Right to LifeBoard

I really tore into Rep. Ro Khanna a little bit ago for his comments on not wanting small businesses that cannot afford to pay $15/hour and being out-of-touch/arrogant, but out of fairness to him I feel I have to walk that back a little bit. He recently came on Ben Shapiro's show to explain/discuss/debate his position, and while I still think his policy is way off-base and his care for such proprietors is lacking (the discussion really just seemed to highlight that he doesn't have any substantial backing, even contradicting himself a couple times) I'll give credit to anyone willing to both publicly have an open debate on their proposal and to do so with someone on the other side of the aisle. I'll have more respect for even someone who is radical but willing to discuss honestly and hold their principles consistently than a more mainstream politico who will not do either.

EDIT: Link if anyone is interested. I think it's telling to see that all the top comments are giving Khanna credit for coming on, I'd be surprised to see anything of that sort the other way around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_K00erN1mA

Created over 3 years ago, you are our oldest embassy.

**sends over a plate of cheese and crackers, a bowl of strawberries, and a bottle of Chablis**

Greetings, Right to Life! Been too long since I poked my head in here. President West Phoenicia has applied me as the official Republic of Conservative Nations Ambassador to RTL. I'd love to see our past treaty renewed as it sort of slipped through the cracks when United massachusetts started down the CTE path.

I did not make any comment on the censorship of Dr. Seuss books, because it would just be another lament for the insanity of our current culture and the gradual downfall of society, but with new developments I feel like I ought to say at least something-the Chicago Public Library system, one of the largest in the nation, will be pulling the Seuss books from the shelves.

The company cancelling it was one thing, stupid, clearly a slap in the face to the author that they are supposed to represent, arguably a fundamental violation of the spirit of copyright law, but it was a corporate decision. Ebay banning the resale of the book was another level, censorship by proxy, actively and severely inhibiting the spread of texts considered verboten, but now a government-run taxpayer-funded library system stripping the books from their shelves has pushed this well beyond the pale if it was not past it already.

It's a book burning in everything but the smoke, worse than one, really. The point of book burnings is to remove books from circulation, after all, and which is more effective at doing that, a few scattered bonfires, or the censorship efforts of Amazon's nigh-monopoly on book sales, the nation's largest secondhand market, the publisher itself, and now taxpayer-funded government institutions?

Librarians are becoming the book-burners. The one group of people that supposedly were to stand from open inquiry and oppose censorship is now backing it to the hilt.

The most chilling line in that is "materials that become dated" which is, of course, all materials. We saw that exact phrase, "dated" used when Laura Ingalls Wilder had her name removed from a children's book award by the American Library Association. You'd struggle to find a person alive before 1900, 1950, even that would survive the intense scrutiny of whether they match up to every modern progressive belief, and that seems to be exactly the way things ought to be. Seuss was openly anti-racist, radically liberal for his time, he's not the canary in the coal mine, he's one of the miners already going down. We have, at present, the terrifying confluence of censorship being able to be more easily implemented than ever before in the modern age with monopolies and digitization, and attitudes towards censorship being more positive than ever before. There's no good outcome that comes from that.

We've reached naked authoritarianism, with no apparent power to fight back, and little evidence that things will not get worse before they get better, if they even can get better. 1984 is overly-cited, frequently, I imagine, uselessly, as I don't think that many people have even read it, but for the ability of cultural, corporate, and governmental institutions to combine to censor "dated" material out of existence, one quote fits very neatly: "He who controls the past, controls the future."

The same people now engaging in and defending this censorship are the ones with near-total control of the education system: the next generation will be a step further in that direction, not a retreat back to the old normalcy. I think we've crossed the tipping point. No going back.

New Dolgaria wrote:

It's not as if the CPL is pulling all Dr. Seuss books from the shelves - only the six that had racist imagery. Just because you vocally oppose racism doesn't mean you can't inadvertently perpetuate it. Just look at some of Seuss' WWII cartoons - even he himself, years later, acknowledged that they had been racist and apologized. I agree with you though that no publication should be removed from society at large (with certain extreme exceptions, e.g., a guide to making home-made bombs). The books in question could simply be removed from the children's section and put in a place where those seeking to learn more about the history of racist caricatures in popular media could find them.

I think that, without any insult meant here, the belief that they're somehow going to just stop with those six and that'll be the end point of censorship, for Seuss or otherwise, is hopelessly naive, or at best extraordinarily optimistic. The publisher has openly left the door open, saying they are "committed to listening and learning and will continue to review our entire portfolio", and it is not as if Seuss's other works are considered just fine by such people, such as the academic paper: The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's children's books, which pretty much describes itself by its title.

https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=rdyl

Said paper considers books such as "Horton Hears a Who" and "The Sneetches" to promote "White supremacy" despite both being deliberately anti-racist because, and this is what the article literally says, " the dominant, paternalistic Horton enacts the White Savior Industrial Complex." Horton, as one can discover from looking at the cover, is an elephant.

Even books that has no human characters and the central message of "a person's a person no matter how small", or, in the Sneetches per Seuss's own words specifically written to be anti-racist (to combat anti-Semitism, more specifically) are considered to promote White Supremacy.

The allegations of 'anti-blackness' or 'white supremacy' don't need any kind of actual justification to be put into place. In the aforementioned case of Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, one of the points raised against her was that she used the word 'papoose' for a Native American baby, a term that, after the book was written, came to be regarded as offensive. At the time the book was written, the term was not only perfectly fine, it was an actual Narragansett word, not English or slang, but not knowing the future was, apparently, sufficient cause for accusation.

All that is to say that there is no true limiting principle at play, and I'm very critical of (you did not say this, but others have) it is 'not censorship' because some Dr. Seuss books are still left, which is absurd. The line now is that only the books with 'racist imagery' were removed, a term that's most interesting in that it's not being neutrally described as 'controversial', but automatically assumed that the imagery is racist when that is a debatable point. (McElligot's Pool is one of the cancelled books, and it was not even included on the list of books with minority characters in the above study. As best I can tell it is included because it has, in its long list of cartoonish fish "Eskimo Fish" that look like they're wearing a parka. Calling it a 'racist caricature' is absolutely absurd, but it has been declared as such by the powers-that-be that write the headlines, so most people will just go along with it rather than actually looking at the book themselves and drawing their own conclusions, particularly because they're getting blocked from seeing it for themselves at every turn.)

The next cancellation, then, would presumably be for 'racist themes', again stated as fact rather than as a debatable (or flatly false) point, and the justification ultimately really does not matter. The people increasingly in power are the people who think Horton Hears a Who is a comrade to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and we're not going to end up going anywhere except further down that path so long as excuses are made for censorship.

EDIT: In what I suppose is a conveniently quick proving of the point, Learning for Justice/Teaching Tolerance from the SPLC is now removing all Dr. Seuss books from its curriculum, including the openly anti-racist "The Sneetches". Direct quote:

tinyurl.com/yhekctcs

“This message of ‘acceptance’ does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn’t address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.”

"The story takes a race-neutral approach" and a "message of acceptance" has become a reason for cancellation. Cancellation is not just for 'racist imagery', cancellation is now for works not being racist in the way 'progressives' want it to be.

Roborian wrote:

...

Hmmm... okay, you've got me there.

The sort of banning actions that Roborian points out is patently hypocritical considering the country-wide promotion of so-called "banned books week" which has displays all over the place in libraries promoting you to check out books that have been "banned" for some reason, somewhere. My high school, and others, even had them labelled "for religious reasons", "for sexual reasons", "for political reasons". Well add one to the list! They even included Harry Potter because there were a few cases of parents stopping it from entering school libraries for its depiction of witchcraft, even if this was a very small scale "ban".

Seriously, it is pretty gross that a library would, by their own definition, ban Dr Seuss books while other sections of "the arts" (this is a real example) lament that a play like Salome, which implies incest and perversion and contains nudity, was ever banned by bigots on moral/religious grounds from being performed in the UK. (I have not seen the play, I just saw it billed as such at a major theatre)

The Gallant Old Republic wrote:

The sort of banning actions that Roborian points out is patently hypocritical considering the country-wide promotion of so-called "banned books week" which has displays all over the place in libraries promoting you to check out books that have been "banned" for some reason, somewhere. My high school, and others, even had them labelled "for religious reasons", "for sexual reasons", "for political reasons". Well add one to the list! They even included Harry Potter because there were a few cases of parents stopping it from entering school libraries for its depiction of witchcraft, even if this was a very small scale "ban".

Seriously, it is pretty gross that a library would, by their own definition, ban Dr Seuss books while other sections of "the arts" (this is a real example) lament that a play like Salome, which implies incest and perversion and contains nudity, was ever banned by bigots on moral/religious grounds from being performed in the UK. (I have not seen the play, I just saw it billed as such at a major theatre)

That's what makes this all so wild. I'm not really surprised to see corporations or academics or politicians on the censorship train, but I thought that librarians and the like were still largely "Harper's Weekly" or (at least the old version) ACLU kinds of liberals, certainly mostly falling to the left side of things in terms of the kind of cultural issues they promoted/favored, but general believers in academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, just typical liberal values in general. Heck, the American Library Association defended providing the Anarchist's Cookbook, directly linked from everything from school shooters to terrorist bombers to plane hijackers, in, I kid you not, prison libraries. I guess it was naive of me to think that the people who did that would stand up against cancellation for drawing an Asian man holding chopsticks.

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Whataburger is just a glorified version of Sonic.

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Hope all is well here.

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