We have a new villain (same as the old villain): librarians. West Virginia wants to make them liable to prosecution.
The West Virginia House of Delegates debated the merits of removing protections for public librarians and school librarians from criminal prosecution in the off chance a minor encounters books and content some consider to be obscene.
The House passed House Bill 4654 – removing bona fide schools, public libraries, and museums from the list of exemptions from criminal liability relating to distribution and display to a minor of obscene matter – in a 85-12 vote Friday, sending the bill to the state Senate.
HB 4654 would lift criminal liability exemptions from schools in the presentation of local or state-approved curriculum, and public libraries and museums displaying obscene matter to a minor when the child is not accompanied by a parent/guardian.
Are you surprised? Those nefarious librarians are probably plotting to commit evil acts like stocking children’s books that present sexuality in an informative and non-threatening way, and maybe they’ll even bring in people wearing women’s clothing to entertain kids and encourage reading. It’s all part of their wicked plan.
This prescient cartoon from more than 20 years saw the whole conspiracy developing.
Meanwhile ignorance and especially deliberate willful ignorance has its own and often far more severe penalties..
..I fear we’re about to find out what those penalties for ignorance & ignoring scientific reality are all too soon and they will be far harsher than anything any judge could impose.. (Cough, Climate Crisis..)
(cough cough–flat earth, moon landing hoax, homeopathy, energy healing, Qanon)
The free public library is a corner-stone of human civilization. The fact that any person can educate themselves on any subject, with no barrier for entry, provides such an essential well-spring of culture and intellectual growth that I’m not sure democracy can survive without it.
An enemy of libraries is an enemy of humanity.
Dewey Decimal? When I worked at my local university library, most of the books were shelved according to the Library of Congress system. The rest were referred to as the “screwy Deweys.”
Obviously, that was after the government takeover of the publishing industry. Just like the commies did!
These creeps are cosmically stupid.
Where are minors, adults, UFO Aliens, or anyone likely to encounter “obscene” matter (whatever that is.) The Internet!!!
These days access to the internet is ubiquitous. Everywhere.
“Smartphones are an important part of our everyday lives; around 92% of Americans own a smartphone.”
Chances are those minors are carrying around a smart phone.
Do they know how to use a smart phone to access R or X rated material.
Of course. C’mon you were a child once yourself. You know how that works.
The amount of time people spend on the internet or smart phones is orders of magnitude more than they spend at libraries.
The other place minors are likely to encounter adult material is cable TV. There are a lot of R rated movies on cable TV and all you have to do is turn on the TV and watch them.
ABout two decades ago, the wacko fundie xians where I live demanded that the public library restrict access to their banks of internet computers to children. Because their children might go to porn sites.
.1. The library refused.
They pointed out that they were a library, not substitute parents to the children. It was up to the parents to raise their own kids, not the library.
.2. They did compromise and set up a bank of computers in the children’s and teen sections with Net Nanny software to prevent kids from accessing porn. Needless to say, that software was easily defeated by anyone who knew how to get on the internet.
.3. They also had a few in the adult section, prominently labeled so people afraid of accidently seeing porn were protected.
No one ever used those.
Except me.
They were always free and I didn’t care about the software which wasn’t very effective any way.
The problems with these sorts of bills are obvious.
One of the main ones is what is “obscene”.
There is no definition and no way to tell.
What is obscene to a demented fundie xian is innocuous to normal people.
An anatomy diagram? The bible? The GOP? DeSantis?
Game of Thrones?
The problem appears to be that Libraries is to close to liberal and that scares them into thinking(?) that they are the same.
Seems like privatizing them is the way to go. Make them a membership club. You know, use all the tricks that white people have used to set up exclusive spaces except make them inclusive.
Why doesn’t this surprise me at all? Maybe the descendants of Walter Barnette (Barnette v. West Virginia Bd. Educ., 319 U.S. 624 (1942) (it’s unconstitutional to force students with religious objections to participate in saluting the flag)) could have predicted this.
Of course, there’s a more subtle, and scarier, bias buried not so deeply there. I will not bet that these new regulations will be used to keep material on black-lung disease, climate change, and other issues inimical to the coal-mining power structure of West Virginia out of libraries in the state… because according to correspondents there who know, it’s already happening. This just reinforces the ability of corruptly-elected officials — and (corruptly-elected) judges — to apply pressure on libraries regarding their personal preferences and pecadillos, not to mention personal history.
feralboy12 @ #5 — Yeah the DDS is old school, although some places may still use it. Dewey had some quirky ideas about information categorization (my field) and he was a Christian. This had specific implications for the Religion classification (10s) and explains why in the DDS books on non-Christian religious subjects often have very long numbers after the decimal.
I saw a meme on FaceBook in the last few days of a writer…recognized the name but don’t remember it…that writers support libraries. Of course, the nut cases don’t usually go after libraries openly but start with restricting children’s access to some material. They start with sexually explicit stuff and then they’ll wedge in things like “critical race theory.” Don’t want those children thinking about such things…or adults for that matter.
I once gave a talk at a high school which had a pretty comprehensive firewall locking up the internet. After my presentation, I was going to show a group of students some science stuff on the internet, but it was all totally inaccessible. The teacher asked a student to come up and get around the firewall…it was practically instantaneous and trivial. All the students knew precisely how to circumvent the barrier — they even bragged that they could get to porn sites (I told them they didn’t need to demonstrate, I believed them).
Behind those innocent cat eye glasses and demure manner is a deeply subversive personality. Lock ‘em up!!
Houston suburb school district fired all 37 librarians effective May. They can apply for 10 positions as “media specialists.” Libraries will be converted to media centers.
I call it the Tubervilling of America.
It is against the rules to wish that a human would rough up these merican taliban assholes. But it is not against the rules to wish The Librarian would do a number on them.
Oook!
Law librarians should boycott helping these jerks, who you just know are mostly lawyers.
These folks don’t seem to remember being kids themselves. Nothing inspires kids to do find a way to do something like being told they can’t.
@18: Remember, most law librarians are non-practicing holders of JD (law) degrees. Who, rightly, bitterly resent that over 90% of their collections would have to fit between 340.08 and 347.65 in the DDS… and that significant pockets even within that small range don’t belong in a law library but over in the history department or political science/government. The less said about how “chemistry,” “biology,” “military affairs,” and “non-European history, language, and culture” fit into DDS, the better (hint: they’re at best scattered across at least five segments each, frequently meaning that “departmental libraries” vary wildly between incomplete and duplicative).
tl; dr DDS must be destroyed because it’s inherently misleading.
@14: That’s because the internet is for porn. Oops, wait, that’s its secondary purpose; the primary purpose is competitive 64-sector Star Trek (and if you don’t know what that means, you’re definitely too young and never had a DARPAnet account). “Easy exchange of scientific data” is at best third place and the excuse used to get funding.
feralboy @12
Ironically the LoC system was invented or, at least, greatly improved by J. Edgar Hoover, a committed anti-Communist.
@#5, feralboy12:
Bah. The LC system is an inventory management scheme, not a knowledge classification scheme. It makes sense if your collection is so physically large that nobody would ever browse the shelves hoping to make connections by looking at the books, or you expect that you’re going to have to constantly shunt chunks of the collection around, or new acquisitions are coming in so fast that your cataloguers can’t keep up. Otherwise, it’s trash. There are issues with how DD splits its range into topics, but from an actual information science perspective, it’s an amazing design.
Frankly , I read some science fiction story (don’t remember the exact title , Canticle for somebody)about the world going through another dark age type knowledge restriction. And I realized that Ignorance WAS trying to birth into the USA itself like Cthulhu . That was about when W Bush and his ilk was restricting info about global warming at NASA and the Dover trial happened
Close.
A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic.
The best science fiction isn’t just good science fiction, it is great literature.
The disaster was a nuclear war followed by book burnings as the surviving population takes out their revenge on science and scientists.
I read it as a kid shortly after it was published and still have a copy.
Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself.
And then re-destroys itself in another nuclear war.
@22:
I disagree as to substantial parts of the LOC system, and sort-of agree as to others.
Wandering a canonical collection in the D (world history) and E (US history) areas in search of connections is useful only if one already has specialist-level knowledge in them. A (philosophy) is a nightmare due primarily to its incoherent subject matter that largely denies connections at the book-length-and-above level. But C (“civilization”), K (law), Q in the core (science, but not specific disciplines), U and V (military and naval affairs), and above all P (literature) are immensely rewarding random browses if one starts with only a little knowledge of the respective fields. (H (economics) never rewards randomness, but then neither do the corresponding areas in Dewey, which is rather my original point.)
A large part of the problem is that there just aren’t a lot of book-length works that have a single, monomaniacal subject — with the possible exception of textbooks and the so-called monograph (and even seldom as to the latter, witness Wittgenstein’s Brown Book). Consider a relatively short book, Bickel’s The Least Dangerous Branch, which has substantial elements of jurisprudence, US constitutional law, US (and to a lesser extent European) history, political science/government, and moral philosophy. It’s canonically shoved into US constitutional law, but pretending that’s its only connection is wrong. (Pretending that it’s correct in all or even most particulars is wrong, too, but that’s for another time; it has to be engaged with at a fundamental level, just like a geneticist has to engage with Mendel.)
If you want to wander and make connections, stick to journals, especially outside of the quadrivium. At book length, the connections are inside the individual volumes, and catching nonmisleading ones requires anything but wandering.† The fundamental problem with cataloging systems is that the res has to sit somewhere findable, even if the tag is arguable; what’s not arguable about DDS is the more-than-slight tinge of racism at its core (do not get me started on how DDS categorizes music and/or literary criticism and the assumptions therein).
† My own scholarship concerns involve the insane multiway-intersection-with-no-traffic-signals of law, literature and the arts, competition economics, governance/military affairs, and science/technology, which sends me to at least five departmental libraries. Wandering among the books seeking to make connections would be self-defeating.