100% agree, but what's frustrating is that "the left" are not much better. We get things like the rewriting[1] of Roald Dahl's books based on the feedback from "sensitivity readers".

I don't really know who to vote for to stop stuff like this. No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech. Instead it's always about censoring your opponents and their ideas while you're in power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controvers...

This law is about what books are in public libraries. It is a counter to the push by teachers to socialize brown kids into having “brown people” ethnic identity. I’m a brown person with brown kids and I’m also furious at the (mostly white liberal) teachers who want my kids to think of themselves as “brown people.” I don’t know if you have kids but this push is very strong right now, especially in blue states.

I want my kids to be socialized like I was, with an American identity shared with their white neighbors. I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than they do with a random person in Appalachia. It’s a shallow, boring mindset and one that’s antithetical to personal success in American society. And frankly, all the “brown people identity” books for south asians are dreck written by losers who are still upset because some kid made fun of their lunch in elementary school. If my kids want to understand her roots, they can read a book about the Mughal Empire.

And it’s not just Florida. Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year. There is a larger debate amongst “brown people” themselves about how to socialize our kids and the liberal preference for identity politics is by no means universally accepted.

If you're in a grossly generic way referring to hispanics, african americans, Indian Americans and many distinct and complex others with less-than caucasian skin color, then i'd suggest you look at voting polls. A surprising number of people from these and other groups support conservative causes too. You going to claim they're all deluded idiots who need a progressive to tell them how they should think and vote?

Same for women. Millions of women are republican-leaning, or conservative in some way. It's not so idiotically simple as hur dur, the republs want to dehumanize women. Their politics on women's reproductive rights and other things are shitty in many ways, but they're more complex than your take.

All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses. In the massively digitally interconnected 21st century, where nearly any information can be obtained at any time by nearly anyone, trying to ban things like "The Handmaid's Tale" or "The Kiterunner" for obscenity is absurd.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what "obscene" means in popular parlance. On the other hand, the legal standard for what should be considered obscene is so inherently uncertain and varies so much across time and place that it's just meaningless to say anything that purports to be definitive about that.

Reading your comment, I feel like the word religion is misleading. You see the same dynamic in how progressive political ideology, despite it not having to do with a god, has been introduced into many layers of government and other institutions. All the things said here can be demonstrated for the religious right but also the non religious left. It’s less about religion in my opinions, and more about how politics is about winning by controlling institutions instead of supporting individual freedoms.

also stats on book reading are notoriously cooked, look at how many books publishers claim the median American reads.

To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.

Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.

Trying to give grades to kids for Oscar Wilde's work is fully against the spirit of his thinking. Trying to grade kids for a whole lot of modern "classics" also goes against the spirit of their thinking. Joyce was too busy writing horny smut to be a supporter of literary analysis of his work.

But more seriously, most young adult fiction is pretty low quality. I cringe pretty hard when I look back at what that genre had us reading at the time. Percy Jackson and Eoin Colfer are poster children for the millennial brain rot that ended our collective love of YAF. We are a far cry from the high point it hit under the excellent writing of a certain Brian Jacques

Stop defending tyranny.

There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.

I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.

There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.

While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.

That being said...

It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.

So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.

A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim goes to retrieve his concubine from her father’s house in Bethlehem.

On their return journey, they stop for the night in Gibeah, a Benjamite town.

The townsmen surround the house, demanding to “know” the man (sexual violence implied, similar to Genesis 19 with Lot).

The host refuses and offers his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead.

The mob abuses the concubine all night; she collapses at the doorway and dies by morning.

The Levite tells her to get up, sees she’s dead, then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them throughout Israel to rally the tribes against Benjamin.

https://oklahoma.gov/education/newsroom/2025/march/despite-c...

The Constitution only applies if there are people able and willing to enforce it.

For example, a writer could call a woman a "Jezebel" without any expository context, assuming that the reader would know what that meant.

Thus the bible should be in every high school and higher education library.

Having a book available does not mean promoting it or establishing it as a religion.

“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.”

Rapin' is ok if she doesn't belong to someone else (theft) and you have $50. Also HIS penalty is that HE has to marry HER.

The government deciding standards for content it purchase is neither tyranny nor fascism. You are free to purchase as much controversial or sexually explicit material as you see fit.

I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.

Is driving 100mph down the highway OK as long as you slow down right before the known speed trap? The system worked?

My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.

School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.

Similarly, you are also wrong about this compelling the government to stock certain books, that's not on the table at all.

The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't kosher is that taken to its extreme, the government could ban all books that aren't the King James Bible without explicitly adopting a pro-King James Bible policy. And if that's the only kind of book they stock in the library, then children who want to check out books are going to be reading literature with a certain kind of slant to it.

Replace the King James Bible with whatever you personally wouldn't want kids to be reading, e.g. the Quran or the Kama Sutra.

Oh and musk of course but I think that's ketamine poisoning, not long-planned betrayal.

I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.

Every. Single. Time.

In the UK and I understand libertarianism to mean an extreme free market position, usually in the belief that markets will fix problems unregulated. I think the UK definition is less extreme than the US one but on similar lines.

Also, "removing" books means the money was already spent. So it's just about whether we should waste money or not by tossing items in good condition.

They are also available in schools, because the judge here enforced the US constitution.

The article is about Florida politicians trying to censor books in public schools, literal government censorship.

Come on, now.

Rather than big government via vague laws that allow random people to control everything in schools.

Why do people associate these disparate things? Because they've been trained to...

Which laws did Democrats pass calling for books to be removed from schools? I admit I'm not always paying attention, but I don't remember any.

It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.

Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.

The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.