banned
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3mo ago
"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"
Bing's AI tells me this is false. Since Bing's AI (like all AIs) is idiotic (and cites Iranian state media as its source!), I'll check myself. I find claims that it was banned in Chicago in 1928 and Detroit in 1957. The Detroit ban is backed up by a newspaper article, but it was not banned for "depicting women in strong leadership roles". Rather, it was banned because "There is nothing uplifting or elevating about the series". Elsewhere, Ralph Ulveling, the library director, said the books were old-fashioned* and "inferior to the modern books we stock". I can find no contemporary evidence for the Chicago ban. The language "strong leadership roles" is suspiciously modern; I suspect this is merely a just-so story made up to back up arguments like yours. Another figure implicated in banning Oz is Anne Carroll Moore, who it is claimed removed the books from the Children's Reading room at the New York public library, in the 1930s, without giving a reason. I believe it is unlikely this was for "depicting women in strong leadership roles", if indeed it happened -- the oldest reference to this story I can find is in the 1970s.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900.
SSCReader
3mo ago
Even if no-one does respond, we have to do our best to write as if they will and we want them to. Otherwise we'll get fewer and fewer people who will.
And I did have a response, I was rewriting when he got banned. I don't know if I would stand up for all of it, but he is wrong about leftism murdering his neutral libraries and wearing the skin suit. It was already murdered when anti-Christian and anti-American books were banned back in the day and libraries had a very different lean. When the Wizard of Oz was banned because witches are theologically evil or portrayed women in leadership roles. It was already a weapon in the culture war, that's why leftists got involved. Because they felt just as disgusted by the way it was previously as he does now. It's a new zombie in the skinsuit that he doesn't like but there will always be a zombie.
"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"
"Pressure was brought to bear not only on the materials in the library but the staff who ran it. Loyalty programs sprang up around the country beginning in 1947, the year that President Harry Truman enacted a federal program for employees in the executive branch. Typically, these programs required that employees sign an oath indicating whether or not they had had or continued to have any affiliations with organizations considered subversive"
"The 1960s brought about turmoil in libraries across the southern United States. African-Americans attempted to access white libraries across the American South."
Once libraries are used as a cultural weapon, you cannot be surprised when your opponents decide it is a weapon they need to contest.
Whether equity based weeding is right or wrong is irrelevant, you can prefer one or the other, but starting history 20 years ago obscures WHY these things happen now. Why did a coalition of the left want to control libraries? Because those libraries had previously been weaponized against their coalition - feminists, leftists and black people at a minimum. Free and neutral libraries had already been skinned and inhabited long ago. It's just a fight over which zombie gets to wear the skin so to speak. And I am sure the Christians in the 1920's would argue that libraries had been corrupted and that is why they needed to assert control and ban ungodly books ,and the patriots of the 50s would cite the rise of un-American communists for why they had to fire people and so on and so forth.
If you hit someone with a club and then they wrest it away from you and hit you with it, your complaint about your opponent using a weapon is void. Your real issue is that your opponent has the club not you, not with the concept of the club being used as a weapon at all.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3mo ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I got banned for that -- in fact, a longer version of that. But to be fair it was a long time ago on a site far, far way.
phailyoor
3mo ago
equity-based weeding
This is one of the most nauseating things I've read in a long time. Thanks for ruining my day.
Keep bringing the the facts next time once you get unbanned, we need it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
@grognard just got banned for this. Make your meaning clear and plain and do not appeal to an imaginary consensus. You are allowed to argue things like "Everyone with a Hispanic name should be deported," but you actually have to state your argument and make your case, not just handwave at it because you aren't willing to type out what you really mean.
JarJarJedi
3mo ago
Support for abortion in germany is in excess of 70%
If Wikipedia is to be believed, abortion in Germany is banned except for when it's necessary for saving mother's life and also the ban is not enforced for the first 12 weeks. I think that's something that not only 70% of US population, but the majority of Republicans would be ok to sign up with. It's interestingly how Germany with it's Euro-leftist tendencies and seemingly wide support for abortions, has the laws that if implemented in the US, would be universally called "far-right abortion ban".
In the entire history of the United States, something around 90 national injunctions have ever been ordered, with Donald Trump accounting for almost 70% of all of them (and rising by the day).
No, this isn't a both-sides situation. If they were effectively banned tomorrow, it would be a large win for Republicans.
For example, the USAID decision carves out big exceptions that allow the administration to continue dismantling USAID:
which they'll use and then the court will broaden or rule against the administration which other judges have already done in other cases
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3mo ago
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them.
Is it? I mean, why should they bother? As I see it, their actual problem is more what you noted here:
In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief.
That is to say, the problem is how to restore their hegemony, and force the rest of us to obey whatever they come up with within their epistemic bubble. "It's the children voters who are wrong."
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3mo ago
Politely claiming that discussions of Israel/Jews on The Motte are low-quality wouldn't have been against the rules,
And if that's what he did I'm sure that he wouldn't have been banned. I've made plenty of posts that would get me banned if I decided to be maximally offensive too.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I understand that users here tend to be particularly stupid
I assume there is no need for me to explain why you are banned for a week.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
I've discoursed elsewhere on the Progressive Epistemic Crisis. Short version: they constructed such impervious bubbles that they become entirely disconnected from reality. Is the president senile? What is a woman? Is the economy good? The list of simple questions that a progressive cannot answer could go on and on.
This is problem for all of us, because they successfully marched through all the institutions that we all relied on to know what was true and what was important. The rot is evident everywhere, and has been discussed in these spaces many times before. Social sciences have a replication crisis. Alzheimer's research has been almost entirely fraud for 2 decades. University presidents dragged before Congress cannot articulate their views on calls for genocide, and cannot fall back on "free speech" defenses without everybody laughing in their faces. Nobody even knows who was running the presidency these past 4 years. And trust in the media, the institution tasked with helping to make sense of all of this, continues to crash.
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them. But the problem for the Right, which already believes them to be irredeemable, is what to replace them with. And it looks like the Right has coalesced around an answer.
Twitter. The answer is Twitter.
Legacy Ways of Knowing were highly authoritative and highly centralized; the new approach flips that entirely on its head.
The first thing you need to understand is that Twitter knowledge is delivered in a breaking-news, but very provisional, style. In Rationalist terms, every tweet is effectively tagged with "epistemic status: low certainty." Info comes in very fast, but the accuracy is also low; you have to wait and watch as the story develops and keep sampling the gestalt before you can have confidence in a given piece of info. When Elon talks about finding all these dead people in the Social Security and implies that this is a major source of fraud, he is pointing at an interesting thing he found and maybe it will grow into some more substantial as they dig into it. This is "move fast and break things" applied to epistemology. Even within the same story, you can contrast the two systems. On the left, an article was found to declare, authoritatively, that actually it's just COBOL. The pitfalls of both approaches show forth here, in that finding dead people will probably not catch much waste/fraud/abuse relatively speaking, but also in that the COBOL response was entirely incorrect.
Second, Twitter Knowing is highly decentralized. In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief. Lefty pundits thought the Trump coalition was already cracking up when Musk tweeted in favor of more H1-Bs over Christmas, and got dogpiled for it; in their world such open dissent would have meant large numbers of purges all around. Instead, Musk retreated and the leadership received some valuable information about their coalition's views.
Of course, Musk did not quietly retreat. Instead, he changed the subject to Rotherham, and the Right united around remembering how terrible their enemies are. And this gets to the primary use of legacy media, which was not so much the transmission of information, but the directing of discussion. Leftwing institutions told them when to care about kids in cages (during Republican administrations) and when not to (during Democratic administrations)(1). Right-wingers have long struggled to match this narrative-pushing ability. But Twitter is now serving the same purpose of pushing forward stories to be talked about, and Musk is experimenting with just how far he can push that ability. Most of his current posts are mostly oriented around trying to nudge the narrative in certain directions. But note that he has this power because he is a highly followed account, not because he owns the site. Others with large follower counts can do the same thing, and increasingly will.
All of this could change very quickly, but that's where we stand at the moment. Legacy institutions already capitulated to this state of affairs when Biden resigned from the race via Twitter, with no further elaboration in any legacy media. Maybe they could have pushed back then, but not now.
tldr;
- Information is low confidence, but very fast. Confidence increases with time and retweets.
- The system is highly decentralized; there is no central arbiter of what is True.
- The system is now able to push stories.
(1) This should actually be seen as Kelsey attempting to wrest back some amount of agency.
There's a reason why King Sejong is the most beloved monarch in Korea, and he did even more than that - not only did he invent Hangul in an attempt to improve literacy, he also hugely supported and encouraged many other technological advancements. Most notably, he established a royal scientific institute called the Hall of Worthies meant to house Joseon's greatest minds, and offered a series of grants and scholarships to incentivise bright young scholars to attend. At one point he appointed Jang Yeong-sil, a nobi, as court technician. Jang would go on to make one of the world's first standardised rain gauges (the cheugugi), which would get used all over Korea, as well as a self-striking water clock. Upon Sejong's request, he also made a faster and more efficient form of metal movable type called gabinja in 1434, a number of years before Gutenberg developed the technology in the Western world.
Sejong also ordered that one thousand copies of farmers' handbooks be printed so as to improve agricultural output, and he also published the Nongsa jikseol, which was a compilation of farming techniques conducive to Korea's environment that documented the best planting methods and soil treatment and so on for each region. In addition, he was the king who granted the nobi class parental leave, and did strangely democratic things like poll the public on reforms such as new tax systems. It really does sound like fiction about a benevolent monarch, except it's real.
Regarding Hangul's use over the years, Sejong actually did manage to get it into popular culture if I remember correctly. Hangul continued to be used among the peasantry throughout the years in applications such as popular fiction, apart from a short-lived period in 1504 when it was banned by the monarch Yeonsangun of Joseon, an infamous tyrant who did so because people wrote letters in Hangul criticising him. That ban did not last for long, and eventually Yeonsangun was dethroned via coup, exiled to Gangwha Island (where he soon died) and his sons were forced to commit suicide. Later in 1506 King Jungjong abolished the ministry related to Hangul research, but Hangul saw a resurgence in the late 16th century and novels written in the Korean alphabet became a major genre of literature. I'd say Sejong largely accomplished his goal.
Joseon in general was a shockingly scholarly society. I visited South Korea recently and went to the National Museum, and 90% of what I saw from Joseon was just books on top of books on top of books, with the occasional world map and astronomical chart thrown in. They were dedicated record-keepers, and the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty are the longest continuous record of a single dynasty in the world, stretching from 1392 to 1865. This scholarly focus even affected their art to the point that there was an entire genre of folding screens (chaekgeori) which just consisted of still-life paintings of bookshelves - honestly that part of the museum is wild.
EDIT: wording
Eetan
3mo ago
Continuing my alt hist scenario- epistemic status, considering moving over to an alternate history forum, open to recommendations.
Online oldest and biggest AH place is here but beware. It is extremely PC, woke long before wokeness was a thing, space. Expect to be banned for the slightest infraction (mere mention of HBDIQ concepts, taken for granted here or other rationalist and post rationalist spaces is sufficient). Enter at your risk.
Just one example: short althistorian career of famous Eric S. Raymond
Others- few old time forums and bulletin boards exist.
Only I can think about is Axis History Forum unsurprisingly dedicated to WWII history with lively alt-his subforum. It is nerd paradise, highly technical discussion backed by proper citations is expected (and it is normie place, nothing resembling Nazi apologia and Holocaust revisionism is tolerated).
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
3mo ago
While I haven't actually played SplitFiction since no friends, only saw some of the gameplay, the game itself seems decent and the schtick feels fairly novel. It's also co-op (couch co-op, granted), and IME co-op can salvage almost any garbage short of something virtually unplayable.
That said I fully agree that the writing (what I've seen of it) is garbage with zero redeeming qualities, and the people(?) who wrote that must be banned from anything resembling a writing implement. I try not to fall to the "everything I don't like is Reddit" mindset but this game really seems to be targeted at r*dditors/normies who run all latest blob updates, love Marvel-style quippy humor and aren't actually into videogames (which is probably why the friend pass is free so your gf/sibling can pester you into playing the cool game s/he heard about). Competently targeted too, if the rave reviews and flamewars in comments to negative reviews on Steam is anything to go by.
The game isn't terrible (hell I'm defending it) but it certainly isn't 10/10, the writing alone should take off like 4 points. I agree this is probably the ur-example of a game which would be substantially better if any attempts at "story" and "characterization" got mercilessly pruned.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen
I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.
School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.
Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.
boys who are a little too male
I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.
I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".
School alone is pretty ineffective
Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)
With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.
The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.
OneTimesOneIsTwo
3mo ago
"Free speech liberals" believe that no viewpoint should be banned. Like all pure ideologies, nobody has it, and in real life there are edge cases, but that's the idea.
Freedom liberals would agree: It is ridiculous that gays cannot advocate for themselves. Some of your bullet points are standard modern liberal rights like that.
Some of your bullet points are special treatment, justified or not. I know the argument for affirmative action: [group] has been treated badly and denied opportunities, so [group members] should be preferentially considered for jobs, housing, schooling, etc. This is also the argument for the "hate crime" construct.
Unfortunately, at no point can you objectively say "[group] is equal now, no more affirmative action." In fact, it is in the best interest of [group] that they enjoy success, but are perceived to be oppressed.
And even putting all that aside: if I am punished more harshly for harming John than for harming Jack, if John is more likely to be considered for economic activities, if John is seen as inherently good because of an intrinsic property he didn't choose, such as race, sexuality, parentage...
John is a noble, and Jack is not.
ulyssessword
3mo ago
...it means I now receive less resources for the same amount...
...and therefore, anything outside of my monopoly is an infringement on my rights, and should be banned.
I'm mostly with MathWizard here. The treatment of sex violates those general rules. Unlike him, I can see a few reasons why they should be an exception, but I'm still not sure if they're sufficient reasons.
hydroacetylene
3mo ago
My grandparents grew up in what was, even in the immediate postwar era, considered a puritanical bubble of religious conservatism. Catholicism between WWII and Vatican II had a reputation similar to Mormonism today; the old-fashioned term ‘banned in Boston’ actually derived from the Irish-Catholic influence on the city’s government. Catholics were expected to accept a censorship regime, have a stricter dress code(my grandmother recalls being forbidden to wear shiny shoes on the theory they could reflect her underwear- women and girls were not allowed to wear trousers), marry soon after beginning courtship, etc, etc.
The bubble may be smaller and have laxer rules these days, but it is no more a bubble today than it was then. Even in the fifties, absolute opposition to rock music and banning girls from wearing shiny shoes was exceptional.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
If he's the guy I think he is, you've permabanned him 5-10 times already. The one who started using a lib trolling style to introduce holocaust revision articles that he pretended to be shocked and outraged about.
Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?
was a huge tell. No actual lib would phrase it like that.
Of course, it's worth asking why pretending to be an obnoxious leftist is the best way to avoid getting modded for weeks around here...
Gooofuckyourself
3mo ago
How on earth is the fst page still on Wikipedia? One of the major contributors has been permabanned, but the page itself hasn't been targeted.
This also implies that if a human from a given ancestral population has a mixed half-sibling, that human is closer genetically to an unrelated individual of their ancestral population than to their mixed half-sibling
TeknOShEeP
3mo ago
Why? This is a symptom of outside thinking- Zelenskyy != Ukraine, and its perfectly possible to be Ukranian, cheer on their military, want no peace deal, and hate Zelenskyy's guts for the way he has conducted the war and turned Ukraine from a somewhat shaky democracy to a military dictatorship. This is in fact the attitude shared by several of my Ukranian friends.
But since a) elections are suspended indefinitely, b) opposition parties are banned, and c) only state-run media is allowed to officially exist, we will never have reliable poll numbers.
I agree 4% is probably low, but I think the 53% number some sources have floated is laughably high as well.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Probably not helpful per se, but I'm thinking of the oldish days in which mods were expected to put up with blunt-to-the-point-of-against-the-rules commentary on their decisions as part and parcel of the awesome power they wield.
This is kind of true. In the oldish days, we had an unofficial policy that the rules were not enforced as strictly when people were sounding off against mods. We understood and expected that people would often get pissed off about being modded, and so we'd let people bitch and whine about moderation and even take shots at us and not mod them the way we would if they spoke to another poster the same way.
It got very tiresome, though. People abused the privilege and thought it was open season to dump on us every time they didn't like how a mod ruled. Eventually we said "That's it, you don't get to abuse us just because we're mods."
(I say "us" but I can't actually remember if I was a mod while this policy was still in effect. I think it changed either just before or just after I became a mod.)
I'll tell you frankly: I'd be okay with loosening up and letting people like Steve take his shots at us, but only if y'all would be fine with us not being expected to be impartial and modly in our responses. I am not sure the people who want to give us "blunt feedback" would enjoy our blunt feedback about their conduct and posting history. Every time someone complains about how converged or biased we are, I remember how that complainer wrote a tirade at us which they then deleted, just because they know we can see deleted comments, or dropped hostile DMs on us while they were banned, or wrote an antagonistic report, or keeps making the same claim that we've addressed and refuted multiple times until you are a liar would be an accurate characterization.
I'm not saying I want mod feedback to become petty flamewars, but we are held to a higher standard. You want people to be able to bite our ankles with impunity, but when I (in an admitted deficiency of patience) said bluntly "Stop the ankle-biting. Now" - Oh, that was too hostile?
I get that some people think that letting people blast us is part of a mod's job, and to a large degree it is, but I don't think it's our job to let someone say the same dishonest thing over and over again, as belligerently as possible, and never tell them to knock it off.
I can't believe this is what dragged me back, but damn it, you're talking about books and this is important. After this, I will sink back into my bog and decent obscurity.
So the tl;dr here is "that's a myth".
The longer version? What I'm always banging on about: go to the primary sources! Where did you get this factoid? Apparently from a site named Canterbury Books. Okay, where did they get it? Well, there's a couple of possible sources, since this gets quoted around the place.
An aside: "The Wizard of Oz" was not banned by all public libraries in 1928 but only by the Chicago Public Library and the reason isn't readily available. The Oz books have been banned at various times, for reasons ranging from (yes) concerns about witchcraft and occultism to Communism! since Oz doesn't have money or an economic system, to "it's outdated, irrelevant to modern children, it's fantasy and they should be reading about the real world, kids today want to read about submarines and missiles". That one comes from a lady library professional in Florida in 1959 and she was tweaked about it by an article in Life:
Nothing there about Stronk Female Wammen being Leaderines. So where did this come out of? Seemingly from an essay by some lassie writing a thesis:
Okay, so what did Ms. Rosenthal say? Well, that's hard to find because the link keeps timing out, but it looks like she might be relying on what some other guy said:
So to sum it up: the Oz book(s) were banned at various times for various reasons, but not a blanket ban in 1928 and, so far as I can tell, not for having Strong Independent Lead Female Characters Who Don't Need No Man.
As ever, when engaging in historical discourse, GO. BACK. TO. THE. PRIMARY. SOURCES.
Now I submerge back into the mud and darkness. Glub, glub.
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