Not sure if your sarcasm is directed at Dua Lipa for including Atwood, or at the states that actually removed it from their public schools (Texas, Florida, Missouri, among others), but it was actually banned in Portugal during
the Salazar regime.
Either way, I agree with your comment that there is nothing dangerous about Atwood unless you are a fan of authoritarian religious governments.
> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.
However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.
That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”
I am normally with the cynics but I have trouble believing that none of the commenters are unaware that some books are banned in schools, prisons and military bases, in America. This is not just a problem limited to foreign theocracies.
They are banned in the US in the same way playboy magazine is, they are not allowed in certain places.
Would you say that Playboy Magazine is a banned book becuase its not allowed in schools and prisons?
I would guess the person you are responding to is thinking about more mundane books that are or have been banned in public and private schools in recent history. Harry Potter, for example.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would get call for a quick chat with HR if I walked around the office with Mein Kampf under my arm as well.
Schools, prisons, etc are institutions that can decide what is appropriate for their audience and how they want to spend their shelf space. A real banned book is a book that gets you in legal trouble if you're caught with it.
Lists of banned books are often quite disappointing, and I think they fall into a few categories:
- Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
- Books that seems relatively anodyne, and it's not clear why they were banned. (eg: the perks of being a wallflower)
- Books that governments might have feared in the old days, but are now much less threatening than, other, more readily-available material. (eg: 1984)
I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information. Instead, modern book-banning feels much more symbolic. ie, "we do not approve of this book!" rather than effective. Anyone can buy the book on Amazon, or pirate it for free, or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas. And importantly, find many, many more extreme, subvesrive, rebellious, etc. ideas for free online.
Of course I do not support the banning of the books, but I think sometimes once a book is banned this act gives the book power -- in more senses than one. Less discussed is that the fans of the book often believe it to be better than it actually is, merely for being banned.
“The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad book” is a wild take to start with.
“I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information.”
You don’t think a school library can prevent access to information? Poor people exist.
> ... prevent access to information. ... or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas
Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.
Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)
For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in his home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.
I think that's a really fair point. A full novel will give you an emotional impact that a list of facts will not provide. A beautifully-told story can convince (at least some people) better than any argument.
I'd still hold that you can just get ahold of books these days if you want to, but your point stands that the mere spread of ideas is not equivalent to really reading the whole book.
Isn't it good marketing though? If I'm a young person looking to read something on the edge, maybe it's not banned where I am but if it was banned somewhere else, that's intriguing. If the consequence is more people reading, I would argue it's far from inconsequential.
There are no books banned in EU... Some countries have laws that criminalise glorification of nazism or communism, but I never heard any book was "banned" as a result.
Here in Poland we had "Mein Kampf" by certain Austrian painter in my primary school library for example.
That's not true at all, for example in Belgium, any book that discredits genocide, incites to racial hatred, or shows sex with minors is banned from sale and/or possession. Then there's also moral rights infringement, such as obscene parodies of Tintin, books explaining suicide methods, etc, etc.
One of those marketing events in a cool instagramable spot in Oporto that already has huge queues of people just to photograph it and I'm sure it will only sell books in English catered to tourists and nomad tech bros that are already ruining the city's housing supply. Awesome.
For those of you pretending to have trouble understanding 'banned' in this context, it means essentially the same thing as when someone gets 'canceled'.
People who are canceled are not literally thrown in prison and executed.
Well, it does kind of matter. "Banned" has a specific meaning. If a book is "banned" and you're allowed to possess it or sell it, it's not really banned, now is it? The usage of the word, despite the reality of the situation, strongly implies "this is a book the government WON'T LET YOU READ!" Except, they do.
A more accurate term might be "politically unfavorable", but that doesn't get people riled up. And, I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but this library is probably zeroing in on books that are politically unfavorable to conservative governments. I doubt we'll find the likes of Mein Kampf in there.
I agree that words do have a specific meaning, but the history of words changing their meaning is truly awful+! I was talking to this young girl++ in my neighborhood about words and slang - he said he had never considered that words could change their meaning, and that the dictionary was some kind of rule book. At first I thought maybe he was nice+++, but after considering it, he's young! Everyone learns this in time.
Language is mutable and alive and ever-changing. That's just how it goes.
I wish there were some photos of it in the article so we could get a better understanding of what it is.
I've been to lots of bookstores with sections or displays for famously banned books. I'm pretty sure my local Indigo (basically a Canadian Barnes & Noble) has one. If that's all this is then it doesn't sound especially newsworthy outside of the celebrity involvement and maybe the renown of this particular shop.
OTOH the article describes it as a "permanent" installation, which does sound a little different from what I'm picturing.
> The Livraria Lello where this is located, is definitely a bookshop.
And barely a bookshop at that, more of a tourist attraction. You need tickets to enter, and the main selection of books are classics, mainly public domain iirc. They have more recent/interesting books but only as decoration (I asked to buy a Naomi Klein book, they refused to sell it). Most people are just there to take pictures because the stairs inspired Harry Potter.
Yeah, nowadays I think it's like 15€ to enter, there's like a huge line to enter, and I think it's usually crowded inside. They'll discount the 15€ if you buy anything, but if you don't find anything interesting... it's a very expensive visit.
This is wrong, given only the text of the article. The two books explicitly listed are not banned in Portugal or anywhere else. They are simply not subsidized with public money in some libraries.
I hope that her star power encourages young people to read literally anything. The ability for her fans to sit with a singular text, without ad breaks, sponcon, brand deals, and everything else on social media seems like a societal win.
A venture that gathers objects of subversion likely to draw the ire of authoritarian powers into a single building doesn’t strike me as something likely to peacefully exist for long.
I mean… yeah? Since when would being in Portugal stop a motivated power?
Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.
It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.
Whenever the topic of “banned books” comes up, a bunch of people argue about whether they should be called “banned”.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.
I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.
A family we know got swept up in the "banned books" movement. They repost banned book content on their Instagram and even got T-shirts with witty sayings about supporting banned books.
They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.
The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.
Because nobody wants (or should have to) read every LGBT-adjacent book to see which ones are explicitly teaching kids to use Grindr to solicit statutory rape from older men.
The "goal" is clear enticement to engage in illegal and dangerous activities, and your cause argues this is necessary literature for children to have access to. "This Book is Gay" was not easily banned; quite the fight was put up by the gay community and its allies to defend it, so it cannot be argued that it's just one psycho pushing it. There is no reason to presume anything gay-adjacent deserves the benefit of doubt when these are the lengths its supporters will push boundaries to.
That anybody needs mentorship in how to "accept" something they were supposedly "born" as and "always knew they were" is sophistry to begin with anyway. I didn't need to be told I was heterosexual, but nobody was given the chance to confuse me into thinking otherwise either. Gay literature (mostly boring, self-indulgent memoirs of narcissists and their sexual endeavors) is the most effective cult recruiting material imaginable since once you desensitize yourself to it, arousal becomes a positive feedback loop, driving continued engagement with it until it feels normal. Literal gay conversion. Training any other behavior works the same way-- ask any dominatrix or dog handler.
We're told we should give this sort of content to children, and for their benefit. Lmao. We give them amphetamines already.
We're also told a trans genocide is going on and the entire western world is about to experience population collapse because nobody is having kids, in addition to a male loneliness epidemic. Maybe teaching kids to engage in illegal, non-procreative sexual activity with adult strangers that strangle them to avoid legal risk/humiliation is a deranged and antisocial idea that is not in the best interests of humanity itself?
It's the school librarian's job to select books. These people are trained in childhood education.
Your imagination has clearly gone way off the deep end here.
Reading that there are gay people doesn't turn people gay. If you think it does, that says more about you, I think.
Trying to hide the existence of gay people from children leads to homophobia from the straight kids, and mental health issues from the gay kids. You are dead wrong here.
So you think parents should not have a say? Wouldn’t that be rather authoritarian to have whatever books and disregard criticism? Many librarians are activists and are choosing books that are not educational. They are actively selecting books that they agree with.
I guess you are fine with the recent increase in homeschooling which is hitting record numbers. The activists..oops "professionals" don't like that either.
Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.
Sure. The place for these adults to get books is the county/city library and not the school library. As I said, there's a certain common denominator that we need to respect when talking about public schools.
They don't ignore it. The conflation is deliberate. Not spending tax money to promote a book to schoolchildren = ban, jailing people for possessing material likely to stir up racial hatred [1] = freedom & democracy.
Sun Tzu did say "appear weak when you are strong".
The “banned books” theme has become intentionally vague because it has become a marketing tool.
That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.
That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.
Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.
Banning a book in a school district still signifies a form of authoritarianism. If someone is prevented from reading Maus[0] (or finding out they are in a cult, or a victim of domestic abuse), what is the effective difference to them between an authoritarian censoring it at the national level or the local one?
We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
Dua Lipa wasn't doing a photo op with Maus. In the photos she's posing with modern books that are still being promoted by their publishers. I'm not familiar with all of them, but a quick search shows one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
This is a promotional stunt, and I'm surprised more people aren't seeing through it.
I don't understand the scare quotes: per my previous reply, is a ban not a ban regardless of who does it? Maus has nudity and curse words; that's why it was banned in Tennessee. 1984 has multiple sex scenes - the well-funded Christian publication PluggedIn rates it 18+[0].
Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.
In Europe every kid over 13 would buy both with no issues at all. 1984's sex scenes are so-so and something that just happens in the background like nothing.
> We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
And no one really pretended that these cases were cases of "banned books".
The problem is when authority bodies (school, government, ...) start to include, in these "normal non-appropriate" books other books not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons.
I think it would be a very bad faith argument to argue that reading Maus will lead to people less socially adjusted.
And, sure, some "banned" books may be inappropriate. But as soon as these authorities have open the doors to arbitrary banning books, they poisoned their own well: maybe under "normal" evaluation this book should be removed from the list, but they removed it "the bad way", they failed the process, and therefore the ban itself is illegitimate.
It's a bit like the procedural miscarriage of justice: if you mess up when arresting someone, they can be freed even if it turns out they were guilty. Or in a more topical subject: the Fifa can reverse some decision, but if they do it in the context where they received phone calls from the US president, then it's a big failure in the process, even if a "normal" re-evaluation should indeed have concluded to reversing the decision.
> not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons
“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.
Saying "entirely subjective" is a bit BS, don't you think?
On one hand, you have someone who says that exposing children to sexual or violent content can have an impact on them. This is something that has been studied, sociologists, psychiatrists, doctors, ... have concluded that this is true.
On the other hand, you have someone who says that an ideology they don't like will lead to the ruin of the society. At the same time, communities, and often whole countries themselves, don't see the problem with these ideologies, and the catastrophe that this person has predicted does not occur. The only reason they claim that is because they are intolerant and want to impose their ideology, not because they want what's good for others.
So, yes, there are __some__ subjectivity. The same way that there is subjectivity around "good and bad" and yet "murdering" is universally considered as "bad" but "not going to the catholic mass" is not.
Neither of your examples would be considered murder by those doing them. In the case of slavery you can’t murder property.
A murder is specifically an unjustified killing. And as far as I am aware it is universally considered bad. Which makes sense because murder being considered bad is pretty much baked into the definition.
I can’t think of a modern society that does not condemn going into a random person’s house and killing them. Nor any past ones for that matter.
Now in some backwards ass country they might not consider it murder if that random person was homosexual. Or a killing might be justified in the context of a revolution. Or to bring rain. Or when shooting some guy fleeing with your tv in the back.
You realise that it is exactly what I'm talking about: everything is "subjective" if you look close enough, but only an idiot will think everything is therefore on the same plane.
Sure, "murdering" is not "100% always in all circumstances considered 100% bad" (but I still think that "universal" was not a bad choice, the same way "universal healthcare" does not mean there is no illegibility criteria and therefore exceptions). And of course, there is a lot of discussion to even have on what people mean by murder, but that is, again, missing the point.
But that is totally ridiculous to then pretend that it means that "murdering is bad" has therefore as much legitimacy as "touching your nose with the left hand index finger is bad".
The fact that is subjective does not mean that you cannot say anything anymore. It feels like a common bias in "technology" people: some of them think they are so smart and are condescending to "social science", and yet they are lost on concepts that social science considers as obvious.
> one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
It's authoritarian because it's about people with authority (parents, teachers), telling people without (students) what kinds of media they are and aren't allowed to consume, which is about controlling which ideas they're allowed to think about. You don't like children thinking or learning about sex, but there is no moral or rational reason for that. You just don't like it, and you wish to use your authority to impose your preferences on people who have no power to stop you. That's authoritarian.
And no, I don't think parents should be able to control their children's media diets, the idea that parents get to control their children is itself authoritarian. You don't own your kids.
You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
That type of media was never in schools to begin with. The problem here is that schools and districts made their own, informed curation decisions, and those decisions are being overridden by zealous parents informed only by the religious and political persuasions.
The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.
> schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it?
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
I think a better frame is: will the children be less socially adjusted if they are exposed to the book?
While "everything is political", I can still see some differences. What was presented as "banned on neutral, apolitical basis base" in the previous comment can be seen as political at some level, but they are way less political than "let's ban this book because I don't want my children to be exposed to lefties ideas".
It feels like there is an order of magnitude less importance to "maintaining our children unexposed to others' point of view" in the cases of left-wing book-banning than in the right-wing side. After all, right-wing book banning often works on "leftie keywords" or themes (gender study stuffs, inclusivity, ...) while I don't think there is a real movement to ban books because they use too much of "right-wing keywords" (free market stuffs, nationalism, ...).
The banned books movement (on either side) is broadly not about curriculum. It’s about access in non-required spaces such as libraries and clubs.
The issue there isn’t that kids are being exposed to these items, the issue is that other parents are censoring what _my_ kid can be exposed to. They are infringing on _my_ rights.
Meanwhile I’m not requiring their kid to go into a library and checkout Maya Angelou.
This kind of thing happens commonly with language development over time. If a word or phrase picks up a strong connotation, then the word or phrase stops being used generically. This used to happen so slowly that nobody really noticed it happening to individual words or phrases, I think.
As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.
If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.
That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.
If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.
They are banned though. Not curated. You are not allowed to have these in school libraries. It’s not an editorial decision. For instance the Utah law says that a book must be removed from all libraries if 3 school districts in the state ban it.
No librarian, or teacher, or admin or parent in the other school districts gets any say.
That’s a ban. People may not like that their state is engaging in authoritarian behavior, and it’s less authoritarian than other behaviors, but it’s a ban by the simple facts. Doublespeak doesn’t change that.
I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.
If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?
We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.
> You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
Obviously, I do think that.
> So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
Sure.
> My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
I don't, but I was one, and I accessed all kinds of stuff on the internet that my parents and teachers didn't want me to see. Including gross violence and sex stuff. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. I'm fine. I'm a better person for having exposed myself to those things than I would be if I'd been sheltered from them.
But now in a vacuum you're advocating from your position (not being a parent) but being a human, that because you turned out ok, that everyone else will. There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
> There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
No one else provided any, either. If you have strong evidence that exposure to media you don't like is bad for your children, please provide it. If you don't have any, my anecdote is better evidence than you've provided.
Two people calling out an opinion as extreme does not make it extreme, and an opinion being extreme does not make it wrong.
> Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
parents
If you want to go full anti-authoritarian, you are literally advocating anarchy. One in which you have no right to jail someone for killing someone else.
There are many moral systems! Some of them are based in Christian ethics, which many people prescribe to. In fact it's the one the United States is based on. You can also choose something like liberalism. Many or most people would at least agree that "killing randon people at random times" being advocated in a book is not a good thing. And if that's not a good thing, then there is a moral judgement to be made to "ban" said book. I'm not saying that book exists, but if it did - would you "ban" it?
No one "owns" another person, but there are many other forms of relationships between people that allows for one person to dictate a media diet for another.
Parent-based rights arguments are perfectly adequate for the 80%, but degenerate in some horrific ways for the rest of the population. We need community-level input on how to raise kids so that the leftover 20% don’t just get fucked up by parents that “know best for their kid”.
Anecdotally know of a few times where kids were taught that their molestation was their own fault (both sub-10yo), and had friends whose parents actively pushed them to kill themselves
So that has nothing to do with what I said. Parents, and if 80% of parents are good people, then it makes sense that parents have a say what is in the school library. It also makes sense that if a parent is abusing a child, a teacher will see it.
I don't have a solution for you for all types of families, but this doesn't change that miyoji's take is fairly extreme.
The effective difference is of course that they could easily get that book from somewhere else if they want it.
If I'm prevented from bringing my dog into a restaurant, that doesn't mean that dogs are banned. It means I have to go to the restaurant on the other side of the street.
If McDonald's doesn't serve any hard liquor it doesn't mean that alcohol has been banned in the country.
Is it really that cut and dry? A technically competent person might easily access a book while living in an authoritarian country, while someone who grows up in an authoritarian family in a "free" country might be prevented from reading a book both at home and at the school where their parents lobbied to ban the book.
Authoritarian family? Parents have the authority over their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions. It is up to them how they raise their kids.
They will have all the time and opportunity in the world to read and try anything they want to when they're older.
The specific examples I provided included family abuse; most sexual abuse is done by a family member. I hope it's not contentious to say that parental control should not be as authoritarian as that.
Authoritarian is an adjective. A thing can be authoritarian without all things being so. Yes, authoritarian things have always existed, and yes, a powerful religious group joining forces to make sure kids continue to hate themselves for being gay or trans is authoritarian.
Everywhere being authoritarian throughout all time seems a fairly good summary to me?
The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.
If the school declines to put a book in the library, that's not a ban. If people outside the school with power over the school demand that books be removed, that's a ban.
The groups demanding books be removed are often not even parents of children in the school. It external parties driving this stuff.
Banning and burning books is from an era when there was no digital publishing. Only way of distributing text/thoughts was by printing press. Today we don't burn books but we constantly ban/shadow ban digital content. This is independent of which country you are from. Corporations do the censorship mostly, in place of the governments. Try writing a Reddit comment opposing mainstream politics. You are only allowed to play in a sandbox. AI shadow-burns your comments automatically and blacklists you if you go out of your human guiderails. No human dictators to blame. So yes, if this is a dictator thing (I think it is), we all live in a kind of modern dictatorship.
Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
Is it useful to limit these thoughts to a dictator doing dictator stuff, though? What would be the material difference between that and operatives of his political party astroturfing local school boards to remove books that teach about the racial history of the country or the existance of trans folk, to make it appear as though the local community decided to do it?
On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.
You're more likely to be aware of a library book curation decision where parents are publicly fighting to remove a book the school library management wants to keep; compared to a curation decision where the school library management simply never decides to make a book available to begin with.
Personally, I am OK with the library making their own curation decisions. That's part of how a library functions, I understand that they can't carry everything. I have a problem when zealous parents try to override those decisions, especially when they are motivated by political or religious worldviews.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
Do you think the librarians' choice about what books to stock in their library aren't motivated by political or religious worldviews? What kind of person becomes a school librarian? One motivation is that they want to influence what kinds of written information young people do and do not readily have access to.
I've known enough librarians to come to a belief that, in general, their curation decisions are more motivated by a love of books and learning than they are by the more divisive political issues of the day.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Given the track we're on, in 80 years Americans will be extinct and whoever's occupying my current space will be living in the Managed Democracy of Monocolored Benetton.
Their kids will be taught that's all it ever was since the first colony was established in this otherwise-uninhabited land on Stardate 2302.5.
Dear reader, "banned" in this case means government institutions (school libraries) did not promote the book to schoolchildren. It does not mean possession of the book got anyone arrested, or that the books are not extremely easily available in major corporate retailers. So for example, one is unlikely to find in this library the kind of stickers that got Sam Melia arrested [1], or anything the UK would consider "likely to stir up racial hate" [2], such as the music album “Phoenix Rising” by Embers of an Empire [3,4].
Whether books by e.g. Jared Taylor are also "banned" in this manner in the UK is left wonderfully vague - the only way to find out is to be found possessing one, and then see if the government prosecutes you. You get chilling effects for free, and avoid the bad PR or a "banned books" list!
I've actually really been a fan of her, and her music before I heard about her Service95 endeavour. So seeing that video led me to looking into her Service95 work, and yeah, I have to say, she's the real deal.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadEither way, I agree with your comment that there is nothing dangerous about Atwood unless you are a fan of authoritarian religious governments.
A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.
However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.
That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”
Further, when people talk about banned books, they usually mean at some sub-country level, even down to a school board. Like if you look at -
https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
- these books weren't banned from the United States, but they're controversial enough that individual school boards or library systems removed them.
Are there examples of these?
The few examples mentioned in the article are easy to buy, at least in the US. Is there a full manifest somewhere?
https://www.service95.com/manifesto-library-launch looking here, it seems the best case would be Navalny, although he wasn't really killed for his book per se, but rather his political opposition.
Schools, prisons, etc are institutions that can decide what is appropriate for their audience and how they want to spend their shelf space. A real banned book is a book that gets you in legal trouble if you're caught with it.
- Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
- Books that seems relatively anodyne, and it's not clear why they were banned. (eg: the perks of being a wallflower)
- Books that governments might have feared in the old days, but are now much less threatening than, other, more readily-available material. (eg: 1984)
I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information. Instead, modern book-banning feels much more symbolic. ie, "we do not approve of this book!" rather than effective. Anyone can buy the book on Amazon, or pirate it for free, or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas. And importantly, find many, many more extreme, subvesrive, rebellious, etc. ideas for free online.
Of course I do not support the banning of the books, but I think sometimes once a book is banned this act gives the book power -- in more senses than one. Less discussed is that the fans of the book often believe it to be better than it actually is, merely for being banned.
“I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information.”
You don’t think a school library can prevent access to information? Poor people exist.
Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.
Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)
For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in his home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.
I'd still hold that you can just get ahold of books these days if you want to, but your point stands that the mere spread of ideas is not equivalent to really reading the whole book.
Here in Poland we had "Mein Kampf" by certain Austrian painter in my primary school library for example.
According to that list, in Germany unannotated editions of Mein Kampf are still banned.
People who are canceled are not literally thrown in prison and executed.
A more accurate term might be "politically unfavorable", but that doesn't get people riled up. And, I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but this library is probably zeroing in on books that are politically unfavorable to conservative governments. I doubt we'll find the likes of Mein Kampf in there.
Language is mutable and alive and ever-changing. That's just how it goes.
+Used to mean 'inspiring awe'
++Used to mean 'young child (gender neutral)'
+++Used to mean 'foolish' or 'ignorant'
For example, North Korea has banned most western books so my local Barnes and Nobles is pretty much a banned book store.
It is not clear to me from the reporting if Manifesto Library is a translation error or if it really is a library within a bookshop.
I suspect it's neither and more like an art installation.
So I think they are aware of the “false friends” words.
With that said, I don’t think it’s an actual library, more like, as you said, an art installation, an exhibition, a space for highlighting books.
I've been to lots of bookstores with sections or displays for famously banned books. I'm pretty sure my local Indigo (basically a Canadian Barnes & Noble) has one. If that's all this is then it doesn't sound especially newsworthy outside of the celebrity involvement and maybe the renown of this particular shop.
OTOH the article describes it as a "permanent" installation, which does sound a little different from what I'm picturing.
Considering the length of the line to get into that place, I'd wager you're correct.
And barely a bookshop at that, more of a tourist attraction. You need tickets to enter, and the main selection of books are classics, mainly public domain iirc. They have more recent/interesting books but only as decoration (I asked to buy a Naomi Klein book, they refused to sell it). Most people are just there to take pictures because the stairs inspired Harry Potter.
Even discussing a taboo topic may cost someone their freedom, if not their life.
Two of my favorite examples:
https://youtu.be/QMF5-0wfs1I
https://youtu.be/5yuL6PcgSgM
Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.
It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.
They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.
The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.
The "goal" is clear enticement to engage in illegal and dangerous activities, and your cause argues this is necessary literature for children to have access to. "This Book is Gay" was not easily banned; quite the fight was put up by the gay community and its allies to defend it, so it cannot be argued that it's just one psycho pushing it. There is no reason to presume anything gay-adjacent deserves the benefit of doubt when these are the lengths its supporters will push boundaries to.
That anybody needs mentorship in how to "accept" something they were supposedly "born" as and "always knew they were" is sophistry to begin with anyway. I didn't need to be told I was heterosexual, but nobody was given the chance to confuse me into thinking otherwise either. Gay literature (mostly boring, self-indulgent memoirs of narcissists and their sexual endeavors) is the most effective cult recruiting material imaginable since once you desensitize yourself to it, arousal becomes a positive feedback loop, driving continued engagement with it until it feels normal. Literal gay conversion. Training any other behavior works the same way-- ask any dominatrix or dog handler.
We're told we should give this sort of content to children, and for their benefit. Lmao. We give them amphetamines already.
We're also told a trans genocide is going on and the entire western world is about to experience population collapse because nobody is having kids, in addition to a male loneliness epidemic. Maybe teaching kids to engage in illegal, non-procreative sexual activity with adult strangers that strangle them to avoid legal risk/humiliation is a deranged and antisocial idea that is not in the best interests of humanity itself?
Maybe your way is...wrong?
Your imagination has clearly gone way off the deep end here. Reading that there are gay people doesn't turn people gay. If you think it does, that says more about you, I think.
Trying to hide the existence of gay people from children leads to homophobia from the straight kids, and mental health issues from the gay kids. You are dead wrong here.
would you need someone to tell you you were heterosexual, or would you figure it out on your own (having rarely, if ever, seen it before)?
try considering things from other people's perspective. you'll find that it opens up your mind and heart to various forms of empathy!
Sun Tzu did say "appear weak when you are strong".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818766
That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.
That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.
Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/holocaust-novel-maus-banne...
Dua Lipa wasn't doing a photo op with Maus. In the photos she's posing with modern books that are still being promoted by their publishers. I'm not familiar with all of them, but a quick search shows one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
This is a promotional stunt, and I'm surprised more people aren't seeing through it.
Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.
[0]: https://www.pluggedin.com/book-reviews/1984/
And no one really pretended that these cases were cases of "banned books".
The problem is when authority bodies (school, government, ...) start to include, in these "normal non-appropriate" books other books not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons.
I think it would be a very bad faith argument to argue that reading Maus will lead to people less socially adjusted.
And, sure, some "banned" books may be inappropriate. But as soon as these authorities have open the doors to arbitrary banning books, they poisoned their own well: maybe under "normal" evaluation this book should be removed from the list, but they removed it "the bad way", they failed the process, and therefore the ban itself is illegitimate.
It's a bit like the procedural miscarriage of justice: if you mess up when arresting someone, they can be freed even if it turns out they were guilty. Or in a more topical subject: the Fifa can reverse some decision, but if they do it in the context where they received phone calls from the US president, then it's a big failure in the process, even if a "normal" re-evaluation should indeed have concluded to reversing the decision.
“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.
On one hand, you have someone who says that exposing children to sexual or violent content can have an impact on them. This is something that has been studied, sociologists, psychiatrists, doctors, ... have concluded that this is true.
On the other hand, you have someone who says that an ideology they don't like will lead to the ruin of the society. At the same time, communities, and often whole countries themselves, don't see the problem with these ideologies, and the catastrophe that this person has predicted does not occur. The only reason they claim that is because they are intolerant and want to impose their ideology, not because they want what's good for others.
So, yes, there are __some__ subjectivity. The same way that there is subjectivity around "good and bad" and yet "murdering" is universally considered as "bad" but "not going to the catholic mass" is not.
Societies that practice(d) slavery and human sacrifice clearly do not share such a "universal" value.
A murder is specifically an unjustified killing. And as far as I am aware it is universally considered bad. Which makes sense because murder being considered bad is pretty much baked into the definition.
I can’t think of a modern society that does not condemn going into a random person’s house and killing them. Nor any past ones for that matter.
Now in some backwards ass country they might not consider it murder if that random person was homosexual. Or a killing might be justified in the context of a revolution. Or to bring rain. Or when shooting some guy fleeing with your tv in the back.
Sure, "murdering" is not "100% always in all circumstances considered 100% bad" (but I still think that "universal" was not a bad choice, the same way "universal healthcare" does not mean there is no illegibility criteria and therefore exceptions). And of course, there is a lot of discussion to even have on what people mean by murder, but that is, again, missing the point.
But that is totally ridiculous to then pretend that it means that "murdering is bad" has therefore as much legitimacy as "touching your nose with the left hand index finger is bad".
The fact that is subjective does not mean that you cannot say anything anymore. It feels like a common bias in "technology" people: some of them think they are so smart and are condescending to "social science", and yet they are lost on concepts that social science considers as obvious.
Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
It's authoritarian because it's about people with authority (parents, teachers), telling people without (students) what kinds of media they are and aren't allowed to consume, which is about controlling which ideas they're allowed to think about. You don't like children thinking or learning about sex, but there is no moral or rational reason for that. You just don't like it, and you wish to use your authority to impose your preferences on people who have no power to stop you. That's authoritarian.
And no, I don't think parents should be able to control their children's media diets, the idea that parents get to control their children is itself authoritarian. You don't own your kids.
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_(2015_film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Behind_the_Sun
Let's just be honest about that at least.
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
While "everything is political", I can still see some differences. What was presented as "banned on neutral, apolitical basis base" in the previous comment can be seen as political at some level, but they are way less political than "let's ban this book because I don't want my children to be exposed to lefties ideas".
It feels like there is an order of magnitude less importance to "maintaining our children unexposed to others' point of view" in the cases of left-wing book-banning than in the right-wing side. After all, right-wing book banning often works on "leftie keywords" or themes (gender study stuffs, inclusivity, ...) while I don't think there is a real movement to ban books because they use too much of "right-wing keywords" (free market stuffs, nationalism, ...).
The issue there isn’t that kids are being exposed to these items, the issue is that other parents are censoring what _my_ kid can be exposed to. They are infringing on _my_ rights.
Meanwhile I’m not requiring their kid to go into a library and checkout Maya Angelou.
The books aren’t banned.
Would you prefer forbidden? Barred? Censored?
As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.
If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.
That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.
If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.
No librarian, or teacher, or admin or parent in the other school districts gets any say.
That’s a ban. People may not like that their state is engaging in authoritarian behavior, and it’s less authoritarian than other behaviors, but it’s a ban by the simple facts. Doublespeak doesn’t change that.
I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.
If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?
We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.
Obviously, I do think that.
> So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
Sure.
> My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
I don't, but I was one, and I accessed all kinds of stuff on the internet that my parents and teachers didn't want me to see. Including gross violence and sex stuff. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. I'm fine. I'm a better person for having exposed myself to those things than I would be if I'd been sheltered from them.
No one else provided any, either. If you have strong evidence that exposure to media you don't like is bad for your children, please provide it. If you don't have any, my anecdote is better evidence than you've provided.
Two people calling out an opinion as extreme does not make it extreme, and an opinion being extreme does not make it wrong.
> Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
parents
If you want to go full anti-authoritarian, you are literally advocating anarchy. One in which you have no right to jail someone for killing someone else.
There are many moral systems! Some of them are based in Christian ethics, which many people prescribe to. In fact it's the one the United States is based on. You can also choose something like liberalism. Many or most people would at least agree that "killing randon people at random times" being advocated in a book is not a good thing. And if that's not a good thing, then there is a moral judgement to be made to "ban" said book. I'm not saying that book exists, but if it did - would you "ban" it?
No one "owns" another person, but there are many other forms of relationships between people that allows for one person to dictate a media diet for another.
Parent-based rights arguments are perfectly adequate for the 80%, but degenerate in some horrific ways for the rest of the population. We need community-level input on how to raise kids so that the leftover 20% don’t just get fucked up by parents that “know best for their kid”.
Anecdotally know of a few times where kids were taught that their molestation was their own fault (both sub-10yo), and had friends whose parents actively pushed them to kill themselves
I don't have a solution for you for all types of families, but this doesn't change that miyoji's take is fairly extreme.
If I'm prevented from bringing my dog into a restaurant, that doesn't mean that dogs are banned. It means I have to go to the restaurant on the other side of the street.
If McDonald's doesn't serve any hard liquor it doesn't mean that alcohol has been banned in the country.
They will have all the time and opportunity in the world to read and try anything they want to when they're older.
Everywhere throughout all time is obviously not authoritarian, so the definition fails. Sorry, you are wrong.
The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.
The book can still be printed, bought, and read. It’s not banned.
The groups demanding books be removed are often not even parents of children in the school. It external parties driving this stuff.
Declining to provide a book is not the same as prohibiting the possession, use, or distribution of a book.
As for “external parties”, schools in the US are public institutions.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Their kids will be taught that's all it ever was since the first colony was established in this otherwise-uninhabited land on Stardate 2302.5.
I don’t think this is actually true. What’s your source for this? States set K-12 curriculum.
Whether books by e.g. Jared Taylor are also "banned" in this manner in the UK is left wonderfully vague - the only way to find out is to be found possessing one, and then see if the government prosecutes you. You get chilling effects for free, and avoid the bad PR or a "banned books" list!
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
[2] https://www.thelawpages.com/criminal-offence/Possessing-raci...
[3] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/R-v-Robe...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3yl0dgq3no
I've actually really been a fan of her, and her music before I heard about her Service95 endeavour. So seeing that video led me to looking into her Service95 work, and yeah, I have to say, she's the real deal.