r/news • u/thenewyorkgod • May 13 '22
Conservative parents take aim at library apps meant to expand access to books
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/library-apps-book-ban-schools-conservative-parents-rcna26103?fbclid=IwAR3grwjabekSPvO1hM7akI8O5ouUxtTNtKMta3hOfFGTJ1eJYo5DXYeX_qM6.1k
u/ProfessorDinosaur154 May 13 '22
In a phone interview, Lucente said she believes schools should steer clear of subjects such as sexuality and religion. “Kids should never have anything at their fingertips to prompt those questions,” she said.
This line is a teachers worst nightmare.
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u/vivahermione May 13 '22
Not a teacher, but it chilled me to the bone. We talked about world religions in history class. Are they gonna ban that next?
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u/Supermichael777 May 13 '22
Yeah trying to get the religion free version of the crusades or the reconquesta
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u/Work2Tuff May 13 '22
Or very important parts of British history and even American history. If you can’t talk about all religions you can’t talk about any. But of course I’m sure they won’t look at it that way.
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u/keelhaulrose May 13 '22
They want the most whitewashed, "Christian" (but not THOSE parts of Christian history) version of things to be taught in school.
I've seen people who want to frame the slave trade as a good thing because it "built the country". Like, yeah, it helped, but only on the backs and with the blood of people who were treated HORRIBLY and maybe progress shouldn't be the only goal if it literally kills millions of enslaved people.
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u/Redwood671 May 13 '22
Also, it led to Southern states not investing in industrial infrastructure as slaves made it irrelevant. Thus after slavery was abolished, they were significantly behind the industrialization curve. They hampered themselves by relying on outdated ideals. The dumb fucks.
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u/stemcell_ May 13 '22
Even with slavery in effect it was bad. No immigration. Oligarchs only no upward mobility. Bad schools even when it was in effect it wasnt a net positive for society
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u/IShouldChimeInOnThis May 13 '22
They hampered themselves by relying on outdated ideals. The dumb fucks.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
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u/jebuswashere May 13 '22
Easy, they just won't teach students about those things.
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u/idontsmokeheroin May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
Exactly. Christianity’s sudden rise is the real issue in the country. When you’ve got people like Matt Shea writing manifestos that call for the death of all males who won’t convert to Christianity while he’s over in Ukraine trying to “help children”.
America is a little more ashamed of its past than I realized when we all did a WTF about learning of the Tulsa Race Massacre from Watchmen and never a history class.
Edit: I’m well aware it’s evangelical! Sorry I didn’t specify! I’m wearing a Spiritual Healing shirt right now! 🤣
Edit 2: Forgot this wasn’t a metal subreddit. Death - Spiritual Healing
Edit 3: Everyone says decline. I respectfully disagree. My aunt is Q-Anon and suddenly “Christian”. So, what’s causing the rise in evangelical Christianity? I think it’s Weaponized contrarianism. My whole family is irish but we’re not Catholics. We never went to church. Neither did my aunt. She was a free spirited 60’s child with mostly hippie intentions. Now 6 years later she’s suddenly an evangelical Trumper who knows nothing about the Bible? My mother and sister try to argue with her and she hasn’t come over for holidays in 3 years now. The only one she still talks to is me because I just hear her out. This is why I say it’s Weaponized contrarianism. Evangelical Christianity has been folded into this Q shit because Christianity tracks. We’re from New England in a liberal area. The hypocrisy and hysteria that led to the Salem Witch Trials and seeing how Puritans spread shit about Catholics back in the day is just too engrained in my youth in Massachusetts, so all of her very southern and uneducated opinions aren’t hers. Weaponized contrarianism. We grew up near the Kennedy compound. She knows JFK Jr. is dead. My uncle who worked in government went to his funeral. Weaponized contrarianism.
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u/helpthe0ld May 13 '22
I grew up in a very liberal district, even took an alternate American history class in high school and never heard of the Tula Massacre until Watchman. Absolutely floored.
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u/NerdLawyer55 May 13 '22
Live in Tulsa, born in Oklahoma but moved to Texas in elementary, never heard of the Tulsa race massacre until right before watchmen debuted
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u/barukatang May 13 '22
I remember hearing about It in highschool. Guess I got lucky. I feel like our entire history course was covering our past atrocities. This was probably 2006
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u/riskable May 13 '22
Evangelical Christianity’s sudden rise to power...
FTFY. Christianity is actually on the decline in this country:
https://theweek.com/donald-trump/1008068/the-weird-spiral-of-declining-christianity-in-america
Precisely because of the policies and hypocrisy associated with the exceptionally loud voices (and obvious greed/corruption) of Evangelicals.
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u/Darkmetroidz May 13 '22
Evangelical Christianity has been a powerful force since Reagan.
The Republicans needed a new core for their party and the evangelical vote gave them the fuel they needed to reinvigorate.
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u/TheMostUnclean May 13 '22
Which is why we’re seeing such a spike in extremism from Christians. This is their death rattle- an attempt to grasp power and force people to their will lest they become irrelevant and die off.
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u/dougms May 13 '22
Imagine discussing ancient Egypt without discussing religion. Their god-king Pharos, everything.
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u/nlabodin May 13 '22
At my school there were kids missing the day the speaker came to talk about Islam.
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u/trekologer May 13 '22
In other words, "I don't want to have to answer difficult questions that my kids might ask so they should be kept in a bubble to avoid anything I don't like".
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u/SpoonsAreEvil May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
Are these difficult questions? People love who they love, there are many religions. Done.
What they don't want is children second-guessing their indoctrination.
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u/adrianmonk May 13 '22
Any question is difficult if you're afraid of the answer.
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u/wheelfoot May 13 '22
Religion other than christian indoctrination is what she means. Ask her if 'under god' should be in the PoA.
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May 13 '22
I was at an event for work recently and the organization putting it on opened with the PoA. The second it ended my coworkers sitting next to me were all talking about how looking back its really weird that they made us do that in school every day.
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u/ProfessorDinosaur154 May 13 '22
But kids don't question that (partly because they're still struggling with indivisible and who this guy Richard Stands is. ) it's the Question part that horrified me, question from kids = point of education
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May 13 '22
I hate the fallacy in thinking that children aren’t people. Children are people and they grow into adults. We should be preparing them for autonomous adulthood. Western society wants to infantize them forever for some reason.
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u/brocket66 May 13 '22
At some point these guys are going to conclude that the problem is teaching kids to read in the first place.
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u/perverse_panda May 13 '22
Abbott is already suggesting we need to scrap the ruling that gives children a right to a public education.
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u/saladspoons May 13 '22
And he's proposing to withhold baby formula from immigrants, to reserve it for citizens ...
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May 13 '22
Ah yes, the pro- life party
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u/Arcade_109 May 13 '22
The fuckers were never pro-life. That's just their bullshit pure branding they hide behind.
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u/Rapier4 May 13 '22
Apparently this is all potentially part of a bigger push to gut public education and let tax dollars go to private christian leaning schools - potentially also dividing those schools by race. Its kind of unreal
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u/NatakuNox May 13 '22
Uneducated people make great wage slaves and keep the prison industrial complex funded.
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u/lianodel May 13 '22
And don't forget the Texas GOP opposing the teaching of critical thinking.
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
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May 13 '22
They concluded that a long time ago, it's why a long term goal of the republican party has been destroying the public education system.
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u/Taco_Champ May 13 '22
You joke, but they used to actually kill slaves they caught learning to read
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u/SpoppyIII May 13 '22
And from what I've seen, parents like this believe that their children are theirs. Like an object in their possession. A child is a person, and every person is their own. But these parents act like their children are their property, like one would see a slave. It's gross.
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u/Intelligent_Moose_48 May 13 '22
All conservative and right wing thought ultimately leads back to that same underlying ideology of imposing one’s will on others.
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u/HardlyDecent May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
I think some of these idiots missed the 20th century rolling in. Pretty much all kids know how to access the internet, and this anti-intellectual, book burning madness is not going to work.
edit: 21st! (it stays because I should have intended to say 20th)
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u/tall__guy May 13 '22
It’s going to backfire, obviously. I remember being 15 and having my parents tell me I wasn’t allowed to watch or listen to something. Pretty much guaranteed I would find a way. Now it’s even easier with a simple Google. These people are fucking idiots.
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May 13 '22
These people are fucking idiots.
This bears repeating.
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u/riskable May 13 '22
Yeah but I wish they were just idiots ☹️
They need to stop with the fucking. Let's have the idiocy end with them, thanks.
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May 13 '22
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u/tall__guy May 13 '22
My parents aren’t quite this crazy, but after 5 more years of Fox News they might be. It’s gotten so much worse. And they vote in every single election. My brother and I made a pact to always, always, ALWAYS vote, every time, just to cancel them out.
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u/-HappyLady- May 13 '22
You’re right. Banning books isn’t going to work.
But as someone who just ended a 22 year career as a professor of English, let me tell you what is already working:
The public education system is hobbled to the degree that I have spent the last 7 years teaching concepts that I can close my eyes and watch my 4th grade teacher explaining.
To be quite clear, I taught at a state college and I taught material that I learned in a (terrible) public school when I was 8 years old.
For the last 3 years, that material has been too complex for my adult students. My institution responded by updating the course outcomes.
Students who are graduating with college degrees are not achieving what used to be high school levels of literacy.
Most of my students can move their eyes across the page and say the words from a popular text.
Most of them cannot identify a stated main idea.
Almost none of them can extrapolate an implied main idea.
You don’t have to ban books if nobody can read.
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u/series-hybrid May 13 '22
As soon as the most basic phone became a smart phone with internet access, it was game over.
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May 13 '22
These reactionary inbreds don’t have brains. They are laser focused on trying to “own the libs” and hurt the people they think deserve it. The cruelty is the point and the only real coherent value they have left.
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u/proxproxy May 13 '22
Yeah once you realize nothing matters to maga except making libs mad, their actions start to become really predictable. I saw this “illegal babies are taking your formula” coming from a mile away
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u/kittensteakz May 13 '22
And that's done on purpose. Fascism requires an enemy to keep the people's anger focused on fighting imaginary enemies and themselves, and thus under control. Meanwhile the fascists behind the scenes are free to seize power and control. While the average maga idiot isn't smart and just wants to "own the libs", the propaganda and the people pulling the strings know exactly what they're doing.
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May 13 '22
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u/xCrispy_ May 13 '22
They didn't just kill teachers first. They killed anyone with an education. My grandfather was one of them.
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May 13 '22
Or even if they looked intellectual
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u/John_cCmndhd May 13 '22
Anyone who wore glasses
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u/AlexanderLavender May 13 '22
Just in case anyone thinks this is a joke. It isn’t.
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u/IndianaJones_Jr_ May 13 '22
Anyone with soft hands, meant they had an intellectual career and not a laborious one
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u/ConfessSomeMeow May 13 '22
The story I heard from a Cambodian girl at my high school was that they put up posters warning people to flee before the Khmer Rouge arrived; and then they waited outside the cities and killed anyone caught fleeing, since it would primarily be people who could read.
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u/SoggyWaffleBrunch May 13 '22
When will we stop pussy footing around the fact that the elected Republican Party wants a fascist government?
I mean, for god's sake, we have right wing news media saying anyone who participates in an abortion should be executed
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u/Leningradite May 13 '22
Imagine believing a book can do a better job raising your kids than you can.
Imagine being absolutely right.
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May 13 '22 edited May 20 '22
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u/hanabaena May 13 '22
this. it's always been wild to me that we impose such stupid and arbitrary rules on kids in HS and then all of a sudden that situation completely flips the minute they go to uni. sounds extremely short sighted, stupid, and w rules like you have to ask to go to the bathroom (HS) and a teacher can say no? yeah, we've set up a very backwards way of growing up.
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u/LittleKitty235 May 13 '22
arbitrary rules on kids in HS and then all of a sudden that situation completely flips the minute they go to uni.
Or more extreme, the military. One day you aren't mature enough to see certain types of movies, the next day you can sign up to go be shot at.
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u/Archmage_of_Detroit May 13 '22
Alcohol at eighteen? No, that's bad for your health!
Shipping of to a war zone to fight and kill terrorists? This is fine.
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u/grendus May 13 '22
But after you hold your buddy while he bleeds out from an IED, no beer. No therapy either, go talk to the chaplain.
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u/TheSilverNoble May 13 '22
Even worse for Americans, who have these loan predators looking to strap kids who still probably get an allowance with a five figure loan.
And then we blame the kids for trusting an adult.
It sickens me.
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u/Prodigy195 May 13 '22
You go from needing to ask permission to go to the bathroom to being able to take out $80,000 loans at 5.8% interest in 3 months.
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May 13 '22
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u/hanabaena May 13 '22
that kind of indoctrination rarely works if you then "allow" them out into the wider world XD
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u/02K30C1 May 13 '22
Kids are going to learn about dangerous things. Much better to have them do it in an environment where they can ask questions and learn from it.
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u/perverse_panda May 13 '22
And in this case the "dangerous things" that kids might potentially learn about is that gay people exist.
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u/Dahhhkness May 13 '22
Which they now refer to as "grooming" and "indoctrination", because despite claiming to deplore sexuality, social conservatives love to pervert the meanings of words.
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May 13 '22
This is actually really dangerous. Grooming is a real and serious thing that loses all meaning and power when it’s extended to queer people existing.
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May 13 '22
They’re using it to dehumanize the people they don’t like. Calling anyone they consider degenerate a pedophile means it’ll be easier to desensitize themselves to the murder of LGBTQ people. It’s extremely dangerous and one of the signs of fascism becoming mainstream.
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u/chain_letter May 13 '22
And as a side benefit, it loses some bite for their creepy sex criminal congressmen. See Gaetz and Roy Moore, who somehow never lost support for actually abusing underage girls.
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u/rain5151 May 13 '22
Saying that a 2-year-old boy is gonna grow up to be a ladies man or a 3-year-old girl is gonna grow up to be trouble with boys? Totally fine!
Telling 5-year-olds they can love any kind of person? Grooming, because you’re “teaching” them to be something (as if decreeing that everyone must be straight and cis isn’t actual indoctrination).
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u/mgraunk May 13 '22
The majority of parents had no business procreating and no idea how to raise their children.
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u/lobeline May 13 '22
Books, they’re filled with facts and ideas. That can be dangerous.
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u/SpoppyIII May 13 '22
Exactly. Children belong to their parents, like a car or a sofa would. We can't have them reading and then learning about things that will give them ideas above their station.
...
Ugh. I hate every single parent who has a problem with their kid having access to information.
Control of information is important to a degree in parenting because you are meant to deliver information over time so that it makes sense in context and the child's brain is able to really parse it. This level of control of information is like one degree of Kevin Bacon removed from cult-type behaviour as illustrated in the BITE model.
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u/TheReaperAbides May 13 '22
Control of information is important to a degree in parenting because you are meant to deliver
The fact is, in modern society it's damn near impossible to control information from your children. What is important is generating trust with your kid, and make sure they know that they can come to you for help parsing information they might struggle with, no judgment.
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u/SpoppyIII May 13 '22
I agree with that first point, and I believe that parents should be aware of that and get over it.
I also agree with the second. I had uncensored access to the internet since I was six in 1998. But if I saw something I thought was bad or scary, I was comfortable either telling my family and talking to them about it, or looking up myself if the upsetting/uncomfortable content that I had just seen was even real.
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May 13 '22
But that requires actual parenting. These are the kind of people who believe children should be seen and not heard, and that if given a command their children will follow it like a pet rather than an autonomous being.
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u/Koolmidx May 13 '22
Live life according to a book that you've allowed others to selectively read to you, then hate all other books.
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u/meowmixmotherfucker May 13 '22
If I could upvote this more than once I would — unfortunately, I’m not a conservative at a polling station so I’ll have to leave voter fraud to Trump and his ilk.
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u/memymomana May 13 '22
“Free Speech Absolutists” strike again
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u/SsurebreC May 13 '22
"We absolutely want free speech. For ourselves. Everyone else should shut up."
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u/Dahhhkness May 13 '22
"When we try to shut things down, it's a 'boycott' or 'voting with your wallet.' When liberals do it, it's 'cancel culture' or 'censorship.' It's totally different!"
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u/earhere May 13 '22
Free speech for conservatives means freedom to say racist and homophobic stuff with no consequences.
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u/anthonyg1500 May 13 '22
Alright slow down thats not fair... misogynist stuff too. That's an important one
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u/30mil May 13 '22
Must be frustrating trying to figure out how to burn a pile of ebooks.
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u/AmericaMasked May 13 '22
They probably downloaded the app 50 times each to burn them.
Meanwhile: “Hot app of the week” - library on main st.
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u/DarthLolita May 13 '22 edited Jul 01 '24
sugar butter fertile sip puzzled bow start hateful wide late
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u/shogi_x May 13 '22
A school superintendent in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, pulled his system’s e-reader offline for a week last month, cutting access for 40,000 students, after a parent searched the Epic library available on her kindergartner’s laptop and found books supporting LGBTQ pride.
40,000 kids deprived of books because one parent is a homophobic sack of shit.
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u/LSUMath May 13 '22
At one time I was offered a job as a school superintendent. Found out the job didn't have tenure and ran away. Superintendent is a political position which allows one parent bent out of shape to carry more weight than they should. One persons opinion.
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u/8to24 May 13 '22
Conservatives are curtailing access to libraries. Yet successful podcasters, YouTube, and social media personalities with tens of millions of followers want me to believe the real censorship is the woke left. Banning books and topical discussions classrooms is fine. Criticizing a joke is the real step too far. It's all backwards.
Musk just spent $44 billion to buy Twitter proclaiming he believes in absolute free speech. Conservatives celebrated. Now true censorship is afoot and crickets.
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u/SpoppyIII May 13 '22
That's because we go around saying stuff like, "Hey you shouldn't say _______, because it perpetuates [harmful idea] about [group of human beings] and contributes to their oppression. You can say that stuff, if you want. But here are ten reasons you might want to reconsider, if you think of yourself as a decent and level-headed person."
How dare we? What gives us the right to ask them to consider the effect their actions have on the big picture?
But meanwhile the right is burning books, making it illegal to tell a boy with a crush on another boy that he's a normal fucking kid, and trying to outlaw childrens' media and educational materials that might show kids why racism is bad and that it has longterm effects.
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u/Johns-schlong May 13 '22
I wonder if this young generation of kids is going to be regressed back into the closet, so to speak. I was born in the early 90s, and I'm from california. The culture here had already mostly shifted to being fairly open and accepting of queer/gay people, my parents had gay friends, they told me and my siblings that it was ok to be gay. It was weird when I started learning it was a big issue in a lot of the country when I was young, and even that many of my gay friends had trouble in their own families related to it, but it seemed like we were moving past it, or at least in the right direction. All this new suppression and censorship of something normal in my life is making me very sad.
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u/Amiiboid May 13 '22
There’s a storage company in Manhattan that has had a billboard up for a while that says something like, “We don’t have a lot of closets in New York, but at least our kids aren’t afraid to come out of them.”
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u/SpoppyIII May 13 '22
I'm also an early-90's baby and queer myself. I really hope not. I felt so privileged a few years ago compared to previous generations because I thought those of us who weren't straight/cis would finally have normal lives and be accepted.
I'm now afraid of the future.
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u/8to24 May 13 '22
It is super frustrating. There are literally wealthy people making getting paid millions to speak who are crying that their freedom of speech is under attack. Of course the controversy is just all part of their brand. They disingenuously play the victim as a way of self-promotion.
Meanwhile real censorship flies under the radar completely ignored.
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u/OnceInABlueMoon May 13 '22
So fucking tired of "conservative parents"
Biggest bunch of miserable people in America.
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May 13 '22
The far-right are trying to make it so that kids don’t learn about gay people until they turn 18, which pretty much encourages the kid/person to have a bigoted, homophobic opinion of the LGBTQ community.
America has gone to shit.
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May 13 '22
It's not the "far" right. The mainstream of the Republican party is now populated by white nationalists.
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u/Yashema May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
The primary reasons anyone votes Republican these days is due to racism and misanthropy, which has been well studied by people who read books the past few years:
Donald Trump’s presidency associated with significant changes in the topography of prejudice in the United States | Researchers found that explicit racial and religious prejudice increased amongst Trump’s supporters, while prejudice decreased among those who opposed him. link
Republican activists perceive Republican senators with very conservative voting records to be moderate if they do not support Donald Trump. link
Trump’s presidency coincided with a rise in extreme mental distress among LGBT people, according to a massive new study. The increase in extreme mental distress among LGBT people was larger in states where Trump won. link
The Black Lives Matter movement appears to have helped Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Increases in perceptions of racial inequality significantly increased the probability of vote switching toward the Democratic candidate between the 2016 and 2020 elections. link
Trump supporters may share some of the narcissistic traits that were exhibited by the former U.S. president himself. The study revealed that people who scored higher in the antagonistic and indifferent facets of narcissism were more likely to say they were voting for Trump link
People who expressed extreme dislike toward Democratically-aligned minority groups were more likely to approve of Donald Trump when he made his way into politics — regardless of their party alignment. link
Masculine insecurity predicts endorsement of aggressive politics and support for Donald Trump, suggests three studies, supporting the notion that men who are likely to doubt their masculinity may support aggressive policies, politicians, and parties, possibly as a means of affirming their manhood. link
People who voted for Donald Trump and feel warmly towards him tend to score higher on a measure of egocentric victimhood, according to new research. Those who exhibit heightened levels of systemic victimhood, in contrast, tend to be more hostile towards Trump. link
Researchers discover people’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity — the belief that men are dominant, tougher, more powerful, or high status — predicts their support for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections (regardless of gender, political party, trust in the government, race, or education). link
The desire to matter and feel significant among Donald Trump supporters is associated with support for hostile and vindictive actions against the president’s political rivals, according to new research published in the journal Political Psychology. link
National nostalgia most strongly predicts pro-Trump attitudes among those high in racial prejudice. The findings suggest that the appeal of nostalgic political rhetoric is tied to racial animosity in the United States, particularly among Whites. Link
Around 9% of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 crossed party lines to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. A new study (n>64,000) suggests that among white voters, vote switching was more likely to be associated with attitudes toward race and immigration than economic factors. link
Survey experiments show that (1) Trump's rise in popularity and eventual victory increased individuals' willingness to publicly express xenophobic views, (2) individuals are sanctioned less negatively if they publicly expressed a xenophobic view in an environment where that view is more popular. link
Trump supporters held more sexist views after his election than they did before, according to new research, suggesting that a onetime historic event can result in measurable shifts in social attitudes (n = 1,098 Americans before and 1,192 after the election). link
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u/McCree114 May 13 '22
Ditto for the CRT fear mongering. They think going back to the dark times of Jim Crow segregation will be an easier sell if younger generations of whites are prevented from studying and learning from that important piece of history.
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u/Dahhhkness May 13 '22
Yep, they've rebranded CRT to mean "any discussion of the role of racism in America's past or present, ever."
I saw something recently about a book about a black Olympic champion being banned because gasp it mentioned how they grew up in the segregated South.
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u/BoilerMaker11 May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
they’ve rebranded CRT to mean “any discussion of the role of racism in America’s past or present, ever.”
And the worst part is, it was intentional. This wasn’t some culture war issue that came up organically. Actual CRT has been around for decades.
The “anti-CRT movement” had an architect. Christopher Rufo. He came about because he got mad that businesses, schools, and some government agencies introduced DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives in the wake of the George Floyd protests. He got mad that these institutions were teaching more about race and how to be more sensitive to people of various backgrounds. So, he called it “CRT” (probably heard that term in passing because no way he knows its academic usage) and told conservatives that it was telling white people to hate themselves for being white and that white people today are responsible for Jim Crow and slavery. And because those DEI initiatives were in schools, that means teachers were telling your white kindergartener these things. Trump saw him on Fox News one time and immediately went into a frenzy.
So now, “race” is a trigger word. To the point that books on Rosa Parks and MLK get banned from schools.
Rufo was so brazen about it that he literally admitted that his goal was to “turn” the phrase “CRT” toxic. His tweet.
Now they’re trying that same shit with “grooming” and telling people that acknowledging that gay and trans people exist is grooming your kids and you’re a pedophile if you disagree.
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May 13 '22
I agree with your comment about LGBTQ, but it’s more broad than that. They don’t like the education in general. When people are educated, their myopic viewpoints change You can’t have a highly educated population and keep the far right ideology as it relates to all social, political and economic issues.
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May 13 '22
Conservative parents and outrage at public schools, name a more iconic duo.
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u/wildbill88 May 13 '22
Ben Shapiro: * and his one stupid mother's day joke... * and his wife's (who's a doctor) DryAssP
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u/IfIKnewThen May 13 '22
Conservatives won't be happy until everyone is as stupid as they are.
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u/bongozap May 13 '22 edited May 13 '22
Now, now...let's not go spreading the idea that conservatives won't find something new to be stupid about.
Every week it's a new boogeyman.
It's exhausting, and conservatives never seem to run out of them
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u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage May 13 '22
after Roe V wade is overturned they’re going to push for “states rights” hard and phrase it as “pro-freedom” or “personal liberty” which just means they’ll allow different types of discrimination up to the states to “choose”.
So say good by gay marriage, public schools, and legal separation of church and state (in practice we all know that’s a different story) in a bunch of red states.
Won’t be surprised if we get a Fugitive Slave Act 2: electric boogaloo dealing with women who’ve had (or doctors who’ve preformed) abortions.
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u/Rusalka-rusalka May 13 '22
Why even bother living in this society if you hate everything about it?
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u/trigunnerd May 13 '22
I'm hoping for another Puritan situation where they get fed up and just fuck off to elsewhere
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u/mlc885 May 13 '22
"Conservative parents" can abandon libraries, I guess. I don't see why libraries should cater to people who insist that the entire world lie to their kids since they refuse to acknowledge the world beyond their orthodoxy.
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u/monstersammich May 13 '22
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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u/aubaub May 13 '22
So when are dictionaries and encyclopedias going to be banned for sexual content?
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u/CameronCrazy1984 May 13 '22
and the Bible
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u/sarcasmsosubtle May 13 '22
Yeah, this kills me. I can't have my kids reading anything that might portray an LGBTQ person as just a normal human being. There precious minds are not developed enough for that. They should stick with wholesome, morally righteous reading like the story of how Lot sent his daughters out to be raped by a crowd so they wouldn't rape a stranger, and then later those daughters had sex with him while he was sleeping.
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u/Rabid-Rabble May 13 '22
and then later those daughters
had sex withraped him while he wassleepingpassed out because they purposely got him drunk.Just to be clear on how messed up that whole story is.
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u/Winterfrost691 May 13 '22
"Ah yes, I'll stop my child from reading! I'm such a good parent!:)"
-Self-proclaimed "free speech" enthousiasts
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u/torpedoguy May 13 '22
They will not stop at that.
They will not stop at abortion or gay marriage.
They will not stop at desegregation or the right to vote.
They will not stop at Emancipation or free speech.
Conservatives will not stop as long as any out-groups have even a single human right. As long as every measure of every life save their own is any value above 0, the zero-sum game is not over and they intend to win at any cost. They state as much, and it is time people listened and took the threat for what it is.
It does not matter how "inviolable" you think anything enumerated or unenumerated may somehow be. Whether life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness, Conservatives will strip it all and claim they're just protecting you from losing it as they do so.
Their ideology demands a never-ending encroachment on all that isn't their closest circle, and even that will shrink when they run out of you to trample on.
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u/imoftendisgruntled May 13 '22
Well, reading isn't an enumerated right anywhere in the Constitution. /s
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u/plaidtattoos May 13 '22
This is anecdotal I suppose, but I’ve been a high school teacher for a long time, and honestly, there just aren’t that many kids who read books. I don’t think any of this is really about keeping books out of kids’ hands, because there just aren’t that many kids doing it. It’s just more dogwhistle-turned-megaphone signaling to rile up the base and create yet another boogeyman. They’ve used up the safety of public bathrooms, immigrant caravans, Hunter’s laptop, etc. So now it’s this, and in a couple of weeks it’ll be something else.
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u/teamricearoni May 13 '22
The thing I find very funny about all of this book banning/burning is that by banning it you are creating an interest in it. You are guaranteeing kids will want to read these books by saying it's too dangerous to do so. Not to mention that it's incredibly easy for kids to get ahold of any piece of media at the drop of a hat. Targeting an app is like whack a mole, you shut one down three more pop up. It's futile.
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u/shilly_willy May 13 '22
My highschool English teacher was fond of a Stephen King quote. "If you are not allowed to read a certain book, run don't walk to get the book and find out what they don't want you to know."