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Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
141–150 of 500 posts
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#142Hey America, is everything okay down there? Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of? Yikes.
Can I correctly surmise that you're Canadian? If so, your leader declared a national emergency to squash free speech, banished handguns so you can no longer protect yourself, and cut off political opponents from the financial system. Trying to control the books children can view in an educational environment seems trivial by comparison.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There were some books that some segment of voters didn't approve of that certain school libraries were providing. I mean, so? This is small minority of people we're talking about. Why do they get veto power over everything present in the classroom? It's the teachers' job to teach the kids, manage/provision the classroom, etc. At some point you have to just tell people "No".
If a law is passed the presumption under democracy is it has the assent of the majority. Personally I'm not a huge fan of democracy, but you're looking at it.
To be clear, this isn't democracy, it's republicanism. Laws get passed in republicanism all the time that the majority of the people don't agree with, because their representatives aren't actually representing their interests.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
To fill in some context... This isn't about Governor approval. This was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. Not a mandate by them. The context of all of this is teachers putting books in front of kids that their parents don't approve of. I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an e…
> I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. What book was it? I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of…
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the book. It was one I was not familiar with.
The discussion noted that the book discussed using "toys". They also noted that there was an add for buying sex toys as part of the book. These are elements that really caught my attention.
I have a hard time seeing most parents in the US being ok with this material being put in front of kids who are 5-10 years old.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#145If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.
Let me be clear that I do not agree at all, in any way with this argument, I'm just answering your question as to what the opinion of people who like this think. There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The on…
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
Having some form of sexual interaction with peers certainly isn't universal but it is well within "normal" for teenagers. The mechanisms of our legal system require us to treat majority as a binary state that people just switch on one day at age 18, but actual development doesn't work like that in any way.
If you enforce on actual people the legal fiction that no one under 18 has ever encountered sexual material in the world or in their own mind, you're creating all sorts of vulnerabilities for them when they do reach 18 and have minimal awareness of their own boundaries, right to have them, and practice enforcing them.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
"Groomers" is very commonly used in this context as a homophoblic slur, conflating queer people with child abuse and pedophilia. If that's not your intention I suggest you don't use it in this way in conversations like this. Grooming is certainly a very serious form of child abuse. Coincidentally I'm sure, depictions of it are also banned by this restriction on books. You are not going to help youths realize they are in this situation if you prevent them from ever engaging with the stories of others who have been.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#146Hey America, is everything okay down there? Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of? Yikes.
 
This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy [0], using the (easy to defend) argument "we shouldn't give obscene material to 8-year-olds" to justify the (indefensible) argument that "no material that any parents find ideologically reprehensible should be made available to any children through the school system".
Note that nobody in this thread defending the policy has been able to name any of these porn books that have been given to children, and that none of them attempt to defend the ramifications of the policy as implemented.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am very much against this law but I think "present in school" is much different than "curated." I couldn't give a shit if kids were bringing Anarchist Cookbook and images of the tortures at Abu Dhabi prison to school. What the kid and his family obtain on their own through private means and choose to read in a public venue like a school IMO is none of my business. If the teachers are curating books that disproporti…
What you're describing very much isn't happening, though. These books indeed were merely "present in school" on a book shelf. Nobody's being indoctrinated into practical terrorism in Florida schools by being forced to read the Anarchist's Cookbook or anything like that.
If the books in the school library just appear there with no influence by the school staff in charge of the libraries then I guess we can just fire the library staff. Then there's no one there to risk a felony. I didn't realize it was completely non-curated and unmanaged in Florida.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#148What’s going on with the politicians in Southern states? Why are they spending time making these pointless laws that often infringe on the rights of their constituents? How are people okay with being dictated what books their children can read?
Hate politics need an underclass to target and oppress. In the US that used to be Black people, but then Black people became too popular and too well supported; and then for a while it was gay people, but then then gay people became too popular and too well supported; and now the target is transgender people and gender nonconformists.
Consider the quote from Lyndon B. Johnson: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Now just swap out the hated group. That's why people are okay with it.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also drives families with kids out of Florida to more sane educational operating environments. Florida already has the worst teacher shortage in the nation: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2023/01/22/our-child...
It looks like Florida public school enrollment is increasing[1] by quite a lot. It's up to 3,032,800 for Fall 2023 from 2,903,500 in 2020[2], only beat by Arizona, Alaska, and Utah. [1] https://www.fldoe.org/finance/fl-edu-finance-program-fefp/ft... [2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.20.a...
OP mentioned a teacher shortage, not a student shortage.
Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools
#150Hey America, is everything okay down there? Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of? Yikes.
We have an big propaganda issue that is being exploited by our national enemy's (I'm talking about you Russia). All this stuff that upsets our stable society is only good for our enemies. Nobody should care of what other people are reading, unless it poses a threat to our society. Talk about shouting fire in a theater.
I think it's a subtle form of white nationalism and American exceptionalism when you pretend that the most racist, backwards, destructive, Country on Earth couldn't have come up with every single one of these policies all on their own