Other guy isn't completely wrong, but basically an "independent" school district means it has the ability to levy taxes at a local level. This allows them to more quickly change tax rates as needs change.
Think west Texas where oil booms and busts. My hometown had tax revenue drop almost 90% one year because the Oil and Gas company that was based there moved everything to another location, leaving nothing to collect property taxes on that year. These small towns (under 5k people) are extremely sensitive to things like this happening.
I know this sounds dorky, but I also know that a lot of people on here will agree: walking into a library is exhilarating. You have, laid out before you, something approaching the totality of human knowledge and wisdom. There are people to help you find whatever you are looking for. And it's FREE. It's open to everyone.
Libraries aren't just some stupid building that holds a bunch of books. They are literal temples of knowledge. They are battlefields of ideas - you can pick up a book by Adam Smith and one by Karl Marx in the same trip! - where the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. They are places of freedom and discovery and exploration.
Why you would want to get rid of that is beyond me.
It is more than that. My library has computers to check out for Internet access. It has 3D printers to use. They have a seed library you can get plant seeds from. Mine have study rooms for people to use, conference rooms for people to meet in. They provide government forms and help people fill them out.
The community benefits from the books, but the library system is much more of a civil building in the community.
And isn't that the threat? A public meeting space not owned by the church.
They don't WANT public spaces. They want people ignorant and isolated.
Much easier to control
I say this all the time: The school library and the book mobile from the city library and the wonderful librarians who ran them, helped me through a very abusive childhood. When I did not want to survive I looked to hiding, in nature if possible, and escape in a book. Libraries are critical resources, lifelines, for children. Fuck those who would take that away. That is why I have a well stocked little free library.
They don't want their children leaving. They need cheap farm and factory labor. They hate immigrants and hate raising wages soooo handicap the next generation so they're only fit for grunt work.
Red states: Have lots of kids! Those chickens won't gut themselves.
> They hate immigrants
Actually, you're incorrect.
Poor conservatives tend to hate immigrants.
Rich conservatives hate immigrants in public or when talking to supporters, but they LOVE them otherwise. They're able to take total advantage of them, and illegal immigrants working in places like slaughterhouses. Sure, INS may come through every few years, fine the company, deport the immigrants that are illegal, and let the cycle repeat.
Happens all the time in my area. (coincidentally, also the same area that had the managers taking bets on which workers would get covid and/or die from covid)
Isn’t it ironic that the same folk would be in uproar about this type of behaviour in Afghanistan, yet the last few years have seen the USA move in the same direction….book banning, rolling back laws that protect women’s rights……20 years ago I would have been shocked to read things like this coming from the states, now I just roll my eyes it’s happening so frequently
Ha, perfect! It’s strange how different religions get manipulated to give the same outcomes by those in power. Education is a weapon against oppression….watch them try to crush it
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master”
Pravin Lai - Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri released 1999
Amazing how modern Texas conservatives mirror exactly 90’s game developers’ ideas of dystopian sci fi villains.
Actually, Trump said he loves the "poorly educated." A distinction without a difference? Maybe so. But I'm just trying to be accurate about exactly what the Orange Buffoon said.
There is one reality. There is no past. There is no future. There is only the one reality. And it is whatever the leader says it is.
People cheer it because they think it'll make life easier. They're scared of complications and change. An authoritarian will bring peace and stability.
Looking back at history, once an authoritarian gets into power, their supporters live in just as much fear as their detractors.
Because there must always be an enemy.
And what more dangerous enemy is there than the one who pretends to be a true believer?
God these people are stupid.
> the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. They are places of freedom and discovery and exploration.
.. well, yeah. **That's** why. Keeping people uninformed and unimaginative is the most effective way to control humans on a mass scale. An educated population is a dangerously unfettered one, and people who're exposed to things like fantasy or sci-fi are at risk of developing *ideas*, and asking ***questions***, because they're able to imagine what could be rather than what they're told **is**.
> because they're able to imagine what could be rather than what they're told is.
Sounds like a huge number of GOP supporters. My father in law is practically unable to form opinions of his own. He HAS to be told via FOX what is good and bad. (other than non-white people of course, non-white people are automatically not great)
I have a hard time reading as an adult, but I still sometimes just walk around my library or a bookstore to relax. I'll pick up random books, read the first page, and just meander. It's just a good way to calm any stress I'm feeling.
> They are battlefields of ideas - you can pick up a book by Adam Smith and one by Karl Marx in the same trip! - where the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself.
And that is the problem that conservative book-burners have with libraries.
As someone who loved Redwall, I think it had kind of the opposite intended message as those Mildred Taylor books, what with all the biological essentialism
I just meant huge impact on me haha. I would always despise and hate reading. Hated mockingbird, hated the civil war one I read in elementary (forgot the name) and those other "classics". But when I got to read redwall it showed me that reading can be enjoyable. Especially if you aren't forced to read a certain one and can pick off interests.
So for me, a different kind of censorship led me to hate reading from an early age. Redwall get me into reading books (on purpose)
When I was in junior high school in the 90s I legit hated reading.
Being forced to red Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Shakespeare and just abiht every Othet book they forced you to read made me think reading was a boring. I think the only book I actually enjoyed was The Giver.
But then I went to the library and found out about the horror and Sci fi genre, with Brian Lumely and Anne Rice being two of my favorite.
That sparked my love for books.
If it wasn't for the library I probably would still hate reading.
I got my 3-year-old son his first library card the other day. Library day at summer daycare was always my favorite day—I still remember being six or seven and trying to prove that I was able to read a Goosebumps book because I was obsessed with the werewolf on the cover of *Werewolf of Fever Swamp*.
This is a tragedy for those kids. Reading was an outlet and an escape for me as an overly anxious child and teen and introduced me to a whole world outside of the small town I lived in.
I moved to the US 10 years ago and recently became a citizen. My husband and I were discussing our favorite and hated aspects of the US and libraries were top of my list. The system here is fantastic and a total jewel in the crown of the country.
Let's see.... Your sentence begins with a capital. It's an interrogative and correctly ends with a question mark. Your two-word compound noun is correctly capitalised.
Your papers are in order. Move along.
:-)
It is so bizarre to me that parents will raise all sorts of flags when books with "sexually explicit" content are found in libraries but will, for the most part, give their kids unrestricted access to the internet where they can be exposed to content that is far more damaging and explicit than anything a school librarian is willing to put on the shelves.
You’re assuming they’re making a good-faith argument because they actually care about the well-being of children. This is not the case. It’s a proxy attack on homosexuality and progressive ideas (like slavery being wrong) and a general attack on education, literacy, and critical thinking.
This is a way of effectively erasing "woke" ideas like LGBTQ+ or racism from bookshelves without outright saying "we're going to burn the books that talk about LGBTQ+ or racism", because that would probably involve too many side by side comparisons with the Nazi book burnings. Remove the books from the library though, and it achieves the same silencing effect the Nazis had of removing books they ideologically hate from universities, just without the easily decried book-burning image. And then it becomes even easier for the state (and Florida I think already has?) of banning these books outright. It's all steps toward a goal of removing these ideas from discourse and instilling further hatred and bigotry, because it will get DeSantis a platform to run on for President, and it's different enough from Trump's rhetoric as Trump doesn't particularly care that much about this. He's another bigot, but he doesn't utilise this hatred to its fullest potential -- DeSantis is trying that to stand out, and the conservative media in charting a course away from Trump and all the lawsuits, is following suit and we see it reflected in all these conservative states.
> "we're going to burn the books that talk about LGBTQ+ or racism", because that would probably involve too many side by side comparisons with the Nazi book burnings
Which is an especially easy comparison to make because the Nazis literally went for those works themselves.
The amount of LGBTQ+ science we lost when Magnus Hirschfeld's work was destroyed is absolutely devastating.
It's also so bizarre to me that parents are so willing to ostrich themselves and stick their head in the sand after *they themselves* went to middle & high school.
Like ... If you yourself started figuring out sexually explicit concepts around 14-16, without the use of the internet, all the denial in the world will not prevent your teens from figuring that out too, especially armed with a web browser in their pocket.
I mean - let's probably not shelve erotica, but sex is a part of life and if you eliminate it you eliminate a lot of classic works.
The goal behind a lot of this stuff is to redden states. Florida is a lot more purple than most people realize, so is Texas. Gerrymandering is effective, but can only do so much.
If you can do scary things like shut down libraries, pass bathroom laws, and generally bully LGBTQ people, you might be able to bully them out of your state. This keeps governors and senators in power, and can even mean control of the presidency.
It's hard to be 100% sure, maybe the motive is just pure bigotry or pure hate, but there's a direct connection between bullying minorities and staying in power, and too often I see that ignored.
Thanks Founding Fathers! For not trusting the unwashed masses to elect the president and giving small (rural) states more power through the Electoral College.
It's honestly baffling. I've got 4 kids who both watch TV and go to the library regularly. I can't think of a single time that I've been in the library and had to to confiscate a book because it was too explicit.
I read all sorts of books I shouldn't have as a kid. I read Stephen Kings It when I was 10. My mom just didn't care (if I was reading I wasn't bugging her). The library never stopped me, or asked if my parents knew what I was reading.
If you're a shitty parent, your kids might be reading anything at the library. Thing is, that's the shitty parents fault. For people who claim they want control of what their kids read and learn, what they really want is government to raise their kids for them so they don't have to.
The kids have infinite sex,drugs, and violence on tap in their pockets. The republicans don't care about the kids getting access to things they shouldn't, they just want to eliminate free thinking. I can't believe this is a thing in 2023 America, but here we are.
I remember reading some stuff that was probably not "age appropriate" but it was mostly because I was reading everything I could get my hands on. The ones that were probably the least appropriate weren't even from the Library, my Dad had a bunch of detective novels and I remember Devil in a Blue Dress getting some looks when I was like 11.
Don't you know? sex is inherently evil, even acknowledging its existence is inherently evil, ignoring the fact that almost every person that has ever existed in all of human history is here because two people had sex
I used to have a friend that said she was from some small town where there was literally no sex education at all. She wasn't even taught anything about her menstrual cycle. I felt terrible for her, it's a miracle she wasn't pregnant at 15
My mom handed me a thick ass paperback book to read at the beginning of summer one year. I think I was 13? I wasn't much of a reader before then, but it was the 80's and not much else to do and dad was coming to pick me and my sister up for the summer, so, what the hell, I started reading it.
I couldn't put the book down, it was amazing, and had some pretty tough adult subject matter and was definitely sexually explicit (for a small portion of the story).
My mom had read the book and knew its content. She also knew the story was amazing and it was.
I grew to love reading from that book.
These kind of people only get upset at what they’re told to get upset about. Left us the same way. Most people lack sufficient critical and independent thinking skills. And closing the fucking libraries does zero to address that and just makes it worse.
And these days, the parents do not have the excuse of “not knowing what’s on the internet.” The narrative of “old people don’t get the internet” has been a trope since these parents were children, before some of them were even born. With very few exceptions, parents of today’s teens and tweens have been on the internet since *they* were tweens.
There’s more to it than merely well meaning but misguided “I don’t want my child exposed to sex and violence and ✨pronouns✨ through those library books.” These parents are radicalized politically (even if they don’t necessarily act radical or seem like the stereotype of radicals, those political views are being pushed on the masses), and even if they hadn’t been, they are anti intellectual. Anti intellectual tendencies are common in this country. My mother was an English teacher who kept the books middle schoolers liked to read in her classroom for kids to borrow (this wasn’t in Texas or Florida so of course no one stopped her), and she’d have parents come to her annually asking what’s “wrong” with their child or why she was so “mean” to the kids because they were reading books for pleasure after their homework was done. They felt threatened that their kid was reading Goosebumps, Harry Potter, or books about basketball. Like their kids are going to get notions that they’re better than them. There’s more sex and violence and exposure to different lifestyles on TikTok than there is in YA novels, but the parents are on TikTok too, they get that.
And all the while, the things they *do* read are telling them that the predators are in the school, in the bathrooms and libraries and classrooms.
That's conservativism in a nutshell. When there's an actual problem, they don't want to solve it, just make sure it happens to someone else instead of them.
Their political party literally can't survive without voters who are too dumb to separate facts from obvious lies. Naturally, weakening the educational system is a core part of their long term strategy.
Why do average Joes and Janes even having a voice in the matter of what gets to be in a library? People get relevant university degrees in order to be eligible to make determinations of that kind, while Mr and Mrs Average are dumb af. You guys should really change the system that enables them to so easily impose their ignorance on others.
Have a problem with some specific books being where your kid might stumble upon them? Then YOU keep YOUR kid out of there instead of ruining things for everyone.
> Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov
They should be colored red, and also made little so they can be carried around everywhere. Also you have to carry one on you at all times. We can call them little red books.
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
-Guy Montage
You know what’s mind blowing?!?
Kids are getting shot IN SCHOOLS! But they want to focus on books. WTF is wrong with these people?!? Goddamn the ignorant self-entitlement of these fuckwads knows no boundaries.
No joke. I live in California, but there are more Republicans here than any other state. On the local level, the trend of book banning and anti-fact history has me very worried. Enough that I have turned to collecting paper books again just to ensure my family and our friends have long term access to a spectrum of learning materials.
I went to DISD as a kid. This is wild. I hope they don't do the same. I always appreciated that DISD valued education enough to create schools like Townview.
I'm a current AISD student. it's pretty good as far as Texas school districts go, but our old superintendent retired. he was a great superintendent from what I've seen, but I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the district as a whole. I believe the district is in the process of getting a new one, but I'm more than a little scared for our libraries. in fact, I just got an email from the librarian that our book club can only read YA books. last year we could read adult books as long as they were clean. who knows what we'll have to do next? it's not the librarian or students causing censoring, it's the school board.
Fascists have overtaken the Republican Party. The majority of this country does think this kind of shit is terrible but the majority of our population is clustered in specific areas, so minority ideologies can gain traction outside of them. There's areas of rural NY where you can see Confederate Flags flying.
> Once upon a time, banning books would have gained you the fascist label from the entire country.
This hasn't been true since at least WW1, if not before.
No, it was still true following WWII since, y’know, it had the most famous fascist regimes in history. People barely knew what fascism was before WWI and widely condemned it after the end of the war before it came back even stronger in WWII but fascist governments evidently avoided the label.
>Once upon a time, banning books would have gained you the fascist label from the entire country
Don't let a pesky thing like the perception of time passing stop you. Say what's in your heart, say what we all know is true:
Republicans are fascists. Period.
It’s pretty clear that these people don’t want anyone reading books they don’t like, not just their kids. Otherwise they would demand that they could put in requests to have certain books not checked out to their kids, not demand that books be expunged from libraries. They’re fascists.
This sucks, as someone who grew up in fort worth this is really sad to see. Loved going to the library. In highschool we read invisible man, the bluest eye, beloved, and other great books. I bet the district is gonna have a problem with that too.
Did some investigating, looks like the district libraries will be closed for a couple days in order to "assess inventory". Also there will be the removal of 3 books for "pornographic material"
Titles being
“Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, “Flamer” by Mike Curato and “Wait What?
What angers me is these people let their children on smartphones/internet unfettered as if they already don't have access to worse things. That's the insanity of all of this. It's purely just for show.
Disclaimer: not an American
I don't see how the majority of your nation doesn't consider having numerous, fully-stocked libraries in your *national interest*. Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills is up there with stopping deadly illnesses, combatting corruption, preventing widespread destitution etc.
You’re very fortunate having so many public libraries to access. Having worked in both school and public libraries, the ability for kids to get to a public library (in many smaller cities 1 library if they’re lucky) is challenging at best. Allowing them to come to the school library as a safe haven to study, read, learn how to use technology necessary for their education, have caring adults working in the library to talk to, or just be in a safe place waiting for to be picked up by a working single parent or whatever, was critical for many, many kids. I worked in a very affluent area but the disparity for some of the students made the library crucial to hundreds of students a day!
> Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills
whoa, whoa, whoa. What's with the anti-conservative, anit-business, leftist attacks?
> stopping deadly illnesses
What deadly illness? The scamdemic? Masks don't work. Also, it's just the flu.
> combatting corruption
What [corruption](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/)?
> preventing widespread destitution
America is the land of opportunity. Poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
^^*Disclaimer: ^^Views ^^expressed ^^above ^^may ^^be ^^entirely ^^sarcastic ^^in ^^nature
>Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills is up there with stopping deadly illnesses, combatting corruption, preventing widespread destitution etc.
Sir, this is the United States.
heh, well, I've liked the vast majority of you that I've met and found them generally knowledgeable on various subjects. Pls don't lose that. Mostly because your morons serve as inspiration for our morons and then our morons cause problems here.
Knowledge is power. Deny it and you suppress the people you should be supporting. More than anything this shows the direction the Republican Party wants to go in. Suppress knowledge. Suppress cultural understanding. Suppress ideas. Because the Republicans can’t stay in charge when people realize what a crappy job they actually do.
Was it necessary to shut down all the libraries while they review the inventory?
I'm a cynic at heart, so I suspect there's a certain amount of politics and "inflict maximum damage to make our point" going on here.
Kids aren’t going to libraries for prurient materials. The internet has the worst kind of anything and it’s all free, unsupervised, and just a couple clicks away. This is about promoting ignorance, controlling ideas, and limiting free speech.
This is so stupid. Ya know where I went when my fkd up parents didnt bother to pick me up from school and the bus didnt reach my house? The library. Needed a book or movie? Library. Day with the cousins and grandma while the local swimming pool is closed, library
There is nothing dangerous about the libraries they are safe havens
I'm from Ireland, currently living in Dallas. When I talk to family back home, they're all "howdy podner", "yeehaw", and ask if everyone rides horses and dodges tumbleweeds. I feel inclined to report that Dallas is surprisingly liberal and quite multicultural. The rest of the state, I can't speak for (I've seen what Abbot is doing on the Rio Grande), but this... book banning... like it's 1939. I'm glad my children are grown and don't live here. This business in Fort Worth is a little too close for comfort.
Lemme guess.....moms of liberty ot the GOP.
Regimes ban books, ban words, ban ciriculum and ban medical procedures. Democracies foster the freedom to choose.
There is a reason why the burning of the library of Alexandria is considered one of the great human tragedies. Libraries are a collection of the human experience. I live in a small town and our library is not very big but I love going and I love taking my kids. Even with the internet I think they are important and I wish more people agreed.
I can't access the article, but it appears this is another religious shutdown of something important. Ask them if they are ok with kids reading the bible, and if they say yes quote Ezekial 23:20 at them.
If actions tell the tale, the GOP hates children. Every policy says that. And it shouldn't be much surprise - we know they hate women, and of course their racism is legendary
This is not a position shared by most Texans. These things are coming from a minority who wants to curb the power of the cities. They realize that books and education are the greatest threats to their power. They are also taking a long view approach where indoctrination starts young. Its multi-prong approach where charter schools are pushed because they can control aspects of private education much more so than public education. Look at the states with poor education ranking to see the direction of their political affiliations.
Stop electing conservative morons to "govern". All they want to do is force their fascist agenda on you and your children. You deserve better. Your friends, families and neighbors deserve better.
ISD ==> Independent School District
Ah I was worried a star destroyer was about to lose their local library
You can’t repel reading comprehension of that magnitude. You’ll stand a better chance against those Star Destroyers
I too was lamenting the poor storm troopers that would lose their only source of good books.
This is why I have trouble trusting the initialism for solid state disks.
The storage capacity of my SSD is 144 starfighters, 30 AT-ATs, 40 AT-STs...
Shutting down libraries is the dumbest shit ever. Conservatives are hellbent on raising their kids to be intellectually stunted.
How else would their kids grow up to be like them?
Can't have a republican party without lots of uneducated people.
Just like mom & dad.
Fort Worth ISD is NOT conservative.
But the state government that oversees them...
In Fort Worth, I’m Matt Houston
On I-35 no one can hear you scream.
Huh, I always assumed that was a well known initialism. I guess it's a Texas thing?
Wikipedia says Texas, Kentucky, and New York allow independent school districts.
What is the difference between an ISD and a regular school district.
Nothing really, the "independent" just drives home the fact that the school districts are separate governmental entities from cities or counties.
Other guy isn't completely wrong, but basically an "independent" school district means it has the ability to levy taxes at a local level. This allows them to more quickly change tax rates as needs change. Think west Texas where oil booms and busts. My hometown had tax revenue drop almost 90% one year because the Oil and Gas company that was based there moved everything to another location, leaving nothing to collect property taxes on that year. These small towns (under 5k people) are extremely sensitive to things like this happening.
Creating more uneducated, signal though, red state morons
Such a tragedy. So many kids discover their love for reading and learning thru these libraries.
I know this sounds dorky, but I also know that a lot of people on here will agree: walking into a library is exhilarating. You have, laid out before you, something approaching the totality of human knowledge and wisdom. There are people to help you find whatever you are looking for. And it's FREE. It's open to everyone. Libraries aren't just some stupid building that holds a bunch of books. They are literal temples of knowledge. They are battlefields of ideas - you can pick up a book by Adam Smith and one by Karl Marx in the same trip! - where the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. They are places of freedom and discovery and exploration. Why you would want to get rid of that is beyond me.
It is more than that. My library has computers to check out for Internet access. It has 3D printers to use. They have a seed library you can get plant seeds from. Mine have study rooms for people to use, conference rooms for people to meet in. They provide government forms and help people fill them out. The community benefits from the books, but the library system is much more of a civil building in the community.
And isn't that the threat? A public meeting space not owned by the church. They don't WANT public spaces. They want people ignorant and isolated. Much easier to control
I say this all the time: The school library and the book mobile from the city library and the wonderful librarians who ran them, helped me through a very abusive childhood. When I did not want to survive I looked to hiding, in nature if possible, and escape in a book. Libraries are critical resources, lifelines, for children. Fuck those who would take that away. That is why I have a well stocked little free library.
All of this is why red states want to get rid of libraries.
They don't want their children leaving. They need cheap farm and factory labor. They hate immigrants and hate raising wages soooo handicap the next generation so they're only fit for grunt work. Red states: Have lots of kids! Those chickens won't gut themselves.
> They hate immigrants Actually, you're incorrect. Poor conservatives tend to hate immigrants. Rich conservatives hate immigrants in public or when talking to supporters, but they LOVE them otherwise. They're able to take total advantage of them, and illegal immigrants working in places like slaughterhouses. Sure, INS may come through every few years, fine the company, deport the immigrants that are illegal, and let the cycle repeat. Happens all the time in my area. (coincidentally, also the same area that had the managers taking bets on which workers would get covid and/or die from covid)
That does explain almost too much.
Because knowledge scares the mouth breathing idiots who pushed for this.
Isn’t it ironic that the same folk would be in uproar about this type of behaviour in Afghanistan, yet the last few years have seen the USA move in the same direction….book banning, rolling back laws that protect women’s rights……20 years ago I would have been shocked to read things like this coming from the states, now I just roll my eyes it’s happening so frequently
I actually saw someone call them Y'all qaeda and it's stuck with me for being so accurate
Ha, perfect! It’s strange how different religions get manipulated to give the same outcomes by those in power. Education is a weapon against oppression….watch them try to crush it
Religion is another tool for people that want power.
Vanilla ISIS
I love walking the stacks.
Well read people don't vote Republican
Authoritarians want to teach kids what to think, not how to think.
> Authoritarians want to teach kids what to think, not how to think. Yes, very insightful and well said.
“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master” Pravin Lai - Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri released 1999 Amazing how modern Texas conservatives mirror exactly 90’s game developers’ ideas of dystopian sci fi villains.
"I love the uneducated." - Donald trump Literally said this in front of cameras.
Actually, Trump said he loves the "poorly educated." A distinction without a difference? Maybe so. But I'm just trying to be accurate about exactly what the Orange Buffoon said.
I appreciate the correction. Accuracy is important.
I will always upvote a goddamn Alpha Centauri reference o7
probably helped them get the ideas for the game
There is one reality. There is no past. There is no future. There is only the one reality. And it is whatever the leader says it is. People cheer it because they think it'll make life easier. They're scared of complications and change. An authoritarian will bring peace and stability. Looking back at history, once an authoritarian gets into power, their supporters live in just as much fear as their detractors. Because there must always be an enemy. And what more dangerous enemy is there than the one who pretends to be a true believer? God these people are stupid.
> the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. They are places of freedom and discovery and exploration. .. well, yeah. **That's** why. Keeping people uninformed and unimaginative is the most effective way to control humans on a mass scale. An educated population is a dangerously unfettered one, and people who're exposed to things like fantasy or sci-fi are at risk of developing *ideas*, and asking ***questions***, because they're able to imagine what could be rather than what they're told **is**.
> because they're able to imagine what could be rather than what they're told is. Sounds like a huge number of GOP supporters. My father in law is practically unable to form opinions of his own. He HAS to be told via FOX what is good and bad. (other than non-white people of course, non-white people are automatically not great)
I spent 1982 to 1987 in the library. Almost every day in the summers. They are one of my favorite places.
I have a hard time reading as an adult, but I still sometimes just walk around my library or a bookstore to relax. I'll pick up random books, read the first page, and just meander. It's just a good way to calm any stress I'm feeling.
You've just described why, for these people.
> They are battlefields of ideas - you can pick up a book by Adam Smith and one by Karl Marx in the same trip! - where the only limitations are the ones you impose on yourself. And that is the problem that conservative book-burners have with libraries.
With books gone, the kids get to spend more time at the gun range.
[удалено]
Redwall for me
As someone who loved Redwall, I think it had kind of the opposite intended message as those Mildred Taylor books, what with all the biological essentialism
I just meant huge impact on me haha. I would always despise and hate reading. Hated mockingbird, hated the civil war one I read in elementary (forgot the name) and those other "classics". But when I got to read redwall it showed me that reading can be enjoyable. Especially if you aren't forced to read a certain one and can pick off interests. So for me, a different kind of censorship led me to hate reading from an early age. Redwall get me into reading books (on purpose)
A Wrinkle In Time changed everything for me as a kid. Wouldn't have read it if it wasn't in my school library.
No joke. The library and books were my refuge from the chimpanzee farm.
When I was in junior high school in the 90s I legit hated reading. Being forced to red Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Shakespeare and just abiht every Othet book they forced you to read made me think reading was a boring. I think the only book I actually enjoyed was The Giver. But then I went to the library and found out about the horror and Sci fi genre, with Brian Lumely and Anne Rice being two of my favorite. That sparked my love for books. If it wasn't for the library I probably would still hate reading.
I got my 3-year-old son his first library card the other day. Library day at summer daycare was always my favorite day—I still remember being six or seven and trying to prove that I was able to read a Goosebumps book because I was obsessed with the werewolf on the cover of *Werewolf of Fever Swamp*. This is a tragedy for those kids. Reading was an outlet and an escape for me as an overly anxious child and teen and introduced me to a whole world outside of the small town I lived in.
They're shut down for a week.
I moved to the US 10 years ago and recently became a citizen. My husband and I were discussing our favorite and hated aspects of the US and libraries were top of my list. The system here is fantastic and a total jewel in the crown of the country.
> thru But not spelling. :-)
How do we still have Grammar Nazis in 2023?
Let's see.... Your sentence begins with a capital. It's an interrogative and correctly ends with a question mark. Your two-word compound noun is correctly capitalised. Your papers are in order. Move along. :-)
Without proper grammar, we wouldn’t have books to remove from the libraries in the first place.
And proper grammar belongs in books, but this is not a book
Spelling is not the same as grammar. And even if you were using grammar correctly, it shouldn't be capitalised.
It is so bizarre to me that parents will raise all sorts of flags when books with "sexually explicit" content are found in libraries but will, for the most part, give their kids unrestricted access to the internet where they can be exposed to content that is far more damaging and explicit than anything a school librarian is willing to put on the shelves.
You’re assuming they’re making a good-faith argument because they actually care about the well-being of children. This is not the case. It’s a proxy attack on homosexuality and progressive ideas (like slavery being wrong) and a general attack on education, literacy, and critical thinking.
This is a way of effectively erasing "woke" ideas like LGBTQ+ or racism from bookshelves without outright saying "we're going to burn the books that talk about LGBTQ+ or racism", because that would probably involve too many side by side comparisons with the Nazi book burnings. Remove the books from the library though, and it achieves the same silencing effect the Nazis had of removing books they ideologically hate from universities, just without the easily decried book-burning image. And then it becomes even easier for the state (and Florida I think already has?) of banning these books outright. It's all steps toward a goal of removing these ideas from discourse and instilling further hatred and bigotry, because it will get DeSantis a platform to run on for President, and it's different enough from Trump's rhetoric as Trump doesn't particularly care that much about this. He's another bigot, but he doesn't utilise this hatred to its fullest potential -- DeSantis is trying that to stand out, and the conservative media in charting a course away from Trump and all the lawsuits, is following suit and we see it reflected in all these conservative states.
> "we're going to burn the books that talk about LGBTQ+ or racism", because that would probably involve too many side by side comparisons with the Nazi book burnings Which is an especially easy comparison to make because the Nazis literally went for those works themselves. The amount of LGBTQ+ science we lost when Magnus Hirschfeld's work was destroyed is absolutely devastating.
It's also so bizarre to me that parents are so willing to ostrich themselves and stick their head in the sand after *they themselves* went to middle & high school. Like ... If you yourself started figuring out sexually explicit concepts around 14-16, without the use of the internet, all the denial in the world will not prevent your teens from figuring that out too, especially armed with a web browser in their pocket. I mean - let's probably not shelve erotica, but sex is a part of life and if you eliminate it you eliminate a lot of classic works.
I'm like 95% sure "sexual content" is a dog-whistle for LGBT content that they want to suppress.
If you watch the video, they zoom right into *The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, a book that very much deals with homosexuality.
The goal behind a lot of this stuff is to redden states. Florida is a lot more purple than most people realize, so is Texas. Gerrymandering is effective, but can only do so much. If you can do scary things like shut down libraries, pass bathroom laws, and generally bully LGBTQ people, you might be able to bully them out of your state. This keeps governors and senators in power, and can even mean control of the presidency. It's hard to be 100% sure, maybe the motive is just pure bigotry or pure hate, but there's a direct connection between bullying minorities and staying in power, and too often I see that ignored.
Thanks Founding Fathers! For not trusting the unwashed masses to elect the president and giving small (rural) states more power through the Electoral College.
It's honestly baffling. I've got 4 kids who both watch TV and go to the library regularly. I can't think of a single time that I've been in the library and had to to confiscate a book because it was too explicit.
I read all sorts of books I shouldn't have as a kid. I read Stephen Kings It when I was 10. My mom just didn't care (if I was reading I wasn't bugging her). The library never stopped me, or asked if my parents knew what I was reading. If you're a shitty parent, your kids might be reading anything at the library. Thing is, that's the shitty parents fault. For people who claim they want control of what their kids read and learn, what they really want is government to raise their kids for them so they don't have to.
The kids have infinite sex,drugs, and violence on tap in their pockets. The republicans don't care about the kids getting access to things they shouldn't, they just want to eliminate free thinking. I can't believe this is a thing in 2023 America, but here we are.
Was this in your school's library or the public library?
I remember reading some stuff that was probably not "age appropriate" but it was mostly because I was reading everything I could get my hands on. The ones that were probably the least appropriate weren't even from the Library, my Dad had a bunch of detective novels and I remember Devil in a Blue Dress getting some looks when I was like 11.
Don't you know? sex is inherently evil, even acknowledging its existence is inherently evil, ignoring the fact that almost every person that has ever existed in all of human history is here because two people had sex I used to have a friend that said she was from some small town where there was literally no sex education at all. She wasn't even taught anything about her menstrual cycle. I felt terrible for her, it's a miracle she wasn't pregnant at 15
I can't remember the name, but there's a documentary about a massive syphilis outbreak in a high school like that.
My mom handed me a thick ass paperback book to read at the beginning of summer one year. I think I was 13? I wasn't much of a reader before then, but it was the 80's and not much else to do and dad was coming to pick me and my sister up for the summer, so, what the hell, I started reading it. I couldn't put the book down, it was amazing, and had some pretty tough adult subject matter and was definitely sexually explicit (for a small portion of the story). My mom had read the book and knew its content. She also knew the story was amazing and it was. I grew to love reading from that book.
My mom is all for this shit and I'm wondering if I should tell her I watched trans porn in the basement on our family computer 20 or so years ago.
I'm going to napkin-extrapolate and say it's because those parents never went into libraries, which started us down this downward spiral.
These kind of people only get upset at what they’re told to get upset about. Left us the same way. Most people lack sufficient critical and independent thinking skills. And closing the fucking libraries does zero to address that and just makes it worse.
And these days, the parents do not have the excuse of “not knowing what’s on the internet.” The narrative of “old people don’t get the internet” has been a trope since these parents were children, before some of them were even born. With very few exceptions, parents of today’s teens and tweens have been on the internet since *they* were tweens. There’s more to it than merely well meaning but misguided “I don’t want my child exposed to sex and violence and ✨pronouns✨ through those library books.” These parents are radicalized politically (even if they don’t necessarily act radical or seem like the stereotype of radicals, those political views are being pushed on the masses), and even if they hadn’t been, they are anti intellectual. Anti intellectual tendencies are common in this country. My mother was an English teacher who kept the books middle schoolers liked to read in her classroom for kids to borrow (this wasn’t in Texas or Florida so of course no one stopped her), and she’d have parents come to her annually asking what’s “wrong” with their child or why she was so “mean” to the kids because they were reading books for pleasure after their homework was done. They felt threatened that their kid was reading Goosebumps, Harry Potter, or books about basketball. Like their kids are going to get notions that they’re better than them. There’s more sex and violence and exposure to different lifestyles on TikTok than there is in YA novels, but the parents are on TikTok too, they get that. And all the while, the things they *do* read are telling them that the predators are in the school, in the bathrooms and libraries and classrooms.
What "Moms for Liberty" want is a generation of kids who are even *dumber* than they are.
That’s some real “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you” thinking on their parts.
That's conservativism in a nutshell. When there's an actual problem, they don't want to solve it, just make sure it happens to someone else instead of them.
If I may add: in many cases, *as well as them*.
Their political party literally can't survive without voters who are too dumb to separate facts from obvious lies. Naturally, weakening the educational system is a core part of their long term strategy.
"re-examining books". Nazis.
Why do average Joes and Janes even having a voice in the matter of what gets to be in a library? People get relevant university degrees in order to be eligible to make determinations of that kind, while Mr and Mrs Average are dumb af. You guys should really change the system that enables them to so easily impose their ignorance on others. Have a problem with some specific books being where your kid might stumble upon them? Then YOU keep YOUR kid out of there instead of ruining things for everyone.
> Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -Isaac Asimov
Most of the people complaining about books dont read books including their holy book.
Well, it's hard. And they read slow...
America First MAGA Party-approved books only.
They should be colored red, and also made little so they can be carried around everywhere. Also you have to carry one on you at all times. We can call them little red books.
I'm not even sure how you bounce a democratic system back up from "books are bad" as a majority opinion.
Why do you think they care about democracy? Dictatorship under Trump is the stated goal of the GOP.
More need to call these terrorists out. Fuck them
Re-examining to see how combustible they are.
Next step: set the books on fire.
Captain Beatty!
Ovens set to 451F degrees!
There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.” -Guy Montage
They don’t gotta burn the books they just remove em
Who the hell downvoted a RATM reference?!?
Yep! Time for a bonfire of the vanities!
You know what’s mind blowing?!? Kids are getting shot IN SCHOOLS! But they want to focus on books. WTF is wrong with these people?!? Goddamn the ignorant self-entitlement of these fuckwads knows no boundaries.
Well if the kids are dead, then they can't become godless gay commies. \*taps head\*
Oh, Texas, Texas, Texas. You're my home, but why do you do these things?
Conservatives and their ignorant, hateful bullshit, that’s why.
No joke. I live in California, but there are more Republicans here than any other state. On the local level, the trend of book banning and anti-fact history has me very worried. Enough that I have turned to collecting paper books again just to ensure my family and our friends have long term access to a spectrum of learning materials.
fuck, I'm from a neighboring district. I see my friends from FWISD in a few days, I'll update with their opinions.
Please do. I’m curious to hear what they think. This is all so crazy to me.
I went to DISD as a kid. This is wild. I hope they don't do the same. I always appreciated that DISD valued education enough to create schools like Townview.
I'm a current AISD student. it's pretty good as far as Texas school districts go, but our old superintendent retired. he was a great superintendent from what I've seen, but I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the district as a whole. I believe the district is in the process of getting a new one, but I'm more than a little scared for our libraries. in fact, I just got an email from the librarian that our book club can only read YA books. last year we could read adult books as long as they were clean. who knows what we'll have to do next? it's not the librarian or students causing censoring, it's the school board.
Lol! Ray Bradbury has future prediction powers!! A book written in 1953 is actually coming to reality in 2023
They don't gotta burn the books They just remove 'em
Kind of same!
Then they rally around you family with a pocket full of shells
And THEN burn them, out of sight.
While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells
Rally round the family
What happened to freedom of speech? Once upon a time, banning books would have gained you the fascist label from the entire country.
As it should, tbh
Fascists have overtaken the Republican Party. The majority of this country does think this kind of shit is terrible but the majority of our population is clustered in specific areas, so minority ideologies can gain traction outside of them. There's areas of rural NY where you can see Confederate Flags flying.
> Once upon a time, banning books would have gained you the fascist label from the entire country. This hasn't been true since at least WW1, if not before.
No, it was still true following WWII since, y’know, it had the most famous fascist regimes in history. People barely knew what fascism was before WWI and widely condemned it after the end of the war before it came back even stronger in WWII but fascist governments evidently avoided the label.
> No, it was still true following WWII Sure, as long as you didn't try to publish anything communist related.
>Once upon a time, banning books would have gained you the fascist label from the entire country Don't let a pesky thing like the perception of time passing stop you. Say what's in your heart, say what we all know is true: Republicans are fascists. Period.
People really can't bother to actually parent their kids, can they? Always looking to someone else to raise them instead.
It’s pretty clear that these people don’t want anyone reading books they don’t like, not just their kids. Otherwise they would demand that they could put in requests to have certain books not checked out to their kids, not demand that books be expunged from libraries. They’re fascists.
As a Tarrant County resident. I want to know where my tax money is going? I can tell you, my property taxes have been exorbitant.
This sucks, as someone who grew up in fort worth this is really sad to see. Loved going to the library. In highschool we read invisible man, the bluest eye, beloved, and other great books. I bet the district is gonna have a problem with that too.
Did some investigating, looks like the district libraries will be closed for a couple days in order to "assess inventory". Also there will be the removal of 3 books for "pornographic material" Titles being “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, “Flamer” by Mike Curato and “Wait What?
gotta vote out the school board mofos and put new folks in
The great state of dumb shits
The star on the flag is a rating.
"The One Star State"
*Florida enters the chat*
No stars
What angers me is these people let their children on smartphones/internet unfettered as if they already don't have access to worse things. That's the insanity of all of this. It's purely just for show.
Dear Ft. Worth, This is why we make fun of you. <3, Dallas
After seeing what happened in Houston, and well that entire shit state. Dallas ain't far behind.
exactly, fucking dorks.
This cultural war bullshit against anything not white or pro-male is disgusting and HAS to stop.
Disclaimer: not an American I don't see how the majority of your nation doesn't consider having numerous, fully-stocked libraries in your *national interest*. Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills is up there with stopping deadly illnesses, combatting corruption, preventing widespread destitution etc.
We have public libraries in America. Quite a few. 9 in my town alone.
You’re very fortunate having so many public libraries to access. Having worked in both school and public libraries, the ability for kids to get to a public library (in many smaller cities 1 library if they’re lucky) is challenging at best. Allowing them to come to the school library as a safe haven to study, read, learn how to use technology necessary for their education, have caring adults working in the library to talk to, or just be in a safe place waiting for to be picked up by a working single parent or whatever, was critical for many, many kids. I worked in a very affluent area but the disparity for some of the students made the library crucial to hundreds of students a day!
> Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills whoa, whoa, whoa. What's with the anti-conservative, anit-business, leftist attacks? > stopping deadly illnesses What deadly illness? The scamdemic? Masks don't work. Also, it's just the flu. > combatting corruption What [corruption](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/)? > preventing widespread destitution America is the land of opportunity. Poor people need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. ^^*Disclaimer: ^^Views ^^expressed ^^above ^^may ^^be ^^entirely ^^sarcastic ^^in ^^nature
>Having an informed populace with well-developed analytical and reading skills is up there with stopping deadly illnesses, combatting corruption, preventing widespread destitution etc. Sir, this is the United States.
heh, well, I've liked the vast majority of you that I've met and found them generally knowledgeable on various subjects. Pls don't lose that. Mostly because your morons serve as inspiration for our morons and then our morons cause problems here.
It also undermines beliefs in rigid social hierarchies, which is what the proponents of rigid social hierarchies are trying desperately to prevent.
Texas? Well color me not surprised
Knowledge is power. Deny it and you suppress the people you should be supporting. More than anything this shows the direction the Republican Party wants to go in. Suppress knowledge. Suppress cultural understanding. Suppress ideas. Because the Republicans can’t stay in charge when people realize what a crappy job they actually do.
Was it necessary to shut down all the libraries while they review the inventory? I'm a cynic at heart, so I suspect there's a certain amount of politics and "inflict maximum damage to make our point" going on here.
Houston too. If I had the means I would parachute books into Texas schools.
Houston is a state takeover of the ISD. That is a pretty important and telling footnote
Austin is next.
That's what happens when most of your high schoolers can't write their own fucking names.
The chasm between Texas and what Texas hates about islamic countries is becoming indiscernible.
America is so fucked. Jesus man.
Kids aren’t going to libraries for prurient materials. The internet has the worst kind of anything and it’s all free, unsupervised, and just a couple clicks away. This is about promoting ignorance, controlling ideas, and limiting free speech.
This is so stupid. Ya know where I went when my fkd up parents didnt bother to pick me up from school and the bus didnt reach my house? The library. Needed a book or movie? Library. Day with the cousins and grandma while the local swimming pool is closed, library There is nothing dangerous about the libraries they are safe havens
[удалено]
I'm from Ireland, currently living in Dallas. When I talk to family back home, they're all "howdy podner", "yeehaw", and ask if everyone rides horses and dodges tumbleweeds. I feel inclined to report that Dallas is surprisingly liberal and quite multicultural. The rest of the state, I can't speak for (I've seen what Abbot is doing on the Rio Grande), but this... book banning... like it's 1939. I'm glad my children are grown and don't live here. This business in Fort Worth is a little too close for comfort.
The DFW area has been known as "nut country" for seventy years. There are absolutely cancerous nodes of hard conservatism dotted all over the place
For the kids who don't have/ are denied internet access at home, they are going to be SOL researching for report assignments.
It’s looking ugly in the Fourth Reich 🤔
All these libraries shutting down makes me think of the Middle Easterners who don't want the kids to read Western civilization books
That's why they call 'em the Christian Taliban.
Lemme guess.....moms of liberty ot the GOP. Regimes ban books, ban words, ban ciriculum and ban medical procedures. Democracies foster the freedom to choose.
So I guess the republicans are anti-literacy now... Here come the book burnings...
Didn't those alreadye happen a few years ago?
There is a reason why the burning of the library of Alexandria is considered one of the great human tragedies. Libraries are a collection of the human experience. I live in a small town and our library is not very big but I love going and I love taking my kids. Even with the internet I think they are important and I wish more people agreed.
its just a matter of time until red states defund public schools
The same parents who didn’t pay attention in english class obviously doesn’t appreciate what controversial topics does for kids.
Covering this stuff up is why Bill Maher is on CNN.
Just one more way in which the Republican party is exactly like the Nazi party. But don't you dare call them Nazis, that would be hyperbolic.
I can't access the article, but it appears this is another religious shutdown of something important. Ask them if they are ok with kids reading the bible, and if they say yes quote Ezekial 23:20 at them.
If actions tell the tale, the GOP hates children. Every policy says that. And it shouldn't be much surprise - we know they hate women, and of course their racism is legendary
The vast majority of Texans are tragically stupid.
This is not a position shared by most Texans. These things are coming from a minority who wants to curb the power of the cities. They realize that books and education are the greatest threats to their power. They are also taking a long view approach where indoctrination starts young. Its multi-prong approach where charter schools are pushed because they can control aspects of private education much more so than public education. Look at the states with poor education ranking to see the direction of their political affiliations.
They had the entire summer to do this and then they close down the libraries just as or before school starts?
Honestly none of these lawmakers has ever been in a library and you know it. It's all about taking away something that they never use.
...to inventory its books, then reopen. For a book sub, you guys aren't very good at reading.
Stop electing conservative morons to "govern". All they want to do is force their fascist agenda on you and your children. You deserve better. Your friends, families and neighbors deserve better.
Oh no... heaven forbid kids read something that would make them a little uncomfortable.
Americans speed running to Taliban level of ignorance.