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Another culture wars item of the week, this time involving culture, and this means culturally cultured culture. Books, luxury bookstores and fine wine, what's not to like?
World famous superstar Dua Lipa decided to do something about rising tide of censorship.
What? Open a library of banned books.
The doors are open to the Manifesto Library
Full list of the books is in the Cosmopolitan article, it is exactly what you would already expect.
Actually banned books in UK and EU banned as "serious prison time for production, distribution and possession" are not on the shelves, for obvious reasons.
Yea, it is about performance, about sticking it up to fictional MAGA villain, not about reading. Neither Dua Lipa not any of the prestigious guests are not going to read these books (and neither any other), not that there is something wrong with it.
Just another notch on the list of centi millionaire celebrities doing nothing with their wealth and influence except to climb up the ranks to hopefully ascend from paltry nine figure wealth to glorious ten and finally make it.
Another reminder that no god, no tsar, no hero and certainly no millionaire is there to save you. You must save yourself by your own hand, aided by huge spare disk space.
Addendum: so what can be done to thwart the censorship of banned books? There are already efforts to make information free on the internets, too numerous to count, just pay their bills, support and amplify them. Just about any book ever digitized is out there at the click of your fingertips.
What about books that were not digitized? Cryptocurrency solves it - establish forum/website where you can put up bounty for ultra obscure book you are looking for, payable at successful upload of usable scan at free book pirate site. Something like this, only with stronger incentives than reddit upvotes. (it had probably had been done somewhere, the hypothetical millionaire has to make the effort more visible).
This sounds less like the purpose is to criticize Trump, and more that it is to drink some nice wine, talk about books, and discuss some (in their circle) noncontroversial politics. Just a nice night out for older, well-off leftist intellectuals really.
The left's inability to accept that they aren't the rebels anymore predates Trump, though his victory has likely allowed them to continue to live in denial.
When were leftists the rebels? Haven't Universities and intellectuals have leaned left since the end of the cold war?
A certain sort of leftist would argue that the "real" (read: Marxist) left was killed by the end of the Cold War.
For the rest of us, nobody would argue the academy has been anti-actually-existing-left in our lifetime. But they could at least claim that the prudes were running the culture when people were going after rap and rock and roll, or that evangelicals and neocons were in charge in the Oughties. In the long run all of those battles were lost decisively by those groups and for a bit only the left-wing position stood as legitimate.
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