[HN Gopher] Librarians are dangerous
___________________________________________________________________
Librarians are dangerous
Author : mooreds
Score : 643 points
Date : 2025-04-19 14:49 UTC (1 days 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.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Well, it helped that in the early 90s, computers from the
| 80s were still highly relevant. I skipped over anything
| that wasn't about IBM "compatibles" since all I had at the
| time were IBMs (other than the oddball TI-85).
| 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?
| alganet wrote:
| My stance is chaotic good, and HN keeps track of timings
| for me, I just have to look.
| 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.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming.
|
| I'm aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I
| can say from personal experience that most of the people
| I know pick up their phones whenever an unskippable cut
| scene appears on screen. Many, many people no longer have
| the patience for narrative in any form and as a
| consequence literacy rates have been declining for years.
|
| > Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places
|
| They have no choice. People can't read anymore. Fifty
| four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade
| level.
| squigz wrote:
| > I can say from personal experience that most of the
| people I know pick up their phones whenever an
| unskippable cut scene appears on screen
|
| My personal experience as a gamer and running a gaming
| community for many years does not line up with this at
| all.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > My personal experience as a gamer and running a gaming
| community
|
| I think that's the rub. Your experience is with people
| who care.
|
| For example, I'm a cinephile. My personal experience is
| that people have home theaters with 100"+ screens, Dolby
| Atmos and Dolby Vision, and they would never use a cell
| phone during a film. That's not most peoples reality
| though.
| 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.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| There are more books now than ever, and we've been
| producing books in vast numbers for hundreds of years.
| Even if the vast majority were garbage there would still
| be more great books available than could be read in
| several lifetimes.
|
| Have you considered trying to optimize the way you
| discover your next read? It almost sounds like you're
| getting your recommendations from social media, and that
| it isn't really working out well for you.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| "More books than ever" will be eternally true unless we
| actively destroy books (god no).
|
| The book industry isn't in a good shape otherwise[0],
| revenue has recovered while unit sales is declining.
|
| I actually don't get recommendations per se, I mostly
| read books from authors I already like (fiction), or
| books on subject I think want to read and will scrape the
| reviews to see what to settle on, or straight go through
| each book if it's at my local library (non fiction).
|
| A surprising number of them are available in the Kindle
| Unlimited bundle or at the library, so I read a lot
| without per unit money involved, and without the sunk
| cost calculation.
|
| > your next read
|
| I think that might be the core of it. I don't see books
| as something that needs to be read continually. I already
| use my eyes way too much, so it's not a hobby and I
| expect value that can't be gained from other means.
|
| [0] https://nielseniq.com/global/en/news-
| center/2025/internation...
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| > "More books than ever" will be eternally true unless we
| actively destroy books (god no).
|
| You are right, of course. My phrasing was off. I meant to
| say that we _produce_ more books than ever.
|
| Although that is also a bit of a misleading statement. It
| is factually true that we produce more books per annum
| than ever before, but the average book now sells far less
| than 1,000 copies in it's lifetime (one source I found
| said around 500) and the growth in quantity has not
| produced a corresponding growth in quality.
|
| > I don't see books as something that needs to be read
| continually.
|
| Fair enough. There are only so many hours in a lifetime,
| and we all have to choose how we spend the ones allotted
| to us. Although, personally I feel that the world would
| be better off if people spent more of them reading
| fiction, and fewer on social media.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Some classics were written with a "per word" payment scheme
| to the author. That created bad writing in awkward places.
|
| The Swiss family Robinson is an example of this. Times of
| interesting adventure and then long passages about poetry
| analysis.
|
| Ironically, reading it feels like you are reading the works
| of an author with a low attention span.
|
| There's a reason so many of the classics have abridged
| versions.
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > The tragedy of the modern library is that no one has the
| attention span for old books.
|
| Fixed that to mean what you say.
|
| Luckily, people still have the attention for good books. Which
| is why libraries still stock good books, classic or otherwise.
| They also stock books that people want to read. Which might
| seem odd until you realize that libraries are there for the
| community to use.
|
| However, you are free to setup a library that stores books that
| no one reads.
| bashmelek wrote:
| I respect what libraries do, yet the past few times I went to
| my local library I couldn't find anything I was looking for--
| and these were well regarded and well known books. I get that
| they want to stock things people read, but I am a person who
| wants older books, and I think part of the library's
| responsibility should include such books.
| 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.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Your non-hypothetical dictionary is irreplaceable.
|
| Scans of books are often sloppy and transcriptions can be
| even worse - especially a book that documents unusual
| orthographies.
| 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.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| If you had a digital twin of your home library and used a
| program such as Docfd[0] I think you would have had a
| much easier time.
|
| [0] - https://github.com/darrenldl/docfd
| 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.
| hitekker wrote:
| Yup, they employed intense scrutiny on books before 2008,
| followed by ideological filtering as you noted, resulting
| in empty library shelves.
|
| On that note, it's sad to see the GP downvoted for raising
| this uncomfortable truth. I guess "deaccessioning" or
| "weeding" reveals a certain hypocrisy among those who
| supposedly hate banning books.
| 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.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| But why did you make that particular leap with your
| utterly baseless accusation? And why are you saying that
| anyone else propagandizing children would be "ridiculous
| edge cases"? I urge you to work out your priors.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Why would you assume lgbt materials are synonymous with
| breaking the rules of this site? It's obvious they don't,
| and realistically the website has rather sparse rules, so
| what could both break the site and be considered integral
| to your movement?
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| > They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias.
|
| Why would they? With Wikipedia being freely and always
| available and up to date, and most/all for-profit
| encyclopedias being online now, who goes to the library to
| use a paper encyclopedia? Have you used a paper encyclopedia
| recently? I haven't for decades, but I still visit the
| library. Google tells me World Book is the only encyclopedia
| left doing print runs, and it's more geared toward students,
| so maybe only purchased by schools. I wouldn't hold up paper
| encyclopedias as evidence of what the library has or doesn't
| have.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Tyranny of the busiest patrons.
| djeastm wrote:
| >They no longer even have paper sets of encyclopedias.
|
| They don't publish many of them anymore as paper sets.
|
| I used to love them, but Wikipedia changed everything
| grandempire wrote:
| Libraries vary greatly in quality. I don't know why this is
| downvoted.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Because they're dancing around specific complaints and this
| line, for example,
|
| > were I to give a factual description of the childrens and
| teens sections, I would get banned by dang.
|
| reeks of "I don't want LGBTQ representation in my library" or
| similar.
|
| If I'm wrong, so be it. But the commenter isn't helping their
| own case.
| grandempire wrote:
| > reeks of "I don't want LGBTQ representation in my
| library" or similar.
|
| Hmm I thought that libraries promoting lgbt content to kids
| was a conspiracy theory.
| kstrauser wrote:
| "Promoting it" is. "Making it available so that kids who
| are are undergoing changes they don't understand but
| desperately need to learn about" is not.
| grandempire wrote:
| Ok, I don't think OPs comment is about eliminating lgbt
| books from the library.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Dang has no problem with lgbt representation, so that
| couldn't be the problem. So what could be rampant in the
| children/teen sections that is banned from this site but is
| simultaneously synonymous in your mind to the lgb movement?
| 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
| matwood wrote:
| I work in the library space and know librarians from all
| over the US (world really), and what you say is
| absolutely true. They really do try and represent diverse
| viewpoints in the limited physical space and budgets they
| have.
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Enemy troops?
|
| Tolerance of censorship?
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Oh hi, I too was in the same boat with reading level.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > Do you always immediately disregard what people say in
| favor of your own beliefs?
|
| It's the internet, it's easy for people to make claims,
| and we have to use our own faculties to try to guess at
| the accuracy of these claims. These might not even be
| outright lies, but they could be exaggerations, partial
| truths, or simply misremembering (most people can't
| clearly remember things that happened to them when they
| were 6 years old).
|
| You claimed both that the books available to you at your
| elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6 year
| old self, and that your elementary school made Mein Kampf
| available to you. I'm not going to make a judgement on
| the veracity of your claims, but I will say that looking
| at both of your claims together, I'm entirely unable to
| tell what level of books your elementary school actually
| made available to students.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > You claimed both that the books available to you at
| your elementary school weren't advanced enough for your 6
| year old self
|
| I did not.
|
| I said "I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or
| 7", and I also said "the books available to us in our
| school library just weren't cutting it". This does not
| imply that at 6/7 the books weren't cutting it. This
| conversation was about the role of the library throughout
| my schooling, and as I got older, I wanted more than the
| library could offer.
|
| > I will say that looking at both of your claims
| together, I'm entirely unable to tell what level of books
| your elementary school actually made available to
| students.
|
| Look again, with more precise reading comprehension.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| You didn't address the actual issue. Looking at your
| claim:
|
| "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."
|
| and your claim:
|
| "I had access to Mein Kampf in my elementary school."
|
| Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of
| your claims, we're still left with no clue about what was
| actually available at your elementary school. Apparently
| your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet
| it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| This is a gross misrepresentation of the text.
|
| Anyway, there is absolutely no point to having such a
| text in an elementary school.
|
| It should be required reading in high school so everyone
| can property understand the attitude that led to WW2. The
| only English translation worth its salt is the Dalton
| translation.
| int_19h wrote:
| The best case for giving them Mein Kampf is that it's so
| tedious and boring, if you force kids to read it, they'll
| learn to hate Nazis early on.
| 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?
| squigz wrote:
| Do you think if a teen is being bullied, cutting them off
| from the Internet will help?
| areoform wrote:
| It does. Because a child is a sentient being. Not an
| accessory for a parent. If you respect the autonomy of
| someone who is sentient, even when they're dependent on
| someone else, it's important they're given the ability to
| forge their own life.
|
| And no, it's not an "extreme case" -- it's a common one.
| Wildeman et al. estimated the lifetime child maltreatment
| prevalence for US children as 12.5% by age 18 years, but
| considered only child maltreatment reports substantiated
| by CPS.12 Substantiated reports are a small subset of all
| reports. In 2014, only 21.9% of investigated reports were
| substantiated.10 (Technically, "investigated" indicates
| "investigated or assessed" and "substantiated" indicates
| "substantiated or indicated" here and after.)
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227926/pdf/AJPH
| .20...
|
| 1 in 5 is hardly uncommon. Note, these are the
| _substantiated_ reports i.e. an investigation was done
| and it was found, "yes, the child is being abused."
|
| But even if it was 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1,000
| then we still can't design the system without this in
| mind, because any system needs to have a safety margin
| for failure, and that includes caring for children.
| 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.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Here's the problem with your rather simple-minded
| analysis. Teachers and education administrations can be
| really fucking stupid too. I trust the parents way more.
| const_cast wrote:
| > Teachers and education administrations can be really
| fucking stupid too.
|
| Yeah, sure, they can be. The difference is that this is
| their JOB and they're EDUCATED.
|
| If you trust parents "way more" than actual educators,
| then great! Pull your kids out of school and teach them
| yourself. That's always been an option. But don't go
| around proclaiming public school should be specifically
| engineered to make YOU comfortable.
|
| You? Are nobody. Your opinion does not matter.
| lazyeye wrote:
| EDUCATED or indoctrinated? And you only have to look at
| the abysmal track record of the "Dept of Education" to
| see how badly things can be run. And yes I agree..my
| opinion is not that important, just like yours.
| 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.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| No.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Yes, that's what my guardians told me, too. I contend
| otherwise. Now, who is right? On what foundation do you
| rest your claim that I lack the protections of an
| individual as a child?
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Probably eastern seaboard - I have spent over a decade in
| New Orleans and while I love it I don't think it really
| loves me back and I haven't really developed deep long
| lasting ties beyond the family I already had here.
| 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?
| immibis wrote:
| In other words, good things are good and bad things are
| bad.
|
| It's astonishing how many people (or bots) in 2025 talk
| as if the only allowed positions are "the state is good"
| or "the state is bad" and "parents are good" or "parents
| are bad", like they have no ability to recognize when
| individual separate actions are good or bad.
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 1. Keep moving the goal posts. But all of those books
| were banned by either a state or the federal government
| at one point. Keep moving the goal posts. I can kick
| harder.
|
| 2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by
| _gove...
| lurk2 wrote:
| > 1. Keep moving the goal posts.
|
| No goal posts have been moved. No common person
| understands the word "ban" to mean "removed from
| circulation by a school district."
|
| > 2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_
| by_gove...
|
| Of the 19 books listed here, The Meritorious Price of Our
| Redemption (1650) is the only one that fits, and it was
| banned 375 years ago. Of the remaining 18 books:
|
| 7 were banned from US mailing and transport across state
| lines under the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act of 1873. This
| notably includes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
| Note that the laws which permitted these bans were
| overturned in 1959.
|
| 1 (Uncle Tom's Cabin) was banned by the Confederate
| States of America.
|
| 1 (Elmer Gantry) was banned in around half-a-dozen US
| cities (I do not care to investigate what these bans
| entailed). It looks like this one may have also fell
| under the Anti-Obscenity Act.
|
| 1 (The Grapes of Wrath) was ostensibly banned in "many
| places in the US" and the state of California (the
| citation for this one has no link).
|
| 1 (Forever Amber) is listed as being banned in fourteen
| states in the US, but the first citation listed seems to
| imply that it was banned under the Anti-Obscenity Act.
| The second citation is an independent article which does
| not even specify what states the book was banned in, nor
| what these bans entailed.
|
| 1 (Memoirs of Hecate County) is listed as having been
| banned in New York by the Supreme Court, but again, the
| citation does not specify what this ban entailed. It also
| strongly implies that the boot would have fallen under
| obscenity laws.
|
| 1 (Howl) was seized by the San Francisco customs
| authority as obscenity, but these charges were later
| dismissed.
|
| 1 (Naked Lunch) was banned in Massachusetts for
| obscenity.
|
| 1 (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) was "banned" from Tucson
| Arizona public schools, but the citation listed does not
| mention what this ban entailed, when it occurred, or even
| any proof _that_ it occurred. The table itself mentions
| under the "Year Unbanned" column that the work was never
| illegal.
|
| 1 (The Pentagon Papers) was an attempt by US President
| Richard Nixon to suspend the publication of classified
| information. This restraint was lifted in a 1971 court
| case, and the papers were subsequently declassified in
| 2011.
|
| 1 (The Federal Mafia) was subject to a court injunction,
| forbidding author Irwin Schiff from profiting off the
| work after a court found it contained fraudulent
| information. This book is not banned from publication.
| "The court rejected Schiff's contention on appeal that
| the First Amendment protects sales of the book, as the
| court found that the information it contains is
| fraudulent, as it advertised that it would teach buyers
| how to legally cease paying federal income taxes."
|
| 1 (Operation Dark Heart) was seized by the Department of
| Defense "citing concerns that it contained classified
| information which could damage national security."
|
| So the prime examples here are a book from 375 years ago
| (126 years before the Declaration of Independence was
| signed), a book banned by the Confederate States of
| America, a book intended to aid and abet the reader in
| the commission of a federal crime, and a couple of books
| which were sequestered due to national security concerns.
| The rest were "banned" for graphic displays of sexuality.
|
| > I can kick harder.
|
| I'll be waiting patiently for you to cite any other
| examples.
| Loughla wrote:
| Keep moving the goal posts = I provide proof, but then
| those aren't _real_ bans.
|
| There are MULTIPLE thought ending logical fallacies in
| what you're saying.
|
| I'm over it. Have a good weekend.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Keep moving the goal posts = I provide proof, but then
| those aren't real bans.
|
| You didn't provide any proof. This is a list of 19 books,
| almost all of them were banned for violating obscenity
| laws. Those that were banned for completely arbitrary
| reasons were banned by entities other than the United
| States (or by entities which preceded the existence of
| the United States). The three others were banned because
| their content amounted to criminal aiding or abetting or
| because they contained classified information.
|
| > There are MULTIPLE thought ending logical fallacies in
| what you're saying.
|
| If there had been, you would have pointed them out.
| 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
| lurk2 wrote:
| Which specific books are being banned? Where are they
| being banned?
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| go back to lurking man.
| lurk2 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| saagarjha wrote:
| Both of those things are literally in the video
| description. You don't even have to watch the video!
| lurk2 wrote:
| It was a plain question and not immediately obvious from
| the first few seconds of the video nor the title of the
| video what the answer was.
|
| The video itself had no relevance to the discussion. The
| appropriate response was "The Perks of Being a Wallflower
| in Oxford, Pennsylvania," along with a non-video citation
| showing that the book was pulled from circulation. Even
| if it was, it would be a non-issue. No ordinary person
| understands the removal of obscenity from a children's
| library to be a "book ban." The people who advance this
| narrative know this and lie about it anyway.
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| >They're never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has
| actually been banned by a national government on these
| display
|
| That's not my lived experience. Even if my experience
| wasn't common, books banned by the local or state
| government or by other governments around the world
| certainly make it into those displays.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Even if my experience wasn't common, books banned by
| the local or state government or by other governments
| around the world certainly make it into those displays.
|
| For example?
| LPisGood wrote:
| 1984, Animal Farm, and Fahrenheit 451 for starters.
| lurk2 wrote:
| All of these books have always been widely accessible in
| the western world, and I suppose that's my chief
| objection; these books _have_ been banned, but they have
| never been seriously challenged in the west. They are
| safe to publish and distribute here, which is what makes
| the whole thing so performative.
|
| I threw out Mein Kampf as the only example I could think
| of where a book had faced an actual ban; it was illegal
| to sell in the Netherlands until about ten years ago. But
| even my regional library carries it. I haven't been able
| to find _any_ instances of a book being banned in the USA
| besides a dozen or so that were banned from being mailed
| or transported across state lines in accordance with the
| Comstock Act. I would imagine the list is more extensive
| than these dozen or so books, and while most were
| pornographic, a few were culturally notable, such as the
| Canterbury Tales.
|
| The idea that librarians are leading a resistance
| movement against the looming threat of Christian
| ultranationalism is a rhetorical cudgel used to undermine
| parental rights regarding children's education. Virtually
| all of the books that have ostensibly been "banned" in
| America have been challenged for containing material
| inappropriate for children. A minority of the materials
| are objected to on purely religious grounds; that is, the
| material is not necessarily obscene or inappropriate, but
| contradicts the religious worldview of the challenging
| parents. While I personally feel the latter material
| should be accessible to students, the right to make that
| determination lies firmly with a student's parents. There
| is maybe an argument to be made that the challenges not
| based on issues of obscenity violate the spirit of
| freedom of information (since the challenges result in
| _all_ students losing access to the books, rather than
| just individual students), but it is hard to make this
| argument when so much of the "book ban" discussion is
| centered around works which most people would view as
| inappropriate for children.
|
| 1984 is a good example; while it is a culturally
| significant work, it contains two or three descriptions
| of sexual intercourse. The sorts of people who browse a
| forum like this might find that quaint, but most people
| do not want their children being exposed to this kind of
| thing.
| 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.
| Amezarak wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-
| requi...
|
| > The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove
| the book from the required reading list on Monday
| evening, The Everett Herald reported.
|
| > Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African
| American, told Newsweek that he and other board members
| made their decision after "seriously considering" the
| information provided
|
| You can find story after story like this. I don't think
| people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I
| think your mental model may need adjustment.
|
| The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a
| lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with
| anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though
| they're quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial
| policies also reflect this. The second most common
| complaint is probably that it is an example of "white
| savior" literature.
|
| You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the
| model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in
| every direction - almost never "banned" and almost never
| complained about for the reasons people assume.
| 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.
| 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".
| greenavocado wrote:
| I suspect that one is dangerous in large part because
| half the recipes will severely harm the implementor
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Just about any book you want is going to be available.
| This is what libraries do
|
| There's a difference between the books that are available
| and the books that are on display.
|
| I can make a request and put a hold and get a book from
| the stacks at the central library. That's not something
| the typical browser of books on a library shelf is going
| to do. I do it now, I never did growing up. What was on
| the shelves was the Overton window for me growing up. I
| break windows now, now I can consider any viewpoints I
| choose. Go get me the book from the stacks, librarian.
|
| What librarians do today is to promote propaganda for a
| certain cause. It's just so self destructive of them to
| do that, but that's what they do.
|
| A change is going to come.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Could you be more specific? What cause do you think they
| are propagandizing? How big does this conspiracy go? And
| when do you think it started?
| 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.
| greenavocado wrote:
| It's really not because the historical context is laid
| out in the early chapters.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Nothing could be further from the truth. Read the Dalton
| translation. Reading excerpts is borderline useless
| because so much builds upon earlier chapters.
| 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.
| ang_cire wrote:
| And here I thought the point was that a librarian has the
| means to ask for and get 3 drinks and water, same as
| anyone else, but a censor (i.e. the state apparatus) has
| the means to make huge and unreasonable demands.
| 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:
| Yes, most interlibrary loans are via OhioLINK. I
| generally can't get anything that's valued over $1,000,
| which is... basically a great deal of out of print books.
| 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
| hn_acker wrote:
| And I find the article's claims hard to believe. According
| to the American Library Association, which tracks attempts
| to ban books from libraries [1]:
|
| > The most common justifications for censorship provided by
| complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for
| minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and
| covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social
| justice.
|
| [1] https://www.ala.org/news/2025/04/american-library-
| associatio...
| karaterobot wrote:
| I have an MLIS, and worked in libraries for years. It's a
| common misconception that librarians choose books they think
| are best, or most morally or intellectually instructive for
| readers. This never happens, or almost never happens. They
| buy and lend books that the community has asked to read, or
| which they believe the community wants to read, based on,
| e.g. popularity. There's not a council of elders deciding
| what you're allowed to read.
| 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".
| sunshowers wrote:
| What? In this context, idiomatic just means the kinds of
| expressions that native speakers would use. (The term
| also applies to programming languages.)
|
| By definition, native speakers aren't wrong. If your
| model doesn't match observed reality, it is the model
| that's at issue, not reality.
| 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)
| roenxi wrote:
| Another thing they have in common is having children. A
| group of bad people having something in common doesn't
| tell us anything about the thing. Obviously the
| motivation in their case might be a bit suspect but
| nuclear families with strong parental authority are
| nonetheless a good model for families. I'd argue an
| extended family is probably a little bit better, but
| nuclear isn't bad.
|
| Same goes for cults, calling something a cult doesn't
| automatically mean it is an organisation dedicated to
| destroying itself. Some cults are organised by people who
| ultimately want their community to be successful and hold
| extremely worthwhile values. Too much authoritarianism
| will be a disaster but nuclear families are a good
| compromise position where there is just a dash of
| authority in the small.
| vintermann wrote:
| And many such parents are in cults similarly guarding
| them, it's not true at all what the grandparent post says
| that cults don't value the nuclear family. They often
| value it a lot more than the rest of society, and it's
| often a key part of their marketing.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm confused though, children getting information via
| unfiltered access to the internet is a subversion of "the
| primacy of the nuclear family and the parent/child
| relationship", no?
| wavefunction wrote:
| that's just a kid, unsupervised where are the parents in
| your scenario anyways that's how I learned to fly,
| without the chains people like you want to throw on the
| rest of us stay down there in the muck and grime
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think this is unfairly assuming what I want, when I
| didn't specify that in my comment.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If a hundred kids throw themselves off the cliff and one
| learns to fly, it's not oppressive to the one who did
| learn to fly to prevent other kids from throwing
| themselves off that same cliff and probably end up like
| the 99 that didn't.
|
| Now, of course, if 99 kids learned to fly, then the
| opposite conclusion should be drawn - so, as in all
| things, we need nuance and a good understanding of the
| situation, not first principles thinking and anecdotes.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Yes, I was agreeing with you.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I get what you meant now, after reading more of the
| thread.
| devmor wrote:
| The nuclear family is neither a natural nor ubiquitous
| relationship, though. Any other dynamic of social support
| - whether it be manipulative or freeing - may likely
| subvert it.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > The nuclear family is neither a natural nor ubiquitous
| relationship
|
| Citation needed!
|
| My read of history is that it's the single most stable
| and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long
| shot.
| defrost wrote:
| History, by my reading, seems more replete with examples
| of extended families, which include additional relatives
| like grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
|
| eg: Some sociologists and anthropologists
| consider the extended family structure to be the most
| common family structure in most cultures and at most
| times for humans, rather than the nuclear family.
|
| ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family
|
| which also provides the common use definitions:
| A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family,
| atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family
| group consisting of parents and their children (one or
| more), typically living in one home residence.
| It is in contrast to a single-parent family, a larger
| extended family, or a family with more than two parents.
|
| Other sources include: _Families Across Cultures: A
| 30-Nation Psychological Study_ (2006) from Cambridge
| press by the same author cited in wikipedia (James
| Georgas) and others: John W. Berry, Fons J. R. van de
| Vijver, Cigdem Kagitcibasi, Ype H. Poortinga
| Contemporary trends such as increased one-parent
| families, high divorce rates, second marriages and
| homosexual partnerships have all contributed to
| variations in the traditional family structure.
| But to what degree has the function of the family changed
| and how have these changes affected family roles in
| cultures throughout the world? This book attempts to
| answer these questions through a psychological study of
| families in thirty nations, carefully selected to present
| a diverse cultural mix. The study utilises
| both cross-cultural and indigenous perspectives to
| analyse variables including family networks, family
| roles, emotional bonds, personality traits, self-
| construal, and 'family portraits' in which the authors
| address common core themes of the family as they apply to
| their native countries. From the introductory
| history of the study of the family to the concluding
| indigenous psychological analysis of the family, this
| book is a source for students and researchers in
| psychology, sociology and anthropology.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Isn't the extended family just a superset of the nuclear
| (or atomic) family? Defining the boundaries at grand-
| parents, aunts and uncles (I'm guessing proximity-based
| living relatives is kind of where you're making the
| boundary). By that logic an extended family is a nuclear
| family (formally) as it contains the definition of
| nuclear families by default, the nuclear family is just
| the smallest self replicating unit we've got available by
| default. Sperm (differential change between gens), (egg -
| really mitochondria) consistent base stability (ground
| truth) across gens, and the ability to self replicate.
|
| EDIT: If you're arguing mixture of experts works better,
| than sure, I got you, if your arguing that there's a more
| non-binary way to do the self replication, that's a
| harder road to hoe. At least if you want to do it for
| free, which has a better track record of working for most
| people.
| weft wrote:
| There's no "logic" here, you're just not aware of the
| history of the term and the sociological history behind
| it.
|
| The nuclear family was an oddity that developed in
| England concomitant to the Industrial Revolution in
| middle-class families for whom occupational relocation
| was common. It was enshrined as an ideal sociological
| familial arrangement in the United States because its
| normalization was conducive for developing larger pools
| of productive labor.
| Avicebron wrote:
| > It was enshrined as an ideal sociological familial
| arrangement in the United States because its
| normalization was conducive for developing larger pools
| of productive labor.
|
| As opposed to pseudo-Confucius China where larger pools
| of productive labor naturally formed?
|
| That doesn't take away anything from the fundamental
| point where it's the smallest self-replicating unit,
| logic on behalf of the participants has nothing to do
| with it because it works out the gate. Of course it isn't
| the best, it was developed during a time of struggle and
| turmoil a la the industrial revolution (for the rural
| poor), it won because it was the the most resilient model
| (small, mobile, reactive, etc) to hard times.
|
| Edit: I said developed, if formed is a word that helps
| you understand that it's not conscious then here you go
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is like saying the diatomic vases include monoatomic
| gasses because there are single atoms in the diatomic gas
| molecules. The whole point of the nuclear family is that
| it is indivisible, but easily divisible from other parts
| of the family. This is very visible in decisions like
| "can we move away for work?". In a nuclear family, this
| decision rests almost entirely on whether both parents
| agree to it and can find work. In an extended family, the
| grandparents and aunts and uncles (especially the grand
| aunts and uncles) will have an important word in the
| decision as well.
| protocolture wrote:
| The Corporate Family is what you are thinking of. A
| corporate family includes all immediate branches. Imagine
| a ranch with a Patriarch and 3 male kids and their wives.
| If your dad dies your uncles and aunts just pick up the
| slack. Its usual also for all branches to work the same
| or related trades.
|
| Its really tertiary education and suburbia that
| undermined the corporate family, atomising it. The Atomic
| family is modern.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| I can't access the first source for that Wikipedia quote,
| but the second is a defunct website created by a graduate
| student. The fact that they're using it in the
| introduction for an article about the nuclear family is a
| good reason why people should be skeptical about claims
| on Wikipedia and should look into the sources themselves,
| not treat Wikipedia as if it was a source.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| See my other comment in this thread about anthropologists
| dichotomizing societies based on nuclear vs extended
| families. In short, it's orthogonal to the issue.
| defrost wrote:
| The issue is that across the movement of time and
| generations a "nuclear family" unit of parents and their
| offspring has all the stability and longevity of a pencil
| balanced on it's tip .. the clock is ticking on Hapsberg
| lips and the oddities of pharoahs.
|
| Long lasting societies have a larger formal weave based
| on outworking and out breeding, formally moieties in the
| indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, Indonesia
| and elsewhere.
|
| A single family unit alone is insufficient and
| historically cycles members in and out over half a
| generation through marriage and fortune seeking.
|
| I've seen your other comments and they have that kind of
| first order depth expected of a simple thought and
| looking things up quickly on a phone.
|
| Here's a _very_ shallow introduction to a family of
| systems with many variations that lasted some 70 thousand
| years keeping bloodlines clean:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moiety_(kinship)
| weft wrote:
| It's not even the most stable or ubiquitous family
| arrangement in the modern day.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| It is. I think you're bringing a lot of baggage to the
| term. In common usage (verified on my phone dictionary),
| it simply means a couple and their dependent children. It
| doesn't require that they live separately from extended
| family. It doesn't require that all the children have the
| same biological parents. It doesn't even require that the
| parents are different sexes. Or that the parents are
| married and live together. It's just a more specific term
| to remove the "extended" sense of the more general
| "family."
| immibis wrote:
| You're telling me that the nuclear family - two parents
| and their children living as a unit without drama - is
| more ubiquitous and stable than, say, the exchange of
| goods and services for money? Divorce rates and credit
| card would beg to differ.
|
| The comment chain you replied to said it's a stable and
| ubiquitous arrangement. You're not trying to argue it's
| stable or even that it's an arrangement - you're just
| arguing it can be found within a larger structure. It's
| as if someone said cliques and anticliques aren't good
| designs for computer networks, and you said yes they are,
| because every network of a certain size contains a clique
| or an anticlique by
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem - that
| may be true but it's incidental.
|
| It's also as if someone is saying that Java isn't best at
| functional programming, and you pointed out that yes it
| is, because look at all the functions calling other
| functions.
| devmor wrote:
| I would suggest that you do some actual reading of
| anthropology - or just look up what the term "nuclear
| family" means and where it started.
|
| I am willing to bet you will be fairly shocked at how
| recent it is, given your comment.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I think you're actually confused about the term, see my
| responses elsewhere in this thread.
| devmor wrote:
| If you are going to refuse to actually look at what the
| term means and insist that you are correct there is no
| conversation to be had.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| Look, I don't know what to tell you. Dictionaries contain
| the meanings of words and terms as commonly used. If you
| look up "nuclear family," the meaning comports entirely
| with how I have been using the term. I'm sorry that's
| inconvenient for your self conception.
| achenet wrote:
| what about Roman families?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_in_ancient_Rome
|
| You had the familia, which was similar to the current
| nuclear family, but that was wrapped into the larger gens
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gens
|
| people cared not just about the success of their
| intermediate family, but also their gens, which was
| similar to a clan.
|
| You'll have similar structures in many tribal societies.
|
| Do you have actual statistics to support your hypothesis
| that
|
| > My read of history is that it's the single most stable
| and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long
| shot.
|
| besides just "oh yeah bro, it's my read of history bro,
| totally rigorous"?
| andrepd wrote:
| I don't think it is. Cultures around the world had wildly
| different familial and child-bearing organisations, too
| much for the nuclear family to be considered a cultural
| universal.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This is mostly a fiction.
|
| Nuclear family has never had primacy - look at wild,
| dangerous places, primacy is held by extended family,
| clans, tribes or mafia.
|
| 'Nuclear family primacy' exists only In carefully crafted
| stable and safe societies, and another authority must
| exist to organise military-age men for matters of war and
| survival.
|
| Thus nuclear family can only exist as we know it, in a
| partially undermined condition.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| It's absolutely not a fiction that the nuclear family is
| the most important human social arrangement. In every
| language I'm aware of, a child's first word is 'mother'
| and in most languages 'father' follows shortly
| thereafter. Other social arrangements are important (we
| live in societies or tribes or clans, after all), but
| throughout most of human history, people grew up with
| their mother, father, and siblings being the most
| important people in their lives.
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's very odd to me seeing nuclear family being propped
| up in an exclusive/or relationship with a strong extended
| family. Every strong extended family dynamic that I've
| seen is the result of a strong nuclear family from a
| generation before.
| weft wrote:
| That distinction is what defines a "nuclear family" to
| begin with...
| toasterlovin wrote:
| To be clear, I am not arguing that nuclear and extended
| families are exclusive of each other. I think most of the
| people arguing against me are confused about this.
| Anthropologists dichotomize societies by nuclear family
| vs extended family because Western societies basically
| don't have extended families as an important social unit
| at all, whereas in many societies the extended family is
| an important social unit. And the difference usually has
| a lot of implications. Hence the dichotomy being useful.
| But this does not mean that in societies where extended
| families are important that they are more important than
| nuclear families. And really this shouldn't be
| surprising: we're not bees. We form reproductive pairs.
| Our children are twice as related to us as our nieces and
| nephews. There's no way it could ever come to be that the
| nuclear family would not be the primary human social
| institution.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > Western societies basically don't have extended
| families as an important social unit at all
|
| Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from
| modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-
| Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended
| families in the past, and both have placed less of an
| emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies
| have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so
| these changes were more noticeable in them.
| weft wrote:
| "Nuclear" here is in reference to households with only
| mother, father, and children, in distinction to the norm
| of multigenerational households throughout history and in
| most of the world today excepting the West.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| No, that's baggage that people are bringing to the
| conversation. It merely means a couple and their
| dependent children. Whether or not they live separately
| from extended family has no bearing on the term.
| nine_k wrote:
| Certainly, having a mother and a father is pretty
| traditional!
|
| But past a toddler age, in a large clan-like structure,
| if your father and the clan's patriarch give you
| conflicting orders, who do you obey?
|
| This question is moot in a nuclear-family society, with
| relatives beside father and mother minding their own
| children, and not more.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > if your father and the clan's patriarch give you
| conflicting orders, who do you obey?
|
| Good question, here's one for you: if your father and a
| police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you
| obey?
|
| The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn't
| argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here's
| another question for you: who's more likely to advocate
| for your interest, your father or the clan's patriarch?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > if your father and a police officer give you
| conflicting orders, who do you obey?
|
| This goes to show that you, along with many other
| commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it's so
| different from your experience.
|
| Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a
| person that was taken away by extended family as a child
| because the father had anger management issues.
|
| They are not functionaries like police, they actually
| share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is
| highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would
| be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive
| and well.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > I know a person that was taken away by extended family
| as a child because the father had anger management
| issues.
|
| Yeah, but the default was for them to be raised by their
| nuclear family.
| protocolture wrote:
| You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which
| differs from the consensus.
|
| >throughout most of human history, people grew up with
| their mother, father, and siblings being the most
| important people in their lives.
|
| Throughout most of history people grew up with their
| mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if
| they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire
| family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this
| corporate family through modern practices (Finance,
| Tertiary Education, Suburbia)
| toasterlovin wrote:
| > You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which
| differs from the consensus.
|
| I'm a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when
| there's a disagreement about what something means. In
| this case, my phone's dictionary, which cites the Oxford
| American dictionary as its source, has the definition of
| 'nuclear family' as "a couple and their dependent
| children, regarded as a basic social unit" and I'm not
| seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.
|
| Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we
| have other terms for them, which belies their reduced
| importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.
| immibis wrote:
| It's the basic social unit part. In society that actually
| exists, they're not a basic unit. You can obviously find
| couples and their dependent children, just like maybe you
| can find a monad in a Java program, but they're not basic
| units.
| toasterlovin wrote:
| If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance,
| you would not see "mother" and "father" universally
| conserved across all languages as the first words that
| people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish
| who don't know what water is; nuclear families are so
| pervasively important that you just can't see it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This is both a non-sequitor and a confabulation.
|
| Kids that don't grow up with their parents do not learn
| them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their
| parents, often still learn something else as their first
| words.
|
| Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a
| foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.
| protocolture wrote:
| The nuclear family is such a recent concept so I have a
| lot of trouble understanding this wacky point of view.
| The nuclear family is itself a destruction of the
| corporate family. How do weird manosphere types identify
| it as somehow being the core of society.
| t-3 wrote:
| To be fair, it has been the dominant mode of familial
| organization in colonial powers for the past 100+ years.
| When economics are stable from generation to generation
| there would be far less tendency to split households -
| only in times of abundance or want would it make sense
| for each generational unit to live separately. Killing
| off natives and taking their land and resources tends to
| create an awful lot of abundance. The nuclear family thus
| symbolizes prosperity and the right-wing mythological
| ideal of past abundance that can be regained by returning
| to "traditional values".
| lazide wrote:
| Multigenerational families are hard to move, and come
| with a lot of baggage (hah).
|
| That gets in the way of Empire and economic flexibility.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| How does this subvert the nuclear family?
|
| If a parent's control over a child is subverted it
| doesn't change the relationship or family structure.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Honestly curious: What does this mean?
|
| I'll expand a bit on my perspective to avoid just
| sealioning here:
|
| Where I've come across proposals for policies like actual
| age verification is in the "social media is bad for kids"
| milieu. I'm extremely skeptical that these proposals are
| workable purely _technically_ , but ignoring that, I have
| some sympathy for the concept. I do think that kids
| mainlining TikTok and YouTube Shorts and PornHub is
| really bad.
|
| So having cleared my throat, I'm back to wondering about
| your comment. How, in your view, is this kind of policy
| "protecting parents at the expense of children"?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean there are many reasons that people say that TikTok
| is bad.
|
| If you think TikTok is bad because it promotes unhelpful
| or malicious advice around body standards, that's one
| thing. (See: bigorexia getting promoted into the DSM)
|
| If you think TikTok is bad because it puts children under
| a lens, that's another thing.
|
| If you think TikTok is bad because it exposes contrarian
| viewpoints that are not available on your television,
| like, say, something Gaza related, then that's yet
| another thing.
| econ wrote:
| The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that
| it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks
| that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or
| talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind
| deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never
| see how they are fundamentally different from you nor
| why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by
| comparison.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but you also
| correctly guessed that I think TikTok is bad.
|
| But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I
| think TikTok is bad for two reasons:
|
| 1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I
| don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with
| propaganda.
|
| 2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.
| roenxi wrote:
| Your #1 reason is bobthepanda's #3 reason - exposes
| contrarian viewpoints. There isn't any reason in the
| abstract to think that Chinese propaganda is any worse
| than US propaganda. US propaganda is pretty stupid vis a
| vis promoting domestic prosperity.
|
| What are the Chinese supposed to do here, influence the
| US to give up their manufacturing edge by outsourcing all
| the capital formation to Asia? Waste their economic
| surpluses on endless war? Promote political division by
| pretending that the president is an agent of a foreign
| country? The US political process throws up a startling
| number of own goals. The Chinese aren't savvy enough to
| outdo the US domestic efforts.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is a naive view of propaganda: everyone always says
| "well, they're not trying to achieve <overtly obvious
| goal>" therefore there could be no benefit!
|
| Propaganda aimed at your enemies isn't about achieving
| any specific goal, it is about obtaining potential
| advantage. It's an investment, the same as funding a
| startup but with much broader success criteria.
|
| Your comment here belies the benefit because at its core
| is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to
| affected by propaganda.
| roenxi wrote:
| Well, no. It is good to listen to other people even if
| you think they don't have your best interests at heart. I
| can certainly see a security argument for restricting
| foreign media, but to get upset because literally one
| media source is owned by foreigners is too much.
|
| The vague "obtaining potential advantage" is
| unreasonable. An advantage at what? China doesn't benefit
| from the US suffering, much like the US has actually
| benefited a huge amount from Chinese prosperity.
|
| > Your comment here belies the benefit because at its
| core is the most dangerous assumption: I am too smart to
| affected by propaganda.
|
| Quite the contrary; We're supposed to be affected by what
| we listen to. But I'm not smart enough to figure out what
| the Chinese think without going and listening to and
| reading things written by Chinese people and pushed by
| people with Chinese perspectives. We're not psychic and
| the Western media are also unreliable. Listening to
| diverse news sources is important. Particularly since the
| truth is often the most effective form of propaganda.
| achenet wrote:
| yes, but I think by your logic Hollywood movies are
| "propaganda"...
|
| by making the main characters of a movie American, and
| giving them positive traits, you're 'obtaining a
| potential advantage' for every American that travels
| abroad is associated with positively portrayed fictional
| characters, or in biopics, historical characters.
| XorNot wrote:
| The US military directly sponsors or promotes Hollywood
| movies with the benefit of gaining fairly good control of
| the overall messaging surrounding the military in the
| film.
|
| _Zero Dark Thirty_ is perhaps the most egregious example
| of this, with the CIA consulting and the film depicting
| that the information leading to Osama Bin Laden 's
| location was extracted under torture from an inmate (it
| was not).
|
| Many American films are not even casually _not_
| propaganda. The way you think about the US military is
| shaped and influenced by the influence the US military
| gets from fronting money, consulting and equipment
| appearances to appear in Hollywood films (with sometimes
| some weird consequences - for example they refused to
| back The Avengers because they felt SHIELD undermined the
| portrayal of the US, but were happy to back The Winter
| Soldier because in that SHIELD isn 't the US DoD and goes
| down).[1]
|
| [1] https://gamerant.com/marvel-military-propaganda-
| explained/
| immibis wrote:
| Many Hollywood movies are literally US government
| propaganda, yes.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Um, yes?
| drdec wrote:
| > There isn't any reason in the abstract to think that
| Chinese propaganda is any worse than US propaganda.
|
| China is (at best) a frenemy of the US. Allowing a rival
| to push propaganda onto your children is foolhardy.
|
| It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is
| worse than US propaganda.
| roenxi wrote:
| > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your children
| is foolhardy.
|
| I don't recall historical instances where that was a
| major problem. The closest analogue would be the cold
| war, where US propaganda successfully got the USSR to
| switch to democracy (a move that, ultimately, was to the
| benefit of the people). The Soviet counter-propaganda was
| ultimately unconvincing and everyone agrees that
| Communism was a disaster - even the people who lived in
| communist communities as children.
|
| It is too hard to come up with a 20- or 30-year
| propaganda campaign that has meaningful impacts, the
| results are fundamentally unclear because everyone will
| have different policies in 30 years. If anyone knew how
| to reliably change societies through propaganda we'd
| already be using that technique in the west to align
| everyone to capitalism instead of having the constant
| socialist regressions that keep cropping up.
|
| Propaganda is effective for specific political decisions
| in the short term when targeted at adults. Over the
| longer term it has impacts that are hard to foresee and
| impossible to control, for good or ill.
|
| > It has nothing to do with whether Chinese propaganda is
| worse than US propaganda.
|
| It sounds important when you phrase it like that. Why
| listen to worse propaganda?
| sanderjd wrote:
| > > Allowing a rival to push propaganda onto your
| children is foolhardy.
|
| > I don't recall historical instances where that was a
| major problem.
|
| This is truly laughable.
|
| We would have never let the German government own ABC in
| the 1930s, for obvious reasons. And the Chinese
| government would never let a US company own any of their
| influential media networks.
|
| I always feel like this argument has a "doth protest too
| much" feel to it.
| roenxi wrote:
| The decisions in the 1930s led to the most bloody and
| meaningless breakdown of communications in human history.
| One of the outcomes was the UN being set up by people
| saying, loosely speaking, "gee, we should listen to each
| others political stance more". I myself wouldn't cite the
| media policy in the decade prior to WWII as a success
| since it is hard to find a worse failure.
|
| Besides; that has nothing to do with children. The Nazis
| didn't last an entire generation. They weren't trying to
| propagandise children, they targeted adults.
|
| > And the Chinese government would never let a US company
| own any of their influential media networks.
|
| Again, Chinese media policy is an example of bad policy -
| I would advocate doing the opposite of them in that
| sphere. They're authoritarians. We want to intentionally
| copy their _industrial_ policies after careful
| consideration.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Nations being unwilling to allow their rivals to own
| their domestic media has literally nothing to do with
| that. The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy.
| One has nothing to do with the other.
|
| Also:
|
| > They weren't trying to propagandise children, they
| targeted adults.
|
| I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically
| illiterate statement.
| roenxi wrote:
| > The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One
| has nothing to do with the other.
|
| If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to
| propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent
| about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are
| supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in,
| "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on
| US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge
| impact on industrial policy?
|
| (Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of
| outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more
| mischievous mood).
|
| > I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically
| illiterate statement.
|
| That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.
| bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't
| nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've
| just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is
| untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media
| company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong
| outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to
| much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign
| views without much reference to what they are or what
| impact they'll have.
|
| [0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably
| opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two
| ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.
| sanderjd wrote:
| No, those are not the same at all. A government
| controlling the content is not "exposing contrarian
| viewpoints".
| jakewins wrote:
| My brother, a middle school teacher, was talking about
| TikTok yesterday. Every 2 years he gets a new batch of
| 10-year-olds.
|
| They all have a "class chat", and it is used daily for
| relentless cyber bullying. The current trend TikTok is
| pushing this month is to push the boundaries of calling
| black kids the n-word without explicitly saying the word.
| There is one little black girl in his class.
|
| He says every class is the same, horror ideas pushed by
| edge lords TikTok algos push on the kids. Relentless
| daily bullying. And unlike bullying on the playground or
| at the boys and girls club.. there is no realistic way
| for adults to intercede beyond disconnecting their kid,
| shutting them out of the social context entirely.
| squigz wrote:
| As someone who was bullied despite adults interceding,
| I'm curious why you think it being physical makes it
| better?
|
| Interestingly the exact example you gave is something I
| can see happening when I was a kid as well as now.
|
| Bullies gunna bully.
| jakewins wrote:
| My primary issue here was actually more about TikTok - I
| don't think it's right that software engineers get rich
| writing code that pushes "bullying challenges" on
| children to increase engagement and ad sales.
|
| But: all other things equal, of I get to pick between
| "10-year-olds primary daily public forum is completely,
| cryptographically, devoid of any moderating adult
| presence whatsoever" and - what I had - 10-year olds have
| privacy but there are adults around that have a chance at
| picking up that things are going off the rails"
| achenet wrote:
| sorry if this is a stupid question,
|
| but can your brother setup a class chat that he
| moderates?
|
| I'm working on a simple chat app in Go as a learning
| project [0], you're welcome to use that, but honestly
| there are almost certainly better solutions out there,
| which he can actively moderate. Maybe a WhatsApp group,
| or something that can be used by a web interface (old
| forum techs?)
|
| Group chats can be nice, I'm part of several acroyoga
| group chats and they're lovely, probably because adults
| who practice acroyoga tend to be nicer than middle
| schoolers.
|
| [0] https://codeberg.org/achenet/go-chat
| 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.
| authorfly wrote:
| Can I engage you on this as someone who once shared your
| view? Not to say I believe my view is better now, but
| maybe you can learn from my experiences.
|
| Not everyone has this reaction, because what they have
| been exposed to shapes how that content will affect them.
|
| Specifically people who have been victims of serious
| assault or even witnessed that can have a much worse, and
| irreversible reaction to you when seeing things that make
| those memories come to the fore as recurrent, intrusive
| thoughts, which then affect their behavior and lives.
| That is really what the restriction of content should be
| about if anything: helping people avoid things they want
| to avoid.
|
| The people who have struggled (especially at a young age)
| with real trauma often come across as distant, quiet or
| anti-social; sometimes they never were so before. But
| often, our community where this behavior is more
| normalized, is where those people come, even if they
| don't have a primary interest in the community, to feel
| normal again, while still feeling fearful or full of
| empathy. You may have trauma, or not, depending on what
| violence you faced. However, even with violence, people
| react in wildly different ways, for one, women are much
| more anxious and cautious after feeling at risk or
| violated than men, so you really cannot assume that how
| you feel represents how a woman would (for evolutionary
| sensible reasons). Meanwhile, men often suppress their
| emotions (at a truly deep level, killing their
| relationships).
|
| The problem with saying that prohibition necessarily
| means they will encounter the material in an unsafe
| environment is that, someone who has been assaulted or
| abused is already in an unsafe environment, everywhere,
| in their mind, and for legitimate and rationale reasons.
| The world is different when you know police will
| generally not deeply investigate a serious crime, when
| one has been personally been conducted against you.
| Seeing content like that, can prolong or make permanent
| that state of being, which can leave to bad and
| convoluted consequences later on. It is easier to
| understand this if you have children or have seen real
| pain and suffering with someone you love too, that can
| give you the empathy to understand this reaction.
|
| It is hard to understand psychological damage unless you
| or someone you truly love and have strong empathy with
| goes through it. Until then, it's hard to understand or
| imagine at all how other people might be affected by some
| things. They will not always have your reaction to
| content which is extreme. I do not agree with
| prohibition, but do consider that others can have
| different reactions to you, ones you possibly cannot
| imagine.
|
| Put another way, many times, we label content extreme not
| because it is extreme for everyone. We label it, because
| for some group of people, at some point, it could set
| their own lives back a lot to encounter it, and these
| people are already suffering more than the average
| person. It's about helping them avoid more pain.
|
| Obviously this does not apply to all content, but for
| your examples, it does. Do not imagine there are not blue
| collar workers who have seen close friends suffer similar
| pain to the fate you mention, haunted by it. Men who
| would break at the knees at the sight of that kind of
| video. There are. You brush shoulders with them on the
| street. We can understand the dark sides of humanity
| through history and the written word (which I believe
| should be fully unrestricted), but not everything needs
| the very human, memory-provoking visual element.
| 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.
| sanderjd wrote:
| As with many things, the concern is that it's bimodal.
| Some people learn empathy through this kind of exposure,
| and some people learn the opposite.
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| What is it about "sexual subcultures" that are inherently
| dangerous as opposed to the main culture that is
| inherently safe.
|
| Is a book character being gay unsafe for kids in a way
| that the same character being straight is not?
| ipaddr wrote:
| They may be ready that's why they are looking but you
| might not be.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| Sounds more like YOU are not ready to handle it, and
| don't want to have that discussion (at an age appropriate
| level) with them. Which is fine. Just don't give us the
| BS excuse that your child is too dumb to think
| critically. Kids are smarter than you give them credit
| for.
|
| If a pre-teen can understand the concept of sex, what's
| so difficult about explaining that _some_ people have
| non-mainstream sexual attraction?
|
| A better example is restricting access to actually
| dangerous ideas, like "Mein Kampf".
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I've read the first chapters of Mein Kampf, because i was
| very curious why the book is forbidden knowledge. It was
| actually quite easy to download it. I did not like the
| book at all, but the search to get it was quite exciting.
| Same with the weirdly Hackers Cookbook. Same with a lot
| of other so-called dangerous knowledge. I have also seen
| awful things on the internet that made me physically
| sick. I have also seen hacks that were so easy i wondered
| why big huge companies had not thought of that. Point is
| that restricting will not stop curious kids to search for
| it and find it. It all taught me to also accept my kids
| as extremely curious human beings who may not align with
| your personal points of view and that can sometimes be ok
| as long as you keep communicating with each other
| respectfully. Tell them why you think Mein Kampf is bad.
| Show them things like experiments on MythBusters if they
| have questions.
| necovek wrote:
| Seemed simple to me: one of the first results for "Mein
| Kampf full text" gave me
| https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601h.html
|
| But yeah, I don't want to be expressly forbidding
| disagreeable content to my kids, I want them to learn to
| choose content that is worthwhile themselves.
| milesrout wrote:
| >If a pre-teen can understand the concept of sex, what's
| so difficult about explaining that _some_ people have
| non-mainstream sexual attraction?
|
| They cannot and do not understand that concept which is
| why exposing them to it is a serious criminal offence.
| squigz wrote:
| Teaching minors about sex is a serious criminal offence?
| saagarjha wrote:
| If telling your children that gay people exist is a crime
| where you live, maybe the problem is with the laws in
| your place of residence.
| milesrout wrote:
| Pre-teens don't understand sex, which is what I said, and
| which is why they cannot consent to it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Pre-teens can understand sex just like they can
| understand what a contract is or that alcohol exists. We
| don't allow them to participate in those things but they
| can certainly be aware of its existence.
| necovek wrote:
| They do understand sex, but don't take the consequences
| seriously enough (like STDs or kids at such a young age)
| -- they are still in the exploration phase where they
| believe they are invincible and nothing bad can happen to
| them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think it's a pretty fundamental mistake to conflate the
| library with the internet. Even the "dangerous section" of
| the library is still a curated, by nature of the medium
| (the printed word), high information, low noise
| environment.
|
| The internet is a commercial, mass media space, in large
| parts an entropy machine, where you're unlike in the
| library backroom are always under surveillance, where it's
| not you actively engaging with books but the internet
| engaging with you. A library is a repository of knowledge
| (which is not the same as information or "data") the
| internet is a dark forest where some pretty eldritch
| entities are always on the lookout for someone to pounce
| on.
|
| Kids can be free in the library because, as to the title of
| the thread, there's always a librarian. There's no heroin
| needles on the tables. You buy the freedom of the library
| by it being an ordered and protected space.
| elijahwright wrote:
| Conflation is probably wrong. But librarianship is one of
| the most hacker-adjacent places I've ever worked. I
| fought pretty damn hard to keep UNIX tooling very
| directly in the information science curriculum at Indiana
| - circa 2005 or so. It was in serious danger of getting
| removed - I was just a graduate student but I got my butt
| on the right committee where I could articulate the need
| for tools and textual technologies to stay on the map
| there. Taking them away from the students would have been
| doing them a massive disservice.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| Good point. One of the things that always strikes me as
| extremely dishonest about these conversations is when
| people pretend that libraries aren't curated collections.
| Usually with the librarians as gatekeepers, sometimes
| with others.
| squigz wrote:
| Out of curiosity, can you link some comments in this
| thread that suggest people think libraries are not
| curated collections? It seems to me that most people
| realize a librarian's role is indeed to curate it.
| andrepd wrote:
| This is the single most insightful comment in the thread.
|
| There is _no_ comparison possible between algorithmic
| surveillance capitalist social media, and a library.
| andrepd wrote:
| I just want infinite scrolling data mining attention
| farming algorithms to be forbidden, at the very least for
| children under 18. Nothing about banning access to the
| internet.
| squigz wrote:
| I don't think I said anything about banning access, just
| restricting it. In any case, I want such things banned
| too, for everyone - because you can't have it banned for
| kids without adversely affecting privacy for everyone.
| kstenerud wrote:
| And that's great, so long as the government remains
| trustworthy.
|
| But then one day you have a government that, say, starts
| mining the IRS databases to pass that information along
| to ICE for arrest prospects...
|
| Once it's recorded, you not only have to trust the
| current government, but all future governments as well.
| 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.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| We may be talking about different eras. I'm Gen X, I
| don't remember any great excitement or optimism
| manifested in schools of my time.
|
| Quite the contrary; I think I was one of only two or
| three people in my year to go on to university. But then
| I was a huge nerd who was really interested in ideas.
| grandempire wrote:
| Yes I think that's right. Thanks for sharing. Kids of the
| 60s-70s who were outsiders because of their
| academic/nerdy interest became teachers and created a
| culture with the ideals they thought were missing. And
| that's what I experienced.
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's not all that hard to read high school texts for kids
| that know how to read. It just exposes them to many words
| they have to infer from context.
|
| I think that's either something you enjoy, or don't.
| __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
| aj7 wrote:
| See my comment about 612.6 above.
| protocolture wrote:
| I really dont get limiting access to books.
|
| I also dont get why whenever I bring this up I am immediately
| asked if I have kids and whether I would support some random
| fascist book being shelved.
|
| Censoring raw information seems like such a seppo thing and I
| really dont want it imported.
| huijzer wrote:
| > I also dont get why whenever I bring this up I am
| immediately asked if I have kids and whether I would
| support some random fascist book being shelved.
|
| That escalated quickly
| squigz wrote:
| Censorship is an American thing? Boy do I have news for
| you...
| ndr42 wrote:
| Well, yes, it is clearly a thing in the USA [1]. I hope I
| get you right, but you seem to insinuate that somebody
| else is worse and therefore its not "an American thing"?
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_the_U
| nited_...
| squigz wrote:
| > Censoring raw information seems like such a seppo thing
| and I really dont want it imported.
|
| This implies it's primarily or originally an American
| thing - ignoring literally thousands of years of
| censorship by countries all over the world, very likely
| including GP's own.
| ndr42 wrote:
| I had to look up what "seppo" is. Now I get why you were
| offended.
|
| I just would have thought that a nation that's proud of
| its first amendment and build on the foundations of
| enlightment would not go down to the darkness where
| others for "literally thousands of years" had been.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm not offended, because I'm not American. I just
| thought it was absurd to think this was a somehow
| uniquely American thing.
|
| I'm also not sure why you quoted that bit of my response
| - we have indeed been burning books for thousands of
| years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
| notarobot123 wrote:
| What about books that amount to propaganda or
| indoctrination? There's obvious potential for harm in books
| that promote dangerous ideologies or things like self-harm
| and suicide. In the age of self-publishing and AI
| authoring, a book can contain pretty much anything without
| the quality/safety filters that publishing used to imply -
| maybe it's time to revise your stance?
| fsloth wrote:
| The only harm books cause is they stimulate thinking and
| erode powerbase of societies whose political structure is
| based on unquestioned deference.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink
| deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there
| shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and
| drinking largely sobers us again.
| Y_Y wrote:
| > In Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring of Macedonia was
| sacred to the Pierides and the Muses. As the metaphorical
| source of knowledge of art and science, it was
| popularized by a couplet in Alexander Pope's 1711 poem An
| Essay on Criticism: "A little learning is a dang'rous
| thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
| immibis wrote:
| What about when people take on unquestioning deference to
| certain books, such as (for illustrative purposes and I'm
| not saying this particular book is actually likely to
| cause this) Mein Kampf?
|
| What's the difference between Alex Jones preaching
| antivaxism on his internet podcast that you listen to, or
| in a book that you read?
| lazide wrote:
| Do you really think your average Nazi read Mein Kampf?
|
| Or that your average authoritarian Christian (or Muslim!)
| has read their holy books?
|
| Fanatics may pretend, but rarely actually read. After
| all, it may conflict with their fanaticism.
|
| They are happy to control what everyone else is able to
| read though.
| matwood wrote:
| As an atheist I often know the religious texts better
| than those who want to tell me I'm going to hell or
| whatever. As a kid I was thrown out of Sunday School for
| asking too many questions because I took the time to read
| the damn book.
| lazide wrote:
| Pro: more free time
|
| Con: ostracized
|
| You're not the only one.
| matwood wrote:
| As an adult I haven't come across many cons. I'm not a
| jerk about it unless someone tries to push their beliefs
| on me so it rarely comes up.
| lazide wrote:
| Sounds like you are in a place where people don't murder
| each other due to apostasy or religious differences.
| Levitz wrote:
| That can happen both ways and the problem doesn't lie in
| the content, but in the "unquestioning deference", which
| should get fixed by exposure to opposing views.
|
| Whenever we dismiss bad ideas out of hand rather than
| showing how they are bad we miss one chance to prove our
| stance, and we ever so slightly feed the notion that
| maybe they aren't bad, just called bad.
| Retric wrote:
| A major difference is books are really terrible at
| propaganda.
|
| They don't get updated with the latest emotional hot
| button issues so they just can't stomp on emotional
| triggers as well. It's much easier to digest arguments
| and see the errors when you can reread them. They don't
| take long to read so they don't clog up access to other
| sources.
|
| Rebuttals are targeting a specific argument so you can't
| just keep throwing up intellectual chaff.
| srveale wrote:
| Books may not be good propaganda for the latest,
| localized issues, but they are fantastic propaganda for
| ideology.
|
| I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen,
| and developed some pretty horrible notions about society
| and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of
| course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by
| reading other books!
|
| Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily
| bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These
| are brilliant but are also such effective forms of
| propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of
| propaganda in itself.
| Retric wrote:
| > Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part
| by reading other books!
|
| I think that shows their weaknesses. Propaganda seems to
| work best when reinforced over long periods. People read
| a book and get really into something for a while, X is
| now the one true diet! However, I rarely see longer term
| shifts without something else reinforcing the ideas.
|
| By comparison the US military has been subsidizing media
| who want access to military hardware for decades as long
| as they follow a few guidelines. It's a subtle drip of
| propaganda but across America and much of the globe
| people's perception has very much been influenced in an
| enduring fashion. No single episode of talk radio or Fox
| News is particularly effective but listen for years and
| you get a meaningful effect.
| necovek wrote:
| People mostly "buy into" ideas they already have:
| developing critical thinking requires access to all sorts
| of true and false material, so readers would learn to
| differentiate between their nuances.
|
| If the only book in your library is Mein Kampf, you are
| likely to empathise with young Mr. Hitler. If you have
| access to alternative viewpoints, you'll be forced to
| compare and contrast, and you just might develop your own
| understanding of the world.
|
| But note that you'll always be comparing to the actual
| circumstances in your proximity: at school,
| neighbourhood, work...
| dornan wrote:
| This isn't much of an issue when competing ideas are
| available. If your ideology is so crappy you have to
| "indoctrinate" people then in an open venue like a
| library your books aren't much more than a curiosity.
|
| Step 1 of teaching people to uncritically accept crappy
| ideas is to remove all references to anything that
| contradicts them. Maybe it's time to revise your stance?
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Our information ecologies aren't so straightforward as to
| always ensure the most rational ideas will always out-
| compete the irrational.
|
| I agree that it's hard to see your own ideological
| commitments without seeing alternatives. Yet allowing any
| and all ideologies the same opportunities to compete for
| public attention is clearly problematic. You don't want
| to wait until flat-earth theories and holocaust denial go
| fully mainstream to start to nuance your no-standards
| policy.
| vintermann wrote:
| > Our information ecologies aren't so straightforward as
| to always ensure the most rational ideas will always out-
| compete the irrational.
|
| In that case, how do you know the rational ones won out
| in _you_?
|
| It's always other people getting brainwashed we worry
| about, right?
| vacuity wrote:
| It's much easier to see flaws in others than ourselves.
| Introspection is a habit that must be developed, and it
| has layers. The average person is not rational (I would
| say no one is); it's because of education that we have
| "rational thinking". It's basically "right place, right
| time" but with the luck being systematized. Just hope
| that the people being sorta-rational are on the right
| track and elevate the tide.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our
| perspective. Humility is necessary if we know that our
| own knowledge is only based on the best information
| available.
|
| That said, we shouldn't then count all our present
| knowledge as worthless and any and all kinds of
| information as equally valid and worthy of dissemination.
|
| I do get your fear - censorship is a dangerous tool that
| is not always used responsibly. Yet abandoning any kind
| of social self-regulation in what information circulates
| publicly sounds a lot more dangerous.
| vintermann wrote:
| > I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our
| perspective
|
| That's not what I said.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I would rather let a young person run free in a library
| or bookshop than on YouTube or TikTok.
|
| The primary difference is that in a library or bookshop
| there are competing ideas right there in the same room. A
| curious mind will develop critical thinking skills. There
| are also curators who care about something other than
| making money - they're playing a long game, so will apply
| quality/safety filters.
|
| This is opposite to the algorithms, which in the name of
| monetization needs to pull you down into a rabbit hole,
| an echo chamber void of contradiction, a spell of
| indoctrination and affirmation of your own Worldview.
|
| Fiction, in particular, is a useful abstraction to grow
| emotional intelligence in hand with critical thinking. It
| allows - no, it _demands_ - you develop a sense of
| empathy and live a life in someone else 's shoes. You can
| then bring that experience back to your own idea of self
| and your place in the World.
|
| There's a lot of money in putting ads next to content
| teaching a kid who feels sad that they should kill
| themselves. I have absolutely no doubt that the World
| would be a better place if people were inclined to read
| books instead of hang out on social media, even if those
| books did contain dangerous ideologies.
|
| So, maybe it's time to revise your stance.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| This is exactly it. Add to this the simple reality that
| each kid has a different temperament and maturity levels
| and you immediately realize why parents want to have some
| level of control over what the kid is exposed to given
| that their filters were not developed yet.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > you immediately realize why parents want to have some
| level of control over what the kid is exposed to
|
| Control we got.
|
| Parenting time is up 20-fold (few
| hours/week->24/7adulting) from my parents generation
| (silent gen).
|
| Consequently, compared to my parents, I (gen x) had 20x
| the control over my what my kids were exposed to.
|
| Parenting was exhausting for me. My kids spent their
| entire childhood in adult-populated, adult-curated boxes.
| They were denied the regular hours of adult-free, free-
| range time, where I developed my most of my life skills.
|
| But as a parent, I had pretty exclusive control over what
| my 5 sons were exposed to.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Firstly, I absolutely agree with you on books > internet
| media.
|
| > _A curious mind will develop critical thinking skills._
|
| This is the linchpin of the debate.
|
| What if the first book you read at a critical age insists
| that it alone is true, and that other books should be
| distrusted at risk of harms to yourself? Say, the
| Christian Bible.
|
| It is absolutely possible -- unlikely, given the subjects
| of most books, but possible -- to have harmful
| information encoded in a book.
|
| The question is then how to blunt those negative
| outcomes, at scale, democratically, without opening the
| door to arbitrary political interference of the day.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| As somebody brought up in the Catholic faith, I can
| assure you that all humans are exposed to varied ideas
| and alternative books that they can make their own mind
| up.
|
| Diversity of opinion for me increased after I left
| school, and that's when I became more critical of the
| beliefs I held as a child. It's for that reason I think
| libraries are better than social media - social media is
| not just the equivalent of a religious tract that insists
| it is true, it actively prevents you from finding and
| considering contrary views all by yourself.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| > that other books should be distrusted at risk of harms
| to yourself? Say, the Christian Bible
|
| A bit off topic, but I find it interesting that the
| Christian Bible is always the example of a "bad" book,
| when there are other, very popular, religions whose books
| literally tell them that non-adherents are worthy only of
| a grisly death.
| erxam wrote:
| Maybe because it's the main book chosen by the cults that
| rule over the Americas today? And most commenters here
| are American.
|
| If it were a Venn Diagram, the circle of the people
| subject to the other 'big' religious books would have
| very little intersection with the set of the people who
| frequent this forum. It follows then that they would get
| far less criticism, since there's so much less exposure.
| tisdadd wrote:
| As it is Resurrection Sunday, and see this getting ready
| for church, wanted to say that I have a large library
| that is made up of mostly fiction and then Bible
| resources. I can say with confidence that, if you read
| the Bible it does not say that you can read only it.
| However, I will say that if those that proclaim Christ
| act more like Him, I think that most would be more happy
| to read it with the thought that it is true. Also, if it
| is not and people follow what were put as the greatest
| commandments, Love the Lord your God with all your heart
| and Love your neighbor as yourself then that would still
| only benefit society. Often people pick and choose bits
| and get some crazy thoughts because without the rest of
| the text in context you are just left with a con.
| Anyway,my heart was saddened to see people listing the
| greatest book in history as bad.
| yusina wrote:
| > Anyway,my heart was saddened to see people listing the
| greatest book in history as bad.
|
| Because it's a work of fiction and since it's missionary,
| it is exactly the kind of work which aims to suppress
| critical thinking in order to lock the reader into a
| particular world view for the rest of their lives.
| parineum wrote:
| Fictional books can be good and there are plenty of
| valuable lessons in the Bible. I know plenty of
| Christians who are great people capable of critical
| thinking.
|
| > aims to suppress critical thinking in order to lock the
| reader into a particular world view for the rest of their
| lives.
|
| There are a myriad of books that present their POV as
| absolute truth. Some of them aren't even in the dreaded
| fiction section! Most books don't end every statement
| with, "I could be wrong though, do your own research."
| tisdadd wrote:
| Knowing we will not agree, I will simply leave it that it
| was the first book on Gutenberg printing press, and that
| I think we can both agree made books much more widely
| available. Additionally, I think that must people on this
| site have more than likely had some logic and critical
| thinking studies, myself included, and that it is ok to
| disagree on some things. However, on the logic side, if
| Heaven is real and there is but one way to get there and
| not many, only those on that way will get there. If it is
| real and there are many ways, it doesn't matter what one
| you pick. If it is not real, then it also doesn't matter.
| I know if someone wants to hear logical discussions there
| are apologetics and debaters out there that are good to
| listen to. With the main thread here, I appreciate
| libraries and librarians greatly, especially in an age
| where so much is kept in a mutable form vs the hard copy.
| I would say that I hope most people have a worldview that
| they can express, and that it should morph with a deeper
| understanding of the world as you mature.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| There are people who have used it as missionary (they're
| literally called missionaries sometimes), but the book
| itself does not suppress critical thinking - in fact some
| of the stories within it challenged me to think about the
| World in a very different way, and to consider what kind
| of person I wanted to be and the place I wanted to
| inhabit in my life, regardless of faith.
|
| I also did not find it prevented me from changing my
| World view as I grew up. I am not a practicing christian
| today, but I do think that many christian parables have
| helped make me a more rounded, generous and thoughtful
| human being. I am certainly quite likely more empathetic
| and loving than many others around me.
|
| Read it as a work of fiction and don't be afraid of it
| "converting you" into a a robot remotely controlled by
| the pope. You might be surprised.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| FWIW the Bible contradicts itself enough that a
| curious/critical mind will have to grapple with what
| truth is. I know I did as a kid.
| techpineapple wrote:
| I also think that books probably don't have the same
| social pressure as online. I can't imagine reading about
| suicide or self harm being nearly as problematic as
| seeing 20 different people advocate for something in a
| reel, and you have to choose to engage with reading in a
| different way from social media or even television.
| duncanfwalker wrote:
| There's a few different things in there that I think have
| different answers. I'd draw a distinction between banning
| and curating to cover the quality points.
|
| I don't know what it's like in other parts of the world
| but I'd say in the UK there's a clear consensus that
| people shouldn't be able to incite violence - and that
| covers books.
|
| Suicide and self-harm is a bit more tricky, there are
| books that deal with those topics that might be important
| to include in a curation depending on the context - e.g.
| the readers age and how vulnerable they are.
| bjourne wrote:
| No? Both Lolita and Mein Kampf has been available no
| questions asked in most well-stocked libraries for
| decades. If older generations survived that, I see no
| reason why younger generations wouldn't.
| Y_Y wrote:
| In fact, Hitler grew up without reading Mein Kampf. I
| wouldn't want to take the chance of that happening again.
| FpUser wrote:
| I have healthy advice for those who want to limit what I
| read: go fuck yourself. I do not remember selling off my
| soul to those victims of unsuccessful abortion.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's always exasperating to see parents with their "well
| you don't have kids so you don't understand" excuse to do
| whatever, like we weren't all kids who had parents at some
| point.
|
| And also I guess then we can't criticize politicians
| because we never ran for office, or judge a murderer
| because we never killed anyone. Like show me your
| graduation diploma from parent school that makes you a
| qualified expert on parenting and I'll concede the
| argument.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Heh. I will take this one.
|
| << like we weren't all kids who had parents at some
| point.
|
| When I was a young impressionable boy, I read through
| just about every book in our household. I remember
| "Painted Bird" by Kosinski making an impression and
| looking back it may have been inappropriate for my age.
| By today's standards, stuff there is nothing like the
| crap available to young minds.
|
| I am fairly permissive, but I also do not simply allow my
| kid to browse the world wide web; stuff is heavily
| curated by me. In a sense, I am effectively replicating
| the approach of my parents adjusted for current tech.
|
| edit: To be clear, librarians are effectively that world
| wide web, which means someone else is curating for you,
| which means you are bound to disagree on the actual
| output.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I personally think religious books should be basically
| destroyed.
|
| Corrupting people to listen to the words of old men in
| power seems like a bad idea.
| yusina wrote:
| Bad examples are important examples.
| toofy wrote:
| > I am immediately asked if I have kids and whether I would
| support some random fascist book being shelved.
|
| i see people often claim "the left" wants to ban fascist
| content, but reality just doesn't seem to back this up. im
| sure it happens sometimes, but i read this soooo often,
| that "the left" is running rampant to ban everything. this
| just doesn't seem to be based in any kind of reality--it
| seems like the exact opposite is true--maga governments
| around the country are feverishly, in reality, banning
| books as we speak. and a wild amount of these bans are
| because they're trying to suppress lgbtq, "woke", or poc
| content. deep red states are going to town banning books,
| the top 3 according to Pen [0] and pen's index of book bans
| which you can download here [1]:
|
| - florida: 33 districts have banned 4561 books [1]
|
| - iowa: 117 districts have banned 3671 books [1]
|
| - texas: 12 districts have banned 538 books [1]
|
| notorious liberal/left states don't seem to be attempting
| to ban content at all, and when they do, it seems like its
| in maga strongholds:
|
| - california: 1 district has banned 2 books. this is
| escondido, the 11th most conservative city in *the
| country*. both banned books seem to be lgbtq. [1]
|
| - washington: 0 book bans [1]
|
| - illinois: 2 districts, 1 banned for lgbtq content, the
| other for racial justice content. [1]
|
| - new york: the district that has banned books, clyde-
| savannah, voted overwhelmingly maga. [1]
|
| - massachusetts: 1 district banned 1 book called "Woke: A
| Young Poets Call to Justice". [1]
|
| - hawaii: 0 [1]
|
| - rhode island: 0 [1]
|
| again, compare this to florida, iowa, and texas who have
| 1000s of banned books across the states.
|
| over 10,000 instances last year of book bans and i didn't
| find mein kampf in this list at all--while The Color Purple
| is one of the most banned. yeah, the novel The Color
| Purple...
|
| [0] https://pen.org/report/beyond-the-shelves/
|
| [1] https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-
| book-b...
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| As an outsider (UKian), looking in, it's been obvious to
| me for a while that what the far right accuses the
| radical left of doing, is rarely actually done by the
| radical left, and ironically, the thing that they
| themselves are up to.
|
| Book banning and other "free speech" impediments? You've
| covered that. Vote rigging? The data on 2024 is wild...
| [0] Tight control of opinion through the media? The right
| trust Fox and few other places, the left tend to look for
| more varied input [1].
|
| Basically if Trump is saying somebody is attacking
| him/the right on something, chances are that the right is
| doing to the left far bigger, far harder, and far further
| away from media scrutiny...
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/comment
| s/1iei2...
|
| [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/pol
| itical-...
| slater wrote:
| As an outsider (UKian), looking in, it's been obvious to
| me for a while that what the far right accuses the
| radical left of doing, is rarely actually done by the
| radical left, and ironically, the thing that they
| themselves are up to.
|
| As the saying goes, every right-wing accusation is a
| confession.
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| I had a very similar childhood, my condolences
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Mine has 3d printers and laser cutters. I don't have kids
| but if I did I wouldn't mind having a place to park them
| while my print finished.
|
| Ideally they'd be interested in more enriching
| activities, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that that's
| maybe harder than it sounds.
| mingus88 wrote:
| That's a parenting problem. Can't blame the library. They
| need to meet people where the are.
|
| When I had a kid I made a vow that I would immediately
| buy them any book they showed interest in. Any other toy
| or game would be a discussion but books, anytime
| anywhere.
|
| And we put up bookshelves, so they would always have
| books nearby. There was a study I read where just the
| existence of books was beneficial, regardless of how much
| reading was done.
|
| https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-having-books-your-
| home
|
| Finally, I read to them every night I could. Just 10
| minutes a night.
|
| Then you just put limits on screens. Let them get bored.
| They will start reading on their own, and when they do
| it's just amazing.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Well, as a parent, I'd prefer my kids not be exposed to
| screens at the library of all places.
|
| We have a great deal of books in our house including ones
| for children but I'd like them to grow up with the
| curiosity had to explore the library. It's a real pain in
| the neck when they have a room with cartoons in it, which
| kids will especially gravitate to if you limit their
| screen time at home (which we do).
| john_the_writer wrote:
| Yeah that blows my mind. Of all places I'd not expect a
| cartoon to be. There are so many books kids could read. I
| don't see how a librarian can view a screen as anything
| they'd allow in their building.
|
| My kids daycare added a TV. The "teachers" said it was
| allowed by law. I said sure and pulled them out. Sucked
| because they'd just replaced most of the staff and the
| new staff was pro-tv while the old staff had never once
| turned on a TV.
| trollbridge wrote:
| One thing I appreciate at (some) YMCAs is that their
| childwatch is TV screen free, including my one locally
| and the one that's next door to my doctor's office. (We
| like to combine doctor visits or checkups with a trip to
| the YMCA if we're well enough to go.)
|
| I avoid the childwatch at the YMCA that has a couple of
| screens, although it's otherwise excellent.
|
| A trend in (some) libraries is to put technology
| everywhere - iPads for example (which I consider a very
| clunky way to search the library catalog). I'm assuming
| these things get bought via grants. If I go to the
| library, I want to deal with books, not computers which
| access the exact same stuff I could get at home. A
| separate computer room with actual, real, desktop
| computers available for people to use is fine.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The "thing you can get at home" is why the iPad is at the
| library. Because it is becoming a community center, and
| also partly because it functions as an extremely
| understaffed daycare.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| I loved this. Though I did start with the any book any
| time, I faltered later when they'd pick a graphic novel
| for 20$, that the'd finish in the car ride home. I had to
| stop.. It got too expensive. (great problem to have) I
| had to insist on what we call "chapter books", for money
| reasons alone. I love graphic-novels/comics but when your
| kid reads 50$ of books in one sitting you've got to draw
| a line. Now they're both on KU.
|
| I really loved the "let them get bored."
| necovek wrote:
| Still not there yet, but my 8 year old will munch 2 no-
| graphics books in two days (prices are much lower though,
| 5 to 10 eur/usd a book).
|
| But as we are on the topic of librarians, his two library
| cards will see more use :)
| Aeolun wrote:
| Weird. Our libraries have dedicated rooms for kids to
| read. And to study. It's incredibly convenient.
|
| What I haven't seen is TV's.
| 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.
| elijahwright wrote:
| My favorite places as a kid were libraries - they
| provided the opportunity for exposure and enrichment that
| I would have otherwise lacked. They are so much oh-holy-
| shit important, especially if you want to advance beyond
| the means of whatever dinky little town you happen to
| live in. I am significantly different and better because
| I had access to lots of materials to read - not money,
| just access. I owe very much to a school librarian and a
| town librarian in Wilkes county NC - they absolutely
| changed my life for the better. If I thought they might
| still be living I would love to tell them so. (Each of
| them would be over 100 years old now...)
| 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.
| piperswe wrote:
| Texas has the TexShare system, which facilitates ILL
| between just about every library in the state (public &
| university), and lets libraries issue TexShare cards that
| give reciprocal borrowing rights at any other TexShare
| 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.
| pyfon wrote:
| Maybe true in 1999? But now the library is a tiny fraction of
| where people get information from.
| karaterobot wrote:
| What's an example of librarians banning books? I typically
| see library books being removed due to regulations passed by
| federal, state, city councils, school boards, etc. There may
| be some examples out there of librarians refusing to lend out
| books, but I think they're pretty rare, and you may be
| thinking of those other groups.
| 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.
| reader_x wrote:
| The librarians I know are adamant about keeping private the
| records of what patrons have checked out or searched. I don't
| know the history you refer to, where library records were used
| to identify certain sections of society. Where can I read more
| about that?
| Larrikin wrote:
| The first sentence tells you what to look for
| dijit wrote:
| Here's some entrypoint: https://www.onb.ac.at/en/more/about-
| us/timeline/1938-politic...
|
| It seems annoying to search for, so I don't blame you for not
| finding anything.
| matwood wrote:
| It's not just librarians, but many states have laws
| protecting patron privacy around what they have read.
|
| https://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacy/statelaws
| greenie_beans wrote:
| rip aaron swartz
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > I led with my appreciation of the good things in the
| post.
|
| Maybe you like frosting on shit, but it's still frosting on
| shit.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I guess they want a 500 page manual done with LaTeX or gtfo
| :)
| enthdegree wrote:
| Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic
| mustache
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > Very cringe.
|
| The irony.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Unfortunately, the comment. Witless. Pointless. Worthless.
| Less.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| It's written in the style of a children's book but with a
| millennial accent. Not a good fit for this audience but it's
| not that bad
| elliotto wrote:
| A writing style like this indicates that the author does not
| have the taste to write well. This is a signal that the content
| will not be good.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| In my opinion the stiltedness served a purpose to take you on a
| journey and faded away since the most important devices used
| were imagery.
|
| The writing warmed my heart, which is more than most - by that
| measure I considered it good!
| 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.
| altcognito wrote:
| https://www.ala.org/advocacy/fight-censorship
|
| https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-
| life/librarians-f...
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/03/lib
| r...
| anannymoose wrote:
| No one is banning books, you can go buy as many copies as you
| want yourself and no one will come for them or you.
|
| Forced spending on garbage content is not a human right.
| hitekker wrote:
| I thought you were harsh, but then I read this piece:
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
|
| It's dispiriting to see librarians distort a normal process
| (deaccession) to cover up their own book banning.
| defrost wrote:
| In the article _librarians_ talk about the normal process of
| weeding out old books, duplicates of rare accesses, etc.
|
| The article itself contrasts that with _school boards_
| directing librarians to remove far more than tha regular
| weeding.
|
| The boards set policy that the librarians are compelled to
| follow or risk being fired.
| remram wrote:
| This is not written by either a journalist or a librarian, so I
| don't understand your comment at all.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > This is not written by either a journalist or a librarian
|
| I never claimed that it was.
| selfhoster wrote:
| Agreed, I'm glad you stated it so eloquently. I was going to
| comment but it would have been a more guttural reaction and not
| well received I'm sure.
| 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.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I've never met a librarian like this article describes. I have
| met people like this in many other walks of life, but I've never
| met a librarian who seemed like anything but a scold with a stick
| up their ass.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Why were they scolding you?
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Stalin was no librarian himself but owned over 25000
| books/pamphlets and invented his own classification scheme.
|
| 1. Stalin's Library by Geoffrey Roberts
|
| 2. https://youtu.be/aa-00IN1b6g
| josh-sematic wrote:
| > Librarians are dangerous
|
| Anybody who has been listening to "Welcome to Night Vale" could
| have told you that years ago.
| sghiassy wrote:
| What if your primary way of learning isn't reading? Are
| librarians still as necessary?
| GuB-42 wrote:
| But don't call them "monkey" or they may become _really_
| dangerous.
|
| ...
|
| I expected more Diskworld references when talking about dangerous
| yet highly skilled librarians.
| murrayb wrote:
| Felt sure that this thread would reference Terry Pratchett, he
| was a man who understood the danger of librarians.
| satoru42 wrote:
| I thought the author was describing a chatbot when reading the
| first half of this article.
| hoseyor wrote:
| If they were actually dangerous, the regime would not be allowing
| them to support and reinforce the regime narrative that it wants
| to spread and would instead have aggressively attacked them.
|
| No, the fact that the regime has not a single time moved against
| libertarians tells anyone with some sense that the regime very
| much sees them not only as not dangerous, but useful.
| joshka wrote:
| This would make an excellent kids book...
| noisy_boy wrote:
| In my university, I spent more time in the library than anywhere
| else reading all kinds of books ranging from encyclopedia
| brittannica to religion to course books to magazines and
| everything else in between. I do regret not working harder on my
| course subjects but the decision to spent hours at the library
| was a life changing one which resulted in me opening my eyes to a
| world beyond my hometown.
| aj7 wrote:
| In the stacks of the Main Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library,
| if you went to 612.6, you saw that a librarian had direct view of
| that aisle from her desk. But she was often not at that desk, so
| timing was involved.
| switchbak wrote:
| The last two libraries I've visited have been taken over by
| homeless ... err, the unhomed. The first one had one dude
| watching porn and farting an impressive amount. The second one
| has been taken over because it's close to a homeless encampment -
| becoming more of a secondary housing site and less of a library.
| This is in two separate cities in the PNW.
|
| I can't even really enter into the debate about librarians since
| the library experience has been so entirely off putting for me.
| It's most certainly not a place I'll take my kids, even though it
| consumes a significant percentage of my municipal taxes.
|
| I'm envious of the folks who have a maker space-like experience,
| that sounds nice!
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Places have been passing laws that prohibit people from
| sleeping and hanging around outside.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Shelters usually close during the day, also.
| Arcuru wrote:
| > it consumes a significant percentage of my municipal taxes.
|
| That's interesting, I assumed it was only a small percentage
| everywhere. What percentage does it consume? I live in Seattle
| (King County) and our library system only costs 3.5% of our
| property taxes.
|
| https://kcls.org/library-funding/
| silexia wrote:
| And that is enormous.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| sounds like you and everyone around really let go of any
| community life.
|
| like most gentrified places.
| wyager wrote:
| It's not so much "let go" as mid-century progressive legal
| reform (the CRA, SCOTUS undermining covenant law, etc.) made
| it effectively illegal to exclude destructive people from
| public spaces
| switchbak wrote:
| Not really, there's three cities in close proximity, only one
| has these progressive policies. The other two are fine, it's
| only the more liberal one that has these kinds of issues.
|
| It's a tough problem with no easy answers, but one of their
| main solutions is to put up solid fencing around the
| encampment. Just ignoring or pretending it's not a problem
| does not make the problem go away.
|
| One of those cities gentrified decades ago. Their problem is
| now more to do with all of their residents dying off. Also an
| interesting problem, and a bit of foreshadowing to what much
| of the western world will have to deal with fairly soon.
|
| I'm a recent resident of this city, so you can't really blame
| me for its state. And I'd place the blame mostly on city
| policy, not people "letting go".
| phibz wrote:
| Simple: information is power. Why else would so many go so far to
| control it.
|
| Also librarians are some of the most overeducated and underpaid
| people out there. Thank you for what you do.
| ask2sk wrote:
| Very well written. Thank you.
| svennidal wrote:
| Ook
| booleandilemma wrote:
| New York City libraries are a cross between homeless shelters and
| daycare centers. And they're closed on Sundays.
| gamificationpan wrote:
| I learned a lot, thanks.
| cornhole wrote:
| ayn rand is a menace
| amol_s wrote:
| Schools should include psychology, neuroscience, and some other
| books which help to bring courage and confidence to survive in
| real life problems.
| mark336 wrote:
| I thought you said "Libertarians"...
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