The people who fight for free speech in these cases, devoting time and money to it, and have real meaningful effect, self-describe in more ordinary ways.
In what way do you consider this similar to laws enforced by courts and police and the full legal system?
They are fighting to get different books (less Eurocentric, for the most part) into the curriculum, but they're not removing them from the library.
Government agents summarily executed Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker exercising his natural right to night time home defense. This was the exact scenario the 2A enthusiasts always grandstand about - "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away", "From my cold, dead hands", etc. Any yet the response from the sheer majority of supposed 2A enthusiasts? Utter fucking silence, if not outright support for the jackboots.
The government deciding standards for content it purchase is neither tyranny nor fascism. You are free to purchase as much controversial or sexually explicit material as you see fit.
This training means nothing. Critical pedagogy is just code for biasing the books in libraries towards the left. It isn’t even a hidden agenda - the ALA has been open about it. This “pedagogy” isn’t about what’s appropriate for kids. It’s about using a public institution and its funds to push one side’s ideas.
So sure, the state may be trying to prevent kids from being exposed to ideas they don't personally like. But it is to counter the librarians and their organizations, who are trying to only expose kids to ideas they personally like.
Substituting one term for another and railing against the substituted term is a very weak argument.
Although I would apply it equally to the other political side as well. “Diversity” = everyone has to think like me, “inclusion” = exclude certain groups and so on
I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.
Is driving 100mph down the highway OK as long as you slow down right before the known speed trap? The system worked?
I for one do not support the law and I would consider myself 99% an absolutist.
Especially with the new Tr*mpian ethos of rules for thee, not for me.
It's attitudes like yours that discourage me from wanting to show up for the cause anymore.
If you are motivated towards free speech action because of banned books don't you think I would suppprt you in that?! That's the entire thrust of my comment, I think people fighting for free speech are great, and based on the information you provided you seem to be doing that!
Of course not and I'll explain why:
Lefties regularly distance themselves from me when I accidentally let my anti-authoritarian positions code as libertarian to them.
Your parent post is a shallow dismissal of some free speech support as opportunistic with a weak-ass signal to identify the group. The same exact behavior I'm used to seeing from ostensibly likeminded individuals that ice me out for non-conformity. (I'll concede you don't name a political party, but in a two party system it's not a secret and I was just saying the implied part out loud.)
So no, I don't think the person who came into the comments to shadowbox people who aren't supporting the cause properly would support me.
Even the word "libertarian" doesn't mean "anarchist" in America as it does everywhere else, to refer to the most far-left you take take political ideology. Instead it refers to a deeply right-wing ideology obsessed with corporatocracy.
Libertarianism is an application of right-wing ideology subtracting the State. Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies, but for another example, just because Nazism advocated for nationalizing industries doesn't mean it has anything beyond that in common with Marxist Leninist Communism which advocates for the same.
Yes, that's the philosophy. All the rest of what you said is just listing different predictions of what will happen after you get rid of the state. Once you get rid of the state, there is no authority to enforce the "mutual aid or communism" so that isn't a political philosophy. It's just a prediction of what will people will do under their own free will in the absence of a compelling authority.
In reality Anarchism describes a political ideology that people have been writing about for a couple hundred years. There are a lot of disagreements, but generally all anarchic philosophies agree on a couple things: opposition to coercion, opposition to hierarchy, opposition to state, opposition to capitalism, promotion of mutual aid, promotion of community strength. The majority of anarchist philosophy resolved first around collectivist anarchism, and then around anarcho-communism.
That's why we don't call American libertarians "Anarchists," that's why we have a different word to describe them. Usually it works fine because American libertarians typically want nothing to do with anarchists, often for culture war reasons, but sometimes some American libertarians, such as those leaning "anarcho-capitalist," try to borrow anarchist terms, leading to confusion such as what we're having here.
Anarchist philosophy isn't a prediction, though sometimes anarchist philosophers make predictions. It's a collection of criticisms, values, strategies, and analyses, like any political philosophy.
But herein lies the problem. You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion. Whether or not you define the authority applying that coercion a "state" is debatable, but that hardly seems like the important distinction here.
> You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion.
I disagree, and so do many writers, and so does history.
First off, the "free rider" problem is a problem under capitalism, not anarchism. We have ample evidence of "free riders" being supported even in ancient societies with high scarcity, such as highly genetically deformed people who lived to a remarkably old age, which means despite their inability to labor, someone was feeding them. Same for people who had traumatic injuries. The idea of a "free rider" is only a problem in a society that believes everyone needs to justify their existence through labor, such as capitalism. Mutualist anarchist societies don't have this problem. Especially a modern day one, now that we've achieved post-scarcity (all scarcity today is artificially enforced).
Second, no human coercion is necessary to ensure collective bounty. Humans are intrinsically motivated to create bounty, if nothing else by hunger. And, being social creatures, we are also intrinsically motivated towards collectivism - ample anthropological evidence for this throughout every continent humans have lived on.
My proposition to you is that capitalist society is motivated by self-preservation to convince you that what I'm telling you is silly and impossible. The system has glaring faults that we all feel, so it can only continue if it can convince everyone that it's The Only Way.
A great resource that covers these historical facts in detail is Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything." If that's too lengthy, the founder of Food Not Bombs wrote a new version of The Anarchist Cookbook that's available as a free PDF https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html . Ignore the recipes, they're genuinely terrible. The first couple chapters are a good short introduction to the history of anarchy, and as I recall include ancient examples.
It was revived only recently with "anarchist capitalism" which is of course a contradiction.
If we were having this conversation in the 1820s before such abominations were dreamed this distinction would be worth making. Nowadays, when people want to talk about "social anarchism," they say, "anarchism," and when they want to say "individualist anarchism," which as been identified for the right wing ideology it is, they say "American libertarianism."
But this is, of course, only if you take their claims that they want to abolish the state seriously, which I don't on either side. In reality these people do nothing but describe the state that they want when asked to go into detail. The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous because we are a social animal that when left to our own devices, forms states. The concept of a stateless human society makes about as much sense as cows forming a republic.
Property can be owned in common. Then it's not private property whose ownership rights are enforced by a State. We have that here in Taiwan with indigenous people and it causes issues with the bureaucracy all the time, which is desperate for a name to put down as landowner. Many societies throughout history have common ownership aka no private property.
Before you ridicule the idea of anarchy perhaps take a look at history - humans as a social animal tend to form societies, not states.
In the UK and I understand libertarianism to mean an extreme free market position, usually in the belief that markets will fix problems unregulated. I think the UK definition is less extreme than the US one but on similar lines.
I don't agree with calling anarchy the most far-left ideology, just as I don't agree with calling Marxism the most far-left ideology, because this isn't a one-dimensional axis. The meaning of words is continuously shifting in language, especially with something as slippery as political ideologies, which themselves are continually changing. We must make the words the tools of our communication, instead of our communication the tool of the words.
People are very volatile and polarized because of their social media's marketing. GOP marketing is insane. They're marketed as fiscally responsible, good for the economy, conservative, pro free speech, pro liberty, capitalist, and recently anti-war. And somehow people believe that despite reality. I can't grasp how anyone could ever support someone so awful as Trump. The man is a pathetic spoiled rotten bully in clown face who can barely string together a coherent sentence. Not to mention all the (sex) crime.
An example of this is FIRE -- which was massively criticized by progressives for suing colleges over anti-conservative speech codes, DEI statements, etc. But FIRE has behavred in a princicpled manner and has sued conservatives and the Trump administration over civil liberties violations.
I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.
Every. Single. Time.
I want to keep my hangouts pleasant, and sometimes that means looking at the unpleasant parts so that you can put a wall between them and myself and my friends.
Oh and musk of course but I think that's ketamine poisoning, not long-planned betrayal.
If this were true, where were they on this clear case of government censorship?
Check out this thread, and the single person admitting to be an "absolutist" seems to have no opposition to this law at all, and merely wants to defend limits to speech.
Free speech "absolutists" are the least principled defenders of free speech, but they may have extremely right-wing principles they are trying to defend. Others here have given examples of high-profile "absolutists" but I'm talking about those I encounter online mostly, such as in this thread.
It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free. It seems to me like compelled speech to require the government to stock certain books. As this pertains to schools, I don't understand how the government doesn't have the same right to control the curriculum as it does in any other case. e.g. it is not a violation of a teacher's right to free speech to order them not to teach flat earth theory in public schools because that teacher is an employee and not on their own time. Same as my employer can restrict my speech while on the job without violating my rights.
Similarly, you are also wrong about this compelling the government to stock certain books, that's not on the table at all.
You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question, which in this case is the state whose budget and laws are controlled by the legislature.
It's the school librarian, who purchases books from their vendor lists. Depending on the school, the school board might vote to put a selection policy in place for the librarian. A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
> A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
No.
if (allowed_books.contains(book) { library.add(book) }
It's the same. (Well, not quite. Yours is much more restrictive.)
Simply recommending or mandating that a particular set of books should be made available is very different, that's in line with the role they should play here, which is to make sure that a good selection of books for pedagogy is made available to students.
What's funny is, the "banned books" might have not even been available in any of the libraries to begin with. That shows the distinction.
And finally, even the set of books they make available, it should reasonably look like an effort was made to select them based on an objective criteria of offering the best education. If it starts to feel like it wasn't done so in good faith, it's leaning on propaganda. The librarian, school board, governor, this applies to all of them, it's not their own personal selection of what they want the kids to learn. It's a set of books of their good faith effort at objectively offering the material that benefits the kids education best.
I'm not saying I agree with it, just listing all of the methods of selection (that I'm aware of) for accuracy. Personally I prefer the school board approach, so that the community can assert local control over the process rather than politicians trying to score points with national parties.
What's being done here is a top-down effort by certain political forces to insert themselves into this community-lead governance. They don't want the community to set local standards; they would rather those standards be dictated by the governor, or by some party-approved commission appointed by him.
> Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question
Agreed, but Republicans think this person should be the governor of the state, and Democrats think this person should be someone local from the community. Ironically, it's Republicans who are styled as the party of small government.
A small branch library making autonomous choices about what books to store behind its walls with backing of the local community doesn't stand to chill speech across the state or nation, so the first amendment protection to free speech isn't really implicated. If some podunk town doesn't want to put books about trans kids on the shelves, that's not going to chill speech about trans people across the state or nation.
But when the governor sets policy that no libraries shall have books about trans people, then that's going to chill speech and the first amendment is implicated. Therefore it's unconstitutional, despite flowing from the same derived power source. That's my view anyway, I'm not a lawyer.
Community norms are not laws, and are much more flexible, have no government enforcement mechanisms, and don't have the weight of the legal system behind them.
These are very different things when it comes to freedom of speech!
There is a very very good answer here: the constitution.
You are not even responding to the constitutionality claim here, and have refused to even acknowledge the core aspect of this entire case! It seems a bit rude to say "you don't have an answer" when you ignore the point again and again.
The government can set laws, curriculum, etc. But it must be in accordance with the constitution.
It seems that in the last year or so, many people think that the government can do whatever it wants, that there's no constitution, that there's no limits on government power. This is fundamentally anti-American, and against everything that the entire country was founded on.
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library.
I'm not dancing around that fact at all. It's a government employee, the school librarian. Guess what, government employees are also subject to restrictions in how they act, as set by the constitution and other laws. When the "other laws" conflict with the constitution, like the one that's the subject of this post, the constitution wins.
Budgetary power is not the ultimate law of the land, it's the constitution. This also seems to have been forgotten in the past year.
The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't kosher is that taken to its extreme, the government could ban all books that aren't the King James Bible without explicitly adopting a pro-King James Bible policy. And if that's the only kind of book they stock in the library, then children who want to check out books are going to be reading literature with a certain kind of slant to it.
Replace the King James Bible with whatever you personally wouldn't want kids to be reading, e.g. the Quran or the Kama Sutra.
But there isn't any other choice except to not have school libraries at all. The library is owned by the government and the books are paid for by government funds. Somebody has to decide what goes in the library and what doesn't. Who would that be other than the government?
So to answer your question: the government can stock the libraries, or the school board can stock them, or the librarian can stock them. The courts have even said they can select books based on age-appropriateness, accuracy and educational value. But if anyone selecting books is making a judgement call about which books go in the libraries based on the ideas/viewpoints within the books, it's a violation of the students' First Amendment rights.
My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.
School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.
What conspiracy are you talking about? Who are the members of this "conspiracy"?
>even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
Huh? IIUC, Florida House Bill 1069 (you know, the law we're discussing) was passed by the Florida Legislature and signed intolaw by the Governor of Florida.
So yes, it was "legislated" and approved by the current executive in 2023.
Those libraries are to the people and paid by the people.
Similarly, the school curriculum is not to be controlled by the government, public schools are also to the people and paid by the people.
In both cases, the criteria for school curriculum and the books to stock are pedagogy. What will best prepare and educate students so they can innovate, thrive and improve our society later in life.
Attempts at seizing control of the school curriculum or the material made available to students for their pedagogy (like books they can research) by the government in a way that appears to be for some political or value setting agenda and not the criteria of offering the best pedagogy for students feels like propaganda and information control for political gain.
Private libraries banning books is perfectly fine and theyre allowed to do that. Public libraries aren't private.
They are also available in schools, because the judge here enforced the US constitution.
The article is about Florida politicians trying to censor books in public schools, literal government censorship.
As a "Free Speech Absolutionist", I think as much material as possible should be in public libraries, including material that some people object to. I also think that school libraries should be curated to what is appropriate for the audience. The rub here is defining what is "appropriate". Silencing minority literature is bad. Also allowing my elementary school kids to check out "the turner diaries" is bad. There needs to be a balance.
https://www.christianpost.com/news/florida-school-board-vote...
You can say whatever you want, that doesn't make it a good idea to stock a school with it.
What does "absolutist" mean to you if you think that limits to what's in a library are a "good idea"?
Remember, I'm not talking about whether there should be limits or not, I'm asking about your self-description of "absolutist" and why absolutism still has fuzzy definitions of what is allowed or not.
Again: how is your belief in this compatible with being an "absolutist"?
I don't know how I can phrase this more clearly, yet you repeatedly doge the question.
Let me try to break the deadlock: epistasis is getting at the fact that you can't call yourself an "absolutist" on free speech because your position is not absolute, but qualified -- all speech is free except speech you find problematic, which shall be regulated. That's pretty much everyone's definition of free speech, not an absolutist take.
An absolutist would say there should be absolutely no content-based restrictions on what is in the library regardless of the ages of the patrons. Hustler, Anarchist Cookbook, whatever. They might justify that by saying "free speech is so important we can't place any limits on it. If you as a parent find the idea your child might access speech you find distasteful, it's up to you to prevent your child from seeing it, not the library or the government".
> without fear of repercussion
Let's say you write a book about being a kid and finding it uncomfortable to grow up who you are. You're free to write it, free to talk about it, free to to sell it. But then the government adds your book to a list of books they deem "pedophilic and a danger to children."
Do you think you would be free from repercussions from the government publishing your book on the harmful to kids list? Can free speech thrive in such an environment?
What is "absolute" about this?
Do you want your own speech to be absolutely free of repercussions to you, be they government or not? Is that it? I really have trouble trying to put some sort of consistent framework in this, unless it's dividing the world into two classes of people: those who will not experience repercussions and those who will experience repercussions for their speech.
A 7-year-old doesn't need to read about nearly any topic. Excluding any mention of all of those subjects from the school library leaves a nearly empty library.
For that heavy-handed of a response to be _legally mandated_ requires not just "no need", but some strong evidence of harm. Mentions of sex, oral or otherwise, doesn't actually have much evidence of harm. Certain treatments of it might -- but that's not what the law targets, nor can effectively target. It covers mere mentions or small bits of explicit language, even where that is necessary for the effect of the book. These can and do make parents profoundly uncomfortable, though, and that is worth taking into consideration.
I would think that the usual approach of professional librarians curating based on their own judgement, subject to some oversight from the local school boards to take into account these valid discomforts, but largely baseless fears would be a far better approach.
Say someone in the police department takes the public stance, as a police officer, that black people are subhuman degenerates, is any pushback from the government a first amendment issue? Note this is an ideological stance and doesn't involve any of their duties.
EDIT: I should have done better than to comment this without the very relevant input from the article. Better late than never I guess:
>A second key component of this ruling is on whether or not regulating books in school libraries constituted “government speech.” Officials for the state argued that they were empowered to make decisions about the materials in those collections because it constituted “government speech” and thus, was not subject to the First Amendment.
>Judge Mendoza disagreed.
>“*A blanket content-based prohibition on materials, rather than one based on individualized curation, hardly expresses any intentional government message at all.* Slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints,” he wrote. While parents have the right to object to “direct the upbringing and education of children,” the government cannot then “repackage their speech and pass it off as its own.”
Emphasis mine. This is frankly even weirder to me. If the government made a blanket, content-based prohibition of any material with a black character, that wouldn't express any intentional government message at all? Really?
A law of the sort that was struck down is clearly an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
It seems more and more that the elephant in the room here is that schools are part of government, but they overwhelmingly lean the opposite side of the administration and they want to exercise their speech through their positions, but the government doesn't want to allow that.
Private individuals would of course enjoy first amendment protections on speech, but if you are government you don't get your speech restricted by government, that's just government. You can't eat your cake and have it too.
Also, "removing" books means the money was already spent. So it's just about whether we should waste money or not by tossing items in good condition.
Come on, now.
Let’s not pretend the default situation is uncensored. Librarians are mostly politically skewed to the left, as is their organization (ALA). Walk into libraries in most cities and you’ll find books on the main shelves pushing political ideas from one side, associated with movements like DEI, BLM, LGBTQ, etc. But you won’t find the other side on those shelves.
And that’s the issue. Public money is being used by activist librarians, who practice “critical librarianship”, to basically censor the other side. Changes to public libraries are intended to correct that bias.