, and video games are far less
| popular than social media. Even the minority that still
| enjoys legacy media enjoys it WHILE consuming other media.
|
| Movie theaters are in as much trouble as libraries, and
| blaming either of them for their decline in popularity
| without mentioning the root causes would be myopic.
|
| The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have
| a single train of thought that lasts longer than the length
| of a TikTok video or tweet are dying.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's true but I've heard that the reason
| so many streaming shows are like twice as long as they
| should be to best-serve their stories, and are so
| repetitive, is because they're written for an audience
| that's using their phones while they "watch".
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to
| have a single train of thought
|
| People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The
| rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones,
| should tell us that people engage with the content and
| focus. For hours at a time.
|
| But they need to care about it, expect way more quality
| and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not
| great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.
|
| Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO
| they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few
| centuries.
| milesrout wrote:
| People definitely watch YouTube videos while playing
| video games and play games on their phones while watching
| TV/movies.
|
| Narrative video games are a tiny and obscure niche.
| EgregiousCube wrote:
| I wonder if it's not that people are getting dumber or less
| able to hold attention; rather, that everyone is being more
| exposed to lowest common denominator material because of
| efficient distribution.
|
| Reader's Digest was always there on the shelf at the store
| and was very commercially successful. Most people who
| consumed more advanced content ignored it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > It's all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade
| vocabulary now
|
| We've had more publicly available educational content than
| ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts
| have brought the quality of audio content to a new level,
| people pay to get additional content.
|
| People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium
| and newsletter also became a viable business model. And
| they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading
| on their phone.
|
| That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of
| it is, content length is often not dictated by ads
| (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads)
| but by how long it needs to be.
|
| If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind
| you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and
| aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The
| bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books
| and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing
| them when going to the bathroom without missing much.
|
| Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're
| now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the
| bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but
| I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could
| have been a blog post.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I've come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like
| the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people
| aren't making it through your book, they _might_ have a short
| attention span but your book also might just be bloated,
| unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set
| expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it's
| very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if
| you don't know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Early in life I learned the rule: If one person is a jerk,
| he's just a jerk. If you feel like everyone is a jerk, you
| are probably the one being a jerk.
|
| The same is true of books. If you think one book is bad,
| it's probably the book. If you think all/most books are
| slow you should work on your attention span.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Shouldn't we take into account that the industry is also
| famous for being a monetization path for bloggers,
| pundits and grifters, for whom a book deal means jackpot;
| combined with a minimum word count pushing authors/ghost
| writers to pad their work to reach an average page volume
| ?
|
| I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably
| grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I
| feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except
| we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already
| fewer people are buying books.
| toast0 wrote:
| Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is
| using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries
| have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that
| people are using.
|
| Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable
| tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and
| considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some
| library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which
| may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
| bigthymer wrote:
| This has been an ongoing discussion within libraries for more
| than a hundred years not a recent issue. Should libraries be a
| place with classics to uplift people or popular books that
| people want to read even if they are low quality?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I find that old books can often take away more than they give
| to me. They often have outdated ideas on women or race and are
| usually far clumsier with depicting homeless, disabled, or sick
| people. Engagement with fans of old books often is a set of
| very sheepish defensiveness when I point these out.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| You're lucky these days if all you get is sheepish
| defensiveness and not revanchist conservatism.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty
| to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most
| part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans,
| if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by
| whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great
| books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you
| think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is
| much more to wade through and the media environment is totally
| different.
|
| At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do
| to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old
| books that are moronic and if the population of the world back
| then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
| kmoser wrote:
| I thought this was going to to be about how librarians were
| instrumental in forming the OSS, which helped the US win WWII
| (yes, this is real).
|
| https://www.harpercollins.com/products/book-and-dagger-elyse...
| romaaeterna wrote:
| I have begun taking my children to the local library, and I am
| shocked at how bad the selection is. There are very few books of
| lasting value in any part of the library. Nothing of serious or
| intellectual interest. And were I to give a factual description
| of the childrens and teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
| This is wildly different from the collections that I grew up
| with, in libraries trashed now by standard publishing spam,
| despite having vastly more money and space than they did when I
| was a kid.
|
| Poorly curated libraries (though often staffed to the gills with
| "librarians") are a gaping cultural void and vacuum, while well-
| curated libraries are an important treasure. Good curation has
| little or nothing to do with "battling"
| misinformation/censorship, which in practice always seems to be
| about librarians championing a very bland and particular
| political monoculture. Good curation is the art of discerning the
| important, the unique, and the interesting, and avoiding the vast
| flows of spam that overwhelm everything these days.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I don't doubt you, but in many locations you don't have to take
| your children to _the_ local library. For example I lived in
| Sunnyvale for a long time, and yet after visiting the nearby
| libraries I decided to get a library card at the Mountain View
| public library. It doesn 't matter I don't live or work in
| Mountain View.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| In this particular city, at least, it's cultural malaise, and
| one that is hard to escape just by going to another branch.
| That said, there are some good used bookstores out here (not
| the big chain stores) that have great collections.
| Amezarak wrote:
| That's because librarians have been making a concerted effort
| to "deaccession" (throw them into the dumpster or send them for
| pulping) old books, no matter how valuable. Often this teeters
| into ideological territory - old books might contain
| unacceptable thoughts. Libraries are now seen as entertainment
| centers by many librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
|
| In some places it's particularly absurd, for example, here's
| one that had the school libraries junk anything written before
| 2008: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-
| lib...
|
| A second awful thing is this usually goes along with the idea
| that "well, it's available online" - even as those resources
| are lost. There's a lot of long tail works on niche historical,
| scientific, and technical topics that have been lost forever,
| aside from the loss of serendipity from discovering this books
| in your library and reading them.
|
| In the past 20 years, my local library system has deaccessioned
| nearly every work from Ancient Rome and Greece. This is
| happening not just as small local libraries like mine, though,
| but even at large, old research libraries.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's definitely a double edged sword. Librarians can plant
| seeds for thought and introspection.
|
| They can also wield the sword of censorship, hiding or
| discarding books they don't personally like, and fronting all
| the ones they do.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Just a few days ago, I visited the community college library
| reference desk. We were discussing and browsing the shrinking
| stacks of reference volumes.
|
| I commented that some of these extant books must be kept
| because it was difficult to typeset or compile them
| electronically, and I pointed out a "Lakota language
| dictionary"...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_language
|
| but the reference librarian immediately disagreed with me,
| and she said that electronic resources were great and
| fantastic and better, and there is nothing of value that
| cannot be electronically reproduced... So I did not argue,
| because the Lady of the House is always right
| trollbridge wrote:
| There's something about that that simply sounds dangerous
| to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's a certain
| resiliency in keeping printed copies of reference
| materials: they cannot be changed, disappeared (other than
| unloading them into the bin), or made impossible to access
| (unless the library starts putting books behind lock and
| key). If I want to learn about gardening (for example), I'd
| much rather get a reference text at the library than search
| for stuff online... which half the time is clickbaity or
| AI-generated trash.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| It's not like the librarians have unilateral choice here.
| Old books on the shelves get vandalized and stolen; new
| books are not easy to come by, due to reduced print runs
| and supply-chain issues. How many times have we heard
| complaints about Amazon orders being "print-on-demand",
| and the quality is horrible? And if a published book is
| typeset in original PDF format anyway, why not distribute
| it that way to begin with?
|
| Librarians have the demand side to cope with too.
| Personally, I don't enjoy checking-out books from the
| library. They're heavy; they require a backpack to carry
| them; they're not ubiquitously available to me wherever I
| am; they need to be physically lugged back to the same
| place where I found them. So yeah, I'd rather have an
| eBook.
|
| But I contend (not in front of librarians) that a book
| such as a "Lakota Language Dictionary" is irreproducible
| in electronic form, because scholars have striven to
| compile those in print form; they developed new
| orthographies and documented the existing ones; and any
| new electronic-format dictionary must be recompiled,
| retypeset, and re-edited to satisfaction for a new
| publisher. So we won't have the same materials.
|
| I used to derive great joy from finding really old copies
| of the Vedas, or a Navajo dictionary, but mostly Hindu
| texts in the original scripts. And yeah, they were
| painstakingly compiled by British colonisers and
| oppressors. But that history is preserved because of
| those colonists having a scholarly interest in
| "Hindooism". And those Vedic texts, and Panini's grammar,
| will not be directly transcribed to eBooks. They may take
| photographic images of them and shove them into a PDF,
| but those volumes will be given short shrift, because
| they're all Public Domain anyway.
|
| The money's in stuff that you can copyright and IP that
| you can defend. And that's where libraries and librarians
| are going to follow.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Well, you don't need to think too hard about this when
| sites like archive.org are in legal danger, and the dream
| of Google Books is dead. I had not considered the
| "everything on the Internet is AI/SEO slop now" - that's
| a good point too: even if the stuff exists online, it's
| often almost impossible to find.
|
| A few months ago I half-remembered a quote from a famous
| philosopher. Google and Bing returned only the vaguest,
| most useless search results - basically assuming I didn't
| actually want the quote, but general information about
| the philosopher. So then I turned to ChatGPT, which
| asserted that no such quote existed, but here were ones
| "like it" (they weren't.) Finally I skimmed through all
| the books I had until I located it.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Maybe you can't get all the nice semantic benefits of
| marked-up plaintext, but there's still always the .tiff
| option.
| hx8 wrote:
| > Libraries are now seen as entertainment centers by many
| librarians, not as a place to educate yourself.
|
| I think you might be missing that there are many different
| types of libraries. For a city or county library, they have
| to meet the very diverse needs of the local residents.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Yet these same local libraries _used_ to be filled with the
| sorts of books I 'm talking about. They threw them away to
| replace them with DVDs of Marvel movies, the worst dreck
| imaginable in the children's section, and shelves and
| shelves of the latest romance and mystery novels, along
| with whatever "hot" ghostwritten politics book is out.
|
| Frankly, I look at that is abandoning their original
| mission and no longer feel inclined to support them in any
| way. Libraries should have led their communities as centers
| and sources of learning. What we have now is something else
| wearing libraries as a skinsuit, and I don't see why
| libraries like this deserve public support _as a library_.
|
| But at any rate, as I said, the problem is not limited to
| municipal libraries, it's ongoing even at institutional
| libraries.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| From your article:
|
| > _Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive
| audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote
| anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And
| step three is a representation audit of how books and other
| resources reflect student diversity.
|
| When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the
| board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either
| as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or
| because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive,
| relevant or accurate."
|
| For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be
| donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners."_
|
| So besides the "no old books" that was purportedly a
| misunderstanding is the official policy, there was also
| explicit ideological filtering.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| > There are very few books of lasting value in any part of the
| library. Nothing of serious or intellectual interest.
|
| I've noticed this at my library as well. I was shocked that
| there wasn't a copy of Spinoza's Ethics which seems kinda
| basic. That being said, I think people underestimate how much
| garbage each generation produces. Past generations have done
| the work of curating the good stuff of their time for us.
|
| > And were I to give a factual description of the childrens and
| teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
|
| I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about but I'm going to
| take a leap and assume you're complaining about the presence of
| LQBTQ books in the library. I've noticed this trend where
| conservatives think that any book with queer characters is
| sexual by definition. People get upset by children's books with
| 2 dads that are just like any other book and it's honestly
| tiring. Queer people exist and have normal, boring lives and
| there's nothing inherently sexual or pornagraphic about that.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Let's not jump to the gun here. It could be as well that
| there's nothing there, or so on. And being accused of
| something you didn't is something I think we'd all want to
| not deal with.
|
| That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you
| say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
| romaaeterna wrote:
| In a world with so many different opinions, where you know
| neither my nation or city or native language, it's odd that
| you would immediately jump to this. After all, my library
| could be run by Scientologists attempting to propagandize
| children, or Soviet-era revanchist apologists, or so on.
| Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who
| propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in the
| fake patronizing way that the the author of the article means
| it either.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| > After all, my library could be run by Scientologists
| attempting to propagandize children, or Soviet-era
|
| I admitted it was a leap and you're absolutely free to
| clarify what you meant instead of pointing out some
| ridiculous edge cases without explaining yourself.
|
| > Regardless of what material it is, yes, anyone who
| propagandizes children really is "dangerous", and not in
| the fake patronizing way that the the author of the article
| means it either.
|
| I don't see how having books with queer characters is
| propaganda but having books with straight characters isn't.
| I'm queer and I don't go around insisting that people ban
| Christian books from the children's section even though I
| think those values aren't great.
| wrycoder wrote:
| My town votes 50/50 Republican/Democrat, yet our newly rebuilt
| library is filled with lib/women oriented non-fiction and
| contemporary women's pulp fiction. They no longer even have
| paper sets of encyclopedias. It's not possible to learn much
| about science or technology there anymore - they weeded much of
| that out during the remodeling.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Bummer. Do you have to go far to find another library that
| has paper encyclopedias when you need to look up some texts?
| 9x39 wrote:
| Science and tech is obsolete like the format of paper
| encyclopedias? (It isn't.)
|
| It's worth considering if a short-term focus on stocking
| fad romantasy comes at the long-term expense of a body of
| knowledge. Consider the classic value of college degrees -
| they're (largely) not optimized for fad pop knowledge or
| even vocational skills, instead optimizing for a rounded
| body of knowledge considered to be broadly 'educated'.
| grandempire wrote:
| It's safe to say the market who purchases books is women,
| under the age of 40.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Women reading mostly romance and the occasional "young
| adult" fantasy book is practically the only market left for
| authors, if they want to sell fiction.
| fuzzer371 wrote:
| > They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias
|
| Honest question from someone who has never actually had to
| use a paper encyclopedia. Do they still print paper
| encyclopedias?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| They are likely stocking the books their users are asking
| for. If you ask for something else I'm sure they can get that
| too.
| grandempire wrote:
| Libraries vary greatly in quality. I don't know why this is
| downvoted.
| delichon wrote:
| Ideas are dangerous, librarians just stockpile and distribute
| them. In terms of potential energy books are more disruptive than
| nukes. The keepers who wrangle their power should have
| proportional status.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into
| the library. So they should be accorded status based on that
| power, but there also should be accountability and
| transparency.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get
| into the library.
|
| But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians
| are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In
| modern times, librarians are working against the factions
| that do that.
|
| > but there also should be accountability and transparency.
|
| There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of
| transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest
| possible measure.
|
| In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good
| faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting
| them do their jobs.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > In modern times, librarians are working against the
| factions that do that.
|
| A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are
| secretly censoring the flow of information are completely
| out of touch with how librarians work.
|
| Librarians take their responsibility to their community
| seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less
| than presenting their patrons with _all_ of the information
| (books and beyond) that they are trying to access,
| regardless of their personal feelings about said
| information.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > People who think that librarians are secretly censoring
| the flow of information are completely out of touch with
| how librarians work.
|
| Absolutely. My farthest r-wing years overlapped with my
| heaviest library patronage. Libraries were a space where
| my overactive, fault-finding radar was quiet.
|
| Seriously. Librarians have always been there for
| everyone.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a
| process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is
| zero sum.
|
| Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was
| excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by
| patrons but not chosen.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is
| inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to
| exclude. It is zero sum.
|
| Titles are removed when the card catalogue shows they
| aren't being checked out. Those titles can be bought by
| the public at a steep discount.
|
| What is included are titles that are likely to be checked
| out, plus what individual patrons ask for.
|
| I've done the latter. For some unusual titles I had to
| supply the ISBN. If they were in print, they were on the
| shelf within a month.
|
| Excluding books is a recent phenomenon driven by book-
| banning agendas.
|
| > Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was
| excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by
| patrons but not chosen.
|
| This seems to flow from wholly imagined concerns - ones
| that are trivially debunked.
|
| What is removed can be seen for sale and is also recorded
| in the card catalog. What is excluded (when book-banning
| efforts are successful) is also recorded.
|
| What is requested by patrons is stocked. Again, I've done
| it.
| 9x39 wrote:
| >But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies
| librarians are working from a position of restricting
| knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against
| the factions that do that.
|
| Peel District restricts books to materials post-2008 and
| deemed antiracist, which is an incredibly narrow slice of
| the historical body of human literature: https://www.peelsc
| hools.org/documents/a7b1e253-1409-475d-bba...
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/teacher-librarians-
| sp...
|
| On the opposite end of the western culture war, we have the
| elimination of the corpus of queer texts at a Florida
| college: https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education
| /2024/08/1...
|
| Either way, it's a position, institutional or otherwise, of
| restricting knowledge that is inherently subject to the
| political pendulum swings.
|
| >In modern times, librarians are working against the
| factions that do that.
|
| Librarians apparently are the factions that do that. What
| books or why varies, but the "weeding" is the euphemism of
| the day to restrict with.
|
| >In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good
| faith.
|
| I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification
| than a useful model for a political process.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Libraries stock what gets checked out.
|
| >>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good
| faith.
|
| >I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification
| than a useful model for a political process.
|
| I assert that librarians fall toward the end of the scale
| we use to example good faith actors. Someone has to be
| there.
| mingus88 wrote:
| A curator promotes. A censor deletes.
|
| Sure you could argue that with limited shelf space, a
| librarian is a censor by choosing what they do and do not
| carry, but then you have to ignore a lot about what censors
| and librarians actually do.
| lurk2 wrote:
| You know this isn't true.
| elashri wrote:
| I used to skip school for at least two days to go to the big
| library in my city. I taught myself a lot of things. Did have
| access to books and high speed internet (by this era standards
| anyway) that I couldn't have or afford at home.
|
| I wouldn't encourage people to skip school to do that of course.
| But I owe this period of my life a lot of what I am today.
| Someone with interest in science and tech. I have known some of
| the people working there and they were happy helping me
| navigating the library (and grap books for the short boy who is
| too short for most of the shelves).
|
| I wasn't happy with how it turned out the last year when I
| visited.
| tianqi wrote:
| A fun fact that please excuse me if off-topic: Mao Zedong was a
| librarian before he started the Bolshevik Revolution in China,
| and then he changed all of China. So it's often said in China
| that it's really dangerous to upset a librarian.
| Pooge wrote:
| Is it known which kind of books he read?
| tianqi wrote:
| Many of his readings are mentioned here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| Wasn't Lao Tzu a librarian as well?
| tianqi wrote:
| Yes, and an upset one too.
| deathlight wrote:
| My understanding is that Mao was a rural peasant from the
| distant Countryside who was looked down on and marked by his
| more (self declared) socialist Coastal betters along China's
| Coast who were contesting with the kmt and later Japanese
| invasion. The idea that Mao invented the communist or socialist
| revolution in China is laughable because that revolution had
| been ongoing prior to Mao's entrance into it. My understanding
| is that Mao was the guy that stood up and said look, the
| peasants in the Hinterlands are an Unstoppable Army that is
| going to come flooding from distant and Central China on to the
| coast and push all opposition aside and so Mao was basically
| saying that that the Communists should be attempting to
| position themselves as favorably as possible in relation to the
| rising peasant tide of discontent in China. If anything the
| concern is that if you say anything that the modern Chinese
| Communist party does not like or agree with they will disappear
| you to all the corners of the Earth. It is probably only in
| Taiwan that you could speak openly and honestly about the
| nature of modern Chinese history from let's say 1900 to the
| current day. They probably have a better accounting of what was
| actually going on, and that will soon be deleted by the now
| dominant Communist Party of China. You can see how they have
| treated their assimilation of Hong Kong, and Macau before them
| to imagine what awaits Taiwan.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I've moved to UK and I'm annoyed by lack of STEM books in
| libraries.
| dijit wrote:
| I always found it interesting how hacker culture is largely
| propped up on the protections society has carved out for
| librarians following world war 2 (where certain sections of
| society had been identified based on what books they had looked
| at).
|
| The hacker culture of "information wants to be free" is largely
| predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment and
| only given protection by western europe after clear and serious
| abuse.
|
| Librarians are the very forefront of information access and the
| privacy of looking up certain information, we owe them a lot.
| o11c wrote:
| It has never really been about "information wants to be free".
| Librarians (and hackers, etc.) have _always_ restricted the
| flow of information.
|
| It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than
| "censorship".
| collingreen wrote:
| I get your meaning but it feels overly reductive. I'd call
| good faith picking a catalog and not trying to prevent people
| from finding certain books "curation". I'd call "delete
| anything that says gay" censorship.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's hard to have an objective standard. A curator and a
| censor are both trying to pick content they think is
| appropriate for their community.
|
| There may be a difference in what they do when the
| community requests content not in the catalog. I would
| think most librarians would consider adding requested
| content or at least referring the patron to another library
| or other means to access it.
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| > There may be a difference in what they do when the
| community requests content not in the catalog.
|
| My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they
| _frequently_ add books they personally dislike or
| outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they
| just think it 's a bad book).
|
| This can happen at the request of the community, or even
| if they believe somebody in the community might want said
| book.
|
| This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is
| completely out of touch with what library curation looks
| like and how librarians work and see their responsibility
| to their community
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think the point is that whoever is in charge of curation
| can (and likely sometimes do) quietly and easily delete
| anything that says gay without anyone really noticing
|
| Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone
| else tells them what they are allowed to curate
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Every school librarian I ever had fought against the
| administration constantly about restricting access to "banned
| books".
|
| We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and
| English teachers would encourage us to read books that have
| either been banned in the past or were currently banned from
| our schools.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow
| of information, please provide a citation that backs up your
| blanket generalization.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or
| just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not
| really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody
| off.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Absolutely. Why is everyone responding to this thread
| going right to Mein Kampf? It was very easy for me to
| access that book.
|
| > It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're
| pissing everybody off.
|
| They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every
| year. Censors will censor.
| bombcar wrote:
| The point they're trying to make is the librarian is
| already the censor by the fact that they decide what
| books to buy.
|
| The _librarian_ gets pissed if someone attempts to "do
| their job" or override them, either by banning a book
| they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not
| want.
|
| I find it hard to believe that someone doesn't have some
| books they think the library shouldn't carry, even if
| it's just _The Art of the Deal_.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This was simply not the case at my middle school, and
| since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight
| into the administrative war going on behind the scenes.
| She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to
| introduce into our library.
|
| The tone was set by the parents and administration, which
| comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism
| which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the
| beginning.
|
| The librarians did the best they could under the
| circumstances, and the only way we can consider them
| censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the
| situation to the point where words start to lose their
| semantic value and anything can be anything else if you
| squint hard enough.
| cycomanic wrote:
| And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people
| working against authoritarian measures. If everything
| (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is
| censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I
| guess is the intent of the argument).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical
| goals and training in library sciences or education is
| quite a bit different than showing up at a school board
| meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page
| excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > Why is everyone responding to this thread going right
| to Mein Kampf?
|
| Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting
| that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to
| demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require
| librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house.
| Because apparently the only valid measure of how free
| your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most
| censorious regimes in history.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians
| and English teachers would encourage us to read books that
| have either been banned in the past or were currently
| banned from our schools.
|
| These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned
| from public schools because they contain graphic displays
| of sexuality that parents don't want their children to be
| exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on
| religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).
|
| They're never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has
| actually been banned by a national government on these
| displays.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school.
|
| > The few exceptions I can think of were based on
| religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter)
|
| I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter at my home, but my
| librarian allowed me to anyway. I wasn't allowed to read
| books with sexual content, but my librarian allowed me to
| anyway. I was raised by massively abusive religious
| extremists. I didn't give a fuck about their attempts to
| control my mind then, and as an adult now I don't give a
| fuck about other idiots' attempts to control their kids
| minds now.
|
| My guardians did every single thing they could think of
| to stunt my growth and turn me into a good little
| Catholic extremist. You simply won't understand unless
| you have been through such a horrible experience, as a
| curious mind with a voracious appetite for knowledge.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| "I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
|
| What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf? Makes no
| sense, doubt it's true, and obviously inappropriate just
| at a difficulty level, let alone content.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > doubt it's true
|
| Do you always immediately disregard what people say in
| favor of your own beliefs?
|
| > obviously inappropriate just at a difficulty level
|
| I had a collegiate reading level in first grade... I
| taught myself to read at age 3 in order to escape my
| situation. I should not have to suffer because other
| people did not invest the same amount of time and energy
| into their literacy.
|
| > What's the best case for giving k-5 Mein Kampf?
|
| I learned about Hitler and why he was a massive piece of
| shit, but also formed my viewpoint while considering
| _all_ available information and opinions, instead of just
| internalizing what other people told me.
| Animats wrote:
| It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context
| that's hard to get. The major political players of a
| century ago are mostly gone now.
|
| In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of
| kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era
| of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet.
| WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but
| lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still
| mattered.
|
| The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-
| monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There
| are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist
| mass movements.
|
| The Catholic Church was still a major political power.
| That's gone.
|
| Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done
| construction work. This was an era which required a huge
| number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get
| things done. That's when unions arise, by the way.
| "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler
| started. The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he
| wrote: _" In times when not the mind but the fist
| decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our
| education in the upper classes makes them incapable of
| defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not
| infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies
| in physical weaknesses."_
|
| There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from
| clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by
| Jews, described as physically weak and overly
| intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI.
| There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected
| legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't
| exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined
| society run by strong working people. He writes
| approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on
| immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.
|
| Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading
| this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to
| 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns
| up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-
| generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better
| choices.
|
| Kids who get all that background will question the way
| things are today, of course. Which scares some people.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Sorry that you had a bad childhood, but the answer to
| you, personally, having a bad childhood is not "the state
| should subvert the primacy of the nuclear family and the
| parent/child relationship." Just consider things under
| Rawls' Veil of Ignorance: would you want a hypothetical
| extremist Catholic state to be able to subvert your
| relationship with your own (hypothetical) children?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > the state should subvert the primacy of the nuclear
| family and the parent/child relationship
|
| No, the State needs to get the fuck out of my business.
| That's the point.
|
| > would you want a hypothetical extremist Catholic state
| to be able to subvert your relationship with your own
| (hypothetical) children?
|
| See the above. Providing protections for open access to
| information is translatable across both situations you've
| described. Access is access. Censorship is censorship.
|
| This isn't about the "nuclear family". It's about me, an
| individual, and my inalienable rights for self-
| determination, regardless of what others around me want.
|
| Make no mistake, I am not using my anecdotal experience
| as the basis for my beliefs. I am using it as
| supplementary evidence for why this is all so important.
| My heart goes out to every child who has been or is
| currently in the situation I faced growing up. I don't
| want them to be like me, holding a gun in their mouth
| with the finger on the trigger at the ripe age of 9,
| wishing to escape a seemingly unending violent war for
| control of my thoughts. The represented majority will
| never understand the struggle of the unrepresented
| minority.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| A librarian (who is employed by and thus an agent of the
| state) giving children access to books with sexual
| content against the will of parents is definitely
| subverting the parent/child relationship.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I didn't have a parent-child relationship. I didn't live
| with my mother or father, they were mostly absent in my
| life after the age of four and I was homeless by 16,
| after seeking emancipation for many years earlier and my
| parents denying me.
|
| And fuck "the will" of the people who raised me, they
| were extremely abusive and traumatized me in every way
| imaginable, including through sexual repression and
| agency to chose my own destiny and seek my own sources of
| truth, knowledge and creativity. They sought to enact a
| chilling effect by surveilling me at every level of my
| life, including through my school systems. They repressed
| nearly every creative outlet I engaged in, including
| programming or exploring computer literacy, fearing it
| would turn me homosexual or turn me into a "hacker".
|
| When he wasn't punching me in the face me or throwing
| furniture at me, or beating me with a belt for hours
| until I stopped crying, because "men don't cry", my
| grandfather used to shake and choke me violently and tell
| me I was a demon and would never love anyone or be loved
| by anyone.
|
| They were evil people and I do not support any
| institution or government which wants to perpetuate the
| experience I had for other children. I seek to enable
| children to have access to knowledge and tools they need
| to determine their own destiny, and I firmly believe that
| full access to information and supporting institutions
| will naturally lead to a more empathetic society than
| will restriction of information.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm sorry for your experience but your extreme case does
| not invalidate the right of normal parents to exercise
| guidance over their children and to decide when and to
| what types of books, movies, games, etc. they are
| exposed.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| My experience is the edge case that people like you try
| to pretend either doesn't exist or doesn't matter when
| justifying the current system.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| FWIW, the most egregious issues you've mentioned about
| your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there
| are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in
| those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against
| those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited
| your access to information, but it's not actually clear
| there's anything wrong with that, which is why we're
| arguing about it, but it's certainly the case that the
| fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a
| kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should
| intervene in matters of mere access to information.
| card_zero wrote:
| Parallel really, not orthogonal. It's better that I cut
| off your internet than hit you with a hammer, but not
| much better.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Is cutting off a teen's internet bad if they're being
| bullied or groomed on social media?
| const_cast wrote:
| > definitely subverting the parent/child relationship.
|
| That's the job of schools. Okay, it's not all about
| parents. We stopped allowing parents to do everything
| because, as it turns out, most of them are fucking
| stupid.
|
| So we have public school, where real things are taught.
| And now, most people aren't illiterate. So, yay us!
|
| But this notion that everything should always bend over
| backwards to cater to what parents want... uh no. This is
| some 2000s bullshit. This is not the way it worked
| before. If parents don't want their kids learning about
| X, Y, Z then their options are either getting over it or
| pulling their kids out of school to home school. Bending
| the public school to whatever their dumbass whim is,
| isn't an option.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| And now my state has this bad boy:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/28/what-is-
| louisianas-...
|
| "Louisiana is the first US state to require the Ten
| Commandments to be displayed in schools. The law
| stipulates the following:
|
| - Public schools are required to display a poster or
| framed copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom,
| school library and cafeteria.
|
| - They must be displayed on a poster of minimum
| 11x14-inch (28x35.5cm) size and be written in an easily
| readable, large font."
|
| Separation of Church and State, my ass.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They're not going to understand unless they lived here
| long-term. My friends in St. Martinville told me stories
| about Jeff Landry's (adoptive) family growing up choosing
| a different pharmacist because the one they went to not
| being cool with Vatican II was still too liberal for
| them.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Hopefully you can see the irony of, on the one hand,
| arguing that the state should have the right to intervene
| in the parent/child relationship wrt what information a
| child has access to and, on the other hand, complaining
| that the state is requiring the display of the Ten
| Commandments in schools. The power you're arguing for is
| the very same thing you're complaining about.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| There is no irony here, you're not understanding the
| context. It's never been against the law for a teacher to
| show them here in school. But now they're forced to, even
| if they personally disagree with displaying and
| perpetuating religion in their public school classrooms,
| when separation of Church and State is such a core
| component of our Constitution. A huge amount of our state
| was against this violation of free speech, but our
| governor signed it into law anyway.
|
| The library is still a resource for those who wish to
| learn more about religion, and I certainly used it while
| learning about various religions that I was not allowed
| to research at home.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and
| say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***
| _. " But if a teen wants to check out a book that has
| sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't
| prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the
| librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if
| they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head,
| but the kid can check out whatever they want.
|
| I think checking out _any* book, without a parent's
| explicit consent, is potentially subverting the
| parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's
| no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good"
| and which books are "bad." And without such a standard,
| it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to
| make literature and information as accessible as possible
| with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's
| responsibility to choose which books are somehow
| "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are
| sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk,
| that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than
| sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I think the reasonable stance is for the state, in its
| various forms, to only expose kids to a (small c)
| conservative subset of what is widely agreed upon as
| factual and morally acceptable and to leave everything
| beyond that to parents. Kids aren't under the purview of
| their parents forever; they'll soon get out into the
| world and come to their own conclusions.
| milesrout wrote:
| When you are a child you are not an individual. You are a
| child. What your parents want matters more than what you
| want.
| praptak wrote:
| Under Rawls' Veil of Ignorance I actually want the state
| to protect me as a child born into a random family that
| could happen to be abusive.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| The context of this thread is access to information, so
| that was the implied context of my comment. But to be
| clear: I agree that the state is right to intervene in
| the parent/child relationship in cases of physical abuse.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| But then the State is implicitly deciding morality by
| deciding what is and isn't abuse. It's engaging in
| censorship, and is subject to corruption, as was and is
| my government in the Deep South. It's actively hostile
| towards information.
|
| Literally just last month, we as a city came together and
| narrowly avoided the city passing a sneak ballot that was
| going to remove a lot of funding from our public
| libraries and redirect it towards police retirement
| funds. They even tried to repress our vote by making it a
| parish-wide vote instead of a city-wide vote, inviting in
| people who were ignorant of the consequences of the
| ballot but easily swayed by local identity politics.
|
| Libraries are in danger, and it's precisely because they
| provide things that our local governments, and the
| current rogue federal government which they massively
| support, and their generationally brainwashed
| constituents, don't want people like me and other
| pacifists and archivists to access and share.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Ah, I see you are in EBR parish. Congratulations from
| NOLA on voting down the proposal. We did our part with
| the constitutional amendments but I won't be in this
| state for much longer. I thought that EBR parish and BR
| city were coterminous however?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Hey, thanks, everyone was pretty nervous but we came
| together :)
|
| There is Zachary, St. George, Baker, Central and Baton
| Rouge. This is one of the games these cities sometimes
| play in order to sway local elections. I too will be
| leaving the state again soon once things line up. I hope
| you find a community that you feel connected to.
| praptak wrote:
| I meant abusive in the general sense, including overt
| restrictions in access to information.
|
| My hypothetical parents behind Rawls' Veil should not be
| able to prevent me from learning about evolution to give
| a concrete example.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Are you willing to take the inversion of your position:
| that you should have no ability to control what
| information the state exposes your children to?
|
| What about media with sexual content? Or content that
| promotes creationism or the idea that there are two
| biological sexes, which were created by God?
| praptak wrote:
| My position is balance between the family and the state
| for the maximal benefit of the child.
|
| Also the balance should be towards access to information.
| There is no symmetry between exposure to harmful ideas
| and restricting good ones. With your example of two
| biological sexes created by God it is pretty easy to
| explain that the reality is more nuanced. If parents
| restrict access to information and the state doesn't
| intervene, the harm is bigger.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| To what degree should the state be able to intervene if
| parents are preventing their children from access to the
| truth? Should homeschooling be allowed? Should children
| be taken from their parents? Should parents who don't
| agree with certain content be compelled to fund
| distribution of that content via public libraries?
| Loughla wrote:
| What? There are a shit load of books banned for being
| "offensive" that aren't because of graphic displays of
| sexuality.
|
| The perks of being a wallflower has been banned. 13
| reasons why. Slaughterhouse 5. The Decameron. Uncle Tom's
| Cabin. The Grapes of Wrath.
|
| Do I need to keep going? The sexual nonsense has been
| used recently to ban lgbt books, as if queer kids aren't
| a thing that exists.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Every single one of the books you listed were suggested
| to me by a teacher. It often felt like some of my
| teachers latched onto my strong ethical stances and
| continual disregard for the brand of institutional
| authoritarianism common in the Deep South, and felt
| compelled to nurture it.
|
| Of course, it goes both ways. Plenty of teachers fixated
| on the idea of breaking me and making me fall in line. By
| middle school I had over 50 write-ups, a few suspensions,
| and had been subject to corporal punishment (literal
| State violence) mainly for "willful disobedience", a
| derogatory term which always confused me because I felt
| it positively described exactly what I was doing. In
| middle school, that number exploded as some authoritarian
| teachers became fixated on forcing me to adhere to school
| uniforms or demanding that I stood and participated in
| the cult-like Pledge of Allegiance, attempting to
| embarrass me in front of the class or to get my guardians
| to whip and punish me at home.
|
| Public school was a battleground for the future of our
| society. It felt like 99% of people at the time simply
| didn't understand that. The few teachers who "saw" me and
| did what they could to help me navigate my abusive and
| restrictive home life became the most important people in
| the world to me, and I owe everything to them.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Where have these books been banned?
| Loughla wrote:
| Inside the United States.
|
| Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have
| been banned.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Inside the United States.
|
| Show me one that was banned at the federal or state level
| from being either owned, read, possessed, transmitted,
| and / or sold. This is what an ordinary person
| understands when you say that a book has been banned.
|
| I know you don't have any examples of this occurring in
| the United States or you would have offered up specific
| examples.
|
| > Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have
| been banned.
|
| No it doesn't.
| djeastm wrote:
| https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-
| book-b...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They also are banning books that are critical of
| authoritarian governments, because they don't want their
| children to resent the one they've chosen to install
| here.
| lurk2 wrote:
| Which specific books are being banned? Where are they
| being banned?
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| here is an example https://youtu.be/G0XWn6S1_iA
| const_cast wrote:
| > because they contain graphic displays of sexuality
|
| This is literally always the excuse used when censoring
| content from people.
|
| At the end of the day, we need to acknowledge A LOT of
| the bans were because of racism, homophobia, and other
| prejudices, and that these "safety" arguments are just
| made to conceal that.
| i80and wrote:
| My mom when I was growing up found _any_ expression of
| same sex relationships to be outright pornographic.
|
| I find it is best to be deeply deeply skeptical of
| anybody defending book censorship because frankly the
| most common pro-censorship movements in the present US
| use words like "sexualization" to mean things like "gay
| couples and trans people exist".
|
| Normal people wouldn't agree with that definition, but
| they'll nod along with "kids shouldn't have access to
| sexual material", so that's the code word that pro-
| censorship camps used.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I somehow doubt that Mein Kampf or playboy magazines would
| feature at "banned book week."
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Is there a specific point that you're trying to make?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned
| book week" is not about exposing people to fringe
| materials. It's about exposing people to the things that
| the librarian/teacher approve of but the community
| doesn't/didn't agree.
|
| The _real_ banned books are the ones that don 't even
| show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of
| books is long.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned
| book week" is not about exposing people to fringe
| materials. It's about exposing people to the things that
| the librarian/teacher approve of but the community
| doesn't/didn't agree.
|
| Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire
| topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became
| involved in the struggle for access to information even
| if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an
| extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist,
| totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once
| have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
|
| > The real banned books are the ones that don't even show
| up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books
| is long.
|
| Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that
| librarians have to make compromises in order to
| continually push the envelope and not undo all of the
| progress that has been made. This is called politics.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when
| students learn to think for themselves is silly, then.
| It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't
| like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the
| new boss, same as the old boss.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| That a cool opinion, but my own experience completely
| invalidates it. I always looked forward to banned book
| week as a chance to expand my horizons, and generally
| sought out texts that I felt the State and its supporters
| would rather me not have.
| Amezarak wrote:
| I've yet to see a "banned book" week display that wasn't
| almost entirely books that were required reading in high
| school.
| const_cast wrote:
| A lot of those books were actually banned.
|
| Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't
| once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce
| that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably
| wildly controversial before integration.
| Amezarak wrote:
| A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents
| or were _maybe_ even possibly removed from _a_ school
| library in one of the thousands of schools in the US.
| That 's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to
| market approved books to kids who have to read them
| anyway as if they were edgy.
|
| In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came
| from across the spectrum because of the use of racial
| slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the
| reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even
| _good_ outside of its propaganda value for fighting
| racism. At any rate, even then it wasn 't meaningfully a
| "banned book", even in the south.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/to-kill-a-
| mockingbird...
|
| Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back
| in 2017 it was simply removed from the _required reading
| list_ in one Mississippi school district because people
| complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the
| reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says
| "banned."
| Larrikin wrote:
| If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a
| meaningful way because you are actually for the racism,
| this is the argument you would make in public.
|
| Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character
| felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If
| your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of
| the internet then you just normalize that way of
| thinking.
| treis wrote:
| I will fight anyone that says To Kill A Mockingbird isn't
| good.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Get exposed to enough different authority figures'
| different favored ideas and there might not be that much
| left that you haven't been exposed to yet.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is a good point, but in US public schools, you only
| get two. The librarians and teachers are pretty much a
| monoculture.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Ok
| streptomycin wrote:
| I wish I could remember the link, but there was some
| website where it would accept uploads of banned books and
| host them so people could freely read them.
|
| It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't
| accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Given that school teachers tech pedo shit like Lolita by
| Nabhkov all the time officially, why not?
|
| Unironically is Justine by Marquis de Sade that much
| different?
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Lol you've really triggered the pro Mein Kampf culture
| warriors
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Ha, I'm so confused! Where the fuck did these guys come
| from?
| o11c wrote:
| I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants
| Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example
| of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The
| Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to
| pick a single work.)
|
| ... and since it's well known, its presence can get
| improperly used as a proxy for "this library is
| uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get
| restricted anyway.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to
| acquire that from the internet.
|
| The people responding here mainly just come across as
| either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if
| they can prove that in some cases the school
| administration overruled our teachers and librarians on
| the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then
| the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and
| not useful
|
| No one here seems to have actually made a real point,
| just looking for "gotchas".
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been
| at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be?
| Libraries usually have it because they have robust
| collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons.
|
| The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are
| terrorist training manuals or other guides for making
| improvised weapons.
| justin66 wrote:
| > It's just a well-known example of a book that most
| people would agree to restrict.
|
| That's just completely wrong. In America it's a book most
| libraries would keep around as a visible indicator that
| they're not censoring books, and a book the letter-
| writing busybodies who want to censor books would not
| prioritize because there's no sex in it.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > It's just a well-known example of a book that most
| people would agree to restrict.
|
| I don't think most reasonable people would agree to
| restrict such an impactful piece of history. It's
| shocking to me that people think something they disagree
| with should be entirely censored.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I don't know but they all have the same response.
|
| My guess is there are forums somewhere where people
| complain a lot about librarians not giving access to Nazi
| material and how it's a crime against free speech
| absolutism.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Mein Kampf is just the most stark example of a book that
| is forbidden, but very significant to read if you want to
| understand WWII history. Uncle Tom's Cabin is another
| example of a book you wont see but is another piece of
| literature you should read if you want to understand the
| ideology of a given time period. You don't have to agree
| with a book to read it.
|
| Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook,
| which is another great book to read.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US which
| makes it an odd choice to focus on.
|
| Nazi material is generally banned in Germany and probably
| some other European countries. And this has been a point
| in the culture war for years.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> As far as I know, it's never been banned in the US
|
| The question is not if it is banned.
|
| The question is if it is general circulation in public
| libraries.
|
| This is motte and bailey. If a school library decides not
| to include a book in their library, that's curation, if
| it is a book you don't like. If it is a book you do like,
| it is censorship.
|
| If you walk into your public library and browse the
| shelves, is the Anarchist Cookbook there? Mein Kampf? If
| they're not, does that mean they are banned?
|
| I go to my public library quite often, and the books I am
| interested in are most often not on the shelves there,
| and the books that are on the shelves there have a
| political slant towards a politics that I detest.
| Librarians are in fact dangerous.
|
| Now, that doesn't mean the books I want to read are
| banned, I have to put a hold on them from the stacks at
| central and they will ship them over, but they will never
| be on display at my local library.
|
| They're not banned. But the books on display at my local
| branch library are curated by dangerous librarians I want
| nothing to do with.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| At my local public library, I could request books to be
| bought and put on the shelves. I was allowed to host open
| mic nights in middle school where I and other friends
| would read poetry and whatever else, free of censorship.
| Civil engagement through the library was easier than a
| lot of other public institutions, because while
| librarians curate, they also have the job of catering to
| their audience, and respecting requests.
|
| The library became a sanctuary for me after school as it
| meant I could avoid abuse back home and have a less
| surveilled access to information such as books, wikis,
| news, protest music, games, etc. which I was able to
| later take back home or to other places and consume
| without fear of reprimand. It was also a third place,
| where I could meet people, gather people and engage with
| my community.
|
| > They're not banned. But the books on display at my
| local branch library are curated by dangerous librarians
| I want nothing to do with.
|
| Did you persistently try to civically engage with your
| local library over time and form a personal, positive
| relationship with the librarians? If so, and if denied,
| did you seek restitution in city hall or by contacting
| local congressmen? Or are you just complaining?
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I was allowed to host open mic nights in middle school
| where I and other friends would read poetry and whatever
| else, free of censorship
|
| That's nice. Keep it down though, we're trying to read
| books in here.
|
| I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible
| ideas of what a library is.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| A public library is a third space where ideas can be
| accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the
| community can civically engage. In the past, that has
| mostly meant books, which have been a great way of
| archiving things, but many public libraries also have
| rooms for listening to music, watching films, or at least
| renting them to take home.
|
| Many public libraries also welcome and encourage open
| mics if they have space to host them without affecting
| others. In my case, it was a small library in a small
| town, so I hosted the open mic after hours with the grace
| of the librarians who worked there, who were more than
| happy to encourage literacy through poetry.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> A public library is a third space where ideas can be
| accessed and exchanged, and a focal point where the
| community can civically engage
|
| I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible
| ideas of what a library is.
|
| For me it is mostly about access to books.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| A public library is different than a regular library, as
| an institution it has a rich history in what I've
| described. You can still access books.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible
| ideas of what a library is.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Yes, and I'm trying to enlighten you on the historical
| purpose of the institution so that you have a better
| understanding of what a library is, instead of just
| relying on a personal feeling or opinion.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I would much rather have a person who has gone to school
| to study childhood education and library science choosing
| books for the library, than randos trying to force their
| religion on everybody else's kids.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I'm an adult. I don't need someone who has studied
| childhood education to tell me what books to read, for
| fucks sake.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Sorry, I was taking about school libraries.
|
| For your public library, if they get requests for books,
| they get the books. Lots of people want to read fantasy
| romance, so those are the books they buy. Hardly anybody
| requests the anarchist's cookbook, so they rely on
| interlibrary loan to get it when someone wants it. They
| buy the books that are popular. This isn't rocket
| science.
|
| Just about any book you want is going to be available.
| This is what libraries do.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Incidentally Mein Kampf often is available in libraries
| in Germany (in a commented version, here for example
| https://www.provinzialbibliothek-
| amberg.de/discovery/fulldis...), and was never banned in
| the sense that people understand banned. You could always
| own and sell old versions however, printing and
| distributing new uncommented versions could be deemed
| Volksverhetzung.
|
| It's also a crappy text and definitely not necessary to
| understand WWII, there are better texts.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook,
| which is another great book to read.
|
| Again why is it a good example, it's not banned in any
| meaningful sense of the word. I can get onto Amazon and
| buy it right now.
|
| Calling it a good book to read is quite a stretch as
| well. It's a poorly written assembly of instructions for
| bomb and drug making (written by a 19 year old). Many of
| the instructions being outright dangerous, so much so
| that it has been suggested that the book was actually a
| plant by the CIA, FBI... (not that this is a very
| credible conspiracy theory). If you want to learn about
| bomb making better just pick up a chemistry textbook.
| dhosek wrote:
| I've only read excerpts from it, and frankly, you don't
| need to read it to understand WWII history. The important
| bits are well covered in any decent book on the subject
| and you won't get any deeper insight by reading the
| source material.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yeah, reading the whole thing is a bit excessive.
| bityard wrote:
| How have hackers restricted the flow of information?
| mystraline wrote:
| I have, personally.
|
| There was a local municipal hack that affected in-person
| county operations.
|
| The fix would be around $2.2M.
|
| I chose to keep quiet because that money could be better
| spent elsewhere.
|
| So yes, I did censor myself because the harm of speaking
| was much greater than being quiet.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| - any ransomware gang when their target pays up
|
| - the people on the technical side of Digital Restrictions
| Management stuff
|
| - the folks behind SELinux
|
| - anyone DOSing a service they don't like
| weard_beard wrote:
| A librarian and a censor walk into a bar. The librarian
| orders 3 drinks and a glass of water.
|
| The censor orders seafood, a live show with pyrotechnics, and
| the dishwasher's birth certificate.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Took me a second, but it's a great analogy for the
| difference in power.
| weard_beard wrote:
| I would call the difference: A librarian has perspective,
| intent, and a fierce optimism honed like the edge of a
| knife through abrasive contact with the world.
|
| A censor sees only wrong thought and choices without any
| of the qualities of a librarian.
|
| (The Seafood in a bar that mostly serves alcohol is
| probably not up to code in terms of food safety, the bar
| might occasionally have live shows and some of the things
| done at the live show might not be 100% safe, the
| dishwasher might have taken the job because he is not a
| legal citizen and the bar owner pays him outside of
| normal employment contracts...)
|
| But if you see another allegory then it's a good joke.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather
| than "censorship".
|
| At least in Germany, virtually all public libraries are
| interconnected with each other, so if one library doesn't
| have a particular book, another one which has it can send the
| book their way. And in the case that there's no library _at
| all_ holding it in stock in all of Germany (which is damn
| near impossible), as long as the printers have fulfilled
| their legal obligation to send at least two copies of the
| book to the National Library, they 'll be the "library of
| last resort".
| AnIrishDuck wrote:
| This interconnection is the case in the US as well. It's
| trivial to get books within the same regional system, and
| you can do inter library loans for pretty much any other
| library in the country (though not the Library of Congress,
| which is the US "library of last resort").
|
| The core "engineer mindset" is solving interesting
| problems. The core librarian mindset is connecting people
| with the information they are seeking. That's what drives
| them.
| trollbridge wrote:
| It's become difficult to get books "valued" at over
| $1,000, which is basically any out of print book now
| thanks to Amazon's bogus valuations.
| justin66 wrote:
| I peeked at your profile and, well, do you know about
| OhioLINK? I think maybe you're holding it wrong.
|
| The last time I grabbed something rare via OhioLINK it
| was a twenty year old instructor's manual that
| accompanies a calculus textbook I own, which they shipped
| all the way from across the state from some little
| college's library. It didn't occur to me to calculate the
| market value of that book. But here's a test...
|
| I see seven copies of Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost
| "AVAILABLE" for borrowing and...
|
| _Your request for Asimov 's annotated Paradise lost.
| Text by John Milton, notes by Isaac Asimov. was
| successful._
|
| I fully expect this to go through but I'll make a note
| here if it doesn't. And hey, you should totally try this
| yourself, it's an interesting book. (edit: although if
| we're being honest that's coming from a big Asimov fan,
| so I'm hopelessly biased. This went out of print after
| one print run, so it's probably not objectively great.)
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Oh wow, I didn't know about that one. His Shakespeare and
| Bible books are tons of fun, I'll have to track that
| down.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I wish we had this in the U.S.
|
| We've actually had to travel (as in physically drive to
| D.C.) to the Library of Congress because it was the only
| place that had a book.
| trelane wrote:
| Seems relevant: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-truth-about-
| banned-books
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I grew up in an extremely repressed and abusive household. I
| wasn't allowed to watch the majority of television or film, and
| my room was regularly searched for offending non-Christian
| records and such.
|
| My aunt was the librarian at my elementary and middle school. I
| was a voracious reader, but I had a collegiate reading level
| since i was 6 or 7 and the books available to us in our school
| library just weren't cutting it. I also pined for more adult-
| oriented themes and plots.
|
| Out of sympathy, my aunt allowed me to access the "forbidden
| zone" of adult books of which our school apparently had a large
| cache, hidden in the back rooms. She didn't tell my guardians,
| and I can't overstate how important this was for me. I've
| always deeply admired her work and attitude towards information
| accessibility, and it left an indelible mark on me.
| js2 wrote:
| > I can't understate how important
|
| Overstate?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Whoops! Thanks for the catch :)
| sunshowers wrote:
| It's like "could care less": not perfectly logical but
| quite idiomatic I think, and in any case the meaning is
| clear.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| The meaning is likely understood/inferred by many if not
| most, sure.
|
| It's still a "contresens" (can't find the right word in
| English, literally counter to its meaning), and should
| absolutely be avoided for clarity.
|
| Let's not just say that it's alright
| cenamus wrote:
| Sounds vaguely similar to Jesperson's cycle and double
| negatives, the "couldn't care less" idioms. And
| "absolutely avoided for clarity" is a bit harsh, language
| is by its nature imprecise and telling people how to
| speak has (thankfully) almost never worked to avert
| language change.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle
| sunshowers wrote:
| It's alright. Human languages aren't really logically
| tight the way computer languages are.
|
| An example that goes completely unremarked on is "near
| miss", which logically means something that came close to
| missing but actually hit, and yet in idiomatic use means
| the opposite. People also get upset at "literally" to
| mean "figuratively", another one I find strange because
| it's an intensifier.
|
| Clarity matters more in formal writing, and "couldn't
| care less" isn't particularly formal in any case.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| I did use literally correctly.
|
| And I can't agree with you. As a non native speaker, I
| deeply appreciate people making an effort to use language
| correctly to transmit information. I call that being
| mindfull of your interlocutors.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I'm also a non-native (though near-native) speaker and
| writer. I grew up reading a lot of English but not
| speaking much of it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| George Carlin had a bit about "near miss" and other
| illogical phrasings.
| synecdoche wrote:
| In a way there's nothing wrong with "near miss". It's a
| miss not far from the target. Still a miss.
| saltcured wrote:
| I wouldn't put these in the same category. The inversion
| of "could care less" meaning "couldn't care less" or
| "unloose" meaning "loose" are similar.
|
| But "near miss" is more a parsing ambiguity, if not a
| mere disagreement about grammar. People who think it is
| illogical seem to assume it is "nearly missing". But in
| actual usage it is more that "near miss" is like a
| "narrow miss" and a "far miss" is like a "wide miss", all
| encoding distance to the implied target/hit zone.
| navbaker wrote:
| It is alright. Most people can figure out from context
| clues what the writer means and the only thing being
| pedantic and demanding about other peoples' language does
| is make them REALLY not want to do what you're saying.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| Clear meaning: yes. But idiomatic? I have to protest XD
|
| Could care less has indeed left the barn by now and I
| could care less (as you can tell) but mixing up
| understate and overstate? I hope we're in time to stop
| this horse.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I agree and I'm glad I was corrected.
|
| I think we lost the plot once "unloosen" and "loosen"
| started meaning the same thing:
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/unloosen
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| (for the record it's all inconsequential pedantry and in
| good cheer :) thanks for being a good sport)
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Don't get me started on "try and"
| GTP wrote:
| Try and get started :D
| stavros wrote:
| "Idiomatic" is idiomatic usage for "wrong".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We can take the horse that's fled the now-closed barn
| door to water, but can we make it think?
| daxfohl wrote:
| underscore
| squigz wrote:
| And this is why things like requiring identification to
| access the Internet is a bad idea, and the narrative it's
| wrapped in - "protecting the children" - is really more about
| keeping children away from differing viewpoints
| soulofmischief wrote:
| It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Interestingly, one of the things cults and totalitarian
| regimes have in common is a singular obsession with
| subverting the primacy of the nuclear family and the
| parent/child relationship.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| You mean like our current totalitarian, oligarchical US
| government?
| dayvigo wrote:
| One of the things all abusive and controlling parents
| have is a singular obsession with maintaining the primacy
| of the nuclear family and absolute parental authority.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Excellent riposte!
|
| (I'm already responding more thoughtfully in other areas
| of this thread, so won't regurgitate the same points
| here)
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Kids should have to identify themselves to access the
| Internet. I echo part of a previous comment from a ways
| back:
|
| > I would not be the person I am today without early
| unfettered access to an uncensored Internet, and I say that
| both as a blessing, and a curse. It gave me at once access
| to early technology that's turned into a prosperous career,
| while also afflicting me with a lifetime of mental scars of
| varying severity and intrusive thoughts of things I saw and
| cannot forget. I struggle to label this trauma, but it's
| certainly not a good thing I carry.
|
| And having reflected on this, yes, it's trauma. It's the
| dictionary definition of trauma. And crucially, none of
| this has anything to do with viewpoints. I _wish_ I had
| found more shit about different viewpoints, and less about
| animals and people being tortured.
|
| But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you from
| accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you from
| accessing... that. And I don't think anyone is going to
| argue that seeing some of the shit I saw was a growth
| moment for me or contributed in any way positively to me
| being a more well rounded person.
|
| I think a far more effective actionable path here is
| disentangling the stranglehold that parents have regarding
| how their children are raised. We still ascribe very
| diligently to the Western notion that children effectively
| "belong" to their parents, and that their parents are the
| single authority figure that decides how this person is
| raised. Most of the time that's benign to a bit obnoxious
| on the part of entitled parents, but it also very very
| easily ramps up into straight up abuse. The notion that,
| for example, a heavily Evangelical parent feels entitled to
| and is endorsed by the system to be able to deny their
| child knowledge of anything outside their specific sect and
| it's religious text, and enshrine that as a reasonable
| choice, is horrendous. This is a _whole other person,_ this
| child is, and in our current system they are effectively a
| resident of a totalitarian mini-state until the age of 18
| (and given economic challenges, potentially much longer
| now) that is largely reinforced by our surrounding systems.
|
| A child has basic rights, sure, to food, water and shelter,
| but even the enforcement of those can be inconsistent due
| to a combination of poor funding and an overall deference
| to parents that frankly is not deserved. We have reams upon
| reams of evidence of parents doing _inconceivable evils_ to
| their children. It is not a given that a parent wants to
| care for their child and see them succeed. And advanced
| rights? They 're a joke. A child doesn't have the right to
| consume and learn knowledge their parents find adversarial.
| They do not have the right to free association, parents
| destroy relationships their children have all the time,
| sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of neglect,
| sometimes out of cruelty. Children's desires, identities,
| and interests are not able to be pursued if their parents
| disagree with them because there is nowhere a child can go
| (save for perhaps a Library, relevant to our thread) where
| they can freely do so, and their economic disadvantages put
| a hard limit on even that.
|
| The notion that parents should have 100% authority to
| effectively shape other, new people into being whatever
| they think they should be is frankly unhinged if you think
| about it for more than a few moments. This isn't a matter
| of coming to grips with a child different from yourself,
| and learning who they are, and helping them be the best
| them that they can be: this authority grants parents the
| right to _determine_ what a child _can_ be, with ZERO
| oversight, and no ability for the child themselves to speak
| on the subject until it 's possibly a decade or more too
| late.
|
| It's incredibly frustrating as well because the same
| Evangelicals who will claim that every woman must be ready
| to lay down her life to bring a child into the world will
| then out of the direct other side of their mouths claim
| that that child, once born, has effectively no rights if
| said rights are potentially to be utilized against this
| unquestionable authority wielded by their parents.
| squigz wrote:
| > But identification as a child doesn't need to stop you
| from accessing opposing viewpoints, it needs to stop you
| from accessing... that.
|
| The problem is you'll be hard-pressed to have one without
| the other - not to mention that even if it starts off
| like that, the system is so easily abused to destroy
| privacy on the Internet for everyone, not just kids.
|
| And by the way, I do actually believe more people need to
| see graphic violence, and I do believe it helps people
| grow. We all hear about gun violence and club shootings
| and the like, but it doesn't drive home the reality of
| it.
|
| Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I also
| don't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize' all
| of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm sure,
| and I don't count it amongst my trauma.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I saw people literally get scalped and flayed alive
| growing up on the internet and all it did was increase my
| empathy for people and compel me to pay attention to the
| violent struggles happening around the world.
|
| I'm not saying exposure to such material doesn't risk
| traumatizing a child or even an adult, or that I am
| entirely untraumatized by what I've seen, but it still
| pales in comparison to the violence I faced at home. The
| problem is that it's like abstinence or prohibition: If
| such material is legally restricted, when people _do_
| encounter these materials, it won 't be in a safe
| environment and the risk for trauma is much greater. To
| be clear, I do understand that some people fetishize
| violence, but I believe this risk is also greater if
| there is not a safe avenue for understanding the darkest
| sides of humanity.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Being _compelled_ to pay attention to violent struggles
| doesn 't sound to me like a particularly good thing.
| Nothing wrong with empathizing, donating, doing what you
| can for the causes you happen to hear about. But in my
| experience, people who are incapable of ever tuning out
| violence inevitably fall down radicalization spirals
| about it. There's just nothing I can meaningfully say or
| do about most of the violence in the world.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| My argument is about restriction, not compulsion.
|
| But on the subject of compulsion: there is definitely a
| line where utility is not worth the trauma, but as a
| child I was shown images of the Holocaust, of emaciated
| and abused Jews, and that has influenced me to now be
| against Israel and their continued holocaust against the
| Palestinian people, so I'm quite thankful for that.
|
| In general, because school introduced me to it, I read
| quite a lot of Holocaust-related literature in my free
| time, both fiction and nonfiction, and that led me to
| learning about ongoing genocides and neoliberal violence-
| backed economic power struggles, and identifying with
| other oppressed people across the globe, greatly
| influencing my politics and turning me into the exact
| kind of person that my current state considers radical
| and would love to imprison and extract slave labor from.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Do I think kids should see that? Probably not, but I
| also don 't believe it's inherently going to 'traumatize'
| all of them - I saw much of the same stuff you did, I'm
| sure, and I don't count it amongst my trauma._
|
| I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post
| shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to
| have survived ok.
| xvector wrote:
| Yeah, it's my view that people don't _truly_ understand
| how fragile life is unless they 've seen how easily it is
| shattered.
|
| People would get in less street fights and do less dumb
| shit if they knew what the world was like. The cartels
| are _not_ your friend, falling and hitting your head can
| kill you, wearing a seatbelt is mandatory, there are no
| winners in armed conflict, factory farming is not
| ethical, etc.
|
| People that say these things, but they don't truly
| understand them until they _see_ it.
| dijit wrote:
| I couldn't possibly agree more.
|
| It's very easy to fetishise war when you have not seen
| the grim barbarity of true conflict.
|
| It's not like the movies, and we should not think of it
| as a desired or easily entered venture.
|
| Street/Knife fights are another, I've seen them first
| hand and its impressive how mundane things or subtle
| movements are actually just lethal. There's a saying that
| "The winner of a knife fight is the one who dies at the
| hospital" but even glib phrases like this are not enough
| to prepare you.
|
| Kids would be less keen to join gangs if they saw the
| brutality before thinking they might get cool points.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| The issue is that by forcing children to identify
| themselves to access information, be it the internet or a
| library, etc is that by doing so you are normalising that
| there are limits to what knowledge a person is allowed to
| consume or possess based on who they are.
|
| That immediately paves the way for expansion of those
| restrictions.
|
| We see that currently with efforts to "protect the
| children" by limiting access to things like porn. It's
| reasonable on it's face but immediately gets weaponised
| to start banning access to any content that isn't gender
| or sex normative.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Indeed. This is how precedents get abused.
|
| There is a very intentional framing of "protecting
| children" while book bans are really targeting what are
| more fairly described as "young adults". The goal is of
| course ensuring young adults are only exposed to a
| certain world view.
| milesrout wrote:
| It is good to normalise that because that is true.
| Children are not allowed access to lots of things, and
| that is a good thing.
|
| Yes, "content that isn't gender or sex normative" should
| be included. Children should not be exposed to sexual
| subcultures or encouraged to experiment with gender non-
| conformity. They are not ready to handle that.
| bokoharambe wrote:
| The real question is, what is it that you're so afraid of
| with gender/sexuality that you think it makes sense to
| show some expressions of it but not others? Sexual norms
| change regardless of what is officially considered
| normative and regardless of what is repressed, so you
| must know you're fighting a losing battle. So who or what
| is it exactly that you're fighting for? I think it has
| more to do with yourself than with children.
| grandempire wrote:
| > I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7
|
| They told me that one too.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| And? I was literally reading high school and college texts
| then, are you indirectly claiming that this wasn't the
| case?
| grandempire wrote:
| No I don't doubt your ability to read.
|
| I just happened to grow up in a similar time and culture
| with libraries, child prodigies, etc and it seems quaint
| and a little silly in retrospect.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I see, thanks for clarifying. I don't know. I still think
| the most important thing we can do is empower children to
| be as smart and well-rounded as they can be. As the only
| intellectual, atheist, etc. in my entire living family I
| experienced a near-constant struggle for growing myself
| despite my circumstances.
|
| I lived in poverty and abuse, under constant
| surveillance, and was subject to a cultural war for my
| own mind against my family and government. This led to
| strong feelings about my own capabilities and
| intellectualism, and a desire to prove others wrong about
| my limitations.
|
| Maybe on one side it might seem a little silly, but the
| child in me still takes all of this extremely seriously
| even now in my 30s. The cultural and intellectual war
| against children never ended, we just stopped paying
| attention or became complicit with the system.
| t43562 wrote:
| I did NOT experience this level of abuse or control but I
| did go to a religious school - not a weird one but you
| know they beat children just as much or more as the other
| schools there did and all that talk about the kindness of
| Jesus seemed to mean very little to them. Information was
| not controlled there, however, so one eventually did get
| to make one's own mind up.
|
| I can see how you had a struggle to emerge and overcome a
| form of control. I can understand it because I had a
| similar, though much smaller, struggle.
| grandempire wrote:
| > I still think the most important thing we can do is
| empower children to be as smart and well-rounded as they
| can be
|
| I agree. If we were actually gifted kids they should have
| given us real challenges with a chance of failure or
| discovery. Instead they just told us how smart we were
| and taught to emulate the appearance of intelligent
| people. Memorizing passages, quotes, checking out
| prestigious books. It's to such a degree that much of
| millennial culture is references and tokens of
| intellectual landmarks from the 20th century - with no
| accomplishments for itself.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I also studied independently at a more advanced level
| than I was supposed to be at. Not sure I follow why this
| seems quaint or silly to you.
| grandempire wrote:
| What did it do for you?
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I enjoyed it, and it gave me confidence that I was
| capable of doing some interesting things. My schooling
| wasn't very inspirational.
|
| Still not sure why it seems silly to you.
| grandempire wrote:
| What seems silly to me is the particular cultural
| excitement and optimism around education and liberalism,
| and the way it was manifest in school, that I lived
| through as a kid and is now dead.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| Half of all people are above average.
|
| (Or maybe a third of all people if you count it as a
| range rather than a point.)
| rightbyte wrote:
| Only if you assume normal distrubition or similar where
| median and average are the same.
| __s wrote:
| They didn't tell me that one. I could hardly read at 8
|
| Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me
| dhosek wrote:
| There was an article I read by Keith Gessen about
| contacting his 3rd grade teacher as a parent during Covid
| and the thing that stuck out with me was the teacher
| talking about how some kids entered kindergarten able to
| read and some didn't learn until second grade and in
| third grade, you'd be hard-pressed to know which ones
| were which.
|
| This helped calm me as a parent of kids who entered first
| grade in the fall of 2020 not able to read (I was one of
| those early readers). My daughter picked up reading
| during the course of first grade but her twin brother not
| so much. Then, during the first month of second grade, he
| went from refusing to read "the" in a chapter title when
| I would read to them at bedtime to being a self-
| sufficient solo reader pretty much overnight.
|
| Both of my kids are pretty dedicated readers now. When we
| go on vacation, if they spot a library, they want to
| visit it. I'm always happy to oblige.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I was one of the kids who didn't learn to read until the
| 3rd grade. The only kid, as I was made aware at the time.
|
| At first the urgency to rectify the situation propelled
| me into not only learning but reading a lot, but I didn't
| know how much my peers were reading or what, so I started
| reading voraciously
|
| Didn't take long to outpace my peers. I have kept it up
| ever since
| threatofrain wrote:
| The next/current phase of the library and librarian is as a
| community center, and not exactly a center of information.
| Instead it will be eyed for its physical accommodations for
| purposes like student meeting rooms, or tutors who rent rooms
| to sell their services.
| Loughla wrote:
| That has been a thing for about a decade.
|
| Librarians and libraries are more like community outreach
| centers now that you can Google anything.
|
| Many are struggling to help people with media literacy, and I
| don't know of any that are really doing a great job with
| that.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Mine has rooms to park your kids in with cartoons playing
| on a TV. I want my kids to be interested in reading, not
| watching cartoons. When I discussed this with them, their
| answer was "Well, kids aren't that interested in books
| anymore."
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Oof, that's too bad. The libraries near me are great for
| my toddler. They do story time and play time, and it's a
| good chance for my kid to play with other kids. My kiddo
| always checks out a book (or three) when we visit.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Yes - they built a huge new library in the town next over as
| the old one was overflowing with books and then only moved
| about 1/5 of the books over when it was completed. They
| disappeared the entire CS section. But it has about 5 unused
| meeting rooms, an unused "media maker space" and an enormous
| light filled open second floor area with two couches.
| mingus88 wrote:
| If your CS section is anything like the "computers" aisles
| I see here, good riddance. I would rather see open space
| than shelves of outdated Dummies books.
|
| We need to bring back "third places" (not home, not
| work/school) and libraries are excellent at providing that.
| You don't need to buy anything, you can stay as long as you
| want, and there is ample community space to socialize.
|
| Without a third place, folk just end up wasting their time
| online and tanking their mental health. Those connections
| aren't real.
|
| I truly feel that the rise of LLMs will devalue online
| interactions to the point where in person interaction is
| the only thing we trust and value. And we will be better
| off for it.
| p_l wrote:
| The trick to handle it well is easy access to catalog and
| ability to recall books from storage.
|
| Another superpower in some countries is the inter library
| loan - you might need to befriend the local library to
| utilise it fully, but a classmate of mine in high school
| used it as effectively free pass to university libraries
| that you can't borrow books from when you're not suffering
| or faculty.
| Amezarak wrote:
| The books don't get put in storage in most places, they
| get thrown away.
|
| > but a classmate of mine in high school used it as
| effectively free pass to university libraries that you
| can't borrow books from when you're not suffering or
| faculty.
|
| The mass de-accessioning of older books is such a huge
| problem you often cannot find (even famous!) works
| through ILL anymore.
| dhosek wrote:
| Where I live now, a large fraction of the suburban
| libraries are part of a consortium (SWAN--covering mostly
| south and western suburbs of Chicago). They have a shared
| catalog and any book/CD/DVD/etc.1 can be requested right
| out of the catalog for pickup at my local library.
|
| In California, I think you can get a library card at any
| public library system as long as you're a California
| resident. At one point I had cards for L.A. County,
| Orange County, Beverly Hills, L.A. City and Santa Ana.
|
| Many public libraries will do ILL for books outside their
| system for free, although that's generally funded with
| money from the federal government which Musk and his band
| of hackers have decided it's vital to eliminate.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. Well, mostly. A few libraries won't send out CDs or
| DVDs but you can still check them out with your card if
| you go to that branch and then return it at your home
| library.
| wat10000 wrote:
| > suffering or faculty
|
| I assume this is a typo, but it's brilliant.
| nimish wrote:
| Librarians are also at the forefront of censorship and shaping
| information, so we also must put them under the greatest of
| scrutiny.
|
| We don't live in an age where access to information is limited.
| Curation (retrieval) is more important than ever.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| That's in a lot of way a reversal. The default state of thing
| before World War II was very little data collection and even
| less aggregation.
|
| Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing
| mechanisation and World War II didn't end with more protection.
| It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling
| ready to use them with things like the generalisation of
| passports, social security numbers becoming standard.
|
| It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I
| think people overestimate what's appropriate to collect and
| misunderstand how things used to work which is why they
| tolerate so much monitoring.
| neilv wrote:
| Good observation.
|
| Years ago, I pointed this out in a university forum, where a
| lot of the students didn't know this history of public
| librarians as intellectual defenders of freedom (e.g.,
| promoting access to information by all, protecting privacy of
| records against tyranny, resisting censorship and book
| burnings).
|
| I don't know whether this awareness-raising was net-positive,
| because it turned out that had painted a target on their backs,
| for a bad-apple element who was opposed to all those things, in
| that microcosm.
|
| With that anecdote in mind, at the moment, with all the
| misaligned craziness going on the last few months especially,
| and the brazen subverting of various checks&balances against
| sabotage... I wonder how to balance communicating to the
| populace what remaining defenses we have against tyranny,
| balanced against the possibly of adding to an adversary's list
| of targets to neutralize.
|
| In the specific case of public libraries, techbros have
| _already_ insinuated themselves, and partially compromised some
| of the traditional library mission, _before_ the more overt
| fascists have even started to use their own tools. (Go check
| your local library Web site or computerized catalog, and there
| 's a good chance you'll find techbro individual-identifying
| cross-Web tracking added gratuitously, even for the physical
| copy media. I just did in mine. And the digital-only lending
| may have to be thrown out entirely.)
|
| But when we happen to realize non-library ways to further good
| ideals, in a period of being under occupation by comically evil
| adversaries with near-ubiquitous surveillance (again, thanks in
| part to techbros), we might have to figure out discreet ways to
| promote the goodness.
| SamLL wrote:
| It seems relevant to this article, and its portrayal of
| librarians as dangerous, that the national Institute for Museum
| and Library Services was recently essentially destroyed by
| Presidential executive order and DOGE, probably illegally, its
| grants largely or entirely revoked, and its employees laid off.
|
| See, e.g.,
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...
|
| https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
| paleotrope wrote:
| My local libary is great for me at the point I am at life. Clean
| bathrooms, 3d printers and laser cutters, video conference rooms,
| free videos to watch, comfy chairs, a huge manga section. Not a
| lot of physical books anymore. I guess I can just use an e-reader
| and check one out that way. No more discovery.
| jruohonen wrote:
| So I kind of hastily posted this one as a follow-up:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43737275
|
| While librarians can be "dangerous", libraries can be extremely
| beautiful (or vice versa, who knows...?). When traveling, I often
| try to visit ones, and, of course, we have some iconic
| photographs of them too.
| jruohonen wrote:
| So it might have been what they call a Freudian slip... ;-)
| cs702 wrote:
| Indeed. Power-hungry authoritarians, demagogues, and ideologues
| of all stripes (ethnic, religious, etc.) have always viewed books
| as dangerous.
|
| Just look at the long list of major book-burning incidents
| throughout history:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents
|
| Books are dangerous, because knowledge is dangerous -- dangerous
| to ignorance, censorship, and misinformation.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Look, I love the sentiment, and the illustrations are charming.
|
| Unfortunately, the writing.
|
| It's...stilted.
|
| It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the
| author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing...
| DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!
|
| But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just
| has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!
|
| > write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to
| their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians.
| said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy.
| style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS,
| ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something
| more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this
| very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These
| shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.
|
| If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you
| start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
| glacier5674 wrote:
| "Write a critique of the following article, using the style of
| the article:"
| mpalmer wrote:
| If you get anything as succinct and focused as what I
| (genuinely) wrote myself, I'll gladly take the criticism!
| adammarples wrote:
| to be fair i pasted your prompt into chatgpt and it was
| genuinely funnier and more readable than the article, it
| even had jokes.
|
| They are EVERYWHERE. Behind desks. In alcoves. Possibly in
| your very home...if you've recently borrowed War and Peace
| and failed to return it on time.
|
| lol
| cootsnuck wrote:
| Only on HN can a light-hearted librarian appreciation post
| still be treated with heavy cynicism, geez lol
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| do enough PR reviews and you start think everything is one.
| alternatively, with the causality reversed, explains why most
| people are pricks in PR reviews.
| mpalmer wrote:
| If I reviewed PRs like I comment on HN I'd get fired. Know
| your audience!
|
| Seems like you think PRs are the only place where criticism
| happens.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Seems like you think everyone is just dying to consume
| your brilliant critique.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Why is criticism bucketed with cynicism? I led with my
| appreciation of the good things in the post.
|
| When the day comes that I post something of mine on HN, I
| will be tremendously disappointed if all of the comments are
| the textual equivalent of a participation trophy.
| enthdegree wrote:
| Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic
| mustache
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Go touch grass dude. Seriously.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Aren't you the guy saying we need to extralegally hang the
| people in charge of the federal government? Wish I had advice
| to offer you in turn but holy cow man idk
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yes, historically it's been the way to defeat fascism. I'm
| not the one mad about a light hearted article about
| libraries lol. More pissed about the end of the US and
| illegal deportations, the president scamming people with
| shitcoins, ignoring the judicial branch, shit like that.
| mpalmer wrote:
| If you take a minute to think about it, you might agree
| we are ultimately mad about similar things
| macintux wrote:
| You're mad about writing styles. The other person is mad
| about a dictator-wannabe tearing down our system of
| government.
|
| How are those "similar"?
| mpalmer wrote:
| I guess you didn't think about it
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Agree with the other comment. You should go touch some
| grass.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Wish I had a balanced life like you two, then I'd feel
| more comfortable judging strangers with childish gamer
| taunts.
| milesrout wrote:
| Anyone that uses this phrase unironically needs to get off
| his computer and read a book or talk to some real people. You
| are telling someone to be less online in the most terminally
| online way possible.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| No one asked.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Agreed. This kind of writing is skimmable but not readable to
| me.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Yeah I see this kind of paternalistic condescending style of
| writing in many left-leaning circles. It sounds like it's
| geared for children but no they're actually writing for adults.
| They see themselves as moral beacons and they need to
| proselytize the stupid unwashed masses because they just don't
| know any better.
|
| I despise it.
| xhevahir wrote:
| The style of this blog post probably owes a lot more to the
| author's career as an author of kids' books rather than to
| his political tendencies.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's millennial speak
| gadders wrote:
| It's like one long Reddit post. Very cringe.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I was thinking it reminded me of a LinkedIn inspir-tizement
| post, but yea, also feels like a Reddit lecture. It reads
| like it is trying desperately to hold the reader's attention
| while they are simultaneously driving a car and in another
| browser window scrolling through brainrot TikTok videos.
| tonymet wrote:
| Treating "knowledge" in the abstract is dangerous. "Knowledge"
| consists of manuscripts . A book store or library is merely a
| curation of those manuscripts (or their copies).
|
| Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present
| "knowledge" as neutral, and "more knowledge" as an unquestionable
| good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed
| ideology.
|
| Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be
| filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book
| stores are ironically treated as neutral "knowledge
| repositories".
|
| My point is that every collection is curated according to the
| taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.
|
| It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the
| volume. Librarians are dangerous because they've convinced the
| public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are
| actually just curators.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Because I saw others here speak about their libraries, I will
| too.
|
| I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to
| say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school
| readings, some history book from communist period and old tech
| manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer
| used).
|
| I really envy Americans in this aspect.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| sounds like underfunding issues, but they're trying their best
| with what they have. And as others have said, they are
| important community spaces for studying, meetups etc.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| not in here - they aren't a place for that :( at best, events
| for primary/secondary school, and that is it
|
| and yup, they are certainly underfunded and i don't envy
| them, i do believe that most of them are trying to do as much
| as they can. :(
| gbolcer wrote:
| That was enjoyable. And the artwork doubled it.
| lurk2 wrote:
| This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles
| journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the
| late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an
| all-time low.
|
| I suspect the same thing is happening with librarians as they've
| begun to abandon all pretence of being impartial guardians of
| information in favor of larping as members of The Resistance.
| Ironically, the experts never seem to learn that you can only
| play this game for so long before no one cares what you have to
| say anymore.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Resistance against book banners has always been part of their
| core ideology, there is nothing new about that.
| lurk2 wrote:
| They are not resisting anything.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I wish much of the lore about librarians were actually true, but
| these days they seem to be mostly focused on either filling up
| dumpsters full of old books for sale (why are they getting rid of
| all of the old books), stocking the shelves with DVDs (why are
| libraries in the movie-rental business?), or else organising
| things that seem to be quite tangentional to being a "library".
| For example, I think it's fine to take family photos or ID photos
| for kids... but is this really the primary mission of a library?
|
| When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book, they
| say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is over
| $1,000. (Of course, we all know the Amazon prices are basically
| made up - offering books for sale that aren't in stock, and on
| the chance they get an order at an outrageous price, go try and
| find it cheap on the secondary market.)
|
| Nonetheless, they're always asking for money - whether applying
| for grants, putting property tax levies on the ballot, attempting
| to raise sales taxes, despite the ever-decreasing levels of
| service, alongside requisite threats "If we don't pass this item,
| the library will close!!!"
|
| I view librarians as ones that completely missed the boat when it
| comes to their traditional domain of organising indexes to
| literature, which has been eclipsed first by Google, and now by
| AI in general.
| justin66 wrote:
| > When I need an inter-library loan of a hard-to-find book,
| they say they can't do it since the Amazon price of the book is
| over $1,000.
|
| That's extremely odd. My experience is that libraries will
| sometimes exclude their particularly rare books from the
| interlibrary loan system (or from lending more generally), for
| the obvious reasons, but I wouldn't have thought the library
| you're trying to use to place the request would have anything
| to say about it at all.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I've never heard of that either. But I can guess it's meant
| to shield the requesting library for financial liability if
| the patron never returns it. If they're on the hook for
| replacing the book, then...
|
| And actually, there are a number of academic books I've had
| to request through ILL because they're only in a handful of
| libraries, the initial print run from the academic press was
| probably 500 at most, and replacing one _would_ probably cost
| $1,000, simply because there 's only one person in the world
| currently with a copy to sell (if you're lucky), and they can
| basically set their price.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| DVDs? Probably incentives. They get some kind of kick backs or
| "points".
| kmeisthax wrote:
| > why are libraries in the movie-rental business?
|
| Because _why not_. Books and DVDs have similar footprint and
| cultural relevance.
| Peteragain wrote:
| Awwe! I teared up! 'cause it's true!!!
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I miss the days when they shushed people. Nowadays, librarians
| where I go (to several local libraries) are invariably the
| loudest, most shameless talkers in the place.
| plemer wrote:
| Varies heavily by location. But I've experienced the same -
| maddening.
| patcon wrote:
| Holy shit librarians are fucking wonderful.
|
| Many of my coolest collaborators have been library science or
| information studies people. They are just the people I trust the
| most to have a sensible balanced worldview between theory and
| action, and with enough distance to understand the false idols of
| capital and power.
|
| I feel librarians so often get to be the sort of people that
| teachers _wish_ they could be, if those teachers weren 't so
| micro-managed by the state and the system
| Peteragain wrote:
| Okay. The point is that someone, yes, SOMEONE, needs to make the
| call as to what goes on the shelves. Mien kampf? The Anachist's
| Cook Book? Lady Chatterley's Lover? Is is librarians who make the
| decision AND IT IS NOT THE SAME FOR EVERY LIBRARY GOER!!!! Yep.
| They consider who's asking and why. They are some of the few
| remaining trusted professionals, and they remain so because we
| think they're harmless drudges. Power to 'em!
| electrosphere wrote:
| Just a comment that the library has become my "third space" these
| days.
|
| I am sooo grateful my local University library is open for public
| visitors. I visit every weekend and enjoy fast internet, a
| pleasant and quiet environment and can plug my laptop into one of
| many large desktop monitors here.
| kleiba wrote:
| On my campus, almost all institutional libraries have been closed
| down over the course of the last 20 years. There's still the main
| campus library and I went there quite a few times to work in
| peace and quiet. However, I have to admit that I never needed any
| of their books.
| lurk2 wrote:
| This reads like the sort of self-congratulatory articles
| journalists were fond of writing about themselves in the
| late-2010s, just as public trust in journalism was reaching an
| all-time low. I suspect the same thing is happening with
| librarians as they've begun to abandon all pretence of being
| impartial guardians of information in favor of larping as members
| of The Resistance. Ironically, the experts never seem to learn
| that you can only play this game for so long before no one cares
| what you have to say anymore.
|
| This comment got flagged within minutes after I had originally
| posted it, which is an indication of how seriously freedom of
| information is valued by those on the other side of this issue.
| alganet wrote:
| Ah! It makes a reference to _Rose, the Hat_ (character in the
| Doctor Sleep movie). "My head is a library [...] you're just a
| fucking child". Hence the drawings looking like children
| homework.
|
| So, if it is an AI that wrote it, maybe it has movie script
| training. That would be a smart move. Movies themselves draw
| specific personas to the foreground of a human mind and could put
| them in specific moods.
|
| Or is it a human who wrote it? Maybe it was an angel.
|
| --
|
| Ok, no movie business. Is there a difference between
| biblioteconomist and librarian? I think one is more akin to that
| notion of classifying without curating or censoring that so many
| here aluded to.
|
| In practice, I wouldn't know! (fun oversharing fact: I actually
| considered biblioteconomy as a degree).
|
| I think the post is good and kind for a general audience. It's a
| good message that I truly believe in.
|
| But I believe it could be harmful for those diagnosed with
| conditions such as Havana Syndrome, Schizophrenia and similar
| disorders. That is due to the fun ambiguous tone of "dangerous",
| which could have unexpected effects in someone going through a
| psychotic episode (I had one once, not a pleasant experience).
| There must be a better, less snarkier way of promoting literacy
| without creating those potential side effects.
| edverma2 wrote:
| Why do people speak online as if the library is a place anyone
| goes to? I understand some people still go to libraries, but this
| cannot be considered a commonplace activity like it once was.
| Librarians do not hold any meaningful position in society because
| so few people come in contact with them.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Kind of the point of the post, isn't it?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Do you have kids? Virtually every parent I know (myself
| included) visits the library at least once a week with their
| kid. In my community the library is very well trafficked.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This sounds like some upper middle class white Boston shit.
| This is 1000% not the experience of most parents in America,
| especially the browner and poorer parts of America. Good luck
| getting one library attendance a year from most American
| children...
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Are these the same American children who graduate high
| school without anything above basic literacy?
| riffraff wrote:
| I love libraries and I credit the library of my home town for
| being who I am.
|
| I don't remember much that the actual people in the library did
| for me, beyond letting me take books at a time than was allowed.
|
| But still, they did let me do that, and asked me for books to
| buy.
|
| Maybe they did more for me than I thought.
| puppycodes wrote:
| long live librarians
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about how librarians are exposed
| to raw knowledge that is true goes against the current-year
| narrative, a.k.a. "malinformation", and librarians should be
| monitored for signs of wrongthink.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's interesting to note that at the core of Asimov's Foundation
| (spoiler: _Va n frafr, ng gur pber bs obgu bs gurz._ ) was a
| bunch of librarians that were supposed to help restore the galaxy
| to order after a prolonged period of decline brought by
| disintegration of the galactic Empire.
| casey2 wrote:
| I really dislike fiction where the author tries to convince you
| it's real but has so many holes that it reads like more like a
| hastily conceived debate premise than a real work.
|
| In reality libraries are one of the most conservative classes of
| people, especially odd the distinction since I'm sure there are
| plenty of progressive minded librarians. Doesn't help that the
| average age gap between a reader and their librarian is greater
| than average life expectancy.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| This is consistent with my experience. One of the most impressive
| and inspiring presentations I saw at last year's HOPE conference
| [1] was from members of the Library Freedom Project [2].
|
| 1. https://hope.net
|
| 2. https://libraryfreedom.org
| cagey wrote:
| Ebooks and Internet sources of all forms of media have rendered
| public libraries moot as book providers: every person alive (in
| the US) has a cell phone, and most have laptops, and can with a
| modicum of bootstrapping access these sources, without having to
| travel to a special building (partially) filled with paper books,
| to obtain a copy of almost any book in existence.
|
| > Today's dangerous librarians are much more. They are part
| educator, part tech wizard, part data analyst, and part myth-
| slayer.
|
| > They host storytimes, teach kids about misinformation, explain
| how to 3D print a prosthetic hand, and calmly help a grown man
| named Todd recover his Gmail password for the seventh time. All
| before lunch.
|
| > [Librarians] are dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship,
| Outdated printer settings, Small thinking, apathy, loneliness
|
| Who asked them to play these roles? If the public school system
| has failed to the extent that people are incapable of using
| online methods to find books or other resources, or login to
| their Google account, why is it the role of a _librarian_ to
| backfill these gaps (and for taxpayers to be forced to fund such
| a peculiar backfilling approach)?
|
| And some of the touted roles ("dangerous to: Misinformation,
| Censorship, Small thinking, apathy") are clearly social activist
| in nature; the meaning of all of these is in the eye of the
| beholder. So why are taxpayers obligated to (unquestioningly)
| fund people who clearly perceive their role, at least in part, as
| activist in nature? IMO you are welcome to engage in activist
| activities on your own dime, not mine.
|
| So I certainly wonder where the value is in "libraries" since,
| say, 2010 (and yes, I read the article). If not for "book
| banning" stories, I doubt librarians would be a topic of
| conversation. Libraries and librarians are like some weird 20th
| century anachronism which persists into the 21st century largely
| because it's part of a (by definition well-established)
| bureaucracy (and lobby/union).
| owl_vision wrote:
| Librarians are very dedicated, this was missed in the article.
| They are the first defenders against our freedom to think, read
| and express our thoughts.
|
| Recently, I interviewed 2 librarians for an essay about recent
| book banning. They are vehemently against book banning, specially
| classics as seen in recent media.
|
| https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill
|
| https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
|
| https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-...
|
| https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2023/October/book-bans-may-h...
|
| edit: newlines to separate links
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| This works if you actually have dangerously good librarians. I
| had one that could remember every single book location but she
| was extremely rude and treated everyone as a mentally challenged.
| Her daughter lived under severe dictatorship with no confidence
| and self esteem.
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