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Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

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Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#141

Post by guilhas »

Aurornis wrote: post #23
caseysoftware wrote: post #5

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 f…

At a certain point it's called lying

Something actually inaccessible? imgur.com in UK, and soon many others

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#142

Post by croes »

BJones12 wrote: post #135
mossTechnician wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#143

Post by runako »

everdrive wrote: post #12

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 les…

> ... 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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#144

Post by ozgung »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #116

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…

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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#145

Post by guilhas »

everdrive wrote: post #12

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 les…

The banned book of the TV hit series The Handmaid's Tale. Watch it tonight on Prime Video!

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#146

Post by fvdessen »

Roark66 wrote: post #34

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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#147

Post by like_any_other »

the_af wrote: post #136
like_any_other wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Englan…

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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#148

Post by Aurornis »

mossTechnician wrote: post #140
Aurornis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opportu…

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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#149

Post by stronglikedan »

croes wrote: post #142
BJones12 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

#150

Post by Aurornis »

glimshe wrote: post #122
pfannkuchen wrote: post #116

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…

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.

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