Whenever the topic of “banned books” comes up, a bunch of people argue about whether they should be called “banned”.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.
The “banned books” theme has become intentionally vague because it has become a marketing tool.
That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.
That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.
Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.
Banning a book in a school district still signifies a form of authoritarianism. If someone is prevented from reading Maus[0] (or finding out they are in a cult, or a victim of domestic abuse), what is the effective difference to them between an authoritarian censoring it at the national level or the local one?
We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
Dua Lipa wasn't doing a photo op with Maus. In the photos she's posing with modern books that are still being promoted by their publishers. I'm not familiar with all of them, but a quick search shows one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
This is a promotional stunt, and I'm surprised more people aren't seeing through it.
> We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
And no one really pretended that these cases were cases of "banned books".
The problem is when authority bodies (school, government, ...) start to include, in these "normal non-appropriate" books other books not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons.
I think it would be a very bad faith argument to argue that reading Maus will lead to people less socially adjusted.
And, sure, some "banned" books may be inappropriate. But as soon as these authorities have open the doors to arbitrary banning books, they poisoned their own well: maybe under "normal" evaluation this book should be removed from the list, but they removed it "the bad way", they failed the process, and therefore the ban itself is illegitimate.
It's a bit like the procedural miscarriage of justice: if you mess up when arresting someone, they can be freed even if it turns out they were guilty. Or in a more topical subject: the Fifa can reverse some decision, but if they do it in the context where they received phone calls from the US president, then it's a big failure in the process, even if a "normal" re-evaluation should indeed have concluded to reversing the decision.
> not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons
“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.
Saying "entirely subjective" is a bit BS, don't you think?
On one hand, you have someone who says that exposing children to sexual or violent content can have an impact on them. This is something that has been studied, sociologists, psychiatrists, doctors, ... have concluded that this is true.
On the other hand, you have someone who says that an ideology they don't like will lead to the ruin of the society. At the same time, communities, and often whole countries themselves, don't see the problem with these ideologies, and the catastrophe that this person has predicted does not occur. The only reason they claim that is because they are intolerant and want to impose their ideology, not because they want what's good for others.
So, yes, there are __some__ subjectivity. The same way that there is subjectivity around "good and bad" and yet "murdering" is universally considered as "bad" but "not going to the catholic mass" is not.
Neither of your examples would be considered murder by those doing them. In the case of slavery you can’t murder property.
A murder is specifically an unjustified killing. And as far as I am aware it is universally considered bad. Which makes sense because murder being considered bad is pretty much baked into the definition.
I can’t think of a modern society that does not condemn going into a random person’s house and killing them. Nor any past ones for that matter.
Now in some backwards ass country they might not consider it murder if that random person was homosexual. Or a killing might be justified in the context of a revolution. Or to bring rain. Or when shooting some guy fleeing with your tv in the back.
You realise that it is exactly what I'm talking about: everything is "subjective" if you look close enough, but only an idiot will think everything is therefore on the same plane.
Sure, "murdering" is not "100% always in all circumstances considered 100% bad" (but I still think that "universal" was not a bad choice, the same way "universal healthcare" does not mean there is no illegibility criteria and therefore exceptions). And of course, there is a lot of discussion to even have on what people mean by murder, but that is, again, missing the point.
But that is totally ridiculous to then pretend that it means that "murdering is bad" has therefore as much legitimacy as "touching your nose with the left hand index finger is bad".
The fact that is subjective does not mean that you cannot say anything anymore. It feels like a common bias in "technology" people: some of them think they are so smart and are condescending to "social science", and yet they are lost on concepts that social science considers as obvious.
I don't understand the scare quotes: per my previous reply, is a ban not a ban regardless of who does it? Maus has nudity and curse words; that's why it was banned in Tennessee. 1984 has multiple sex scenes - the well-funded Christian publication PluggedIn[0] rates it 18+.
Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.
In Europe every kid over 13 would buy both with no issues at all. 1984's sex scenes are so-so and something that just happens in the background like nothing.
> one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
It's authoritarian because it's about people with authority (parents, teachers), telling people without (students) what kinds of media they are and aren't allowed to consume, which is about controlling which ideas they're allowed to think about. You don't like children thinking or learning about sex, but there is no moral or rational reason for that. You just don't like it, and you wish to use your authority to impose your preferences on people who have no power to stop you. That's authoritarian.
And no, I don't think parents should be able to control their children's media diets, the idea that parents get to control their children is itself authoritarian. You don't own your kids.
You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
That type of media was never in schools to begin with. The problem here is that schools and districts made their own, informed curation decisions, and those decisions are being overridden by zealous parents informed only by their religious and political persuasions.
The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.
The banned books movement (on either side) is broadly not about curriculum. It’s about access in non-required spaces such as libraries and clubs.
The issue there isn’t that kids are being exposed to these items, the issue is that other parents are censoring what _my_ kid can be exposed to. They are infringing on _my_ rights.
Meanwhile I’m not requiring their kid to go into a library and checkout Maya Angelou.
This kind of thing happens commonly with language development over time. If a word or phrase picks up a strong connotation, then the word or phrase stops being used generically. This used to happen so slowly that nobody really noticed it happening to individual words or phrases, I think.
As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.
If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.
That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.
If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.
They are banned though. Not curated. You are not allowed to have these in school libraries. It’s not an editorial decision. For instance the Utah law says that a book must be removed from all libraries if 3 school districts in the state ban it.
No librarian, or teacher, or admin or parent in the other school districts gets any say.
That’s a ban. People may not like that their state is engaging in authoritarian behavior, and it’s less authoritarian than other behaviors, but it’s a ban by the simple facts. Doublespeak doesn’t change that.
I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.
If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?
We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.
I think a better frame is: will the children be less socially adjusted if they are exposed to the book?
While "everything is political", I can still see some differences. What was presented as "banned on neutral, apolitical basis base" in the previous comment can be seen as political at some level, but they are way less political than "let's ban this book because I don't want my children to be exposed to lefties ideas".
It feels like there is an order of magnitude less importance to "maintaining our children unexposed to others' point of view" in the cases of left-wing book-banning than in the right-wing side. After all, right-wing book banning often works on "leftie keywords" or themes (gender study stuffs, inclusivity, ...) while I don't think there is a real movement to ban books because they use too much of "right-wing keywords" (free market stuffs, nationalism, ...).
> schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it?
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
> You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
I do think that. It's rude to assume that I haven't thought my position through.
> So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
Sure.
> My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
I don't, but I was one, and I accessed all kinds of stuff on the internet that my parents and teachers didn't want me to see. Including gross violence and sex stuff. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. I'm fine. I'm a better person for having exposed myself to those things than I would be if I'd been sheltered from them.
But now in a vacuum you're advocating from your position (not being a parent) but being a human, that because you turned out ok, that everyone else will. There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
> There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
No one else provided any, either. If you have strong evidence that exposure to media you don't like is bad for your children, please provide it. If you don't have any, my anecdote is better evidence than you've provided.
Two people calling out an opinion as extreme does not make it extreme, and an opinion being extreme does not make it wrong.
> Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
parents
If you want to go full anti-authoritarian, you are literally advocating anarchy. One in which you have no right to jail someone for killing someone else.
There are many moral systems! Some of them are based in Christian ethics, which many people prescribe to. In fact it's the one the United States is based on. You can also choose something like liberalism. Many or most people would at least agree that "killing randon people at random times" being advocated in a book is not a good thing. And if that's not a good thing, then there is a moral judgement to be made to "ban" said book. I'm not saying that book exists, but if it did - would you "ban" it?
No one "owns" another person, but there are many other forms of relationships between people that allows for one person to dictate a media diet for another.
Parent-based rights arguments are perfectly adequate for the 80%, but degenerate in some horrific ways for the rest of the population. We need community-level input on how to raise kids so that the leftover 20% don’t just get fucked up by parents that “know best for their kid”.
Anecdotally know of a few times where kids were taught that their molestation was their own fault (both sub-10yo), and had friends whose parents actively pushed them to kill themselves
So that has nothing to do with what I said. Parents, and if 80% of parents are good people, then it makes sense that parents have a say what is in the school library. It also makes sense that if a parent is abusing a child, a teacher will see it.
I don't have a solution for you for all types of families, but this doesn't change that miyoji's take is fairly extreme.
The effective difference is of course that they could easily get that book from somewhere else if they want it.
If I'm prevented from bringing my dog into a restaurant, that doesn't mean that dogs are banned. It means I have to go to the restaurant on the other side of the street.
If McDonald's doesn't serve any hard liquor it doesn't mean that alcohol has been banned in the country.
Is it really that cut and dry? A technically competent person might easily access a book while living in an authoritarian country, while someone who grows up in an authoritarian family in a "free" country might be prevented from reading a book both at home and at the school where their parents lobbied to ban the book. (It's quite hard to access suppressed information if you lack the knowledge it exists in the first place.)
Authoritarian family? Parents have the authority over their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions. It is up to them how they raise their kids.
They will have all the time and opportunity in the world to read and try anything they want to when they're older.
The specific examples I provided included domestic abuse; most sexual abuse is done by a family member. I hope it's not contentious to say that parental control should not be as authoritarian as to allow that, let alone suppress the victim's knowledge of what it is.
Authoritarian is an adjective. A thing can be authoritarian without all things being so. Yes, authoritarian things have always existed, and yes, a powerful religious group joining forces to make sure kids continue to hate themselves for being gay or trans is authoritarian.
Everywhere being authoritarian throughout all time seems a fairly good summary to me?
The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.
On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.
You're more likely to be aware of a library book curation decision where parents are publicly fighting to remove a book the school library management wants to keep; compared to a curation decision where the school library management simply never decides to make a book available to begin with.
Personally, I am OK with the library making their own curation decisions. That's part of how a library functions, I understand that they can't carry everything. I have a problem when zealous parents try to override those decisions, especially when they are motivated by political or religious worldviews.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
Do you think the librarians' choice about what books to stock in their library aren't motivated by political or religious worldviews? What kind of person becomes a school librarian? One motivation is that they want to influence what kinds of written information young people do and do not readily have access to.
I've known enough librarians to come to a belief that, in general, their curation decisions are more motivated by a love of books and learning than they are by the more divisive political issues of the day.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.
A family we know got swept up in the "banned books" movement. They repost banned book content on their Instagram and even got T-shirts with witty sayings about supporting banned books.
They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.
The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.
It's the school librarian's job to select books. These people are trained in childhood education.
Your imagination has clearly gone way off the deep end here.
Reading that there are gay people doesn't turn people gay. If you think it does, that says more about you, I think.
Trying to hide the existence of gay people from children leads to homophobia from the straight kids, and mental health issues from the gay kids. You are dead wrong here.
So you think parents should not have a say? Wouldn’t that be rather authoritarian to have whatever books and disregard criticism? Many librarians are activists and are choosing books that are not educational. They are actively selecting books that they agree with.
I guess you are fine with the recent increase in homeschooling which is hitting record numbers. The activists..oops "professionals" don't like that either.
People choose to commit atrocities in the name of the famous holy books - you either support banning them as well or concede there's something more to it.
... Wait, are you claiming that people are, having not previously been exposed to Nazism, reading it, and going "well, this seems like a pretty good idea really"? I'm fairly sure that's not a thing. No-one's being radicalised by it; rather the only people who really read it are already radicalised, because, otherwise, why would you bother?
There may be books which radicalise people. But I'm fairly sure Mein Kampf is not one of them.
To a common denominator yes but if you aim for too much breath then you miss out on a lot of good things if you ban until almost everyone is satisfied. And some fads that get popular to ban things I disagree with like when people said violent games were the reason for violence or that rock and metal music made teenagers angry or that grunge makes them kill themselves. Many times some groups latch on to some popular culture topic as the reason for X pre-existing problem of the world.
Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.
Sure. The place for these adults to get books is the county/city library and not the school library. As I said, there's a certain common denominator that we need to respect when talking about public schools.
Banning and burning books is from an era when there was no digital publishing. Only way of distributing text/thoughts was by printing press. Today we don't burn books but we constantly ban/shadow ban digital content. This is independent of which country you are from. Corporations do the censorship mostly, in place of the governments. Try writing a Reddit comment opposing mainstream politics. You are only allowed to play in a sandbox. AI shadow-burns your comments automatically and blacklists you if you go out of your human guiderails. No human dictators to blame. So yes, if this is a dictator thing (I think it is), we all live in a kind of modern dictatorship.
Is it useful to limit these thoughts to a dictator doing dictator stuff, though? What would be the material difference be between that and operatives of his political party astroturfing local school boards to remove books that teach about the racial history of the country or the existance of trans folk, to make it appear as though the local community decided to do it?
I think it's a little bit naive to think they ignore the association. They know it perfectly well, which is why they are using it. Same thing with concentration camps, same thing with mentions of Gestapo.
Given the track we're on, in 80 years Americans will be extinct and whoever's occupying my current space will be living in the Managed Democracy of Monocolored Benetton.
Their kids will be taught that's all it ever was since the first colony was established in this otherwise-uninhabited land on Stardate 2302.5.
If the school declines to put a book in the library, that's not a ban. If people outside the school with power over the school demand that books be removed, that's a ban.
The groups demanding books be removed are often not even parents of children in the school. It external parties driving this stuff.
> The Livraria Lello where this is located, is definitely a bookshop.
And barely a bookshop at that, more of a tourist attraction. You need tickets to enter, and the main selection of books are classics, mainly public domain iirc. They have more recent/interesting books but only as decoration (I asked to buy a Naomi Klein book, they refused to sell it). Most people are just there to take pictures because the stairs inspired Harry Potter.
Yeah, nowadays I think it's like 15€ to enter, there's like a huge line to enter, and I think it's usually crowded inside. They'll discount the 15€ if you buy anything, but if you don't find anything interesting... it's a very expensive visit.
I wish there were some photos of it in the article so we could get a better understanding of what it is.
I've been to lots of bookstores with sections or displays for famously banned books. I'm pretty sure my local Indigo (basically a Canadian Barnes & Noble) has one. If that's all this is then it doesn't sound especially newsworthy outside of the celebrity involvement and maybe the renown of this particular shop.
OTOH the article describes it as a "permanent" installation, which does sound a little different from what I'm picturing.
This is wrong, given only the text of the article. The two books explicitly listed are not banned in Portugal or anywhere else. They are simply not subsidized with public money in some libraries.
I don't know the law in Portugal but I will assume the principles are similar to other western European countries.
If you have book that are actually banned in these countries, I don't think many people will call it awesome.
Books are typically banned for:
- copyright: not really a ban, but the copyright holder simply doesn't want it to be published the way you want it to be, doing it anyway is just piracy. It can be seen as "brave" if the copyright owner is an asshole, but doing that to authors you support is not great.
- hate speech: Germany for instance bans most Nazi stuff, whether or not it is a good thing is debatable, but in any case, what do you think the political message would be if you opened a Nazi library. Most other European countries have similar laws to some degree.
- porn: Need I say more? Special mention to child porn, which is super-banned, and definitely not awesome.
- libel: some people hide behind defamation laws to avoid criticism, but in most cases, these are actual lies and you don't want that.
I don't know of any banned book in Europe that anyone "woke" (for a lack of a better term) would want to put forward.
>The main source for the events of the battle is Herodotus. According to his account, the Spartans held Thermopylae for three days, and although ultimately defeated, they inflicted serious damage on the Persian army. Most importantly, this delayed the Persians' progress to Athens, providing sufficient time for the city's evacuation to the island of Salamis.
>Though a tactical defeat, Thermopylae served as a strategic and moral victory, inspiring the Greek forces to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Salamis later the same year and the Battle of Plataea one year later.
I've actually really been a fan of her, and her music before I heard about her Service95 endeavour. So seeing that video led me to looking into her Service95 work, and yeah, I have to say, she's the real deal.
A lot of people in this thread think they're being clever by pointing out that a bookstore can't sell "banned" books. But it's common for bookstores and libraries to feature titles that have been banned in some jurisdictions. It's a small way to push back against censorship and promote freedom of information and critical thinking.
And there are always people who think they are clever by saying that a library deciding to not have a book on their shelves means the book is BANNED. OK, it's banned in that library, so what? This is not the government sending you to prison if they find you with this book in your pocket, it's a library deciding to use the shelf space for something else and thinking the book is not appropriate for their target audience.
Except the Bell Curve it's bullshit. I'm from Europe (Spain), and even the Francoists said otherwise. Right wing people further than Pether Thiel itself. Go figure.
A nun, some woman (women are far more aware than men on emotions as their hormones basically grant an A+ on social skills) stated that Black People weren't dumb, but African people had no tradition at all on stimulating or paying good attention babies/toddlers as the Western mom do with little plays and the like. That lead to mild development issues.
She followed some children with more Western-like educations and caring and they got far better marks than the ones locked to their cultures.
Add a far better nutrition on top and now you know the reasons on why the Black African countries are underdeveloped. Westernize them and their IQ will boost like crazy.
And still better than most Africans. The more attention they pay to their children, the better adults you get. Also, a good nutritition can be THE major change for anything, such as the Omega3 fats from several fish based dishes.
I hope that her star power encourages young people to read literally anything. The ability for her fans to sit with a singular text, without ad breaks, sponcon, brand deals, and everything else on social media seems like a societal win.
Only two books are explicitly listed by the article, neither of which have been banned anywhere.
Unsubsidized is the more accurate word here. Some governments have chosen not to pay public money to stock these books in libraries, but no government has created criminal penalties for ownership.
It may be the case that her library includes some books that genuinely carry criminal penalties, but the article does not provide enough info to assess that.
They are banned somewhere and the library is open in Portugal.
If they were banned in Portugal it would run afoul of the legal system, and probably be closed down, obviously.
But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.
Though I think there's going to be a lot of garbage, one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican. (along with a bunch more).
Sometimes just seeing what is banned and where is a sort of art in of itself.
> one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican.
I can find no confirmation of this, or of any ban since 1966 (and that is assuming that the index of forbidden books had legal force in the Vatican).
> But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.
Is it worth a visit to a physical location? A lot of those books are ones I could see on a list and order online. Its not really that interesting if a book as been banned somewhere very authoritarian, nor am I that interested if schools in one area somewhere were not allowed to have a book in their libraries. On the other hand reading down this list is very illuminating, and often astonishing:
One thing to note about this list is that it mostly seems to be books which were _banned at some point_. It's also terribly incomplete; while they got unbanned a while back, at one point Ireland banned _thousands_ of books, for instance.
(Some but not all country grids do list unbanned dates.)
Good Friday is a "quiet holiday" in North-Rhine Westphalia (and other areas), which involves restrictions on various kinds of entertainment: https://lexmea.de/de/gesetz/feiertg-nrw/6 So it's not that Life of Brian in particular was banned, but the activist group in question picked it intentionally for their screening to protest against the holiday.
I think it's just a poorly written title. I doubt millions of people will click on the link specifically to learn which books Portugal banned vs to learn about that Dua Lipa is doing. A better title would be "Dua Lipa opens library in Portugal for banned and censored books."
I did not get that implication. I simply thought it was a library that contains books that have been banned from some context that happens to be in Portugal.
The same people who think "banned" and "censored" books must be completely banned and censored in all places to have earned that title instead of just at one point in the past.
At least one of those were literally banned back when Portugal was a dictatorship though, which wasn't all that long time ago.
I think though the library is supposed to be a general, worldwide collection of books that were censored/banned anywhere in the world, the physical location of the library just happens to be in Portugal. That's how I understood the article at least.
Isn't it good marketing though? If I'm a young person looking to read something on the edge, maybe it's not banned where I am but if it was banned somewhere else, that's intriguing. If the consequence is more people reading, I would argue it's far from inconsequential.
Dear reader, "banned" in this case means government institutions (school libraries) did not promote the book to schoolchildren. It does not mean possession of the book got anyone arrested, or that the books are not extremely easily available in major corporate retailers (or even in non-school government-funded libraries). So for example, one is unlikely to find in this library the kind of stickers that got Sam Melia arrested [1], or anything the UK would consider "likely to stir up racial hate" [2], such as the music album “Phoenix Rising” by Embers of an Empire [3,4].
Whether books by e.g. Jared Taylor are also "banned" in this manner in the UK is left wonderfully vague - the only way to find out is to be found possessing one, and then see if the government prosecutes you. You get chilling effects for free, and avoid the bad PR of a "banned books" list!
This was interesting until I read it's inside Livraria Lello. You have to pay to get inside and wait 1 hour in a line alongside tourists. So this looks more like a stunt than anything truly meaningful.
Spat my coffee out laughing. Believing "The Handmaiden's Tale" is "banned/censored" is something only people as shallow as Dua Lipa believe. Everyone knows which "banned and censored books" won't be allowed at this library.
Terrible article. As a European who grew up in a country that has banned¹ thousands of books, periodicals and other media for most of its existence, I was expecting this article to be about some campaign to unban books that were still being censored as a relic of the Salazar era. The headline is deceptive and the article itself is uninformative. It wasn’t until I came across a reference to “school districts” that I realised that this is just more American culture war bullshit being imported into Europe.
I come across her most frequently on Google Maps where the yellow pin man icon for Google Street View is replaced by a Dua Lipa icon. (Not sure if it's global - I'm in London).
For those of you pretending to have trouble understanding 'banned' in this context, it means essentially the same thing as when someone gets 'canceled'.
People who are canceled are not literally thrown in prison and executed.
I don't think a philosopher who died 80 years ago is driving the change in how words are used in the last 20 years. It has more to do with the Internet and the cultural forces driving people to use hyperbole or make things up to make money in the attention market. This article wouldn't be on HN if it was just about Dua Lipa starting a bookstore, they added "banned" so it would catch peoples attention even if that's basically a lie.
> perfectly clear communication was always a polite fiction.
The comment I replied to is trying to argue that it's ok to call books "banned" even if they're not banned, because it's like the term "cancelled" which at one point meant someone whose content was actually cancelled but I guess they're suggesting it doesn't mean that anymore either.
I'm not arguing that words should have perfect meanings, that is obviously a strawman, but this article and comment thread are using words to mean the complete opposite of their common meaning.
> I don't think a philosopher who died 80 years ago is driving the change in how words are used in the last 20 years.
The phenomenon is not restricted to this century. Orwell's book published in 1949 includes many prescient examples. Witgenstein's contribution, at a minimum, is that he named the paradigm, thus raising awareness, and perhaps leading to an increase in intentional engagement with these practices.
Is it a problem? I think it allows greater flexibility for humor and subtext than ever. It's the people who insist on contextualess interpretation that rain on the parade.
> it's ok to call books "banned" even if they're not
First of all, of course it's ok. Nobody is getting hurt. Second, the books are banned—just not where the bookstore is. I'm not sure how anyone could struggle to understand this. Anyway, what book is banned everywhere? Has any book in history really been banned to such an extent? Or do you really think Dua Lipa would be investing in a bookstore that would immediately be shut down? Being upset at this just seems like a waste of energy.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that for the most part it's the people who do believe in canonical definitions that get hurt by thinking they communicate clearly, by allowing others who do have a more flexible understanding of semantics undermine and fool them. We should teach words as polysemous by default so as to ensure they're able to function in the modern world. Hell, a great deal of wordplay can only be enjoyed if you're able to hold multiple definitions in your head at once.
For instance, "literally" notoriously connotes "figuratively".... sometimes. This is actually quite an old phenomenon that well predates the internet. But it allows ironic commentary on the speaker's perspectives that forces the audience to interpret the phrase in a broader context.
There is certainly a role for formal, unambiguous speech—in technical communication, in legal briefs, in analysis more generally—but it's not hard to see why people enjoy straying far beyond that in service of fluid, natural, and concise communication.
>I think it allows greater flexibility for humor and subtext than ever.
It has more ambiguity because we had many similar words for similar things that are differential in some minor way.
Now everything can mean anything, it is leaning more expressive with less precision, English's best quality is that it balances the precise and the expressive, the craft is gone and if you misunderstand what I've written because I've used the wrong words that's your fault.
Be creative, use ten simple words when one archaic or obscure one would suffice, sure, go ahead, use nonplussed synonymously with indifferent, what's most important is that you be creative in your artless murder of English.
This usage of "banned" has been around for over a century, beginning in the USA when the USPS tried to interdict copies of Joyce's Ulysses. It further gained popularity when Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterly's Lover were challenged as obscenity in landmark 1950s-60s trials.
The first Banned Books Week happened in 1982, sponsored by the American Library Association.
However, yes, since 2021 there has been a big spike in the usage of the term "banned" books. Perhaps it was because around that time, there has been a massive push to challenge books (the ironically named "Moms for Liberty" though whose liberty they are protecting seems to be up for debate). 2023 saw >4,000 books challenged, whereas an average year between 2001-2020 saw ~275.
Perhaps if people stopped trying to police the reading habits of others' children, people would be less apt to talk about so called "banned" books?
I, for one, think that policing the reading habits of other people, and the micromanagement of libraries, is far more odious than the hyperbolic use of the word "banned." No one has to check out a book they don't want to.
human language != computer languages and that's why the latter exists. if human language had the precision you are (futilely, ahistorically) pining for, then we could program with them.
Well, it does kind of matter. "Banned" has a specific meaning. If a book is "banned" and you're allowed to possess it or sell it, it's not really banned, now is it? The usage of the word, despite the reality of the situation, strongly implies "this is a book the government WON'T LET YOU READ!" Except, they do.
A more accurate term might be "politically unfavorable", but that doesn't get people riled up. And, I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but this library is probably zeroing in on books that are politically unfavorable to conservative governments. I doubt we'll find the likes of Mein Kampf in there.
I agree that words do have a specific meaning, but the history of words changing their meaning is truly awful+! I was talking to this young girl++ in my neighborhood about words and slang - he said he had never considered that words could change their meaning, and that the dictionary was some kind of rule book. At first I thought maybe he was nice+++, but after considering it, he's young! Everyone learns this in time.
Language is mutable and alive and ever-changing. That's just how it goes.
A venture that gathers objects of subversion likely to draw the ire of authoritarian powers into a single building doesn’t strike me as something likely to peacefully exist for long.
I mean… yeah? Since when would being in Portugal stop a motivated power?
Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.
It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.
> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.
However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.
That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”
>In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere.
and what is a good word to use when something isn't allowed somewhere? perhaps... "banned"?
i dont understand why people think something needs be unavailable globally to be considered "banned".
there's a million examples of the word "banned" being used when X isn't allowed in Y context. people only get touchy about it when it comes to books for some reason.
dang bans people from HN, no one gets upset about the use of the word "ban" there, despite it being a context-specific ban.
The confusion is because some books were literally banned somewhere, while others were just deemed not to be age-appropriate for young children in a school environment.
We don’t call R-rated movies “banned” because we’ve decided not to show it at schools to kids. That’s why it’s confusing when we switch to books and the word “banned” means somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn’t appropriate for kids in their school or something like that.
If someone opened a banned speech museum and then it turns out most of the display is just spam comments from HN it would be pretty silly and rightly criticized.
If you were to make a list of banned books, yes, it would be fine to include Hustler magazine, as it was (and remains) banned in many places (and because of its historical significance in the fight against censorship).
I can pick one up at the corner store or order it online but its not allowed to sit in the libraries of US elementary schools so would you consider it to still be banned in the US?
Pretend confusion, especially over the very terms of the discussion, is a really common shitposting tactic all over the Internet. Though yeah it’s maybe more common here. Possibly because it falls under the category of trolling that doesn’t draw moderator ire (here, I mean, not in general)
its not strange. Books represent knowledge and ideas. Ways of thinking. An attempt to ban a book is an attempt to restrict freedom of thought and the exchange of ideas. It has a historical context and a ban is generally considered on a societal level, not building specific. Some books are not allowed in school buildings, they are not banned.
Banning books for example has a very different context than banning cocaine.
Cocaine use in the United States is banned, Hustler magazine is not. I can swing by the store tomorrow and pick one up legally, I can't get cocaine legally.
Restricting Hustler from a school full of kids is not banning it. Thus the quirk.
If I don't allow Green Eggs and Ham in my house does it belong in a museam of banned books?
I believe when most libraries and stores use the term 'ban', they rely on PEN America's definition:
"any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished." [1]
> "any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
Though this is a fascinating definition.. anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book outside of purely budgetary or physical space limits, it is now a "ban".
The more fascinating question would be discovering the boundary of what PEN, et al consider a "good ban" because I bet we could come up with a few.
> anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book
That's not what the definition you just quoted says. In fact, the definition you quoted is very close to the common definition of "ban": a refusal to allow something, usually by an official entity.
What would happen if a child brought those not-banned or not-censored books to a library/school where they have "forgo those specific books"? What would the reaction be?
I feel like if they'd still let the person read the book by themselves, and freely share it with others, then indeed it's merely a curation choice. But, if I'd expect, they try to prevent this person from reading their own brought book or sharing it with others, then I think it's fair to say that book been banned and/or censored, at least in that particular location.
> “We aren’t including this book because we don’t think it’s appropriate for kids to learn about trans people.” <—- censorship
Removing books from public libraries (not just schools) because we find criticism of certain ideas around gender to be offensive <-- definitely censorship
Of course it worked. Any authoritarian intent on banning a book just could give the spurious reason that "the library does not have enough room" and then there is no censorship ever, according to the original post. See how childish that reasoning is?
I largely agree with you for the time being; I think right now we are in the "dumb authoritarian" phase because Trump, Musk, Thiel can't keep their mouths shut about their true motivations. I fear that there are probably a smarter generation of authoritarians who are more clever (Russel Vought, for example), and not in the spotlight, waiting for their time to ascend.
The loud ones come first, because they have to corrupt the minds of the youth and the mentally weak so they can have a movement.
Banning books on a country level may be silly but curating what is allowed in a school library is not. Which is exactly why people with an agenda want to conflate these two.
The librarians should curate, not the parents. The parents are welcome to decide for their own children what is permissible and not, but should have no authority to prevent others' children from accessing materials they do not find objectionable.
Why is it about "parental rights" when it comes to anti-vaccination, but authoritarian control mechanisms when it comes to someone else's kid reading a fucking book?
If your goal is what to have parents decide what their kids can read then the only way to do that is to have the shared (e.g. school) library carry the commonly agreed upon subset and individual parents who want their kids to have access to more to provide those more controversial book at home. The only reason to call to have books other parents don't want their kids to be exposed to in the school library is if you want to override their choice and make those books available to kids other than yours as well.
No, you need to understand that your specific narrow definition has not handed down by God, and is not more valid than others. US book banning has been a subject for so long now that you are tilling at windmills if you think you can deside what 10000s of people mean when they say banned.
Is a specific institution or library are banned by their decision makers to have a book - that book is banned in that context. If you don't buy this that fair, but don't come at me with your pedantry when I just answered your question.
Not sure if your sarcasm is directed at Dua Lipa for including Atwood, or at the states that actually removed it from their public schools (Texas, Florida, Missouri, among others), but it was actually banned in Portugal during
the Salazar regime.
Either way, I agree with your comment that there is nothing dangerous about Atwood unless you are a fan of authoritarian religious governments.
I was referencing a direct quote from the author, looks like the Booker Prize board actually looked into it and disputes the certainty of the claim. Oh well. However:
1. Regime change doesn't happen instantaneously. The Francoist line of thinking was still pervasive after Franco died, and through the 70s there was a waxing and waning of censorship.
2. The book was still restricted in multiple states, the spirit of my comment still stands.
Regarding 1, I still don't see why what happened the decade before the book was published in another country has any bearing on whether the book was banned in Portugal.
Instead of replying in kind, I will benevolently nudge you to review the Hacker News comment guidelines. I don't think any of us want this site to fall to lower standards of other social media platforms.
One of those marketing events in a cool instagramable spot in Oporto that already has huge queues of people just to photograph it and I'm sure it will only sell books in English catered to tourists and nomad tech bros that are already ruining the city's housing supply. Awesome.
There are no books banned in EU... Some countries have laws that criminalise glorification of nazism or communism, but I never heard any book was "banned" as a result.
Here in Poland we had "Mein Kampf" by certain Austrian painter in my primary school library for example.
That's not true at all, for example in Belgium, any book that discredits genocide, incites to racial hatred, or shows sex with minors is banned from sale and/or possession. Then there's also moral rights infringement, such as obscene parodies of Tintin, books explaining suicide methods, etc, etc.
Lists of banned books are often quite disappointing, and I think they fall into a few categories:
- Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
- Books that seem relatively anodyne, and it's not clear why they were banned. (eg: the perks of being a wallflower)
- Books that governments might have feared in the old days, but are now much less threatening than other more readily-available material. (eg: 1984)
I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information. Instead, modern book-banning feels much more symbolic. ie, "we do not approve of this book!" rather than effective. Anyone can buy the book on Amazon, or pirate it for free, or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas. And importantly, find many, many more extreme, subvesrive, rebellious, etc. ideas for free online.
Of course I do not support the banning of the books, but I think sometimes once a book is banned this act gives the book power -- in more senses than one. Less discussed is that the fans of the book often believe it to be better than it actually is, merely for being banned.
> ... prevent access to information. ... or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas
Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.
Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)
For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in the author's home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.
I think that's a really fair point. A full novel will give you an emotional impact that a list of facts will not provide. A beautifully-told story can convince (at least some people) better than any argument.
I'd still hold that you can just get ahold of books these days if you want to, but your point stands that the mere spread of ideas is not equivalent to really reading the whole book.
Atwood is on record as saying that everything that happens in The Handmaid's Tale has happened somewhere in the world within the 50-100 years that preceded her writing it. While Iran may have been an inspiration, it was not the inspiration, and she has many times spoken of things that have taken place in the USA and found their way into the book.
Yes, it's "about a Christian theocracy" in the sense of "what if a Christian theocracy behaved exactly like an Islamic one".
"Atwood was also inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978–79 that saw a theocracy established that drastically reduced the rights of women and imposed a strict dress code on Iranian women, very much like that of Gilead." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale#Composit...
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."
God forbid we notice any similarities not approved by the author. How silly of me to think it could be about anything other than the religion and cultures where gender equality is the highest.
Oh, the similarities to fundamentalist Islam are absolutely warranted, I just wanted to address the incorrect claim that Atwood wrote Handmain about Iran or Islam (which is false).
Of course all fundamentalist oppressive branches of religions, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism or whatever, converge to similar shapes.
Atwood was worried about trends in the US and imagined a world where the earliest conservative Puritan Christianity -- that she considers a foundational part of America -- made a comeback. So no "gender equality". The early Puritans didn't behave "like Islam", any similarities are a result of a convergent evolution of sorts; their sins are entirely their own: fundamentalist Christianity. Atwood said much, that these were faults of the West she was describing.
I'm all for Death of the Author, but the specific claim I refuted was about what Handmaid was intended to be about (not other valid interpretations) and only the author can answer that. And she did!
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.""
"Like the original theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New.
[...]
Surely the Gilead command would have moved to eliminate the Quakers, as their 17th-century Puritan forebears had done."
"I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)"
> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
Weird example. The Handmaid's Tale is quite good.
Edit: wow, downvotes for stating a book is quite good. HN at its worst.
Edit 2: in fact it's so bizarre, also seeing other commenters here downvoted for saying Handmaid is a good book, that I struggled to see the reason for the ire. I'm not from the US, mind you, so it took me a while to add 2 and 2 and remember Atwood and Handmaid are in the current political climate of the US an anti-Trump stance. So that has to be the reason. Saying Handmaid is a good book implies you're anti-Trump and therefore invites downvotes (but also upvotes from the other camp, I'd guess). Wow.
i find that whenever walking into an HN post about books (or, oddly enough, anything regarding dark matter or dark energy), you are in for an absolutely wild ride of voting.
I didn't mention the show, isn't this thread and article about books?
> It was a thinly veiled world-building exercise on the subjection of women in Islam… then it ends. Nothing really happens.
The Handmaid's Tale wasn't about Islam but about religious Christian fundamentalism and, by Atwood's own words, an extrapolation of trends she saw in the US.
It's a good book, it seems contentious to list it as a "bad book" as a given, and expect people to agree with you. It's an acclaimed book and well received by other authors.
> Nothing really happens.
Bizarre take.
In structure it has a lot of parallels to 1984, the protagonist is trapped in an oppressive regime seemingly without escape, some authority figures are ambiguous, there's some hope but it can turn into a trap, and finally a sort of open end (both Winston's and Offred's fates are implied but unresolved, though Offred's is more ambiguous) and a an epilogue explaining the regime and its implied downfall.
Do you also find 1984 as a novel where nothing happens?
“The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad book” is a wild take to start with.
“I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information.”
You don’t think a school library can prevent access to information? Poor people exist.
I figured my chosen examples would be the least popular part of the post. :)
I just don't think you can prevent access to information the same way, though. There will be at least one smart phone in the house. There will be friends and relatives with smartphones, with computers, etc.
A poor person who lacks the resources to query on youtube for videos or wikipedia for research will also not be able to sit through a full-length novel.
[edit]
In the 1960s it may yet have been true (despite radio and shortwave) that if your local libraries and shops did not contain a book -- if your friends had never heard of its ideas -- that you would truly remain ignorant of some of the subversive ideas out there. Things just do not work that way these days. Ideas spread faster and farther than ever. You really cannot prevent the spread of information the same way.
At best, you can create a culture of censorship around certain information, which is what I believe modern book-banning does. My quibble here is that people seem to treat book-banning as if it's 1890, and the ideas are being killed due to lack of spread. In the modern world, book banning is symbolic and helps to identify ideas as subversive and unwanted -- but they are NOT out of reach.
I am normally with the cynics but I have trouble believing that none of the commenters are unaware that some books are banned in schools, prisons and military bases, in America. This is not just a problem limited to foreign theocracies.
They are banned in the US in the same way playboy magazine is, they are not allowed in certain places.
Would you say that Playboy Magazine is a banned book becuase its not allowed in schools and prisons?
I would guess the person you are responding to is thinking about more mundane books that are or have been banned in public and private schools in recent history. Harry Potter, for example.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would get call for a quick chat with HR if I walked around the office with Mein Kampf under my arm as well.
Schools, prisons, etc are institutions that can decide what is appropriate for their audience and how they want to spend their shelf space. A real banned book is a book that gets you in legal trouble if you're caught with it.
Whenever the topic of “banned books” comes up, a bunch of people argue about whether they should be called “banned”.
What I haven’t seen mentioned in these discussions is where the mental association of “banned books” comes from.
In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators. It mentions, numerous times over many years of a child’s life, that something dictators often do is to ban books that could make people question them or that could make people support people the dictator doesn’t like, etc. In all such cases covered in the school curriculum, dictators’ “banned books” are not allowed to be sold in the country at all, and are often destroyed, sometimes even in mass burnings.
So, this is the psychological association people typically have with the phrase “banned books”.
The news articles over the past X years declaring something like “Government Y bans books!” seem to be leveraging this mental association to give people the emotional impression that Government Y is doing dictatorships things. I think this is why people get annoyed, since not allowing whatever books in the school library is not a dictator thing (okay dictators do it but it’s like drinking milk or being against animal cruelty, it’s not something that is primarily done by dictators).
So, when people say that not allowing a book in a school library is a type of ban, they are correct, but they ignore this association which most people have from school.
The “banned books” theme has become intentionally vague because it has become a marketing tool.
That’s how we got to Dua Lipa doing a promotional photo op holding up books that can be purchased on Amazon and delivered to your Kindle to read immediately. Attaching the “banned” word to a book turns the purchase into an act of rebellion and a reason to talk about it, and the marketers are not going to waste that opportunity.
That’s why the “banned books” category has been expanded so much to include not only books that governments or corporations have tried to suppress, but also books that some school board in Kansas decided shouldn’t be included in the elementary school library.
Unfortunately once a term becomes this overloaded it loses meaning. The original topics of government censorship and oppression get less attention because it’s drowned out by pop stars holding up Margaret Atwood books for photo ops and people buying books on Amazon as a form of slacktivism.
Banning a book in a school district still signifies a form of authoritarianism. If someone is prevented from reading Maus[0] (or finding out they are in a cult, or a victim of domestic abuse), what is the effective difference to them between an authoritarian censoring it at the national level or the local one?
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/holocaust-novel-maus-banne...
We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
Dua Lipa wasn't doing a photo op with Maus. In the photos she's posing with modern books that are still being promoted by their publishers. I'm not familiar with all of them, but a quick search shows one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
This is a promotional stunt, and I'm surprised more people aren't seeing through it.
> We "ban" things from school kids all the time, though: Pornography, gambling, smoking, alcohol, R-rated movies.
And no one really pretended that these cases were cases of "banned books".
The problem is when authority bodies (school, government, ...) start to include, in these "normal non-appropriate" books other books not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons.
I think it would be a very bad faith argument to argue that reading Maus will lead to people less socially adjusted.
And, sure, some "banned" books may be inappropriate. But as soon as these authorities have open the doors to arbitrary banning books, they poisoned their own well: maybe under "normal" evaluation this book should be removed from the list, but they removed it "the bad way", they failed the process, and therefore the ban itself is illegitimate.
It's a bit like the procedural miscarriage of justice: if you mess up when arresting someone, they can be freed even if it turns out they were guilty. Or in a more topical subject: the Fifa can reverse some decision, but if they do it in the context where they received phone calls from the US president, then it's a big failure in the process, even if a "normal" re-evaluation should indeed have concluded to reversing the decision.
> not because they have bad societal consequences when the reader is not mature enough, but because they don't like the content for ideological reasons
“Bad societal consequences” is entirely subjective, though. This is the crux of the issue.
Saying "entirely subjective" is a bit BS, don't you think?
On one hand, you have someone who says that exposing children to sexual or violent content can have an impact on them. This is something that has been studied, sociologists, psychiatrists, doctors, ... have concluded that this is true.
On the other hand, you have someone who says that an ideology they don't like will lead to the ruin of the society. At the same time, communities, and often whole countries themselves, don't see the problem with these ideologies, and the catastrophe that this person has predicted does not occur. The only reason they claim that is because they are intolerant and want to impose their ideology, not because they want what's good for others.
So, yes, there are __some__ subjectivity. The same way that there is subjectivity around "good and bad" and yet "murdering" is universally considered as "bad" but "not going to the catholic mass" is not.
> "murdering" is universally considered as "bad"
Societies that practice(d) slavery and human sacrifice clearly do not share such a "universal" value.
Neither of your examples would be considered murder by those doing them. In the case of slavery you can’t murder property.
A murder is specifically an unjustified killing. And as far as I am aware it is universally considered bad. Which makes sense because murder being considered bad is pretty much baked into the definition.
I can’t think of a modern society that does not condemn going into a random person’s house and killing them. Nor any past ones for that matter.
Now in some backwards ass country they might not consider it murder if that random person was homosexual. Or a killing might be justified in the context of a revolution. Or to bring rain. Or when shooting some guy fleeing with your tv in the back.
You realise that it is exactly what I'm talking about: everything is "subjective" if you look close enough, but only an idiot will think everything is therefore on the same plane.
Sure, "murdering" is not "100% always in all circumstances considered 100% bad" (but I still think that "universal" was not a bad choice, the same way "universal healthcare" does not mean there is no illegibility criteria and therefore exceptions). And of course, there is a lot of discussion to even have on what people mean by murder, but that is, again, missing the point.
But that is totally ridiculous to then pretend that it means that "murdering is bad" has therefore as much legitimacy as "touching your nose with the left hand index finger is bad".
The fact that is subjective does not mean that you cannot say anything anymore. It feels like a common bias in "technology" people: some of them think they are so smart and are condescending to "social science", and yet they are lost on concepts that social science considers as obvious.
I don't understand the scare quotes: per my previous reply, is a ban not a ban regardless of who does it? Maus has nudity and curse words; that's why it was banned in Tennessee. 1984 has multiple sex scenes - the well-funded Christian publication PluggedIn[0] rates it 18+.
Two things can be true at the same time: a book can be both banned in one place, and used to promote someone's brand in another. Somebody in a deeply repressive and abusive home will not have a better or worse life if Dua Lipa did not exist.
[0]: https://www.pluggedin.com/book-reviews/1984/
In Europe every kid over 13 would buy both with no issues at all. 1984's sex scenes are so-so and something that just happens in the background like nothing.
Indeed, after reading the book I was surprised that the movie has explicit frontal nudity.
> one of them is not appropriate for elementary schools because it includes essays debating which sexual acts are appropriate for feminists to perform and other adult topics. Why is it "authoritarianism" to say that a book like that doesn't belong in my kids' school library?
Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
It's authoritarian because it's about people with authority (parents, teachers), telling people without (students) what kinds of media they are and aren't allowed to consume, which is about controlling which ideas they're allowed to think about. You don't like children thinking or learning about sex, but there is no moral or rational reason for that. You just don't like it, and you wish to use your authority to impose your preferences on people who have no power to stop you. That's authoritarian.
And no, I don't think parents should be able to control their children's media diets, the idea that parents get to control their children is itself authoritarian. You don't own your kids.
You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_(2015_film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Behind_the_Sun
That type of media was never in schools to begin with. The problem here is that schools and districts made their own, informed curation decisions, and those decisions are being overridden by zealous parents informed only by their religious and political persuasions.
The implication here is that schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it? As many on the left would say: "everything is political". So what we're discussing is (yet another) front in the "culture war", this time about what ideas and values children should be exposed to.
Let's just be honest about that at least.
The banned books movement (on either side) is broadly not about curriculum. It’s about access in non-required spaces such as libraries and clubs.
The issue there isn’t that kids are being exposed to these items, the issue is that other parents are censoring what _my_ kid can be exposed to. They are infringing on _my_ rights.
Meanwhile I’m not requiring their kid to go into a library and checkout Maya Angelou.
Who or what is preventing you from exposing your children to whatever you’d prefer?
The books aren’t banned.
If you don’t allow something to exist in a school or classroom library through statute or governmental action what do you call it?
Would you prefer forbidden? Barred? Censored?
This kind of thing happens commonly with language development over time. If a word or phrase picks up a strong connotation, then the word or phrase stops being used generically. This used to happen so slowly that nobody really noticed it happening to individual words or phrases, I think.
As an example, starting a fire could be called “firing”. If you say you’re going to “fire the stove”, that isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant. If you call your friend group a “squad”, again, this isn’t typically said, but everyone would know what you meant.
If your friend group goes camping and works together to light a fire, you could say that you’re part of a “firing squad”. But, that already has such a strong connotation that it would be confusing and you would have to constantly explain what you actually mean because “firing squad” as a phrase is already taken.
That is of course a synthetic example but I think it illustrates the point. When we say “banned books”, that has a certain connotation. If what we mean is more like “curated books”, because they aren’t actually banned for sale anywhere, even at the local level, then saying “banned books” is confusing in the same way and it carries an undue emotional charge from the typical usage of that phrase.
If that undue emotional charge seems to be getting weaponized, then using it and acting innocent about it is going to ruffle some feathers.
They are banned though. Not curated. You are not allowed to have these in school libraries. It’s not an editorial decision. For instance the Utah law says that a book must be removed from all libraries if 3 school districts in the state ban it.
No librarian, or teacher, or admin or parent in the other school districts gets any say.
That’s a ban. People may not like that their state is engaging in authoritarian behavior, and it’s less authoritarian than other behaviors, but it’s a ban by the simple facts. Doublespeak doesn’t change that.
Okay let’s be clear on what we’re talking about.
I have seen lots of discussions about headlines along the lines of “<state or local government> bans <book X>”. Or just referring to book X as “a banned book in <state or local jurisdiction>”. This has the problem I described, and this is where I see arguments happening that don’t really make sense to me. It isn’t doublespeak to say what I said about this.
If what we’re talking about is actually the more detailed headline “<state or local government> bans <book x> FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES”, or “book X which is banned FROM SCHOOL LIBRARIES in <state or local jurisdiction>” then that is accurate and fine. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this, have you?
We can’t pretend the two are the same thing, they aren’t the same thing.
Yes? That’s what the whole movement is about in the US and it’s the lead reason dua lipa quotes in the linked article.
I think a better frame is: will the children be less socially adjusted if they are exposed to the book?
While "everything is political", I can still see some differences. What was presented as "banned on neutral, apolitical basis base" in the previous comment can be seen as political at some level, but they are way less political than "let's ban this book because I don't want my children to be exposed to lefties ideas".
It feels like there is an order of magnitude less importance to "maintaining our children unexposed to others' point of view" in the cases of left-wing book-banning than in the right-wing side. After all, right-wing book banning often works on "leftie keywords" or themes (gender study stuffs, inclusivity, ...) while I don't think there is a real movement to ban books because they use too much of "right-wing keywords" (free market stuffs, nationalism, ...).
> schools are making these decisions on a neutral, apolitical basis - but this is not really possible, is it?
Well, sure, but it's not possible for the religious parent groups to be apolitical either (nor do they make any attempt at even ostensible neutrality). Teachers and administrators are well trained, often have or have had children, and are generally a part of the community where they work and teach. It's not like they are 'coastal elites' making lefty decisions for the community; by and large, they share similar worldviews to the kids and their parents. I think we should give them more of our trust in making these decisions.
I guess you're not aware of the "Libs of TikTok" account?
Not really, no. How it is relevant?
> You should think this through. The logical endpoint is that all age based content restrictions are "authoritarian".
I do think that. It's rude to assume that I haven't thought my position through.
> So it should be ok to stock movies like Martyrs[1] or Men Behind the Sun[2] in elementary school libraries, because who are parents and teachers to decide whether seeing a woman flayed to death or a child vivisected is something that a 6 year old should be allowed to see?
Sure.
> My real takeaway here is that you probably don't have children.
I don't, but I was one, and I accessed all kinds of stuff on the internet that my parents and teachers didn't want me to see. Including gross violence and sex stuff. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. I'm fine. I'm a better person for having exposed myself to those things than I would be if I'd been sheltered from them.
But now in a vacuum you're advocating from your position (not being a parent) but being a human, that because you turned out ok, that everyone else will. There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
> There is no numbers, no statistics, just your anecdote here. Which is ok, but that's why two people immediately called your opinion out as being extreme.
No one else provided any, either. If you have strong evidence that exposure to media you don't like is bad for your children, please provide it. If you don't have any, my anecdote is better evidence than you've provided.
Two people calling out an opinion as extreme does not make it extreme, and an opinion being extreme does not make it wrong.
This take is pretty extreme.
> Who exactly are you to say what is or isn't appropriate for elementary school libraries?
parents
If you want to go full anti-authoritarian, you are literally advocating anarchy. One in which you have no right to jail someone for killing someone else.
There are many moral systems! Some of them are based in Christian ethics, which many people prescribe to. In fact it's the one the United States is based on. You can also choose something like liberalism. Many or most people would at least agree that "killing randon people at random times" being advocated in a book is not a good thing. And if that's not a good thing, then there is a moral judgement to be made to "ban" said book. I'm not saying that book exists, but if it did - would you "ban" it?
No one "owns" another person, but there are many other forms of relationships between people that allows for one person to dictate a media diet for another.
> parents
Parent-based rights arguments are perfectly adequate for the 80%, but degenerate in some horrific ways for the rest of the population. We need community-level input on how to raise kids so that the leftover 20% don’t just get fucked up by parents that “know best for their kid”.
Anecdotally know of a few times where kids were taught that their molestation was their own fault (both sub-10yo), and had friends whose parents actively pushed them to kill themselves
So that has nothing to do with what I said. Parents, and if 80% of parents are good people, then it makes sense that parents have a say what is in the school library. It also makes sense that if a parent is abusing a child, a teacher will see it.
I don't have a solution for you for all types of families, but this doesn't change that miyoji's take is fairly extreme.
The effective difference is of course that they could easily get that book from somewhere else if they want it.
If I'm prevented from bringing my dog into a restaurant, that doesn't mean that dogs are banned. It means I have to go to the restaurant on the other side of the street.
If McDonald's doesn't serve any hard liquor it doesn't mean that alcohol has been banned in the country.
Is it really that cut and dry? A technically competent person might easily access a book while living in an authoritarian country, while someone who grows up in an authoritarian family in a "free" country might be prevented from reading a book both at home and at the school where their parents lobbied to ban the book. (It's quite hard to access suppressed information if you lack the knowledge it exists in the first place.)
Authoritarian family? Parents have the authority over their children until they are old enough to make their own decisions. It is up to them how they raise their kids.
They will have all the time and opportunity in the world to read and try anything they want to when they're older.
The specific examples I provided included domestic abuse; most sexual abuse is done by a family member. I hope it's not contentious to say that parental control should not be as authoritarian as to allow that, let alone suppress the victim's knowledge of what it is.
Not any abuse, no. But who is trying to censor or ban information on how abuse victims can get help?
So you are suggesting that kids should just go to a different public school?
You can get books from other places than your public school.
By that definition everywhere throughout all time is authoritarian.
Everywhere throughout all time is obviously not authoritarian, so the definition fails. Sorry, you are wrong.
Authoritarian is an adjective. A thing can be authoritarian without all things being so. Yes, authoritarian things have always existed, and yes, a powerful religious group joining forces to make sure kids continue to hate themselves for being gay or trans is authoritarian.
Everywhere being authoritarian throughout all time seems a fairly good summary to me?
The Romans nailed Jesus to a cross, the American south bred human slaves, Europe regularly had crusades and pogroms, post-war America supported a crazy number of military dictatorships, the Iron curtain, Communist China and so on.
On the other hand, there is a persistent idea that schools are just making curation decisions for the children in their district, and people are calling that book banning. That's what you seem to be suggesting here. In all cases I'm aware of, that's not what's happening either; it's generally a parent, or a small group of parents, generally all from the same religious group and political party, bullying the library or school district into reversing curation decisions they had already made. A small, vocal group ultimately makes decisions about what all the kids in the district can read at school, based on their own religious and political affiliation. That comes much closer to your "banned book mental association" than I think you give it credit for.
You're more likely to be aware of a library book curation decision where parents are publicly fighting to remove a book the school library management wants to keep; compared to a curation decision where the school library management simply never decides to make a book available to begin with.
Personally, I am OK with the library making their own curation decisions. That's part of how a library functions, I understand that they can't carry everything. I have a problem when zealous parents try to override those decisions, especially when they are motivated by political or religious worldviews.
I think the Bible should be in school libraries (and it always has been), but if you're keeping it while removing other books for sex, violence, genocide, pedophilia, rape, homosexuality, or other objectionable things that are also included in the Bible, I think you're being inconsistent and overzealous.
Do you think the librarians' choice about what books to stock in their library aren't motivated by political or religious worldviews? What kind of person becomes a school librarian? One motivation is that they want to influence what kinds of written information young people do and do not readily have access to.
I've known enough librarians to come to a belief that, in general, their curation decisions are more motivated by a love of books and learning than they are by the more divisive political issues of the day.
Of course, none of us can completely escape our own biases. That said, librarians aren't airdropped in to small towns from San Francisco; generally, they're local. If they're in a religious conservative community, it's pretty darn likely they are also religious and conservative. They have probably also had some education that helped them understand biases and how to practice avoiding them.
I find your implicit suggestion that there is some underground network of Leftys descending on small town America to become librarians and put LGBTQ books on the shelves laughably unserious. If you want to influence kids, go on tiktok or become a youth pastor or something. It's hard enough to get kids to read books they're actually interested in, you're not gonna get far as a librarian.
Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.
A family we know got swept up in the "banned books" movement. They repost banned book content on their Instagram and even got T-shirts with witty sayings about supporting banned books.
They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.
The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.
A lot of books are getting banned from schools because they mention gay characters or other "woke" content. Not at all the same thing.
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consider a world in which same sex attraction was normalized and produced children.
would you need someone to tell you you were heterosexual, or would you figure it out on your own (having rarely, if ever, seen it before)?
try considering things from other people's perspective. you'll find that it opens up your mind and heart to various forms of empathy!
It's the school librarian's job to select books. These people are trained in childhood education.
Your imagination has clearly gone way off the deep end here. Reading that there are gay people doesn't turn people gay. If you think it does, that says more about you, I think.
Trying to hide the existence of gay people from children leads to homophobia from the straight kids, and mental health issues from the gay kids. You are dead wrong here.
So you think parents should not have a say? Wouldn’t that be rather authoritarian to have whatever books and disregard criticism? Many librarians are activists and are choosing books that are not educational. They are actively selecting books that they agree with.
You hire professionals to teach your children. If you think you can do it better than them, why are you sending your kids to school?
I guess you are fine with the recent increase in homeschooling which is hitting record numbers. The activists..oops "professionals" don't like that either.
Look at who homeschools children. It's not people who value education.
Can you list some of these books you want removed from school libraries, along with why?
Mein Kampf?
No, make it part of the curriculum. Read it and shown how boring and stupid it is.
Demystify such nonsense
> Read it and shown how boring and stupid it is.
Except it's not, or it couldn't have continued to radicalize people to this very day.
I doubt that most owner have read it completely.
Like the bible people mostly know the parts of it that fit their own agenda.
And don’t underestimate the effect it has if you are forced to read a book in school from front to back and write essays about it.
People choose to commit atrocities in the name of the famous holy books - you either support banning them as well or concede there's something more to it.
... Wait, are you claiming that people are, having not previously been exposed to Nazism, reading it, and going "well, this seems like a pretty good idea really"? I'm fairly sure that's not a thing. No-one's being radicalised by it; rather the only people who really read it are already radicalised, because, otherwise, why would you bother?
There may be books which radicalise people. But I'm fairly sure Mein Kampf is not one of them.
The irony of Mein Kampf suffering the streisand effect is not lost.
To a common denominator yes but if you aim for too much breath then you miss out on a lot of good things if you ban until almost everyone is satisfied. And some fads that get popular to ban things I disagree with like when people said violent games were the reason for violence or that rock and metal music made teenagers angry or that grunge makes them kill themselves. Many times some groups latch on to some popular culture topic as the reason for X pre-existing problem of the world.
Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.
Sure. The place for these adults to get books is the county/city library and not the school library. As I said, there's a certain common denominator that we need to respect when talking about public schools.
Banning and burning books is from an era when there was no digital publishing. Only way of distributing text/thoughts was by printing press. Today we don't burn books but we constantly ban/shadow ban digital content. This is independent of which country you are from. Corporations do the censorship mostly, in place of the governments. Try writing a Reddit comment opposing mainstream politics. You are only allowed to play in a sandbox. AI shadow-burns your comments automatically and blacklists you if you go out of your human guiderails. No human dictators to blame. So yes, if this is a dictator thing (I think it is), we all live in a kind of modern dictatorship.
Is it useful to limit these thoughts to a dictator doing dictator stuff, though? What would be the material difference be between that and operatives of his political party astroturfing local school boards to remove books that teach about the racial history of the country or the existance of trans folk, to make it appear as though the local community decided to do it?
I think it's a little bit naive to think they ignore the association. They know it perfectly well, which is why they are using it. Same thing with concentration camps, same thing with mentions of Gestapo.
book burnings like this? https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/09/gop-lawmakers-hold-symbo...
> In America, at least, the school curriculum spends a lot of time talking about dictators.
I don’t think this is actually true. What’s your source for this? States set K-12 curriculum.
One can only wonder how American Schools will talk about the current US Gov and presidents in a few decades...
Given the track we're on, in 80 years Americans will be extinct and whoever's occupying my current space will be living in the Managed Democracy of Monocolored Benetton.
Their kids will be taught that's all it ever was since the first colony was established in this otherwise-uninhabited land on Stardate 2302.5.
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Declining to buy and stock a book in a school library is not a ban at all.
The book can still be printed, bought, and read. It can be brought into that same school, and read there. It’s not banned.
If the school declines to put a book in the library, that's not a ban. If people outside the school with power over the school demand that books be removed, that's a ban.
The groups demanding books be removed are often not even parents of children in the school. It external parties driving this stuff.
Removing a book from the library is not a ban any more than a publisher rejecting a manuscript is a ban.
Declining to provide a book is not the same as prohibiting the possession, use, or distribution of a book.
As for “external parties”, schools in the US are public institutions.
If rather have folks that are trained in childhood education doing that job than randos.
Livraria does not mean library, but bookstore. The Livraria Lello where this is located, is definitely a bookshop.
It is not clear to me from the reporting if Manifesto Library is a translation error or if it really is a library within a bookshop.
I suspect it's neither and more like an art installation.
> The Livraria Lello where this is located, is definitely a bookshop.
And barely a bookshop at that, more of a tourist attraction. You need tickets to enter, and the main selection of books are classics, mainly public domain iirc. They have more recent/interesting books but only as decoration (I asked to buy a Naomi Klein book, they refused to sell it). Most people are just there to take pictures because the stairs inspired Harry Potter.
Yeah, nowadays I think it's like 15€ to enter, there's like a huge line to enter, and I think it's usually crowded inside. They'll discount the 15€ if you buy anything, but if you don't find anything interesting... it's a very expensive visit.
> more like an art installation
Considering the length of the line to get into that place, I'd wager you're correct.
They wrote: > inside the famed Livraria Lello bookshop
So I think they are aware of the “false friends” words.
With that said, I don’t think it’s an actual library, more like, as you said, an art installation, an exhibition, a space for highlighting books.
I wish there were some photos of it in the article so we could get a better understanding of what it is.
I've been to lots of bookstores with sections or displays for famously banned books. I'm pretty sure my local Indigo (basically a Canadian Barnes & Noble) has one. If that's all this is then it doesn't sound especially newsworthy outside of the celebrity involvement and maybe the renown of this particular shop.
OTOH the article describes it as a "permanent" installation, which does sound a little different from what I'm picturing.
It's a book store.
I find this video that looks at Dua Lipa and her love of books great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN1rULxGHCA
Came straight to my mind as well. Thanks for sharing. Her music is not my cup a tea but her interest in books seems absolutely genuine.
For anyone with doubts, I insist that you give watching the video a chance.
you know the questions are good when the authors take a step back and think!
Dua Lipa opens, in Portugal, a library for books that are banned and censored (elsewhere).
This is wrong, given only the text of the article. The two books explicitly listed are not banned in Portugal or anywhere else. They are simply not subsidized with public money in some libraries.
That makes more sense. How could a library or a bookshop in a location legally offer books that are banned in that location?
THAT would be awesome bravery and freedom: "Come and take it" has been powerful before.
I don't know the law in Portugal but I will assume the principles are similar to other western European countries.
If you have book that are actually banned in these countries, I don't think many people will call it awesome.
Books are typically banned for:
- copyright: not really a ban, but the copyright holder simply doesn't want it to be published the way you want it to be, doing it anyway is just piracy. It can be seen as "brave" if the copyright owner is an asshole, but doing that to authors you support is not great.
- hate speech: Germany for instance bans most Nazi stuff, whether or not it is a good thing is debatable, but in any case, what do you think the political message would be if you opened a Nazi library. Most other European countries have similar laws to some degree.
- porn: Need I say more? Special mention to child porn, which is super-banned, and definitely not awesome.
- libel: some people hide behind defamation laws to avoid criticism, but in most cases, these are actual lies and you don't want that.
I don't know of any banned book in Europe that anyone "woke" (for a lack of a better term) would want to put forward.
"I don't want to share a book that the government has actually banned" is quite a position on this thread.
> Most other European countries have similar laws to some degree.
Except for historical or drama purposes. In the Basque Country you could buy tons of books about Nazis, Franco, ETA and whatnot.
The first "Molon labe" famously did not go well.
oh, i would say it went quite well:
>The main source for the events of the battle is Herodotus. According to his account, the Spartans held Thermopylae for three days, and although ultimately defeated, they inflicted serious damage on the Persian army. Most importantly, this delayed the Persians' progress to Athens, providing sufficient time for the city's evacuation to the island of Salamis.
>Though a tactical defeat, Thermopylae served as a strategic and moral victory, inspiring the Greek forces to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Salamis later the same year and the Battle of Plataea one year later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe
Historically (and maybe still today, in some very authoritarian countries!) university libraries were often this.
As someone who lived under an authoritarian regime for more than 2 decades: that's not even close to be true.
Even discussing a taboo topic may cost someone their freedom, if not their life.
Here's a video to highlight why Dua Lipa is not a typical "celebrity book club" type person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN1rULxGHCA
I've actually really been a fan of her, and her music before I heard about her Service95 endeavour. So seeing that video led me to looking into her Service95 work, and yeah, I have to say, she's the real deal.
A lot of people in this thread think they're being clever by pointing out that a bookstore can't sell "banned" books. But it's common for bookstores and libraries to feature titles that have been banned in some jurisdictions. It's a small way to push back against censorship and promote freedom of information and critical thinking.
And there are always people who think they are clever by saying that a library deciding to not have a book on their shelves means the book is BANNED. OK, it's banned in that library, so what? This is not the government sending you to prison if they find you with this book in your pocket, it's a library deciding to use the shelf space for something else and thinking the book is not appropriate for their target audience.
Looking forward to picking up copies of The Bell Curve and The Camp of the Saints since free speech is now so widely supported in Europe.
Except the Bell Curve it's bullshit. I'm from Europe (Spain), and even the Francoists said otherwise. Right wing people further than Pether Thiel itself. Go figure.
A nun, some woman (women are far more aware than men on emotions as their hormones basically grant an A+ on social skills) stated that Black People weren't dumb, but African people had no tradition at all on stimulating or paying good attention babies/toddlers as the Western mom do with little plays and the like. That lead to mild development issues. She followed some children with more Western-like educations and caring and they got far better marks than the ones locked to their cultures.
Add a far better nutrition on top and now you know the reasons on why the Black African countries are underdeveloped. Westernize them and their IQ will boost like crazy.
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And still better than most Africans. The more attention they pay to their children, the better adults you get. Also, a good nutritition can be THE major change for anything, such as the Omega3 fats from several fish based dishes.
Which is an SES effect; SES effects are all generally "highly politically relevant".
I hope that her star power encourages young people to read literally anything. The ability for her fans to sit with a singular text, without ad breaks, sponcon, brand deals, and everything else on social media seems like a societal win.
Only two books are explicitly listed by the article, neither of which have been banned anywhere.
Unsubsidized is the more accurate word here. Some governments have chosen not to pay public money to stock these books in libraries, but no government has created criminal penalties for ownership.
It may be the case that her library includes some books that genuinely carry criminal penalties, but the article does not provide enough info to assess that.
Dua Lipa opens a library, in Portugal, for banned and censored books.
Two of my favorite examples of grammatical importance:
https://youtu.be/QMF5-0wfs1I
https://youtu.be/5yuL6PcgSgM
Seriously though, good on her.
They are not banned in portugal. Appreciate the gesture but it s very inconsequential.
They are banned somewhere and the library is open in Portugal.
If they were banned in Portugal it would run afoul of the legal system, and probably be closed down, obviously.
But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.
Though I think there's going to be a lot of garbage, one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican. (along with a bunch more).
Sometimes just seeing what is banned and where is a sort of art in of itself.
> one need only remember that Life of Brian (the Monty Python movie) is banned in the Vatican.
I can find no confirmation of this, or of any ban since 1966 (and that is assuming that the index of forbidden books had legal force in the Vatican).
> But if the criteria of being in the library - that the book be banned somewhere in the world; that's a reason to visit the library in of itself.
Is it worth a visit to a physical location? A lot of those books are ones I could see on a list and order online. Its not really that interesting if a book as been banned somewhere very authoritarian, nor am I that interested if schools in one area somewhere were not allowed to have a book in their libraries. On the other hand reading down this list is very illuminating, and often astonishing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern... I am still scrolling down it, but Austria, Australia and China are all fascinating.
Ah, sorry, I was confused, it was Italy.
https://www.thewoodword.org/entertainment/2023/04/03/reeling...
One thing to note about this list is that it mostly seems to be books which were _banned at some point_. It's also terribly incomplete; while they got unbanned a while back, at one point Ireland banned _thousands_ of books, for instance.
(Some but not all country grids do list unbanned dates.)
The notes column also sometimes explains current status.
Some historical bans and the reasons for them are very interesting too.
Life of Brian is banned from public screening in parts of Germany on Good Friday. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23227452
Good Friday is a "quiet holiday" in North-Rhine Westphalia (and other areas), which involves restrictions on various kinds of entertainment: https://lexmea.de/de/gesetz/feiertg-nrw/6 So it's not that Life of Brian in particular was banned, but the activist group in question picked it intentionally for their screening to protest against the holiday.
In Germany you're not allowed to mow your lawn with a motorised mower or to recycle glass bottles on Sundays either.
"Banned" feels like a slightly clumsy word to use to describe restrictions such as these.
I think I'll make showing that on Good Friday a tradition now.
ok
Actually the article title is shit clickbait because it IMPLIES those books are banned in Portugal.
The museum is in Portugal. It is not specified where those books are banned.
I think it's just a poorly written title. I doubt millions of people will click on the link specifically to learn which books Portugal banned vs to learn about that Dua Lipa is doing. A better title would be "Dua Lipa opens library in Portugal for banned and censored books."
I did not get that implication. I simply thought it was a library that contains books that have been banned from some context that happens to be in Portugal.
> article title is shit clickbait because it IMPLIES those books are banned in Portugal
People on this site have some really bizarre ideas about what constitutes "clickbait".
People who litter the comments with worthless complaints about titles are one of the most annoying things about this place.
The same people who think "banned" and "censored" books must be completely banned and censored in all places to have earned that title instead of just at one point in the past.
At least one of those were literally banned back when Portugal was a dictatorship though, which wasn't all that long time ago.
I think though the library is supposed to be a general, worldwide collection of books that were censored/banned anywhere in the world, the physical location of the library just happens to be in Portugal. That's how I understood the article at least.
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Isn't it good marketing though? If I'm a young person looking to read something on the edge, maybe it's not banned where I am but if it was banned somewhere else, that's intriguing. If the consequence is more people reading, I would argue it's far from inconsequential.
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Dear reader, "banned" in this case means government institutions (school libraries) did not promote the book to schoolchildren. It does not mean possession of the book got anyone arrested, or that the books are not extremely easily available in major corporate retailers (or even in non-school government-funded libraries). So for example, one is unlikely to find in this library the kind of stickers that got Sam Melia arrested [1], or anything the UK would consider "likely to stir up racial hate" [2], such as the music album “Phoenix Rising” by Embers of an Empire [3,4].
Whether books by e.g. Jared Taylor are also "banned" in this manner in the UK is left wonderfully vague - the only way to find out is to be found possessing one, and then see if the government prosecutes you. You get chilling effects for free, and avoid the bad PR of a "banned books" list!
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
[2] https://www.thelawpages.com/criminal-offence/Possessing-raci...
[3] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/R-v-Robe...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3yl0dgq3no
This was interesting until I read it's inside Livraria Lello. You have to pay to get inside and wait 1 hour in a line alongside tourists. So this looks more like a stunt than anything truly meaningful.
Spat my coffee out laughing. Believing "The Handmaiden's Tale" is "banned/censored" is something only people as shallow as Dua Lipa believe. Everyone knows which "banned and censored books" won't be allowed at this library.
Terrible article. As a European who grew up in a country that has banned¹ thousands of books, periodicals and other media for most of its existence, I was expecting this article to be about some campaign to unban books that were still being censored as a relic of the Salazar era. The headline is deceptive and the article itself is uninformative. It wasn’t until I came across a reference to “school districts” that I realised that this is just more American culture war bullshit being imported into Europe.
¹ literally banned, i.e. it was illegal to buy, sell or distribute such publications in the state: https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1929/act/21/enacted/en/h...
It's 100 books. Does your house have bookshelves? You have more books than this. It's like a display at a bookstore.
I don't know anything about her music, but she seems pretty cool on the literary front.
I come across her most frequently on Google Maps where the yellow pin man icon for Google Street View is replaced by a Dua Lipa icon. (Not sure if it's global - I'm in London).
For those of you pretending to have trouble understanding 'banned' in this context, it means essentially the same thing as when someone gets 'canceled'.
People who are canceled are not literally thrown in prison and executed.
I miss the days when words still had meaning
Words have more meanings than ever.... but last century produced wittgenstein; perfectly clear communication was always a polite fiction.
> Words have more meanings than ever
Right, that's the problem
> but last century produced wittgenstein;
I don't think a philosopher who died 80 years ago is driving the change in how words are used in the last 20 years. It has more to do with the Internet and the cultural forces driving people to use hyperbole or make things up to make money in the attention market. This article wouldn't be on HN if it was just about Dua Lipa starting a bookstore, they added "banned" so it would catch peoples attention even if that's basically a lie.
> perfectly clear communication was always a polite fiction.
The comment I replied to is trying to argue that it's ok to call books "banned" even if they're not banned, because it's like the term "cancelled" which at one point meant someone whose content was actually cancelled but I guess they're suggesting it doesn't mean that anymore either.
I'm not arguing that words should have perfect meanings, that is obviously a strawman, but this article and comment thread are using words to mean the complete opposite of their common meaning.
> I don't think a philosopher who died 80 years ago is driving the change in how words are used in the last 20 years.
The phenomenon is not restricted to this century. Orwell's book published in 1949 includes many prescient examples. Witgenstein's contribution, at a minimum, is that he named the paradigm, thus raising awareness, and perhaps leading to an increase in intentional engagement with these practices.
> Right, that's the problem
Is it a problem? I think it allows greater flexibility for humor and subtext than ever. It's the people who insist on contextualess interpretation that rain on the parade.
> it's ok to call books "banned" even if they're not
First of all, of course it's ok. Nobody is getting hurt. Second, the books are banned—just not where the bookstore is. I'm not sure how anyone could struggle to understand this. Anyway, what book is banned everywhere? Has any book in history really been banned to such an extent? Or do you really think Dua Lipa would be investing in a bookstore that would immediately be shut down? Being upset at this just seems like a waste of energy.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that for the most part it's the people who do believe in canonical definitions that get hurt by thinking they communicate clearly, by allowing others who do have a more flexible understanding of semantics undermine and fool them. We should teach words as polysemous by default so as to ensure they're able to function in the modern world. Hell, a great deal of wordplay can only be enjoyed if you're able to hold multiple definitions in your head at once.
For instance, "literally" notoriously connotes "figuratively".... sometimes. This is actually quite an old phenomenon that well predates the internet. But it allows ironic commentary on the speaker's perspectives that forces the audience to interpret the phrase in a broader context.
There is certainly a role for formal, unambiguous speech—in technical communication, in legal briefs, in analysis more generally—but it's not hard to see why people enjoy straying far beyond that in service of fluid, natural, and concise communication.
>I think it allows greater flexibility for humor and subtext than ever.
It has more ambiguity because we had many similar words for similar things that are differential in some minor way.
Now everything can mean anything, it is leaning more expressive with less precision, English's best quality is that it balances the precise and the expressive, the craft is gone and if you misunderstand what I've written because I've used the wrong words that's your fault.
> Now everything can mean anything
I don't think you're this unable to discern meaning. I have faith in you.
> if you misunderstand what I've written because I've used the wrong words that's your fault.
You could say the same thing about how you're reacting right now.
Be creative, use ten simple words when one archaic or obscure one would suffice, sure, go ahead, use nonplussed synonymously with indifferent, what's most important is that you be creative in your artless murder of English.
This usage of "banned" has been around for over a century, beginning in the USA when the USPS tried to interdict copies of Joyce's Ulysses. It further gained popularity when Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterly's Lover were challenged as obscenity in landmark 1950s-60s trials.
The first Banned Books Week happened in 1982, sponsored by the American Library Association.
However, yes, since 2021 there has been a big spike in the usage of the term "banned" books. Perhaps it was because around that time, there has been a massive push to challenge books (the ironically named "Moms for Liberty" though whose liberty they are protecting seems to be up for debate). 2023 saw >4,000 books challenged, whereas an average year between 2001-2020 saw ~275.
Perhaps if people stopped trying to police the reading habits of others' children, people would be less apt to talk about so called "banned" books?
I, for one, think that policing the reading habits of other people, and the micromanagement of libraries, is far more odious than the hyperbolic use of the word "banned." No one has to check out a book they don't want to.
human language != computer languages and that's why the latter exists. if human language had the precision you are (futilely, ahistorically) pining for, then we could program with them.
Well, it does kind of matter. "Banned" has a specific meaning. If a book is "banned" and you're allowed to possess it or sell it, it's not really banned, now is it? The usage of the word, despite the reality of the situation, strongly implies "this is a book the government WON'T LET YOU READ!" Except, they do.
A more accurate term might be "politically unfavorable", but that doesn't get people riled up. And, I'm just going to take a wild guess here, but this library is probably zeroing in on books that are politically unfavorable to conservative governments. I doubt we'll find the likes of Mein Kampf in there.
I agree that words do have a specific meaning, but the history of words changing their meaning is truly awful+! I was talking to this young girl++ in my neighborhood about words and slang - he said he had never considered that words could change their meaning, and that the dictionary was some kind of rule book. At first I thought maybe he was nice+++, but after considering it, he's young! Everyone learns this in time.
Language is mutable and alive and ever-changing. That's just how it goes.
+Used to mean 'inspiring awe'
++Used to mean 'young child (gender neutral)'
+++Used to mean 'foolish' or 'ignorant'
When somebody says a book is banned, there's usually some context that provides details on the scope of the ban.
For example, North Korea has banned most western books so my local Barnes and Nobles is pretty much a banned book store.
The irony of discussing the "new meaning" of a word on a thread about books/bookstore. Then say "canceled".
> In some cases, the author has paid for their words with their life.”
Are there examples of these?
The few examples mentioned in the article are easy to buy, at least in the US. Is there a full manifest somewhere?
I guess Salman Rushdie nearly did.
https://www.service95.com/manifesto-library-launch looking here, it seems the best case would be Navalny, although he wasn't really killed for his book per se, but rather his political opposition.
Hundreds in Gaza alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_...
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These are journalists murdered by Israel.
The "real banned books" are (in my opinion) generally those which have not been translated.
Good on her using her platform for something.
A venture that gathers objects of subversion likely to draw the ire of authoritarian powers into a single building doesn’t strike me as something likely to peacefully exist for long.
... I mean, it's in Portugal. Are you expecting Russia or a Florida school board or whatever to bomb it?
I mean… yeah? Since when would being in Portugal stop a motivated power?
Just ask Vadym Yermolaiev, Andriy Portnov, Emilian Gebrev or the staff at the warehouse in Vrbetice. Being in Portugal is an implementation detail.
It’s a soft target, but it’s a _very easy_ soft target when people have a host of possible enemies who might be motivated to disrupt your operations to point fingers at. None of the powers you’re criticising are going to be rushing to promote any investigation when your library accidentally sets on fire for the 4th time in 2 months.
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Are those just banned and censored in Portugal specifically or the EU as a whole?
A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.
However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.
That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”
>In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere.
and what is a good word to use when something isn't allowed somewhere? perhaps... "banned"?
i dont understand why people think something needs be unavailable globally to be considered "banned".
there's a million examples of the word "banned" being used when X isn't allowed in Y context. people only get touchy about it when it comes to books for some reason.
dang bans people from HN, no one gets upset about the use of the word "ban" there, despite it being a context-specific ban.
The confusion is because some books were literally banned somewhere, while others were just deemed not to be age-appropriate for young children in a school environment.
We don’t call R-rated movies “banned” because we’ve decided not to show it at schools to kids. That’s why it’s confusing when we switch to books and the word “banned” means somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn’t appropriate for kids in their school or something like that.
the confusion is fake. books are the only time people get fussy about the word. (despite the same conversation occurring every month or two here)
dang bans someone from HN? no confusion. alcohol banned in public? no confusion. weapons banned from schools? no confusion.
books? oh my god, they aren't banned they just aren't allowed
> dang bans someone from HN? no confusion. alcohol banned in public? no confusion. weapons banned from schools? no confusion.
Notice how all of those bans include a specific context? From HN, in schools, in public.
No confusion.
Notice how the only context in the headline is “in Portugal” but the books are not banned in Portugal?
Confusion.
It’s really not hard.
like every post on HN, if you want the context, you should read more than just the headline. its really not hard.
If someone opened a banned speech museum and then it turns out most of the display is just spam comments from HN it would be pretty silly and rightly criticized.
In your opinion is Hustler magazine a banned book becuase its not allowed in schools?
If you were to make a list of banned books, yes, it would be fine to include Hustler magazine, as it was (and remains) banned in many places (and because of its historical significance in the fight against censorship).
I can pick one up at the corner store or order it online but its not allowed to sit in the libraries of US elementary schools so would you consider it to still be banned in the US?
No, I would not consider it to be "banned in the US".
if i said "hustler is banned from my school", and someone came along and said "it's not banned, it's just not allowed", i would laugh.
the word "banned", specifically and only in the context of books, is one of the fucking strangest quirks of HN.
Pretend confusion, especially over the very terms of the discussion, is a really common shitposting tactic all over the Internet. Though yeah it’s maybe more common here. Possibly because it falls under the category of trolling that doesn’t draw moderator ire (here, I mean, not in general)
its not strange. Books represent knowledge and ideas. Ways of thinking. An attempt to ban a book is an attempt to restrict freedom of thought and the exchange of ideas. It has a historical context and a ban is generally considered on a societal level, not building specific. Some books are not allowed in school buildings, they are not banned.
Banning books for example has a very different context than banning cocaine. Cocaine use in the United States is banned, Hustler magazine is not. I can swing by the store tomorrow and pick one up legally, I can't get cocaine legally.
Restricting Hustler from a school full of kids is not banning it. Thus the quirk.
If I don't allow Green Eggs and Ham in my house does it belong in a museam of banned books?
>a ban is generally considered on a societal level
no, its not.
>Restricting Hustler from a school full of kids is not banning it.
only if you are making up your own definition of "ban".
by any dictionary definition, it is completely appropriate to say hustler is banned from the school.
If I don't allow Green Eggs and Ham in my house does it belong in a museam of banned books?
its completely normal and acceptable english to say that you've banned green eggs and ham from your house. that's my point.
I'm more likely to laugh at the implication that Hustler somehow qualifies as a book.
At a certain point it's called lying
Something actually inaccessible? imgur.com in UK, and soon many others
The "in Portugal" is, I presume, a statement on where the library is.
Further, when people talk about banned books, they usually mean at some sub-country level, even down to a school board. Like if you look at -
https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
- these books weren't banned from the United States, but they're controversial enough that individual school boards or library systems removed them.
No non of them are censored in the EU. They are all censored in the US, maybe with the exception of Salman Rushdie.
US book banning is mainly schools and parent groups strong arming libraries and educators to forgo specific books.
Are you serious about this? There’s not a single school in the EU where an employee takes books off the shelves because they find them offensive?
Because that’s the standard you’re using for ”censored in the US”.
"libraries and educators to forgo specific books" is neither "banning" nor "censoring"
In the name of literacy, we need to use words properly.
I believe when most libraries and stores use the term 'ban', they rely on PEN America's definition: "any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished." [1]
[1] https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
Thanks, this is useful.
> "any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
Though this is a fascinating definition.. anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book outside of purely budgetary or physical space limits, it is now a "ban".
The more fascinating question would be discovering the boundary of what PEN, et al consider a "good ban" because I bet we could come up with a few.
> anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book
That's not what the definition you just quoted says. In fact, the definition you quoted is very close to the common definition of "ban": a refusal to allow something, usually by an official entity.
It matters a lot who does it.
What would happen if a child brought those not-banned or not-censored books to a library/school where they have "forgo those specific books"? What would the reaction be?
I feel like if they'd still let the person read the book by themselves, and freely share it with others, then indeed it's merely a curation choice. But, if I'd expect, they try to prevent this person from reading their own brought book or sharing it with others, then I think it's fair to say that book been banned and/or censored, at least in that particular location.
What if someone brought a porno to blockbuster?
How is that at all related or relevant to anything I wrote?
It is censorship if those books are not included for a specific reason.
“We aren’t including this book in the library because we don’t have space for every book.” <—— not censorship
“We aren’t including this book because we don’t think it’s appropriate for kids to learn about trans people.” <—- censorship
> “We aren’t including this book because we don’t think it’s appropriate for kids to learn about trans people.” <—- censorship
Removing books from public libraries (not just schools) because we find criticism of certain ideas around gender to be offensive <-- definitely censorship
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66441947
Yes, book bans are bad no matter who does it. See how simple that is?
Playboy was never in school libraries either, basically because children aren't adults.
Isn't this basic curation and child protection, not censorship?
Since there are no libraries with space for every book (ever), then there is no censorship?
That's a childish argument.
My point was to highlight the ridiculousness of the comment to which I was responding; glad it worked!
It didn't work. The comment wasn't ridiculous. Your reply was. But yes, if you want to flip thing around so you feel validated, be my guest.
Of course it worked. Any authoritarian intent on banning a book just could give the spurious reason that "the library does not have enough room" and then there is no censorship ever, according to the original post. See how childish that reasoning is?
You're right
> Since there are no libraries with space for every book (ever), then there is no censorship?
When people ban books because they don't want others to learn about trans people, they're usually pretty vocal about their motivations.
>When people ban books because they don't want others to learn about trans people, they're usually pretty vocal about their motivations.
You assume they are vocal about their motivations, because how could you possibly know, if they claim it under cover of "not enough shelf space"?
Well, maybe a lot of people do keep it secret… that’s true. But plenty of people do not keep it secret.
I largely agree with you for the time being; I think right now we are in the "dumb authoritarian" phase because Trump, Musk, Thiel can't keep their mouths shut about their true motivations. I fear that there are probably a smarter generation of authoritarians who are more clever (Russel Vought, for example), and not in the spotlight, waiting for their time to ascend.
The loud ones come first, because they have to corrupt the minds of the youth and the mentally weak so they can have a movement.
Yes, this is colloquially referred to as "banning." Sorry, you don't get to decide how others use language.
Used by those wanting to sell and profit from outrage about "banned" books to be precise.
See also: normal people who aren't afraid of books and think that banning them is silly.
Banning books on a country level may be silly but curating what is allowed in a school library is not. Which is exactly why people with an agenda want to conflate these two.
The librarians should curate, not the parents. The parents are welcome to decide for their own children what is permissible and not, but should have no authority to prevent others' children from accessing materials they do not find objectionable.
Why is it about "parental rights" when it comes to anti-vaccination, but authoritarian control mechanisms when it comes to someone else's kid reading a fucking book?
If your goal is what to have parents decide what their kids can read then the only way to do that is to have the shared (e.g. school) library carry the commonly agreed upon subset and individual parents who want their kids to have access to more to provide those more controversial book at home. The only reason to call to have books other parents don't want their kids to be exposed to in the school library is if you want to override their choice and make those books available to kids other than yours as well.
No, you need to understand that your specific narrow definition has not handed down by God, and is not more valid than others. US book banning has been a subject for so long now that you are tilling at windmills if you think you can deside what 10000s of people mean when they say banned.
Is a specific institution or library are banned by their decision makers to have a book - that book is banned in that context. If you don't buy this that fair, but don't come at me with your pedantry when I just answered your question.
> Is a specific institution or library are banned by their decision makers to have a book - that book is banned in that context.
By that reasoning, all PG-13 and R rated movies are "banned" just because your elementary school library doesn't carry them. Absurd, huh?
"10000s of people" can create new definitions of words as they choose, just don't be surprised when educated people think they're fools.
Wow, Margaret Atwood how dangerous and subversive.
Yeah, she's really underground. Not many people have heard of her.
Not sure if your sarcasm is directed at Dua Lipa for including Atwood, or at the states that actually removed it from their public schools (Texas, Florida, Missouri, among others), but it was actually banned in Portugal during the Salazar regime.
Either way, I agree with your comment that there is nothing dangerous about Atwood unless you are a fan of authoritarian religious governments.
That's strange that a book that was published in 1985 was banned by a regime which fell in 1974.
I was referencing a direct quote from the author, looks like the Booker Prize board actually looked into it and disputes the certainty of the claim. Oh well. However:
1. Regime change doesn't happen instantaneously. The Francoist line of thinking was still pervasive after Franco died, and through the 70s there was a waxing and waning of censorship.
2. The book was still restricted in multiple states, the spirit of my comment still stands.
Regarding 1, I still don't see why what happened the decade before the book was published in another country has any bearing on whether the book was banned in Portugal.
The spirit of incorrectness
Instead of replying in kind, I will benevolently nudge you to review the Hacker News comment guidelines. I don't think any of us want this site to fall to lower standards of other social media platforms.
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One of those marketing events in a cool instagramable spot in Oporto that already has huge queues of people just to photograph it and I'm sure it will only sell books in English catered to tourists and nomad tech bros that are already ruining the city's housing supply. Awesome.
There are no books banned in EU... Some countries have laws that criminalise glorification of nazism or communism, but I never heard any book was "banned" as a result.
Here in Poland we had "Mein Kampf" by certain Austrian painter in my primary school library for example.
No Eu wide bans, but quite a few in some EU countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
According to that list, in Germany unannotated editions of Mein Kampf are still banned.
Seeing it in the flesh is the reason why I don't believe too many people actually read the original (and not the abridged version).
It's a brick! And poorly written at that. The man had no talent for the arts.
Wouldn't something like a book of child pornography be banned in the EU?
That's not true at all, for example in Belgium, any book that discredits genocide, incites to racial hatred, or shows sex with minors is banned from sale and/or possession. Then there's also moral rights infringement, such as obscene parodies of Tintin, books explaining suicide methods, etc, etc.
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Cool.
Lists of banned books are often quite disappointing, and I think they fall into a few categories:
- Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
- Books that seem relatively anodyne, and it's not clear why they were banned. (eg: the perks of being a wallflower)
- Books that governments might have feared in the old days, but are now much less threatening than other more readily-available material. (eg: 1984)
I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information. Instead, modern book-banning feels much more symbolic. ie, "we do not approve of this book!" rather than effective. Anyone can buy the book on Amazon, or pirate it for free, or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas. And importantly, find many, many more extreme, subvesrive, rebellious, etc. ideas for free online.
Of course I do not support the banning of the books, but I think sometimes once a book is banned this act gives the book power -- in more senses than one. Less discussed is that the fans of the book often believe it to be better than it actually is, merely for being banned.
> ... prevent access to information. ... or find countless video reviews which contain its ideas
Popping in to point out that novels are not "information" in the sense of being lists of facts or ideas. The medium is part of the message. That's why novels can be banned but a list of the facts/ideas are often not.
Reading an AI summary of a novel is not even roughly equivalent to reading the book. (Before AI, there were handwritten summaries like Cliff's Notes that served the same purpose of allowing a person to gain a superficial understanding of a book.)
For example: one could list the key facts of _Roots_ (banned in school libraries in the author's home state of Tennessee in 2026) and not convey the points of the book, which is embodied in the totality of the work. Incidentally, _Roots_ was banned for integral parts of the message of the book.
I think that's a really fair point. A full novel will give you an emotional impact that a list of facts will not provide. A beautifully-told story can convince (at least some people) better than any argument.
I'd still hold that you can just get ahold of books these days if you want to, but your point stands that the mere spread of ideas is not equivalent to really reading the whole book.
The banned book of the TV hit series The Handmaid's Tale. Watch it tonight on Prime Video!
> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
Handmaid's Tale is actually a pretty decently written book for a dystopia. You just need to like dystopias.
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If you read the book instead of watching "influencers" you'd notice it's explicitly about a Christian theocracy, but whatever.
Atwood is on record saying the inspiration is Iran 79's Islamic revolution.
Atwood is on record as saying that everything that happens in The Handmaid's Tale has happened somewhere in the world within the 50-100 years that preceded her writing it. While Iran may have been an inspiration, it was not the inspiration, and she has many times spoken of things that have taken place in the USA and found their way into the book.
She might be, but what she's actually written in the book is bible not koran references...
Yes, it's "about a Christian theocracy" in the sense of "what if a Christian theocracy behaved exactly like an Islamic one".
"Atwood was also inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978–79 that saw a theocracy established that drastically reduced the rights of women and imposed a strict dress code on Iranian women, very much like that of Gilead." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale#Composit...
Nope. A Christian theocracy of Puritan values.
From Atwood herself (https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-how-she-came-to-write-...)
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself."
God forbid we notice any similarities not approved by the author. How silly of me to think it could be about anything other than the religion and cultures where gender equality is the highest.
Oh, the similarities to fundamentalist Islam are absolutely warranted, I just wanted to address the incorrect claim that Atwood wrote Handmain about Iran or Islam (which is false).
Of course all fundamentalist oppressive branches of religions, be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism or whatever, converge to similar shapes.
Atwood was worried about trends in the US and imagined a world where the earliest conservative Puritan Christianity -- that she considers a foundational part of America -- made a comeback. So no "gender equality". The early Puritans didn't behave "like Islam", any similarities are a result of a convergent evolution of sorts; their sins are entirely their own: fundamentalist Christianity. Atwood said much, that these were faults of the West she was describing.
I'm all for Death of the Author, but the specific claim I refuted was about what Handmaid was intended to be about (not other valid interpretations) and only the author can answer that. And she did!
It's not about Islam. If that's what you thought, I suggest a second read, this time paying more attention?
"Atwood herself has acknowledged that the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which took place in 1978-79, was a direct inspiration for her novel."
https://www.patreon.com/DarvishIntelligence/posts/handmaids-...
https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-how-she-came-to-write-...
From Atwood herself:
"The deep foundation of the United States—so went my thinking—was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the Republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of Church and State, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England—with its marked bias against women—which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.""
"Like the original theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New.
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Surely the Gilead command would have moved to eliminate the Quakers, as their 17th-century Puritan forebears had done."
"I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights—all had precedents, and many of these were to be found, not in other cultures and religions, but within Western society, and within the “Christian” tradition itself. (I enclose “Christian” in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the Church’s behavior and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organization would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)"
> Books that are simply bad books and in addition to being bad take an aggressive, political bent. (eg: the handmaid's tale)
Weird example. The Handmaid's Tale is quite good.
Edit: wow, downvotes for stating a book is quite good. HN at its worst.
Edit 2: in fact it's so bizarre, also seeing other commenters here downvoted for saying Handmaid is a good book, that I struggled to see the reason for the ire. I'm not from the US, mind you, so it took me a while to add 2 and 2 and remember Atwood and Handmaid are in the current political climate of the US an anti-Trump stance. So that has to be the reason. Saying Handmaid is a good book implies you're anti-Trump and therefore invites downvotes (but also upvotes from the other camp, I'd guess). Wow.
i find that whenever walking into an HN post about books (or, oddly enough, anything regarding dark matter or dark energy), you are in for an absolutely wild ride of voting.
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I didn't mention the show, isn't this thread and article about books?
> It was a thinly veiled world-building exercise on the subjection of women in Islam… then it ends. Nothing really happens.
The Handmaid's Tale wasn't about Islam but about religious Christian fundamentalism and, by Atwood's own words, an extrapolation of trends she saw in the US.
It's a good book, it seems contentious to list it as a "bad book" as a given, and expect people to agree with you. It's an acclaimed book and well received by other authors.
> Nothing really happens.
Bizarre take.
In structure it has a lot of parallels to 1984, the protagonist is trapped in an oppressive regime seemingly without escape, some authority figures are ambiguous, there's some hope but it can turn into a trap, and finally a sort of open end (both Winston's and Offred's fates are implied but unresolved, though Offred's is more ambiguous) and a an epilogue explaining the regime and its implied downfall.
Do you also find 1984 as a novel where nothing happens?
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Francoist Spain. "Sección femenina". Be really scared of what happened to these women even after the Moon Landing.
That's the true face of the Catholic Church when they have the power and they are not limited by a democratic state.
“The Handmaid’s Tale is a bad book” is a wild take to start with.
“I still think, even in these crazy, censorious times, that people who love banned books list are (intentionally or not) hearkening back to an older time when a centralized body could actually prevent access to information.”
You don’t think a school library can prevent access to information? Poor people exist.
I figured my chosen examples would be the least popular part of the post. :)
I just don't think you can prevent access to information the same way, though. There will be at least one smart phone in the house. There will be friends and relatives with smartphones, with computers, etc.
A poor person who lacks the resources to query on youtube for videos or wikipedia for research will also not be able to sit through a full-length novel.
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In the 1960s it may yet have been true (despite radio and shortwave) that if your local libraries and shops did not contain a book -- if your friends had never heard of its ideas -- that you would truly remain ignorant of some of the subversive ideas out there. Things just do not work that way these days. Ideas spread faster and farther than ever. You really cannot prevent the spread of information the same way.
At best, you can create a culture of censorship around certain information, which is what I believe modern book-banning does. My quibble here is that people seem to treat book-banning as if it's 1890, and the ideas are being killed due to lack of spread. In the modern world, book banning is symbolic and helps to identify ideas as subversive and unwanted -- but they are NOT out of reach.
Again, I do not support book banning whatsoever.
I am normally with the cynics but I have trouble believing that none of the commenters are unaware that some books are banned in schools, prisons and military bases, in America. This is not just a problem limited to foreign theocracies.
They are banned in the US in the same way playboy magazine is, they are not allowed in certain places. Would you say that Playboy Magazine is a banned book becuase its not allowed in schools and prisons?
I would guess the person you are responding to is thinking about more mundane books that are or have been banned in public and private schools in recent history. Harry Potter, for example.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would get call for a quick chat with HR if I walked around the office with Mein Kampf under my arm as well.
Schools, prisons, etc are institutions that can decide what is appropriate for their audience and how they want to spend their shelf space. A real banned book is a book that gets you in legal trouble if you're caught with it.