322
Stephen King gives blunt three-word response after discovering Florida banned 23 of his books in schools
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
322 points (87.4% liked)
News
23287 readers
3436 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's called "reductio ad absurdio". It's a method in philosophy to examine arguments/principles by taking to the most extreme example and it's what came to mind. Again, I personally am not for banning. I'm just playing devil's advocate.
So far all the arguments brought by repubs in favor of banning have not convinced me. The only thing so far has been conversations with my wife who is a teacher.
To be clear, I'm just musing on an internet forum because censorship is an interesting topic to me. I'm not on the "pro-ban camp".
Edit: also it's not a "straw man" if it logically follows from the original premise. People : stop throwing this expression around unless you really understand how logical fallacies work.
Ok, with reductio ad absurdio in mind. You'd be ok with banning all the books that have romance in them, thats inappropriate for young people to be thinking about relationships. At least some people would think so, just like in this case. The banning of books falls apart when you realize that the decisions of what books to ban are based on personal morals.
Also, I agree with them, it is a strawman. A book about a girl realizing she might like other girls is not the same as having kids watch a snuff film. It's not related to things they will experience in their life, no one is asking to watch it, it is no where even close to the same. You're building up that wild stance, or straw man, to fight an entirely different topic. You might as well have asked if they could take them on field trips to executions. It's ridiculous.
Man, the straw man was about having access to the internet as an example of uncensored access to information invalidating book moderation. It wasn't about equivocating between different degrees of offending narratives. I was just following the principle to its final conclusion.
It doesn't have to be a snuff film. That was an example or meant to be a hypothetical to further the discussion. I don't see how nitpicking it is constructive if it sidesteps my point.
Now we get to an actual strawman -Finally! My position has never been the banning of all books, but rather questioning if moderation is useful or not. You can't say that the logical conclusion of some moderation is total banning because it doesn't follow.
The person I replied to said internet exists so banning books is worthless anyway which is not a terrible argument. I think it's worth considering it 2024. I was just taking the hypothetical to its extreme conclusion to test if it was still a principled position to have. I think we all agree at this point.
Anyway. I'm not pro banning and I appreciate the convo so thanks.
Cheers!
I'm in the anti-ban camp because restricting access to knowledge due to arbitrary lines like age is the opposite of learning. It is up to the reader and their mentors to guide their reading depending on ability and maturity as needed. No two people will have the same levels at the same age so books appropriate for one may not be appropriate for another.
That said, to nitpick a tad: pointing to the Internet when on a discussion of book banning or restrictions is more "red herring" or "false equivalence" than strawman.