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this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Cool, now we know who to bribe / influence / coerce. I don't know if this is a win for at-risk groups.
You don't know if it's a win to have someone with actual competency, knowledge and a passion for the written word (because you really don't go through that amount of education for that little pay if you aren't) to make the call rather than fascist PTA moms having a psychotic episode at the thought of the word "penis" being mentioned in a book? 🤦
You missed my point.
If a small committee can make the call, then that committee can be coerced for power. Especially if that committee gets little pay (in your words).
If you don't want fascism, then you want to avoid consolidation of power.
Again, this sounds like a win on the surface, but I fear library staff being harassed.
We've had (mostly) librarians in charge of content curation since there were libraries and it's mostly gone fine. Sometimes they would remove or censor some stuff they shouldn't have, but much more often than not, they were the ones fighting tooth and nail AGAINST it.
Librarians are much less likely to censor without any outside pressure AND much less likely to accept bribes or otherwise buckle under outside pressure.
People who choose an important but low-paying career that they're passionate about tend not to do a shitty job out of greed or to get attention. Unlike the far right demagogue politicians and PTA Karens who are there for greed and attention only.
That's not how it works, no. The way to avoid fascism is to keep power away from bigoted demagogues.
While neither would be a good idea, it would be better for one qualified and dedicated librarian to make the content decisions for all of New England than for a hundred fascist demagogues making them for a Boston suburb.
And you're absolutely right to. That was already happening, though, and will keep happening until politicians get off their asses and codify a system of rules to prevent it or just tighten up enforcement of existing harassment laws.
What if we just choose a role who decides what is and isn't harassment? Just like how Minnesota chose a role that decides what books should be banned.
And there are no librarians that are bigoted demagogues?
They might not have made it impossible, but most of this book banning crap has been political point scoring rather than actual attempts to change the literary record for its own sake. Now they’d have to loudly proclaim their book bans without admitting what they’re doing, which sounds a lot harder to pull off.
Anything that underlines the offensive nature of censorship like this is a good thing in my opinion.
I’d guess the requirement that experienced librarians make the decisions is just another way to exclude politicians and random mums with opinions from the process, I imagine most who go through a library sciences degree have already got a healthy respect for libraries which limits their willingness to play these stupid games.