Librarians are dangerous
bradmontague.substack.com
bradmontague.substack.com
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.
It's just called "curation" when you agree with it rather than "censorship".
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.
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
Then those same people will often make a fuss when someone else tells them what they are allowed to curate
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Tolerance of censorship?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My hypothetical parents behind Rawls' Veil should not be able to prevent me from learning about evolution to give a concrete example.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.
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.
2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_gove...
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.
There are MULTIPLE thought ending logical fallacies in what you're saying.
I'm over it. Have a good weekend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For example?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
... 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 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".
The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.
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.
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.
Another commenter pointed out the anarchist's cookbook, which is another great book to read.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm beginning to suspect we have completely incompatible ideas of what a library is.
For me it is mostly about access to books.
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.
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.
It's also a crappy text and definitely not necessary to understand WWII, there are better texts.
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.
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.
- the people on the technical side of Digital Restrictions Management stuff
- the folks behind SELinux
- anyone DOSing a service they don't like
The censor orders seafood, a live show with pyrotechnics, and the dishwasher's birth certificate.
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.
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".
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.
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.)
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.
> 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...
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.
Overstate?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 think we lost the plot once "unloosen" and "loosen" started meaning the same thing: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/unloosen
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.
(I’m already responding more thoughtfully in other areas of this thread, so won’t regurgitate the same points here)
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.
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.
Citation needed!
My read of history is that it’s the single most stable and ubiquitous human social arrangement by a very long shot.
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.
which also provides the common use definitions:
A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family, atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence.
It is in contrast to a single-parent family, a larger extended family, or a family with more than two parents.
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.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.
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.
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
Its really tertiary education and suburbia that undermined the corporate family, atomising it. The Atomic family is modern.
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)
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 am willing to bet you will be fairly shocked at how recent it is, given your comment.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, but the default was for them to be raised by their nuclear family.
>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)
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.
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.
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 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.
That gets in the way of Empire and economic flexibility.
Has it? I thought most colonies relied on corporate families.
If a parent's control over a child is subverted it doesn't change the relationship or family structure.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Also:
> They weren't trying to propagandise children, they targeted adults.
I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.
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.
>>> 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.
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, 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...
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.
Interestingly the exact example you gave is something I can see happening when I was a kid as well as now.
Bullies gunna bully.
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”
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.
> 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 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'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.
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.
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.
I remember when it was fashionable for trolls to post shock images like tubgirl or lathe accidents. I seen to have survived ok.
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.
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.
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.
There is no comparison possible between algorithmic surveillance capitalist social media, and a library.
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.
They told me that one too.
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 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 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.
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.
Still not sure why it seems silly to you.
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.
(Or maybe a third of all people if you count it as a range rather than a point.)
I think that’s either something you enjoy, or don’t.
Once I started reading tho things really opened up for me
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.
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
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.
Ideally they'd be interested in more enriching activities, but I'm sympathetic to the idea that that's maybe harder than it sounds.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I really loved the "let them get bored."
But as we are on the topic of librarians, his two library cards will see more use :)
What I haven’t seen is TV’s.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I assume this is a typo, but it’s brilliant.
We don't live in an age where access to information is limited. Curation (retrieval) is more important than ever.
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.
It seems annoying to search for, so I don’t blame you for not finding anything.
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.
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.
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.
Forced spending on garbage content is not a human right.
This is the part where you lost everyone
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.
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.
I never claimed that it was.
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.
I kid you not, I've had people ask Grok to summarize a 3-4 tweet thread I posted.
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.
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
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.
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.
Narrative video games are a tiny and obscure niche.
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 for many years does not line up with this at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/book-and-dagger-elyse...
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!
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.
$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/
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.
Get out of my city.
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/
like most gentrified places.
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'd bet it's most because of sending police to every thing than being liberal or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because why not. Books and DVDs have similar footprint and cultural relevance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.
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.
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.
>>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
They can also wield the sword of censorship, hiding or discarding books they don't personally like, and fronting all the ones they do.
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
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.
Scans of books are often sloppy and transcriptions can be even worse - especially a book that documents unusual orthographies.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
That being said, I do also very much hope it's not what you say because I've been noticing that trend too :(
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.
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'.
Honest question from someone who has never actually had to use a paper encyclopedia. Do they still print paper 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.
They don't publish many of them anymore as paper sets.
I used to love them, but Wikipedia changed everything
> 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.
Hmm I thought that libraries promoting lgbt content to kids was a conspiracy theory.
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.
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.
Sure thing but your community would have to pay insignificantly more in local taxes
The primary goal of libraries is to educate the public - not to employ librarians, right?
Accessibility is probably a factor, narrow spaces are hard to navigate with a wheelchair.
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.
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.
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
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.
See, e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/11/trum...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
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.
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. :(
Also librarians are some of the most overeducated and underpaid people out there. Thank you for what you do.
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.
Anybody who has been listening to “Welcome to Night Vale” could have told you that years ago.
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.
1. Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts
> 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).
...
I expected more Diskworld references when talking about dangerous yet highly skilled librarians.
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.
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
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.
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
Seems like you think PRs are the only place where criticism happens.
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.
Maybe you like frosting on shit, but it's still frosting on shit.
I despise it.
The irony.
The writing warmed my heart, which is more than most - by that measure I considered it good!