Filtering content sounds like doublespeak for banning to me. The title is Top 52 Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools, how is it that inaccurate?
because that would suggest something very bad is happening in the US and the HN party line is "this is nothing unusual, typical woke [1] panic attack over nothing, now please get back to your HN job of trying to win VC money"
At least in my mind it's unfair because the books are not in any way banned. Anyone can get them. They're more available than perhaps any time in history. The school's decision not to stock them may merit criticism, but the books are hardly "banned" in the traditional sense of the word.
99.99% of all books ever are not going to be available at your local library. But we don't consider those to be "banned" either. Here, the difference is that these books were selected and stocked in the past, but were removed due to political pressure - or these books weren't available, but a ruling from up above blanket banned their libraries from being able to consider them in the first place. It's frustrating to see so many people in this comment section equate these two.
Just because you can find those books online or elsewhere doesn't mean that the rulings to ban them from school libraries isn't about trying to restrict access to that information.
Yes, there a selection, it reflected the previous political power sensibilities, now the current power doesn't like them that much, so they are not selected.
As far as I'm concerned, if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
> it reflected the previous political power sensibilities
It reflected the sensibilities of the people who were actually running the libraries and whose entire jobs was comprehending and choosing books based on what they know about their field. Now, it reflects the sensibilities of politicians from up above who are likely to know less than nothing about literature, but are important enough to scream "Nonono, you can't just do that!" and be obeyed. It's not exactly a fair trade.
> if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
Thinking that all politics is categorically bad is a very strange viewpoint that I could never wrap my head around. It's especially prevalent in the US. Politics, the methods of organizing and running society, impacts absolutely every facet of our lives. Not understanding politics and not being exposed to it leaves one with an incomplete view of how humans work, and how to maneuver around human irrationality to get things done. What's worse is that giving people nothing but century-old books will just teach them about what was "current politics" a hundred years ago, leaving people with heaps of knowledge on how people lived and thought in a completely alien world, and no real objective information on how radically different the current day is, and why.
The sensibilities of the people running the librairies are extremely political.
One could argue that since their employment largely lies outside of market forces, they get chosen or self-select for political reasons.
Having the power to chose what should be read and influence children in the direction you prefer is very much a political endeavor, a power that shouldn't be left to anyone else but the parents and whoever they chose can have that power. This should be true until people become fully formed adult, they are not properties/projects of the state, but very much the result of an alliance between two individuals, it seems that people that are pro-governement forget that a bit too easily.
Politics is the realm of feminity, it brings only chaos, bad strategies and poor decision making. Much of the western world is in a bad spot because they have embraced too much politics.
It doesn't look too bad because there are still structures (business, army) that try to tone done politics as much as possible in order to be achieve their goals.
Yes, politics affect life too much and that is precisely the problem, it hilarious that you advocate for it, instead of requiring a system to become less political and more grounded in reality so that it can thrive. There is no functional system on earth that works because of politics, in fact, politics is the cancer that tries to bring down working system for power and gains to be distributed according to the sensibilites of the rulers.
Old books survive because they are ever-green content. They describe human nature and what works/fails. They are usefull precisely because if you read them carefully, you can understand all the problematic behaviors that lead to failure.
Just because we are a more technologically advanced society, doesn't mean we have transcended the bad parts of human behavior. In fact, pretty much everything that makes modern life confortable, happened despite politics.
And now we are falling back into the old ways, with war, unsustainable debts and all kinds of disruptions because we gave in to much into the politics.
The point the OP made was specifically to call out what they deemed as doublespeak of the word ban. I made no comment on why any given book is justifiably banned or "filtered".
> I certainly wouldn’t want my children getting exposed to books that normalise trans ideology, for example.
fortunately "trans ideology" is a nonexistent boogeyman made up by whatever vile youtube videos or FOX news you're watching, so there's no worry about such books existing
The problem is that the definition of "things that are inappropriate for kids" brought up by book-banners is almost always heavily inspired by religion. A book containing graphical violence and sex, like the Bible? Totally okay! A book containing casual day-to-day life, like mentioning in passing that little Johnny next door has two dads? Somehow completely inappropriate.
They never said that. They just pointed out the hypocrisy of the situation, where certain topics normally deemed extremely controversial by those very figures become totally fine if they're brought up along the lines of their ideology. The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
I've got to interject. Clearly religious texts are of a different nature than gay kids books and teen romance novels. There may be some milquetoast books targetted by the religious but many of them are legitimately in the category of erotica. I've never seen a religious scripture that fell into the category of erotica, besides perhaps the Kama Sutra lol.
>The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit. I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube. Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either. If you ever catch a video of the people at the top of the American Library Association talking about these "book ban" issues it will all start to make sense.
> There may be some milquetoast books targeted by the religious but many of them are legitimately in the category of erotica
How much erotica are you seeing in the list linked above? Maybe a few could be kind of misconstrued for it, if someone was interpreting them with active hostility, but the far more obvious theme that ties them together is dealing with "heavy" themes in general - mental illness, discrimination, abuse, prostitution, suicide. Especially books that are overt in their themes and/or make the "wrong" conclusions in the eyes of the censors. You just set the rules for the argument by just filing all of that away as erotica, while most of it is anything but.
> I've never seen a religious scripture that fell into the category of erotica
That's because the hypocrisy that people argue about tends to concern things way worse than just some plain erotica. With their millennia-old standards for morality, religious texts from most religions often feature and endorse horrific acts and social standards that would without a doubt be instantly censored in schools much like the books above, if they weren't religious.
> Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit
"Being real" in this case seems to be a way of making a leading argument. I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that. The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible. While I disagree with many religious books on most levels, censoring them would be equally misguided and pointless. At this point, they're important historical texts that frame a lot of how our society works. Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
> I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube
I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
> Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either
This is the crux of your argument, and you leave it up to subjective doubting? How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats. The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
>How much erotica are you seeing in the list linked above?
I honestly don't have time to go do a bunch of research on 52 random books I'm definitely not going to read. All I can tell you for sure is that many of these books are inappropriate for children, and I'd object to any book with sex scenes being in any public school library. I have seen people give damning reviews, including quotes and photos of graphic content, from books they wanted removed from school libraries, and I was inclined to agree with them. I'm not even a Christian, but I want to pay for that even less than copies of random religious texts.
>I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that.
I am not going to give a blanket endorsement to LGBT in this way. I believe in live and let live, more or less, but I believe many of these people are more evangelical than any religion at this point. Anyway, on the subject of injecting their "representation" into everything, even content for prepubescent children, I am very opposed.
>The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible.
I hope this is true, but I am not so sure these days.
>Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
At risk of going off on a tangent: As much as I love libraries and books, I don't believe in "information wants to be free" type rhetoric. People need to be paid for their work one way or another.
>I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
I never said that it was hard to find in general. I said that some people reported that their libraries did not have these bog standard books.
>How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
As I said, I only heard some anecdotes. I believe this is still probably a rare occurrence but I can't prove one way or another. I mention it mainly so people can look out for it, not to prove anything.
>Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats.
Nobody is actually forced to own and read a bible, unless they are trying to do it to fit in with the religious folk. I consider that voluntary.
>The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
I personally witnessed some normal inoffensive Christian content censored on Facebook a couple of years ago as if it was gore. There is definitely a sizeable group of people which openly detests Christians and hopes to see the religion die, even though most Christians are very nice people and the religion is very important for Western values. Meanwhile, we have Islamic apologists hoping to excuse terrorism and continue importing millions of highly fertile, culturally incompatible invaders. The same people talking shit about Christian views on abortion will stick up for Muslims who hate all of us and want to take over, and LGBT, which the Muslims especially hate. Sometimes the absurdity of it all makes me suspect we live in a simulation.
