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Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

kansascity.com

31–40 of 132 posts

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#31

If they are willing to go to such extremes to censor books how do they feel about the internet? The internet has a reach that is orders of magnitude greater than books, but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet. Is it just too decentralized to even attempt or is their pursuit of book censorship just for show to impress their followers?

Generally if you are out-of-touch enough to think libraries are important facets of societal knowledge that require sexual policing rather than a book warehouse with free wifi than you are out-of-touch enough to think the internet only consists of Facebook and google searches to Facebook

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#32
post #8

As a european that frequently discusses political topics with people from the US, I recall times when conservatives over there were all about "small government" and "freedom of speech" and how they would literally fight for those rights (that's what the second amendment was written for in their eyes). Where are those people today? Why are they not more vocal? Or were these values always just a veneer for something el…

Small government is code for cutting welfare spending and regulation of business activities.

Freedom of speech is code for a lot of things. In conservative circles it means the right to burn books, incite insurrections, and eventually burn crosses on the lawns of people of color and have women wear red robes and white headscarves.

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#33
post #8

As a european that frequently discusses political topics with people from the US, I recall times when conservatives over there were all about "small government" and "freedom of speech" and how they would literally fight for those rights (that's what the second amendment was written for in their eyes). Where are those people today? Why are they not more vocal? Or were these values always just a veneer for something el…

The state unanimously passed a law to exclude sexually explicit books from public school libraries. A reasonable thing to do. The library association and the ACLU decided they wanted to sue the state. The state, in turn, removed the relatively small amount of funds allocated for the libraries. FaFo. All of this is in the article.

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#34

$4 million is a lot of money for a library and completely unnecessary in current economic conditions

It's comically evil to cut such a small amount of money for the state's public libraries under pretty much any circumstance (The total budget is ~50 billion dollars). Libraries should be considered some of our crowning achievements: (nearly) free and unprivileged access to as much knowledge as we can cram into a single building. Unfortunately, one of the primary political parties is actively waging war on education a…

> The total budget is nearly 3 billion dollars

According to the article the total budget is $50 billion.

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#35
post #5

> The proposal, approved close to midnight by the House Budget Committee, would cut the entire $4.5 million in state aid that libraries were slated to get next year. The proposed library cut, along with other changes to the state’s roughly $50 billion budget, will now head to the full Missouri House. What does this mean for libraries? $4.5 million can't have been enough to fund a statewide library network so presumab…

It's Missouri, so I highly doubt the money is equally distributed among libraries. You can see where aid goes here: https://www.sos.mo.gov/library/development/stateaid/default And then you can look up or estimate the total spend for each of those community's libraries. Likely this means approximately nothing for most suburban, urban, and exurban/college town/resort town/etc. library systems. Those communities can eas…

Are the politicians pushing for this from rural areas? Seems like either they are serving their constituents, or they'll be voted out next time?

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#37

If they are willing to go to such extremes to censor books how do they feel about the internet? The internet has a reach that is orders of magnitude greater than books, but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet. Is it just too decentralized to even attempt or is their pursuit of book censorship just for show to impress their followers?

Well recently they went after a journalist for "hacking the government website" after he ran an article about how they had a bunch of people's SS#s in the source code of one of their webpages so I'm not sure Missouri is too keen on it either.

Just a nitpick, but "source code" might imply that it was something secretive. The guy found SSNs of teachers in MO served up publicly on a state website within the page's HTML. The governor went on a crusade against this guy because he didn't understand it, and despite being told by numerous experts that there was no case, he kept it going.

The worst part was that this guy was beyond reproach - he went out of his way to notify people and said he wouldn't mention it to news outlets etc until the issue was resolved. It was a clear case of the governor misusing his power to prosecute a free press that he didn't like using a pretext he knew was incorrect. While it's funny to poke at the governor for this, I personally believe it should have caused his removal from office.

https://missouriindependent.com/2022/02/23/claim-that-report...

excerpt:

  State education officials initially wanted to thank Renaud for discovering the problem that, as investigators would learn, has existed undetected since 2011. And an FBI agent who looked at the incident informed the state that it was “not an actual network intrusion,” noting that the website in question “allowed open source tools to be used to query data that should not be public.”

  State officials made it clear the information was on a public site, it was not encrypted or password protected and the reporter was not anywhere he wasn’t allowed.

  The governor decided to blame a government failing on the reporter who discovered it.

  Despite all this, Parson convened a press conference to label the reporter a “hacker” and demand a highway patrol investigation. He accused the Post-Dispatch of trying to use the security flaw to embarrass him, and his political action committee launched ads to raise money off Parson’s attacks.

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#38

If they are willing to go to such extremes to censor books how do they feel about the internet? The internet has a reach that is orders of magnitude greater than books, but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet. Is it just too decentralized to even attempt or is their pursuit of book censorship just for show to impress their followers?

[deleted]

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#39

If they are willing to go to such extremes to censor books how do they feel about the internet? The internet has a reach that is orders of magnitude greater than books, but I never hear about lawmakers attempting to shut down the internet or part of the internet. Is it just too decentralized to even attempt or is their pursuit of book censorship just for show to impress their followers?

Well, that fight is happening on the scale of entire nations, isn't it? States wouldn't logically have jurisdiction over it because it's interstate commerce, but at the federal and international level, it's definitely at issue.

Re: Missouri lawmakers move to strip library funding, retaliate for book ban lawsuit

#40

Where should the line be drawn? As a parent of kids in elementary and middle school, I don't want them reading about anything sexually explicit. Maybe in high school but I feel something should be done to evaluate what reading materials are seen by children. We didn't do it with social media, we didn't do it with pornography, and we bear the results of that nonintervention. What is the best argument for allowing elem…

Perhaps the answer lies in teaching kids (young adults?) in an objective, strictly-educational manner as the time dawns for it to become relevant in their lives.

Of course that solution would be objected to by both sides. The social leftists think it's literally a death sentence to trans children to not teach 6-year-olds about anal sex, and populist conservatives think sex ed in any capacity is degenerate pedophilia.

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