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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
If you have a hyperlexic child but the parents are not, nor are they well educated, most of the books quite early are going to male the parents uncomfortable. Even with educated parents, you get well meaning protective measures which are harmful to the child in the short and long term. Children even who arent big readers are harmed when their questions are deflected or ignored. Especially when it starts young. When your answers or you are uncomfortable towards an intelligent childs questions, especially as their parent, they pick up on that. You may intend well, you may want to shield them from the horrors inherent in their question, or prevent anxiety. But they still have the questions, they just find the answers themselves. They stop asking you for many reasons. Ultimately the result is you have left them alone with their questjons, and for bright children particularly the very young it does so much damage, that continues. They've in a very real way, been left alone by even very devoted parents.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
I think it’s mostly bad for a developing brain because it fuels dopamine-driven short attention span and on that level alone is comparable to zoning out on drugs. It is basically child maltreatment in the form of neglect, first parent-child-neglect, continued into self-neglect. Neglect as a silent form of abuse is one of the most damaging and difficult to treat in psychotherapy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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?
> > 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.
>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.
They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.
Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.
> They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth.
The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.
It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).
> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.
Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"
No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have
mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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".
The colonized often do - the colonizers are the ones splitting and creating new families as quickly as possible in order to occupy more resources and grab a larger slice of the opportunities afforded by empire.
Perhaps but when I look into examples of corporate families they are almost always in a colonial context. Like you might be more likely to fragment if opportunities exist, and franchise out. But you still get the same stories of a family farm or workshop being owned and operated by multiple generations until the young ones get a tertiary opportunity to take on something else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.
I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.
>nuclear families are so pervasively important
Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
On what basis can they do this? No human is born with a magical algorithm in their brain that can sort good ideas from bad. The only scalpels we have are those which we collect. Critical thinking must be bootstrapped. Mind viruses must be inoculated against. Just because you (eventually!) threw off your case of memetic measles, doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people die of it.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
'Thou shalts' tend to be antithetical to free thinking. If nothing else, because it absolves readers from having to independently consider things and encouraging relying on community and/or leader dogma.
We can quibble about whether or not dogmatic interpretations are in the original work or were layered on top by the organized church, but at the root of both is the idea that some things must be believed without questioning.
Up and down this thread there are notes about people who were raised in a religious tradition and then branched out -- that's great, but you all are also the exceptions.
There are far more people who believe what they're told, as a consequence of religious indoctrination, until the day they die.
And because of that, on the whole, the Bible (as used in modern Christianity) is anti- free thought.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>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!
I would be more worried about you developing a terrible sense of narrative and character development. I would kill for a well written ancap paradise book (there are plenty of Ancom options) but it honestly just sucks as a piece of writing I cant get into it.
>A major difference is books are really terrible at propaganda.
In my experience, consumers of propaganda respond to emotional and social cues. They rarely ever review the information provided without social and emotional context. Its always a video or a rally or something.
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.
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...
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.
Well, I think you should give a concrete example of such a dangerous book or we veer off into pointless whataboutism.
Considering Nazi propaganda, it used newspapers, radio and TV to a great effect. Mein Kampf alone did not turn Germans - a country of poets and scientist - to totalitarians.
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.
>There's obvious potential for harm in books that promote dangerous ideologies
Feel like specifically defining these dangerous ideologies and explaining why you or anyone in a position of non-parental authority should be the people who get to decide if youth and kids are "exposed" (as if we were talking about some poisonous substance) to them and to what degree?
Same goes for self harm and suicide. Maybe these subjects should be added to a list of other things that young people's fragile little minds should be morally kept away from? Lot's of room for defining all kinds of literature, text and ideas as supposedly promoting self harm, or suicide. Better we keep things forcefully childish for young minds instead?
This shitty, tired story is very old and remains as stupid as it ever was. The dogmas and censorship fixations may vary but the people promoting them always pull out their tedious little "protecting children from harmful ideas" card as justification to then repress whatever doesn't suit their pet ideological obsessions.
If anyone should carefully consider their stance it's closet censors who can't stop thinking as you seem to.
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.
> 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.
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.
<< 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.
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"?
> 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.
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.
I go online, into book spaces, and its american parents kvetching that there might be naughty bits in the novels they buy for their 17 year olds. Its american schools trying to limit content. Whereas my english teachers couldnt wait to introduce these subjects into our reading. "The Club" would instantly kill a seppo.
Its american "booktokers" trying to subdivide genre labels to filter out sex and sexuality.
Its americans writing angry reviews that characters had sex in a novel.
Its americans complaining that I would let my kid read any book, where socially no one gives a shit around me. (Be that LGBT content, or old fascist propaganda. Theres always a seppo waiting to tell you that you are """grooming""" a child with information)
Its americans creating sanitised versions of classic books """suitable""" for children
Really theres so much seppo moral panic shit these days that I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who tries to both side this.
>ignoring literally thousands of years of censorship
I dont care about thousands of years of censorship, I simply don't want to import these stupid ideas from the land of the terminally braindead who currently champion them in some form or another.
"US supreme court leans toward religious parents who object to elementary school LGBT storybooks
The US supreme court appeared inclined to rule in favor of parents in Maryland seeking to keep their elementary school children out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read, Reuters reports."
> 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...
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...
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.
Arguments with my religion teachers helped form my critical thinking skills.
Even in grade 1 I remember asking if there were dinosaurs on noah's ark and getting sent out of class. This shits formative I wouldnt remove it for anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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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.
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
Illinois has RAILS which is similar (without the cards). The problem is that these programs are funded by federal money which Trump/Musk are cutting off.
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.
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.
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.
> The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment
Maybe? It is also a fact of reality. You need to look no further than the information in your cells, which has certainly spread extremely freely since the very first spodge of RNA to exist on this planet. The very concept of "locking down information" was something that humans had to invent, with mixed success historically.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
You're completely confusing reading level, historical significance with thematic content. "Mein Kampf" is not what I was looking for in reading material.
> Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims
I don't care if you spend the rest of your life questioning my own experience; I don't question it, because I lived it, and after this conversation we'll never speak to each other again and I will continue to live my life.
> Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.
Can you understand the difference between Mein Kampf and other books and why Mein Kampf might not scratch that itch? After I read it, what, do I just read it again and again? No, I want more books. I read 2-4 books a week. I suffered extreme childhood abuse and reading was my escape.
You're not making any real points, just looking for a little gotcha moment so you can pat yourself on the back, looking for inconsistencies so desperately that you're willing to intentionally ignore the obvious in search of something else.
This isn't how you have a conversation with others.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> the removal of obscenity from a children’s library
Uh, that's literally what a book ban is? But given that you aren't even willing to do the bare minimum work for this conversation and yet demand things from others I am not really sure whether it's worth even having it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Read the Dalton translation. Reading excerpts is borderline useless because so much builds upon earlier chapters.
>> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A significant part of the imagery of the joke on another level is that a librarian is there to use the bar for its intended purpose, and even within that small amount of power, the librarian knows her limits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> "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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
I hope you meant "enormous" as in "commendable" because it's a fantastic bargain compared to what they get for that money.
$151,360,905 of King County's property tax revenue in 2024 went to the library.[1]
From Wikipedia[2]:
"KCLS consists of 49 branches, one standalone book locker, the Traveling Library Center, ABC Express Vans, a mobile TechLab, and 11 bookmobiles."
"As of 2023, the library system serves a population of 1.6 million residents and has 3.7 million items in its collection . . ."
"Circulation 21.5 million"
And according to their 2025 budget, employs 842 people.[3]
I encourage you to review those statistics, and then look at the library system's website[4] for a sample of the events, access, and services they provide.
$151 million / 842 employees is $179,000 per employee. And have you visited many branches? They are mostly empty except for drug addicts and the mentally ill.
The books promoted by the King County Library system on its website are almost universally far left on the political spectrum. My tax dollars are being used to fund opinions I hate. This is forced speech of the worst kind.
I posted the King County Library System's budget in the comment you're responding to. In 2024, they spent roughly $84,897,000 on personnel expenses, including benefits.
As another poster pointed out, libraries have to do more than just pay salaries and benefits, but you can find out where the rest of the money goes by looking at the budget.
You should contact the library to see if they would promote books that you don't hate.
I'd recommend trying to understand what the libraries do as fully as possible before deciding how it should be changed. You could even start your research with the help of a librarian: https://kcls.org/ask/
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
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”.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”...
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 :(
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the single most insightful comment in the thread.
There is no comparison possible between algorithmic surveillance capitalist social media, and a library.
It's protecting the parents at the expense of the children.
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"?
If you have a hyperlexic child but the parents are not, nor are they well educated, most of the books quite early are going to male the parents uncomfortable. Even with educated parents, you get well meaning protective measures which are harmful to the child in the short and long term. Children even who arent big readers are harmed when their questions are deflected or ignored. Especially when it starts young. When your answers or you are uncomfortable towards an intelligent childs questions, especially as their parent, they pick up on that. You may intend well, you may want to shield them from the horrors inherent in their question, or prevent anxiety. But they still have the questions, they just find the answers themselves. They stop asking you for many reasons. Ultimately the result is you have left them alone with their questjons, and for bright children particularly the very young it does so much damage, that continues. They've in a very real way, been left alone by even very devoted parents.
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.
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.
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
Why would the kids want to use that?
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.
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”
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.
I think it’s mostly bad for a developing brain because it fuels dopamine-driven short attention span and on that level alone is comparable to zoning out on drugs. It is basically child maltreatment in the form of neglect, first parent-child-neglect, continued into self-neglect. Neglect as a silent form of abuse is one of the most damaging and difficult to treat in psychotherapy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Many Hollywood movies are literally US government propaganda, yes.
Um, yes?
> 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.
> 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?
> > 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
>>> They weren't trying to propagandize children, they targeted adults.
>> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
> That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today.
They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth. Either you were unaware of that or you're arguing in bad faith.
Either way, I don't think you're a serious person.
> They had a propaganda organization called The Hitler Youth.
The Hitler Youths weren't the result of foreign propaganda, they were Germans consuming German propaganda. I'm not sure why you think that is relevant. If you want to bring them in to the argument, note that they'd probably have done a lot better if they were exposed a bit more to foreign propaganda rather than a steady diet of home-grown muck that the Nazis were feeding them. The Nazis had a pretty serious groupthink problem that led to the eradication of their entire ideology and left Germany devastated for decades; they desperately needed persuasive external opinions in their society.
It would take a lot more than TikTok and some propaganda efforts to establish something equivalent to the Hitler Youth in the US; it was their equivalent of the Democrat/Republican party feeder systems - building a political machine. That takes on-the-ground work, many years and is extremely visible (not to mention quite delicate).
> You're using fancy language and fancy-seeming arguments that don't engage in the actual argument being made, but instead are designed to distract while changing the subject. This kind of argumentation is called sophistry.
You're probably in a state of cognitive dissonance. Unable to articulate why you worry about foreign propaganda your mind isn't latching on to a pretty basic challenge of articulating what you think the problem is. It'll pass, nothing wrong with being surprised and it doesn't make you a bad person.
No, those are not the same at all. A government controlling the content is not "exposing contrarian viewpoints".
Chinese propaganda efforts will look more like russian botnets astroturfing culture war bullshit (which is a major factor in politics now), only instead of crude sockpuppets parroting talking points at people, it will look more like "nudge each personality/demographic archtype towards the content that incites their flavor of distrust in government/society/the elite/immigrants etc"
No, the runner up country in the AI race with a vested interest in undermining the USA should not, as a matter of reasonable statecraft, have mainline access to the algorithmic media feed of the nation's youth...
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.
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.
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.
Excellent riposte!
(I’m already responding more thoughtfully in other areas of this thread, so won’t regurgitate the same points here)
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.
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?
Yes, I was agreeing with you.
I get what you meant now, after reading more of the thread.
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
I think this is unfairly assuming what I want, when I didn't specify that in my comment.
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.
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.
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".
Multigenerational families are hard to move, and come with a lot of baggage (hah).
That gets in the way of Empire and economic flexibility.
>To be fair, it has been the dominant mode of familial organization in colonial powers for the past 100+ years
Has it? I thought most colonies relied on corporate families.
The colonized often do - the colonizers are the ones splitting and creating new families as quickly as possible in order to occupy more resources and grab a larger slice of the opportunities afforded by empire.
Perhaps but when I look into examples of corporate families they are almost always in a colonial context. Like you might be more likely to fragment if opportunities exist, and franchise out. But you still get the same stories of a family farm or workshop being owned and operated by multiple generations until the young ones get a tertiary opportunity to take on something else.
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.
You mean like our current totalitarian, oligarchical US government?
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.
> 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.
History, by my reading, seems more replete with examples of extended families, which include additional relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
eg:
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_familywhich also provides the common use definitions:
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. PoortingaI 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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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)
It's not even the most stable or ubiquitous family arrangement in the modern day.
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.”
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.
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.
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"?
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.
I think you’re actually confused about the term, see my responses elsewhere in this thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.
I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.
>nuclear families are so pervasively important
Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.
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.
>has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit”
This doesnt agree with anything I said lmao. A corporate family is much larger than a nuclear family.
>Sure, people often grow up with other relatives.
Not in the same house, as the basic social unit.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, my response to you was in agreement if that wasn't clear.
That distinction is what defines a "nuclear family" to begin with...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>they can make their own mind up
On what basis can they do this? No human is born with a magical algorithm in their brain that can sort good ideas from bad. The only scalpels we have are those which we collect. Critical thinking must be bootstrapped. Mind viruses must be inoculated against. Just because you (eventually!) threw off your case of memetic measles, doesn't mean that everyone does. Some people die of it.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
'Thou shalts' tend to be antithetical to free thinking. If nothing else, because it absolves readers from having to independently consider things and encouraging relying on community and/or leader dogma.
We can quibble about whether or not dogmatic interpretations are in the original work or were layered on top by the organized church, but at the root of both is the idea that some things must be believed without questioning.
Up and down this thread there are notes about people who were raised in a religious tradition and then branched out -- that's great, but you all are also the exceptions.
There are far more people who believe what they're told, as a consequence of religious indoctrination, until the day they die.
And because of that, on the whole, the Bible (as used in modern Christianity) is anti- free thought.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, Hitler grew up without reading Mein Kampf. I wouldn't want to take the chance of that happening again.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> I agree, let's be open to new ideas and to revising our perspective
That's not what I said.
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.
The only harm books cause is they stimulate thinking and erode powerbase of societies whose political structure is based on unquestioned deference.
> 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."
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
>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!
I would be more worried about you developing a terrible sense of narrative and character development. I would kill for a well written ancap paradise book (there are plenty of Ancom options) but it honestly just sucks as a piece of writing I cant get into it.
>A major difference is books are really terrible at propaganda.
In my experience, consumers of propaganda respond to emotional and social cues. They rarely ever review the information provided without social and emotional context. Its always a video or a rally or something.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Pro: more free time
Con: ostracized
You’re not the only one.
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.
Sounds like you are in a place where people don’t murder each other due to apostasy or religious differences.
I specifically said it probably didn't but was just a generic example of a book of bad ideas.
Care to provide an actual example then?
I'm not going to waste my time looking up the exact sources cults get their propaganda, no.
I guess we can agree that books that are too dangerous in general don’t exist then?
Well, I think you should give a concrete example of such a dangerous book or we veer off into pointless whataboutism.
Considering Nazi propaganda, it used newspapers, radio and TV to a great effect. Mein Kampf alone did not turn Germans - a country of poets and scientist - to totalitarians.
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.
>There's obvious potential for harm in books that promote dangerous ideologies
Feel like specifically defining these dangerous ideologies and explaining why you or anyone in a position of non-parental authority should be the people who get to decide if youth and kids are "exposed" (as if we were talking about some poisonous substance) to them and to what degree?
Same goes for self harm and suicide. Maybe these subjects should be added to a list of other things that young people's fragile little minds should be morally kept away from? Lot's of room for defining all kinds of literature, text and ideas as supposedly promoting self harm, or suicide. Better we keep things forcefully childish for young minds instead?
This shitty, tired story is very old and remains as stupid as it ever was. The dogmas and censorship fixations may vary but the people promoting them always pull out their tedious little "protecting children from harmful ideas" card as justification to then repress whatever doesn't suit their pet ideological obsessions.
If anyone should carefully consider their stance it's closet censors who can't stop thinking as you seem to.
Propaganda is just information silly.
I literally hung a lantern on this.
How are people meant to study propaganda and develop tactics to counter it if they cant go and read it.
Maybe its time to revise your stance?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Censorship is an American thing? Boy do I have news for you...
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_United_...
> 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.
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.
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
I go online, into book spaces, and its american parents kvetching that there might be naughty bits in the novels they buy for their 17 year olds. Its american schools trying to limit content. Whereas my english teachers couldnt wait to introduce these subjects into our reading. "The Club" would instantly kill a seppo.
Its american "booktokers" trying to subdivide genre labels to filter out sex and sexuality.
Its americans writing angry reviews that characters had sex in a novel.
Its americans complaining that I would let my kid read any book, where socially no one gives a shit around me. (Be that LGBT content, or old fascist propaganda. Theres always a seppo waiting to tell you that you are """grooming""" a child with information)
Its americans creating sanitised versions of classic books """suitable""" for children
Really theres so much seppo moral panic shit these days that I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who tries to both side this.
>ignoring literally thousands of years of censorship
I dont care about thousands of years of censorship, I simply don't want to import these stupid ideas from the land of the terminally braindead who currently champion them in some form or another.
"US supreme court leans toward religious parents who object to elementary school LGBT storybooks
The US supreme court appeared inclined to rule in favor of parents in Maryland seeking to keep their elementary school children out of certain classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read, Reuters reports."
> 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...
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/comments/1iei2...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/10/21/political-...
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.
Bad examples are important examples.
Arguments with my religion teachers helped form my critical thinking skills.
Even in grade 1 I remember asking if there were dinosaurs on noah's ark and getting sent out of class. This shits formative I wouldnt remove it for anything.
> I can't understate how important
Overstate?
It's like "could care less": not perfectly logical but quite idiomatic I think, and in any case the meaning is clear.
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.
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
(for the record it's all inconsequential pedantry and in good cheer :) thanks for being a good sport)
Don't get me started on "try and"
Try and get started :D
We can take the horse that's fled the now-closed barn door to water, but can we make it think?
"Idiomatic" is idiomatic usage for "wrong".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a way there’s nothing wrong with ”near miss”. It’s a miss not far from the target. Still a miss.
George Carlin had a bit about “near miss” and other illogical phrasings.
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.
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
Whoops! Thanks for the catch :)
underscore
I had a very similar childhood, my condolences
See my comment about 612.6 above.
> I had a collegiate reading level since i was 6 or 7
They told me that one too.
They didn't tell me that one. I could hardly read at 8
Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me
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.
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
And? I was literally reading high school and college texts then, are you indirectly claiming that this wasn't the case?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Only if you assume normal distrubition or similar where median and average are the same.
What did it do for you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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 :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…)
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.
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.
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
Illinois has RAILS which is similar (without the cards). The problem is that these programs are funded by federal money which Trump/Musk are cutting off.
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.
> suffering or faculty
I assume this is a typo, but it’s brilliant.
... it's phone autocorrupt, but I have to admit it had a point, being a student often was suffering :D
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.
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.
> The hacker culture of “information wants to be free” is largely predicated on the librarian mantras of the same sentiment
Maybe? It is also a fact of reality. You need to look no further than the information in your cells, which has certainly spread extremely freely since the very first spodge of RNA to exist on this planet. The very concept of "locking down information" was something that humans had to invent, with mixed success historically.
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?
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.
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
The first sentence tells you what to look for
rip aaron swartz
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.
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.
Maybe true in 1999? But now the library is a tiny fraction of where people get information from.
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".
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.
I somehow doubt that Mein Kampf or playboy magazines would feature at "banned book week."
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.
Is there a specific point that you're trying to make?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is a good point, but in US public schools, you only get two. The librarians and teachers are pretty much a monoculture.
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.
I've yet to see a "banned book" week display that wasn't almost entirely books that were required reading in high school.
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.
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."
I will fight anyone that says To Kill A Mockingbird isn't good.
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.
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.
Ok
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
What actual issue didn't I address?
You're completely confusing reading level, historical significance with thematic content. "Mein Kampf" is not what I was looking for in reading material.
> Even if we put aside the question about the veracity of your claims
I don't care if you spend the rest of your life questioning my own experience; I don't question it, because I lived it, and after this conversation we'll never speak to each other again and I will continue to live my life.
> Apparently your school didn't have enough adult-oriented books...yet it also gave the kids access to Mein Kampf.
Can you understand the difference between Mein Kampf and other books and why Mein Kampf might not scratch that itch? After I read it, what, do I just read it again and again? No, I want more books. I read 2-4 books a week. I suffered extreme childhood abuse and reading was my escape.
You're not making any real points, just looking for a little gotcha moment so you can pat yourself on the back, looking for inconsistencies so desperately that you're willing to intentionally ignore the obvious in search of something else.
This isn't how you have a conversation with others.
Oh hi, I too was in the same boat with reading level.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Parallel really, not orthogonal. It's better that I cut off your internet than hit you with a hammer, but not much better.
Is cutting off a teen’s internet bad if they’re being bullied or groomed on social media?
Do you think if a teen is being bullied, cutting them off from the Internet will help?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 11×14-inch (28×35.5cm) size and be written in an easily readable, large font."
Separation of Church and State, my ass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When you are a child you are not an individual. You are a child. What your parents want matters more than what you want.
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?
No.
>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.
> 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?
1984, Animal Farm, and Fahrenheit 451 for starters.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Which specific books are being banned? Where are they being banned?
here is an example https://youtu.be/G0XWn6S1_iA
Which specific books are being banned? Where are they being banned?
Both of those things are literally in the video description. You don't even have to watch the video!
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.
> the removal of obscenity from a children’s library
Uh, that's literally what a book ban is? But given that you aren't even willing to do the bare minimum work for this conversation and yet demand things from others I am not really sure whether it's worth even having it.
go back to lurking man.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
Where have these books been banned?
Inside the United States.
Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
https://pen.org/book-bans/pen-america-index-of-school-book-b...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
Enemy troops?
Tolerance of censorship?
Lol you've really triggered the pro Mein Kampf culture warriors
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, reading the whole thing is a bit excessive.
It's really not because the historical context is laid out in the early chapters.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Read the Dalton translation. Reading excerpts is borderline useless because so much builds upon earlier chapters.
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.
>> 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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible ideas of what a library is.
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.
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.
I'm an adult. I don't need someone who has studied childhood education to tell me what books to read, for fucks sake.
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.
>> 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.
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?
> 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.
Ha, I'm so confused! Where the fuck did these guys come from?
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.
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".
I suspect that one is dangerous in large part because half the recipes will severely harm the implementor
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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
> 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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seems relevant: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-truth-about-banned-books
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...
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.
Took me a second, but it's a great analogy for the difference in power.
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.
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.
A significant part of the imagery of the joke on another level is that a librarian is there to use the bar for its intended purpose, and even within that small amount of power, the librarian knows her limits.
How have hackers restricted the flow of information?
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.
- 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
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.
Wasn't Lao Tzu a librarian as well?
Yes, and an upset one too.
Is it known which kind of books he read?
Many of his readings are mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
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.
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.
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.
Resistance against book banners has always been part of their core ideology, there is nothing new about that.
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.
> No one is banning books
This is the part where you lost everyone
They are not resisting anything.
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/libr...
Nothing huh? I guess I'm hallucinating a literal percentage point of the country hitting the streets every weekend.
This is not written by either a journalist or a librarian, so I don't understand your comment at all.
> This is not written by either a journalist or a librarian
I never claimed that it was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
> "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.
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.
"Grok summarize this comment"
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
40 minutes or so? You guys are getting lazy. I expected an AI connection in less than 10 minutes after the post.
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?
My stance is chaotic good, and HN keeps track of timings for me, I just have to look.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
You're lucky these days if all you get is sheepish defensiveness and not revanchist conservatism.
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.
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...
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!
Places have been passing laws that prohibit people from sleeping and hanging around outside.
Shelters usually close during the day, also.
> 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/
And that is enormous.
I hope you meant "enormous" as in "commendable" because it's a fantastic bargain compared to what they get for that money.
$151,360,905 of King County's property tax revenue in 2024 went to the library.[1]
From Wikipedia[2]: "KCLS consists of 49 branches, one standalone book locker, the Traveling Library Center, ABC Express Vans, a mobile TechLab, and 11 bookmobiles."
"As of 2023, the library system serves a population of 1.6 million residents and has 3.7 million items in its collection . . ."
"Circulation 21.5 million"
And according to their 2025 budget, employs 842 people.[3]
I encourage you to review those statistics, and then look at the library system's website[4] for a sample of the events, access, and services they provide.
1: 2024 Property Tax Distribution for King County, Washington: https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/assesso... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_County_Library_System# 3:https://kcls.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024/12/2025-KC... 4: https://kcls.org/
$151 million / 842 employees is $179,000 per employee. And have you visited many branches? They are mostly empty except for drug addicts and the mentally ill.
The books promoted by the King County Library system on its website are almost universally far left on the political spectrum. My tax dollars are being used to fund opinions I hate. This is forced speech of the worst kind.
I posted the King County Library System's budget in the comment you're responding to. In 2024, they spent roughly $84,897,000 on personnel expenses, including benefits. As another poster pointed out, libraries have to do more than just pay salaries and benefits, but you can find out where the rest of the money goes by looking at the budget.
You should contact the library to see if they would promote books that you don't hate.
I'd recommend trying to understand what the libraries do as fully as possible before deciding how it should be changed. You could even start your research with the help of a librarian: https://kcls.org/ask/
The money isn't all going to salary. There's building maintenance. Heating and cooling. Power. The stock. Cleaning up all the homeless excrement.
I just read the second of your paragraphs.
Get out of my city.
sounds like you and everyone around really let go of any community life.
like most gentrified places.
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
sending more police will make it better /s
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”.
> And I’d place the blame mostly on city policy
I'd bet it's most because of sending police to every thing than being liberal or not.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> why are libraries in the movie-rental business?
Because why not. Books and DVDs have similar footprint and cultural relevance.
DVDs? Probably incentives. They get some kind of kick backs or “points”.
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.
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.
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.
Varies heavily by location. But I’ve experienced the same - maddening.
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.
So it might have been what they call a Freudian slip... ;-)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.peelschools.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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You know this isn’t true.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
It’s safe to say the market who purchases books is women, under the age of 40.
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.
>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
Bummer. Do you have to go far to find another library that has paper encyclopedias when you need to look up some texts?
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'.
Tyranny of the busiest patrons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe you can't get all the nice semantic benefits of marked-up plaintext, but there's still always the .tiff option.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 :(
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Libraries vary greatly in quality. I don’t know why this is downvoted.
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.
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?
> 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.
"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.
Ok, I don’t think OPs comment is about eliminating lgbt books from the library.
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.
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.
Probably depends on if your local community - which includes you! - has valued (and funded) libraries. Ours is really well done.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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
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?
My local library on the other hand got a lot better.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Why were they scolding you?
Schools should include psychology, neuroscience, and some other books which help to bring courage and confidence to survive in real life problems.
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...
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.
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.
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. :(
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.
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.
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…
Are these the same American children who graduate high school without anything above basic literacy?
Kind of the point of the post, isn't it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
New York City libraries are a cross between homeless shelters and daycare centers. And they're closed on Sundays.
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.
Felt sure that this thread would reference Terry Pratchett, he was a man who understood the danger of librarians.
> Librarians are dangerous
Anybody who has been listening to “Welcome to Night Vale” could have told you that years ago.
I expected this to be about the Brandon Sanderson teen series that starts with Alcatraz vs The Evil Librarians.
Librarians are wonderful. I married one.
Ha ha, so did I as it happens.
I thought the author was describing a chatbot when reading the first half of this article.
What if your primary way of learning isn’t reading? Are librarians still as necessary?
That was enjoyable. And the artwork doubled it.
This would make an excellent kids book...
Very well written. Thank you.
I learned a lot, thanks.
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.
long live librarians
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
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).
Awwe! I teared up! 'cause it's true!!!
Ook
I’ve moved to UK and I’m annoyed by lack of STEM books in libraries.
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.
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.
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
I thought you said "Libertarians"...
ayn rand is a menace
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.
Only on HN can a light-hearted librarian appreciation post still be treated with heavy cynicism, geez lol
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Seems like you think everyone is just dying to consume your brilliant critique.
I guess they want a 500 page manual done with LaTeX or gtfo :)
Reminds me of the old The Oatmeal infographics. Very epic mustache
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!
It's like one long Reddit post. Very cringe.
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.
> Very cringe.
The irony.
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
Agreed. This kind of writing is skimmable but not readable to me.
"Write a critique of the following article, using the style of the article:"
If you get anything as succinct and focused as what I (genuinely) wrote myself, I'll gladly take the criticism!
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
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the comment. Witless. Pointless. Worthless. Less.
It’s millennial speak
No one asked.
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.
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.