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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I mean this with utmost sincerity: I legitimately never thought “socially progressive” people would advocate banning books. I guess we have many more lessons to learn regarding censorship and puritanism. I’m not surprised about that — I’m just surprised that it was the people I thought could be trusted to not make this mistake that seem to be doing so.

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Then you may be interested in another banned book: Animal Farm.

Animal Farm was not mentioned in the article. It wasn't banned. This is about the choice of literature taught to children, not what they're allowed to read.

I’m aware it wasn’t in the article. In Animal Farm, the leaders (pigs) start out trying to cure the farm of injustice, but eventually become just like the humans they overthrew.

Nobody's banning any books. This is about the books kids are required to read in class. Would you object if your kids were mainly reading the Old Testament and Mein Kampf for class, or would you push for a more balanced curriculum? Should the parents have no say in the literature their children are taught from? This isn't a law, the focus here should be increasing the effectiveness and fairness of education.

I'm a little sorry to pick on your comment, but hopefully you now see the danger of naievly trusting a group of people because they self-identify as the "good guys".

> I legitimately never thought “socially progressive” people would advocate banning books.

Are you kidding me? The US Progressive Left is heading down a path that has been obvious for years.

>I guess we have many more lessons to learn regarding censorship and puritanism.

No. This lesson has played out many times. We just ignore it, or somehow think this time we have out-smarted it. Or, we don't care, because this time we really are the good guys, and the other people are just really bad.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. This comment is a clear example of what we mean by that phrase. Heading this way makes discussion much more repetitive and much less informative. That leaves a vacuum which eventually gets filled by nastiness.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Edit: these are other examples of the same thing, from the current thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25124001

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25123681

Can you please not post like this? We want curious conversation here.

His criticism is valid. A bit ideologically baited maybe but please, a simple statement of hard-to-negate ideas is what it amounts to. Who pushed for the removal of these books? Conservative Trump supporters? Nazis? Jehovah's Witnesses? No. It was people who would very probably self identify as social justice progressives with a leftward lean, and this sort of behavior is a notable part of a persistent trend that many different but in many ways similar cases bear out; namely, missing many forests because of their trees, by pushing for absurd things....... like banning "To Kill a Mockingbird" because it contains racially charged themes. despite it's very obviously anti-racist central message. Curious conversation does not and should not rule out plainly spoken criticisms of obvious stupidities, so long as it doesn't degenerate into the irrational.

Ok but I fear that my point is getting missed here a bit. It's not that the GP comment was wrong. It's that it was generic, and specifically generic-ideological. When a comment takes a thread further in that direction, that's bad for HN, irrespective of how right some people feel it is.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

You know what they say, history doesn't repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. I share your frustration, but I do think it's possible to eventually learn a lesson here... looking back at censorship in the past, it does feel like we're still at a relatively high point historically.

The lesson to be learned is "once the mob starts howling, you're done".

The trick is not being part of the mob, as it starts so benignly.

It isn't just the "left" as the "right" wants to ban such things too. Just see PMRC and other such joint efforts.

Scary part is that it does seem to be a part of the left's platform. Decades ago the left used to be the champions of free speech and the right wanted limits. Now that is reversed. Even the ACLU has questioned their commitment to free speech.

“Banning books” use to refer to banning them from libraries. You seem to be using it differently, since this article is about a school district choosing not to include a book in a curriculum. So maybe progressives have changed, but so have the definitions of words at issue

Hmm that's probably enough to justify editing the title as misleading. I've done so above.

They are not socially progressive, they are just left-wing.

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