Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb
richardosgood.com
richardosgood.com
What’s really being debated is whether a particular school library, children’s section, or curriculum should include a book. That’s not the same thing as government censorship. Schools and libraries make age-appropriate selection decisions all the time. They don’t carry every book ever published, and not every objectionable book belongs in front of kids just because someone wants to call its removal a “ban.” A single school library deciding not to carry a book because they think it's inappropriate, but that same book being available at the local public library, every book store in town, the internet, etc is not the same as the soviet union literally banning the ownership of books.
except for the cases where the government, not the librarian, is saying "you cannot have that book on your shelf, even if you think it is appropriate and want it".
>Nobody is being arrested for owning it, Amazon isn’t forbidden from selling it, and adults can still read it whenever they want.
when tomhow/dang "ban" someone from HN, that user doesn't get arrested if they make a new account. they can still visit the site. is it misleading for them to use the word "ban"?
It’s pretty clear this was mostly a fun idea with a bit of “could be useful in this scenario” motivation, which they mention came from reading a short story.
In many cases these books are not simply being removed at the school level but are being driven by the government and it is politically motivated.
Ignoring the problem won’t lead to them being banned in the sense that having them would be illegal, but it could make it more difficult to get. It would not be hard to imagine states like Florida going further and attacking public libraries or possibly even making it so you have to show an ID to buy these books.
Some public libraries are already being attacked.
“Banned” may not be technically correct but it also properly communicates the seriousness of this and the goals of the people pushing this.
which term is being redefined?
But there might not be a better word for the latter scenario. Surely, few oppose libraries from “banning” pornographic books, so some level of discretion must be used by administrators.
How about age-gating?
That's the thing... everyone may have a slightly different definition of banned. Even if an entire country agreed on one definition, another country might not, or it could change over time, so I don't think it's ever possible to say there is a single right or wrong definition for any word.
[1] Free speech non-profit mostly focused on literature.
In the context of this thread, it would be calling a book a "banned book" because it is banned in some school libraries, despite being widely available everywhere else. Akin to calling dogs a "banned pet" because they are banned from post offices. Technically correct but highly misleading without context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_Books_Week
I suspect that the same applies to most of the words that came to your mind; they're just being used in contexts you politically disagree with and therefore it's a "misuse". (Seinfeld's "soup nazi" was a misuse. Putin's use of the same word is a misuse. Descriptions of modern nationalist movements and the powers that support them are descriptive.)
There is a concept for pets called "banned breeds" (e.g., "pit bulls") that are similarly politically motivated in the same way that book banning happens.
Nope. I just care about words and their meaning. If you tell someone that X is a "banned book", the vast majority of people will understand it as meaning that it's a country wide ban (I just verified this with a couple of people to make sure I wasn't crazy).
There are books and magazines banned in prison libraries. Because it's prison, those books are also considered contraband if a prisoner's family delivers it to them. This is a book banning. One may argue whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's a book banning.
If children would _normally_ have access to age-appropriate books in a school library about same sex marriages (Suzie's Two Dads or Johnny's Two Mommies or whatever) but some retrogressive numbskull politician in Florida decides that teaching kids about same sex marriages is wrong and therefore those books are no longer allowed in school libraries, it's a book banning. If the child brought said book from home because they have two dads or two moms, they'd also probably land in trouble because school administrations are conservative and CYA in nature.
If you actually cared about words and their meaning, you wouldn't try to insist that there's only one correct meaning. Language evolves.
Wikipedia: Book censorship or book banning is the act of some authority (countries, government) taking measures to suppress ideas and information within a book.
More Wikipedia: According to the Marshall University Library, a banned book in the United States is one that has been "removed from a library, classroom, etc."[19] In many situations, parents or concerned parties will ban or propose a ban on a children's book based on the book's contents.[20] The American Library Association publishes a list of the top "Banned and Challenged Books" for any given year.[21] The American Library Association also organizes a "Banned Books Week", which is "an annual event celebrating the freedom to read."[21] The goal of the project is to bring awareness to banned books and promote the freedom to learn.[22]
All that's required for a "ban" to be a ban is an official act to prevent or prohibit someone from doing something. In the case of school book bans, it's to prevent teachers or school librarians from exercising their skills and judgement on introducing books for kids to read. Sometimes this is justifiable, most of the time it is not.
it doesn't need to apply globally for something to be banned. it doesn't need to be illegal across the country. something can be banned from a certain place (e.g. a school). it's still correct to say it is banned.
some HNers are so weird when it comes to the word "banned" regarding books, i really dont understand why. its only ever in the context of school/library books. use "ban" in the sense of "banned from the forum" or similar, and no one bats an eye.
why dont people get worked up when tom/dang "ban" someone from HN? they haven't made it illegal for that user to visit HN.
[1] Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons
...yes? that is the meaning of "ban", so it seems entirely appropriate to use that word
but now you are saying "the books" as if we were already talking about specific books. are you sure you are replying to the comment chain you intended to reply to?
It is a fact that there is a government lead effort in various states to ban books from k-12 libraries. That part of this is not up for debate because it is happening. So they are in fact “banned”. As a society we generally accept that words have more complicated or nuanced meanings when connected to other words, as “banned” is in this case.
We also as a society generally accept that those other words may be implied or require looking at something for more than a minute to understand the context. If you are in a country where a book is actually banned, I would wager that you would likely just say “this book is banned” implying it is banned where you are instead of adding in “this book is banned here in X” since it would be unnecessary to say and would be generally understood.
If you don’t like the word than propose another word.
As far as I can tell the standard for a book being "banned" is just that the librarian or the bookseller is sympathetic to the book's message and thinks it should be more widely read while politicians or parents might think it's inappropriate or they disagree with the message.
If you put the shoe on the other foot and name a book that's out of print because publishers dislike the material or it's problematic in the eyes of librarians, I don't think it fits the standard. Birth of a Nation for example is not a "banned movie" and neither is Song of the South. So the standard is entirely set by teachers, librarians and booksellers.
These are non-sexually-obscene informational speech yet the librarians and teachers don't actually want you looking at these banned media because they could actually be used to challenge the established order and system rather than just shuffling who is in power to possibly the guy the librarian likes.
But a library acting like they are doing some brave act of resistance by putting out a stack of books that are widely available, have always been widely available, and will always be, and saying they are "banned books, this is banned books week, look at all the books that have been banned!" when really they are books that a school board in wisconsin said shouldn't be in an elementary school library because the sex scenes are not appropriate for 7 year olds seems really silly to me.
> I really don't see the issue with local entities like a school board having some say in material that is available in a school.
Then you prefer a low-trust environment. I prefer a high-trust environment. A librarian shouldn't be putting 50 Shades of Grey on a grade school shelf to begin with. If they are, then you should be replacing the librarian, not micromanaging them. Book selection is their job. Let them do their job or don't; don't allow them the authority to only do half their job.
> But a library acting like they are doing some brave act of resistance by putting out a stack of books that are widely available...and saying they are "banned books, this is banned books week, look at all the books that have been banned!" when really they are books that a school board in wisconsin said shouldn't be in an elementary school library because the sex scenes are not appropriate for 7 year olds seems really silly to me.
Again, that's a "replace or reprimand the librarian" problem. It's not meant to be a brave act of resistance, it's information to say "these books have been banned, look at them so you can better understand what books people want to ban and why". And obviously, it's more interesting than "these are books where the 3rd letter in the title is T" and so it garners more attention, but it's no more than that. If they're including one that was banned for dumb reasons as in your example, then that makes it a dumb display (and an inappropriate one if the display is also in a library for 7 year olds.)
Obviously, the OP is not the librarian, and is aiming for an act of resistance, so my argument mostly doesn't apply there. Though the part about choices having the potential of being dumb still does. The set of books that have been banned somewhere or other is quite large, it's not like it would have any meaning to have a display of all or even a random selection of them. That's a strawman. You're going to curate based on some metric.
I understand the point you are trying to make and you have good evidence backing your statement ("alcohol is banned the stadium", etc) but when it comes to books, when people hear ban, they think Fahrenheit 451 or The Khmer Rouge burning books. So I also understand the OPs point.
Unless you're an alcoholic, banning alcohol in schools or stadiums isn't quite the hardship of arresting people for owning To Kill A Mockingbird.
Its connotation has changed in the same way that people calling others "Nazis" and "Fascists" has changed with the constant misuse of them.
https://legiscan.com/MS/text/HB1315/id/2767725
> (4) The Attorney General may investigate compliance with this section. The contracting party must report to the Attorney General a provider's failure to comply with subsection (2) of this section no later than thirty (30) days after the contracting party learns of the provider's noncompliance. Such a report shall constitute a public record under the Mississippi Public Records Act.
If you're that bad with semantics, I'd recommend the next book you check out is the dictionary.
It also makes it possible to provide free access to books that libraries decide against.
A project hosted on a public git repo cannot break the law, however adding whatever books you think are required looks easy. The instructions say:
> First, you'll want to put the ebook files in the /library/data/html/books directory.
- Commissioner Pravin Lal, Datalinks
Alpha Centauri pertinent as ever.
"This is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause." feels more grounded in reality.
Then the counter movement happened. And let's just say by 2016 social media was firmly under control and became a force against the people
Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever screams at us the loudest. (from S2 Andor)
The loss of objectivity is one of the greatest losses. People who are online to want their trench to “win” are advocates for loss. People who abuse their position to only proclaim their side is the best, the all-knowing, the superior, or whatever the flavor is of the day, are advocates for loss.
And as we have seen, we are losing a lot by losing objectivity.
But social media is also uniquely good at developing "negative polarization". Some of the counter movement was organic simply because people hated the progressive wins they saw.
We have an abundance of allowed information today, there is more restriction than ever of the distribution of information. Social media censoring, takedown requests, shadow banning, government censoring.
If you ban or censor a book, you immediately make the book seem more valuable. Because governments aren't omnipotent and all restrictions can be overcome (see the war on drugs as a particularly recent and pertinent example), you just Streisand-effect yourself.
If, on the other hand, you take away the popularity and social status of those who read that book, branding them as gullible idiots in the popular imagination, people will have an aversion to reading it. You don't need to ban access to the book, in fact you shouldn't do that, just make sure that talking about it will get people to lose all their friends.
Social media are the modern arbiters of popularity. If social media bans a subject, people get angry. If it just quietly deboosts anybody who talks about that subject, "well let's better not do that, we tried and people really didn't like those videos I guess"
If you browse any CS career forum though, at least 60% of the complaints about "the industry" happen in most capitalist industries and typically have one or more corresponding chapters in das kapital (e.g. one of the various forms of alienation, treadmill effect, capital accumulation, the creation of a reserve army of labour).
Isn't this basically just a form of forced compliance ? I agree it's happening, but its happening because the ideas/information is not beneficial for the one who can control the distribution. Before anyone could post on usenet, add their own tinfoil hat blog if they wanted, but take the UK for now, if there is any discussion or interaction with people on your website, the government wants your ID and your users'. It's exhausting.
I don't think it sounds true. Pre-internet, information distribution required access to specific technical tools, and physical transportation efforts. As one of USSR dissidents noted, risks of distribution grew almost exponentially with amount of pages (and it's about imprisonment, not account deletion). For comparison, emailing so far works even in very repressive countries. And even narrowing the issue to the West, while free speech suffered a lot recently, shadowbanned account is probably still works better than hectograph.
There's an endless source of information if you look for it. Just because social media doesn't stuff them in your face doesn't mean they're censored.
On the other hand, you can shove proof in people's faces and they'll still find reasons to argue against it. Information availability is not the problem. It's more energy consuming to search and filter information so people largely avoid doing it.
There's a trope in movies where the antagonist is secretly recorded and broadcast so regular people finally see the truth and wake up. I've seen journalists risking their carriers to expose corruption only for people to shrug and look the other way.
It is trivial to concoct believable lies as compared to the effort needed to debunk them in a way that is effective at social scale.
Perhaps the only weapon is to teach how to think for oneself. Who is going to invest in that in a scale necessary? Those who have the resources to do that do not have sufficient motivation. Often the motivation to do the opposite is stronger.
And the US elections in 2028? I can barely imagine.
And the massive problem is, most people I talk to still think what they see on youtube is real. But of course, people thought the TV show Survivor was real, too. It's not a new phenomenon.
But it is at crazy levels. I like your 'denial of service' designation, because even knowing the problem, maybe you can't find real info still.
_Most_ developed countries do invest in the education and teaching of critical thinking. It's not even that expensive.
In most countries, if a political party prefers an uneducated voter base, they don't win elections. Or if they do, there are enough working checks and balances (and parties in the opposition) to prevent serious harm.
Political parties are very good at making elections about manufactured issues. They strategically polarize the voters by amplifying and creating fault lines within the society.
If what you say is true in your world, I would be sincerely interested to know where would that be (my guesses would be Uruguay, New Zealand). This is not sarcasm, I am genuinely interested. In my world, India, it is as untrue as it can be.
Belgium gets a lot of criticism for moving slowing, but it also rarely breaks crucial things. The system of >10 political parties has its flaws, but it's a lot less divisive than a 2 party system. It means compromise needs to be found, and that no 1 party has full control (slows things down but reduces corruption and critical errors imo). Purposely dumbing down the population or firing 10% of government employees in order to hide malicious acts (or make corruption easier) just aren't conceivable in Belgium.
The only criticism of Belgium that I have heard are the horrors of colonialism under Leopold.
Its a picturesque country.
The colonization of Congo was indeed horrible. Inconsequential clarification: Congo wasn't actually a Belgian colony, it was Leopold's personal colony.
Umm, wouldn't a simple solution be going back to linear news feed that only includes updates from people you follow rather than the algorithm deciding what content to push to you?
We have the solution.
“Fighting disinformation” is the banner under which free flow is necessarily interrupted.
Peak of complexity and maturism in games...
I found the strat to go was to spam Scouts for resources, then get that upgrade that gave you Science per deal and spam every cheap deal as soon as you can.
Sister Miriam Godwinson, We Must Dissent
This game and its ideas are so timeless.
Best 4x game of all time. The 2060 that game envisioned seems closer everyday.
- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft
Some of us remember when they assured us that the novel virus in china was not to be afraid of.
Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook children, they'll tell you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
> The arguments for and against freedom of speech
It’s not about freedom of speech but about access to information.
More importantly, I don’t understand why you’re so hung up on that. What difference does it make? If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important? It doesn’t matter to the discussion, it’s only distracting from the point.
Of course, so what? If your implication is that none of the arguments made over 300 years are relevant today, I would say it is pretty obviously completely wrong.
> when you can’t even know if the person on the other side is real or from your own country
Did people in England and France use to know the authors of seditious pamphlets that were produced in the Dutch Republic and smuggled into those countries? Most of them were anonymous. Not only they didn't know the authors, the authors 100% were enabled by foreign actors.
> it’s only distracting from the point
The point: we've seen recently how damaging the fast spread of lies is therefore only naive fools would be against information control. My rebuttal: we've seen how damaging lies are for 300 years, yet it is a deep ongoing debate that many great thinkers contributed to, therefore it is not just a matter of fools believing into something.
Or do you see "the point" to be something different?
No, the point is that for the purposes of this discussion it is irrelevant when the arguments were first made. And reread the original:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48550066
Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea. It’s merely anchoring it to something recent HN readers have a good likelihood of being acquainted with. It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
I’ll ask again:
> If you agree with the conclusion, why are the dates of when the idea started so important?
How is that irrelevant if the whole statement is literally about when the arguments were first made and supposedly disproven?
> Nowhere does it say that “information wants to be free” was the originator of the idea.
It literally says __now__ that we've seen how lies are also information and can travel even better using the same flow, as if it is something recent.
> It’s like someone used Avatar to discuss how colonialism is portrayed in media, and someone came along to say “Pocahontas did it way before”. Alright, but that doesn’t matter for the argument. We’re discussing the idea itself, its origins do not make a difference for the matter.
If someone says that our views on colonialism were naive before Avatar 2 changed our perception of Avatar, of course it is fair to mention Pocahontas and 300 years of nuanced discussions of colonialism.
Yet you continue to not answer it, and I can only guess it is deliberate since you clearly read the comment if you quote so much of it.
So I have a new question: What is the point of continuing to engage with you if you refuse to answer the most basic of queries to clarify your point?
I shared its optimism and naivete :-(
> the definition of truths and lies can change with time and location
This is moral relativism.
I don't see how the existence of wrong or disinformation somehow makes that assumption wrong. Considering the amounts of (true) information you can freely access with the internet right now that is being otherwise suppressed.
>This is moral relativism.
There exists change of truths outside of moral ones, science for example.
Although, I dread to think what sort of files one would get when user uploads are allowed.
However I haven't actually played with this and don't know if that would work, or if the network would require DNS to function properly.
For the curious, the "banned" books are (it's a short list):
- Call of the Wild - Jack London
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
- Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
These are just public domain books provided as examples. You can put whatever you want on it.
"Since the device is a light bulb, it would be difficult to detect and likely to go unnoticed."
I doubt it would be any harder to shut down than any other public-access WiFi device, just a bit of experimentation with turning off power / devices would find it.
Modern enterprise access points even have built-in functionality to physically locate devices, and automatic warnings for rogue access points. The latter is often ignored or disabled though, because it'll go off every time someone prints or screen casts over Wi-Fi Direct.
If you went the other direction and didn't worry about it being noticeable, it would be kind of a fun project to break up a book into a series of QR codes. A scavenger hunt, with each code's text ending with a clue of where to find the next?
I can't wait until it's formalized enough that I can just buy a $20 light bulb, update it wirelessly somehow, and then have my own little "light bulb library" server.
1: > I was talking with a friend about this idea and the storage limitation and he thought it would be cool to have these devices form a mesh network
2: https://meshtastic.org/docs/community/enclosures/rak/harbor-...
As far as I can tell, RNS is a networking protocol that attempts to provide a mesh network that can run over almost any bidirectional connection (and interconnect different types of connections) without centralisation (basically random addresses using encryption, and announces to make that address reachable).
It's kinda similar to Meshtastic and Meshcore but designed to be more generic for any connection. Compared to Meshcore it's less bandwidth efficient since it uses larger addresses but I like RNS more because it's more generic (it's intended to be fairly bandwidth efficient but at a larger more internet level scale than just kilobytes per second) and less proprietary than the Meshcore official ecosystem. Compared to Meshtastic, RNS is much more efficient since it doesn't use flood routing for every packet.
I guess the key is to disguise it further by making it entirely like normal. I’d perhaps give the SSID two passwords. One which is the normal configuration password and the other enables the port for your connection.
Reads like you had fun, keep up the hacking!
P.S main -> mail I think?
And it's even better that it's for a good cause as well.
A lzs decompressor is pretty simple ..
advice for the op: the images in the page took half a minute to load (on multigigabit internet not being stressed). might be a routing issue between the server and my isp, but the images could use some optimization.
LoRa is also sub-optimal for payloads more than a few K in size and most ePub files are at least a meg...
Take a look at HaLow if you insist, but in general if a bulb has esp32 then you could likely replace the module for one with LoRA capabilities.
They're usually school libraries that are removing books from their collection that contain explicit material, usually at the request of parents.
Unless I missed something I only spotted two book examples since that wasn't the focus of the article.
It is the choice of the individual to base their project around these "banned books", which invites this discourse.
The book Nineteen Eighty-four contains sexual content. An authoritarian interested in reducing access to such literature about totalitarianism simply needs to get some parents worked up over sex.
If it was just explicit material then the bible would also need to be banned. But as always, it was never about protecting the children.
When I was growing up in the early 90s, a local crazy preacher guy got a bunch of people riled up and angry about Goosebumps, Huckleberry Finn and to Kill a Mockingbird. These were the same types of folks playing metal music backwards to find satanic instructions.
It was a simpler time without the internet to keep stupid people riled up for extended periods. Now idiocy is a social movement.
But on a fun sidenote: When Life of Brian was initially banned in Norway, its distributor in Sweden started marketing it as "a movie so funny it's banned in Norway" :-)
> They're usually school libraries that are removing books from their collection that contain explicit material, usually at the request of parents.
So they were banned from certain school libraries then. Something doesn't have to be banned globally to count as being banned.
"Banned" isn't generally universally applied. It may just be banned in the OPs libraries. Or maybe these are simply commonly banned books.
I’ll grant that some of the restrictions seem overprotective. That being said, a parent could easily check out one of those books for their child.
When people say "banned book" they mean that a certain level of government such as a school board or municipality has "banned" them from being in a public (often school) library.
But the headline "In [state I disagree with] they are banning books that have [ideas I agree with]" makes a lot more headlines and clicks.
Then people run with the phrase "banned books" to make things sound worse than they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
USA is ultra conservative on the average in comparison to just any European state for example.
Are you serious? The UK and Germany are arresting people for social media posts. That is actual impingement of free speech.
The evidence is that they don't serve it for school lunches.
Is that a weird argument? That's the same way people argue that books are "banned" in America.
Purely obscene material is also not protected by the 1st, but since the 1970s, the bar for that has been placed very, very high.
The closest I can think of offhand is that for about a year during the pandemic, Twitter suppressed gratuitous COVID misinformation posts, at the request of the government.
Very cool project nonetheless!
The majority of "banned books" are books that a random school district/religious school in a conservative part of the country elected not to include in their library at some point. Many of them are required reading in many other school districts and some of the most well known books of the 20th century.
The closer-to-banned ones are generally not included on banned-book-reading-lists and are banned on major retail platforms and long out of print and tend to be racist and/or genuinely subversive to liberal democratic principles. Most of these tend to be some of the most-downloaded-books-on-the-internet, and are also in no way illegal to own in the US - though possession of many is illegal in much of the EU.
An interesting case is United States vs Progressive inc [0] in which the US dropped a lawsuit to prevent a magazine from publishing a how-to guide on building an H bomb and Defense Distributed vs United States Department of State [1] in which the US federal government settled and allowed for the publishing of 3d printed gun files online, previously prevented under arms exports claims.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Progressive,_.... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...
A library can choose what books they stock (especially a school library. Of course they're highly curated.). You don't have to agree with their choices, but the book isn't banned. You can still find it at a county library, an ebook library, or on the Internet.
So it's a bit dramatic to say "I'm fighting the system by hosting banned books!", just because some Tennessee elementary schoolers can't check it out from their school library. Just feels like a joke and a mockery when there's governments that genuinely censor books.
Once the books go out of copyright they will no longer be able to legally prevent anyone else from printing the books, and copyright law doesn't prevent people from legally reselling their already-purchased copies of books. But if you go onto Amazon right now and look at prices, you'll find that a copy of one of the Dr. Seuss books that the rights-holder refuses to print more copies of, such as McElligot's Pool, costs over 100 dollars; whereas a Dr. Seuss book that the rights-holders haven't judged as racist, such as The Cat in the Hat, costs about $5.
Edit: per the other comment's Wikipedia link, the unredacted Operation Dark Heart seems banned in the US because it included classified info
Although copyright-infringing books may be illegal to redistribute in general, the difficulty in determining what counts as copyright infringement and what counts as fair use means you can't really tell for sure which books are illegal to distribute and which aren't, so I'm not sure that really counts as "banned". 60 Years Later had an actual court order which makes things a little more concrete.
Having been in prison, I can tell you that being a Blood and having "certain books" in your locker is a "smash on sight" offense. The same could be said for the Aryan Brotherhood/Circle, and I'm sure for many other gangs.
There's a difference between "this one small group: local oklahoma school district/aryan brotherhood/catholic church" decided they don't like a book and the government level you will be imprisoned for owning/sharing this book.
If it's a 'banned' book library, why doesn't it include books banned by a variety of sources? To me, a 'banned' book library would included many thousands of books each tagged by which groups are banning them. That way, were I inclined to do so, I could read texts that were banned by both Jews and Christians, or by both democratic nations and totalitarian regimes, or whatever it was that I was interested in.
This particular compilation is a perfect example. Calling The Call of the Wild, a book that's been made in to several movies (the most recent of which grossing $111.1 million against a production budget of $125–150 million) a "banned book" is kind of ludicrous, no? Clearly many thousands or millions of people have access to it and it's contents, so it is clearly not 'banned' in any meaningful sense of the term, unless you happen to live in some region in which it is banned, but that enforces my claim that any such random small list doesn't really live up to the label.
In the article example, to deny this because of a technically or the degree of legal enforcement is foolish since it is rebelling against the act of banning books, the process of banning, which doesn't occur out of thin air, it is an evolution of acts. It is not an absolute and one doesn't have to wait until there is a legally defined ban to start the protest. That would be ridiculous as it would be too late.
I don't think the project is trying to make the Banned Library of Congress either, anyone could put whatever books they want on their server. It is suggesting civil disobedience by circumventing oppression through censorship with creativity, which is awesome.
The thing is that every other country does have what they're describing.
> The Color Purple has been challenged many times in order to be removed from public library circulation and public school curriculums.
And yet nobody challenged it to get it removed from US Amazon. Amazon _is_ forbidden from selling certain books in other countries. It's so not the same thing
Now where the USA censors routinely is financial censorship. If you can afford the thing thats fincially banned, the sure, its not banned. But if you cant afford it, youre screwed.
And, if you work for a company, they can fire you for any/no reason, INCLUDING your speech off work.
In the USA, its "freedom of speech" if youre independently wealthy. If not, hope you dont offend power.
The book that is commonly at the number one spot on "banned book" lists has what would always be called hardcore pornography in the middle of the book. It depicts fellatio literally (not just implying it). It has no educational value, and is meant, within its context, to be erotic/lewd. I can link directly to it on archive.org, I can link to that exact page even. I do that sometimes in these arguments, and I'm downvoted until my comment is hidden but not before a bunch of jackasses say "and what does it matter"...
Sorry, don't want my 10 yr old looking at it in the school library. No, take that back... I'm not sorry. And you're all awful people for wanting that in the school library. Or dumb for not realizing that it's in the book. What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska#Author's_re...
(I've not read it, of course, and don't know whether I'd consider it inappropriate for school libraries. However, it sounds like it was not intended as pornography and therefore isn't pornography according to some narrow definitions of that term. In any case, school libraries have such tiny budgets and there are so many uncontroversial good books in the world I can see why they might want to give this one a miss.)
And its easy to attack books in k-12 school libraries. The hard conservative christians attack DEI, sexuality, suicide, witchcraft, and other things regularly.
However, we are also seeing direct attacks on funding with public libraries.
https://michiganadvance.com/2025/06/23/local-michigan-librar...
They almost had their funding yanked to keep librarians from putting LGBTQ books on the shelves. These christian nationalists would rather destroy public libraries than allow (gasp!) books on subjects they dont like.
And as far as I can tell, the solution as of May 21 2026, was that the 4 republicans on the board voted to segregate all the aforementioned topics to the adult section. They also voted to remove the ALA's Library Bill of Rights. And who is this "They" who rewote it? "Alliance Defending Freedom", a christian nationalist group known for LGBTQ hatred.
https://thelivingstonpost.com/guest-column-cromaines-mass-re...
And all of this shit is in the name of children and "harmful to minors". (Geeee, where have we seen this using children for terrible shit before? Perhaps age verification?)
Im not always for democrats, as many of them are statist stooges as well. But book banning and threatening to shut down libraries is well within fascist and nazi regimes.
From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir
And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.
And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.
But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.
Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.
At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.
Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)
The underlying theme with your comments and invoking shame points that you support the utterly failed approach of abstinence only education. Everywhere its tried is an abject failure. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e...
And Id say that you are harming your children more by arbitrary abstinence, than by actual education. Shocker image or no.
The news articles focus on the LGBT books. Notice how they never actually list the titles of books being moved, because readers would see that these aren't classics being witch-hunted decades after publication for some slight reason. Most are new things recently inserted into school libraries with an agenda, and/or books that the majority would find inappropriate for children. Here's the only one mentioned in your second link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir and here's a longer list https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/2024-book-bans/
Its easy to say that pornography and smut are the only things banned in school and public libraries, as your claim. But thats easily demonstrably false.
One only need to look at the American Library Association's banned list
https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
What do we see? Descriptions of sexual acts? Well, some. But we also see horrific accounts of sexual slavery, high schooler life troubles including suicide, a comic called 'Gender Queer', depictions of magic (read: non-abrahamic occult practices).
In general, anything that doesnt fit the puritanical hard right wing christian gets threatened with bans, with great scruitiny on LGBTQ, sexuality, mysticism, suicide, and real troubles of young adults in high school.
But its completely disingenuous to says 'oh its just smut'. No. Its censorship for people who cant vote, and have no power. And the censorship is done by adults who want to pretend that not having a LGBTQ book will make young adults 'not gay' or some bullshit.
> What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.
'Young children' are like 5 or 6. And no, its not a "right to show smut". Its having these books on the shelf in a age-appropriate way. These christian nationalist types are targeting anything related to anti-christian sentiments, DEI, LGBTQ themes of any sort, and whatever else falls in the sights of these worse-than-nazi folks.
Even a picture book that says a friend has 2 dads (and elementary way to relate) is banned. And those are real situations children will deal with, book or no. Im not saying to an 8 year old to read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty", either. But if they look up basic LGBTQ books cause they feel different, yeah, they should be able to.
Also, I think it would behoove you to learn your history, especially with the original nazies. One of the first libraries they dismantled and burnt was the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen... or a university for sex medical studies. Some of the first trans research was done there. And anyone who wants to destroy knowledge is an enemy of me.
This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages? The main character doesn't advocate for sexual activity of any kind, they actually seem to lose interest and proceed to display positive emotional communication skills by telling their partner of their disinterest?
Somehow you think you've got a zinger when you point out "they hid it in the middle where people would be less likely to look!" Before, everyone was saying I was lying, but I linked to the exact page and now we've moved on to "and that's a good thing".
No one banned this book. You can buy it. You can sell it in your bookstore. What you mean when you lie and say that it's banned is "we're not allowed to sneak it into the school library and make parents pay for it through their tax dollars even when they wouldn't let their kids read it". That's what you mean by "banned".
What that implies is that your ideal of a school library is one that only has books that every single parent out of a thousand plus parents approves of.
One with no Christian books that the Satanists object to, one with no science books that the flat earthers disagree with etc.
What a dull dull bland straitjacketed life that must impose.
PS: Ever built a stump-jump plough in your back shed? What is your favourite type of plough? I ask as you went quiet after we last discussed ploughs.
Exactly this. I remember how much hatred and strive was back in my high school days, with "fa@@ot" tossed around with anything not masculine. As a clarinet player, I got that a LOT. (Evidently the F word auto-kills a post. Hello, context matters.)
If a middle or high schooler is even so much as picking this book up, means theyre trying to cope with their own sexuality, that folks like NoMoreNicksLeft tremendously shames and demeans.
> This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages?
We both know that answer. Of course they didnt. They gravitated to the single shocker image, and even ignored the shocker image of asexual feelings and how they're OK.
Ive been fighting against these types of christian nationalists for decades. I remember when Reagan called HIV a gay disease, cut funding, and said 'God would solve it'.
Killing us doesnt work, cause straights end up having children who are LGBTQ. And no amount of conversion therapy (sexual assault, seriously) or abstinence, or active denial of library materials will ever get rid of LGBTQ.
Hell, even Muslim nationalist nations can execute gay people, and there will still be gay people.
But this is the fight and the hatred we deal with on a weekly, and sometimes daily routine.
I would put Kevin MacDonald's antisemitic trilogy The Culture of Critique, the Turner Diaries ( which calls for mass extermination of non-white groups in the USA ) and Mein Kampf in the realm of books that should be shunned.
"Mein Kampf" is a good example of well written propaganda.
Like any good propaganda, it starts from true facts, so the first part of the book describes real problems of the society at that time (most of which are again problems of the present society).
The real problems would capture the attention of the readers, who were heavily affected by them in their own real lives.
Also like any good propaganda, from the true premises the book transitions to conclusions that do not result from the premises, but are falsely claimed to do so, and then solutions to the false conclusions are presented as if they will solve the problem described by the true premises (i.e. life is bad => the reason why it is bad is because there exist Jews => eliminate them and life will become good).
The same propaganda scheme from "Mein Kampf" is frequently applied today, but usually the Jews are replaced by China or by legal immigrants or by illegal immigrants or by people supporting another political party, always failing to identify the real culprits for the "life is bad" premises.
I do not agree that any propaganda books must be banned based on the condescending idea that humans are stupid, but I believe that it should be mandatory that any propaganda book should be accompanied by a well-written rebuttal, which should explain where the book in lying and why its conclusions are wrong, for the benefit of those less experienced, who might not notice these facts themselves.
I understand your discomfort with these books, and I actually agree that they deserve to be banned, but banning is not what we should do.
Its ultra important for historical/social and linguistic education.
I read it when I was 14, and I'm from Poland.
It is AWFUL and PAINFUL to read due to the horrible styling - which amuses me to this day. :) That's why no need to ban it hehehe
Nowadays books are for intellectuals, not for the masses... That's why I would be ok for any modern teenager to read anything 18+ or anti-whatever books :) It's net positive no matter of content IMO.
I guess when it comes to Freedom of Speech, you fall into the latter category.