I admire the students that are setting up book clubs for banned books. They are recognizing that they are being given a list of what they should read.
They’re also evidence of why the book banning doesn’t really work as well today as conservatives would like it to.
Book banning was an effective way of controlling what your young population was exposed to before the internet and social media. It worked best when the young weren’t even aware of the information they were being denied.
But social media is making sure they’re all very much aware of what has been hidden from them. They know what’s going on. You will find teenagers in particular are kind of resistant to being told no by an authority, so they’re going to do something about it.
Now, don’t feel too excited about this, because there’s a threat here. Every single time you see a conservative talking about more stringent age verification for things on the internet, part of what they’re actually trying to do is create an avenue to control the information kids are exposed to. They are pretty open about how LGBT issues, particularly the T ones, can be labeled as “sexual” and “inappropriate”. With very simple changes to the regulation, they can suppress children’s access to anything they like as long as they make a half-assed argument that it’s “inappropriate”.
It also opens the door to more internet censorship…
Fun trick I do with my children is to way things like “Oh yeah you don’t want that. It’s forbidden” if I want them to read more about it.
You’re parent clickbait. “Honey, that’s one of the twelve things THEY don’t want you to know about!”
I’m assuming that getting books banned from libraries requires them to be there in the first place (in most cases at least), so any arguments using examples age rating issues should rather focus on why those books got into a school library in the first place.
Surely the ones responsible don’t just blindly choose some books to fill the library without at least making sure they’re not as wildly inappropriate as some people like to say.“Hey there’s a book about Minecraft - wait no it says ‘Mein Kampf’…”
i bet that one is allowed in most of these lists
Not in Germany… (it’s banned outside of school too)
Not true, you can even buy it on Amazon if you really want to.
I don’t think it’s legal though or is it?
It’s legal. An annotated version, with neither the swastika nor a picture of the greasy Nazi fuck, was published a few years back and tens of thousands were sold, primarily to German libraries and schools. It’s a good study on how shitheads think.
Those who erase history are attempting to repeat it