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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   29818 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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/r/fednews is going wild about what's going on with the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This is in-line with this executive order. If this really does goes forward and a significant chunk of federal funding is cut from museums and libraries nationwide, I might really just start go kick a rock somewhere. I love libraries, I love museums, and I really don't think they're that wasteful either. I've read and somewhat understand where other posters are coming from with regards to institutional-ideological-capture, but on this I am struggling to see how that weighs so much compared to the good being provided.

Literally over the weekend on a day trip, my wife and I stopped at the local town's library for a midtrip break and I was absolutely astound at the many services this small town library provided. There was weekly notary service, children activities, a display of locally important quilts, a plethora of tax-season offerings, etc. Personally, in my childhood, my school library was open on Saturday and it was common for my mum to unload us kids there for the day and let us roam the stacks as we please. As a middle schooler, the library was great for a socially anxious kid. And in adulthood, on every exploration walk I've made, if there's a library open, I'm walking in.

For any trip to any world-class city, museums are the first thing on my list. The artifacts, the stories, the experience of seeing things you've only seen in books or through the internet with your own eyes, letting those electrons hit those retinas. Washington DC would be a lot less inviting or exciting without the many museums that dot its map. Even the small libraries can be a great experience as they often document a subject I've never thought of before.

The US greatest treasures are its national parks and forests and public land. Thankfully at least that nature would survive when there are less humans, though I still fear for the actual long term consequences. Not so the libraries and museums. Can someone explains to me why this is a good thing?

exploration walk

What is an exploration walk?

Pretty much what @SigurdsSilverSword said. I guess maybe a better term might be free-roaming?

I can't speak to @lollol 's experiences but for myself, an exploration walk (though I don't term it that exactly) is getting to a new place and in a part of the day where there aren't any plans (or minimal plans - eg "we're going to this place at 12, so be there by then"), just walking around town to see what it's like, and see what catches your interest. See what the architecture is like, see what the shops are like, find out what makes this place different. They could have a lot of no-appointment-needed attractions (museums can be one). They might have a really pleasing architectural style. Maybe they have interesting local "fauna" (generally not places I tend to go back to). But in general just striking out into the town/city/area to figure out what the place is like, at least on the surface.

As someone with a close relative who works at one of our libraries (here in Alaska), and has listened to her complain about both the workplace and her coworkers, as well as spent some time in said library, I'll second what @6tjk, @CrispyFriedBarnacles, and @ThenElection have said below.

Every library system in the country receives these grants.

How about cities and towns pay for their own libraries? All the feds are doing is taking the money through our taxes, attaching strings to it, and sending it back down unequally to their most loyal constituencies.

Now of course these feds don't run any museums or libraries, just like the doe doesn't run any schools. It appears that the money doesn't actually make up any amount of library operating budget, so approximately zero libraries will close due to this change.

I found this article screeching about the cuts, and it's not exactly convincing me that it's anything important. It just looks like pork and bullshit to me.

  • a tribal college in northern Michigan to continue offering library services during a building renovation.
  • a historically Black university in Virginia $52,000 to digitize an archival collection about the women’s college it absorbed in 1932.
  • a $150,000 grant to help school librarians better support students who are autistic.

After knowing that none of this money actually goes to books or computers or printers or anything, I feel really good about cutting it all off.

After knowing that none of this money actually goes to books or computers or printers or anything

I'm going to take your exact examples without looking at the links.

a tribal college in northern Michigan to continue offering library services during a building renovation.

This looks to me exactly like books, computers, or printers cause it seems with the funding absence, there will be less books/computers/printers available for that area.

a historically Black university in Virginia $52,000 to digitize an archival collection about the women’s college it absorbed in 1932.

This is literally about creating more books. Or at the very least, making the books more accessible.

a $150,000 grant to help school librarians better support students who are autistic.

Ok, don't know what exactly that is, I will concede on this example.

I think 2/3 is a good score.

2/3 being “good” for the federal government is why we are $37,000,000,000,000 in debt…

I think this is a big stretch in argument, very far away from what I am arguing for or against. I don’t know the right terms but I do believe this is along the lines of a “strawman argument” or “moving the goalpost” or “dodging the arguments” or, to borrow another commenter that pointed out to me what I was doing, “retreating from the bailey to the motte”. I do not think the IMLS budget is remotely within the realm of comparison or analogy with the totality of US debt. I was rebutting on the characterization with which @phailyoor was describing the three line items. That if I apply their criteria on whether that was government waste, I found at least 2/3 not a waste, and definitely satisfy their criteria of providing “books or computers or printers or anything”. Emphasis on “I” and “their” because obviously they did not find the same conclusions.

It’s called getting trolled on the internet brah

But seriously, 1/3rd of your budget wasted is a failing company, or a nearly bankrupt government. Raise your standards

1/3rd of your budget wasted is a failing company

You need to read way more 10-Ks if you believe that

1/3

You could waste 1/3 of your operating profit or r&d budget possibly, but wasting 1/3 of your revenues or total expenditure will get you eaten alive in any low margin business. You might not even be able to have 1/3 headroom after cogs.

No doubt Google is wasting 1/3 of their money, but they are a near monopoly with a cash cow. Come to think of it the government has a monopoly on a lot of things too.

Again, you need to read more 10-Ks. Much of the S&P 500, let alone S&P 600 or Russel 2000 are hilarious money holes. Big tech (besides Meta) are actually among the most efficient. It generally gets worse, the smaller the business (for obvious reasons) but it's shocking how much waste there is, everywhere.

If we could cut 1/3 of the federal spending off, we'd probably solve the deficit

Yuuuuuup. But that 1/3 spending is someone else’s paycheck, so expect a lot of screaming and crying as we attempt this.

In my city, the public libraries are completely unusable because they are filled with drug addicted bums who sit in front of the library computers all day, presumably shitting themselves based on the wall of smell that hits anyone walking in. I don't know why there should be libraries at all if they are just going to be containment centers for "persons experiencing unhousedness." No one cares about this state of affairs until the suggestion comes in of funding these "libraries" a bit less, in which case Redditors working for the federal government start clutching their pearls about how this will somehow ruin the already completely unusable libraries, which are sacrosanct (except for the fentanyl junkies shooting up in the bathroom).

I am completely in favor of cutting off the federal funding to these people.

In library school this topic was taught as "dealing with our homeless patrons" and balancing their right to use the internet freely like the dignified upstanding citizens they are with preventing children from seeing them masturbate in public.

Does that really make them "unusable?" I used to live in a city with a bad homeless problem, and the libraries naturally attracted a lot of homeless like you describe. The bathrooms were a nightmare. But the library was still perfectly usable. I never felt unsafe going in there, just a bit gross and sad about the state of society.

On the other hand, I also saw homeless outside doing... much worse things. So I'd much rather have them in there as a "containment center" then just about anywhere else. Sure, in a perfect world, we'd get them housing, treatment, a job placement, etc... but that's not the world we live in.

If you are a single young man who is willing and able to fight, you are probably fine. If you are married with a wife and kids, do you really want them around those people?

Good point, it's much better to have them out committing crimes on the streets instead. Or were you suggesting that we simply execute all of them?

  • -18

Perhaps something less extreme than mass executions. Such as institutionalization. Crazy homeless library masterbaters need help we are failing to provide.

As someone who lives in a city that's really gone to shit because of feral homeless, this kind of strawmanning is a pet peeve of mine. All that it would take to clean up the problems with the homeless is enforcing laws currently on the books. They harass somebody? Prosecute them. They jerk off in a library? Prosecute them. They dump out a garbage can on the sidewalk to look for reimbursable cans? Prosecute them. The problematic homeless are constantly committing crimes, JUST PROSECUTE THOSE CRIMES. That's all it would take!

I can't say that I would object too hard if my city adopted Judge Dredd rules and started executing vagrants, but there's no need for any tyranny at all besides the tyranny of basic law enforcement.

You say "just enforce laws" but what you mean is prison. All the homeless people will be sent to prison, because that's what happens when you enforce laws and prosecute people every time they break laws. This would of course cost 10x more money than the current library system, and lead to horrific human rights abuse in prison but... oh well, out of sight out of mind, right? You call it a strawman to to talk of executions, but your proposed solution is really not much better, and I'm tired of people like you who sneer that there's some quick easy solution that could be implemented overnight if only the local government could stop being pussies or whatever.

Prosecutorial discretion is a bad thing. If all laws were enforced to the hilt 100 percent of the time, then legislators would be very quickly incentivized by public outcry to make the definitions and the penalties for those crimes more reasonable.

You call it a strawman to to talk of executions, but your proposed solution is really not much better,

Well, if it's not much better, can we start executing criminals then? No skin off your nosenat this point, right?

man, what? I'm in favor of allowing them to stay and chill at the library. It seems like you're just venting and want to yell at someone on the internet at this point.

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Where I live there are cities with homeless problems and cities without them(housing is cheap enough than anyone who’s minimally functional can rent a room, so long term homeless are dysfunctional). The cities without them have the police beat the homeless until they move. The cities with them just let them concentrate in the ghetto.

Labor camps will probably suffice. Put them to useful work like filling in potholes, cleaning up trash from sidewalks and vacant lots, and removing graffiti 14 hours a day, under strict supervision, and they'll be too exhausted to get up to didoes.

There are not enough people in the US willing to be prison guards to make this happen. It’s a low status job.

IIRC there was a Scott article or Mottepost a few years ago about how forced labor is generally unproductive because the overhead costs exceed the value produced by unmotivated and unskilled workers? Not sure how much of that is motivated reasoning, but I'm willing to credit it.

Does anyone know which text I mean?

Another related datapoint is Project 100,000: generally people who are dysfunctional in society when given copious opportunities to be functional will not be net productive when press-ganged put into large work groups.

Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:

It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)

Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.

It did not go well.

Possibly Meditations on Moloch (Ctrl-F "slave" to get to the relevant part) or Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs (Ctrl-F "useful work" to get to the relevant part).

Note that neither of these makes the full claim that if you've got people sitting around whom you have to supervise and feed anyway, you can't extract useful labour from most/any of them. The first makes the much weaker claim that owning slaves-for-life is not the most cost-effective way of getting work done (vs. allowing the slaves to earn their freedom), and the second makes the weaker claim that there exist people from whom useful labour cannot be extracted (and even there, I will note that he did not consider the "job" of "low-class prostitute", probably because that's illegal in 49/50 states of the USA and also significantly dystopian).

In this case it's not intended to be directly productive, it's intended to tire out the criminals.

Why are "Status Quo", "Status Quo from the next town over" and "Hyperbole" the only viable options?

Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters. People don't realize this but a lot of shelters are closed during the day and will literally kick out the people using them and tell them to come back that night.

This presents an obvious issue, if the shelters are where you're supposed to go when you're homeless but they're not open, where are the homeless using them supposed to go? Some places have daytime shelters but as illustrated by this thread often the answer is just "go to the library". Some others (across multiple threads, you can find quite a few discussing where to go when the shelters close) include heading out to the woods, the mall, a movie theater, setting up a tent, coffee shops, a university/community college, even a storage unit or go do their day job (something like 40% of homeless have a job and that number is rising).

Now maybe if we do get plentiful and reliable day shelters where homeless can go, there will still be some shitty stragglers at the libraries and parks and buses. There probably would be a few at least and we can figure out how to get them away then but until the option of daytime shelters is at least available we can't be expecting anything else. They have to exist somewhere and they're gonna choose a place that is open to the public, air condition and feels safe.

Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters.

Nope. Absolutely fucking not. Not only will further subsidization just incentivize more homelessness, we have massively increased our homelessness spending concurrent with the homeless problem getting worse. We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

Flophouses were common in the early 20th century and before.

Living conditions were poor, but they worked just fine.

We've run this experiment and it didn't work.

Have we? I've not seen any experiment where they take a city without day shelters for their homeless and then put funding into day shelters and see what happens.

we don't spend enough on homeless shelters

There are localities that spend $60k per homeless person per year. They are overburdened with meth addled street shitters hanging out in libraries. In a better world these people would be institutionalized. But alas we don't live in that happy place.

I don't think that a bare metric of dollars spent is relevant. The homeless industrial complex consumes that money.

Libraries taken over by homeless seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, though, mores than night only shelters.

The shelters kick them out not necessarily for lack of funding, but possibly hoping they’ll get jobs/go to work?

That might be the intent, I don't know. But the result seems to be, as we can see in those threads, "oh shit where do I go? Oh the library or the mall".

It seems the lack of day shelters just turns other things into day shelters.

My city spends almost six figures per homeless person. The exact accounting is difficult, because of a combination of understandable (what philosophically counts as spending on the homeless?), bureaucratic (how do you get figures on the costs of emergency room visits?), and sheer graft (nonprofits that mysteriously siphon away lots of money with no services rendered evident), but it's a lot. Despite that, the homeless problem is as bad as ever, and many of the libraries are as a result entirely unusable to the public.

So, suppose it is true that so long as spending isn't, say, a quarter million per year per homeless, libraries will remain unusable. Voters are left with a set of unenviable choices: spend a quarter million per year on the homeless and finally get clean safe libraries; let libraries remain ersatz day shelters for the homeless that happen to be decorated with shelves of books; or stop funding public libraries. The first option isn't practicable, and the second is just stupid. So the third option ends up being the one that actually happens.

Total amount of money isn't very useful if it's being spent on things that aren't effective. It's a similar issue to what we see with drug rehab, all the money going to the Christian centers whose cure is "find God" or the reiki ones or the horseback riding ones or the chicken processing plant one not only doesn't help, it likely hurts compared to the more evidence backed solution of medication.

I imagine if a bunch of the money currently spent on "homelessness" just went to day shelters or (even better for a pretty large amount of homeless) just having temporary housing/apartments available, we'd have all the people in those instead of heading off to their local library.

Christian rehab centers

Can anyone tell me about the Christian graft industry, how you get in etc.? In another life, I'd have love to be involved! (Not joking, seriously curious what life decisions would have gotten me there.)

It’s unclear that Christian rehab centers are worse than harm-reduction based ones, to start with.

But if you’d like to work in a Christian charity, start by volunteering. When and if you get hired it will be at a lower rate of pay than elsewhere.

(Warning to the reader: this turned into an extended rant.)

The issue with homeless shelters is quite simple: other homeless people. They are unsafe and chaotic. You can add rules to make this slightly better--no drugs, no alcohol, no pets--but that makes the homeless you most want out of the libraries and off the streets even less willing to go to a shelter.

So that leaves individual housing and apartments. But they can't be temporary: if they are, what happens when the beneficiary runs out of time? Do you kick them out, making them homeless again? So you indefinitely let them stay. A one bedroom in my city runs around $2500 a month, at the very low end. That's $36k/year for each person housed, which in isolation is still better than $100k/year. But the population housed would be constantly growing. And it's assuming no additional costs: you might reduce emergency room visits from once per week to once per month, but it's still a cost. And what happens when the tenant destroys substantial parts of the property? During COVID, vacant hotels were used by my city to house the homeless, and one hosting a couple hundred suffered $20M in damages over two years. $20M here, $20M there, and soon you're talking about real money.

All these funds are coming from taxpayers that are themselves having to spend a significant part, and often a majority, of their income to pay for rent or mortgage. It's the number one reason people leave my city.

And yes, our housing policy is shit, significantly contributing to the issue. But in a world where activism to improve our housing policy has failed for over a decade, I have to assume that it'll be at least a decade before anything improves on that front. Does that mean I should just forego crazy luxuries like clean and safe libraries, parks, sidewalks, and transit for the next decade? Why shouldn't I just move, taking the 60k I pay every year to the city along with me, when there are plenty of places that do manage to have public spaces at a small fraction of the cost? Plenty of people are doing exactly that already, which has driven massive deficits in the city budget. And then how are we going to pay for even more homeless services? Shutting down schools? Libraries? Parks?

I don't really disagree with anything you wrote. But in practice, none of these cities seem to be capable of building the shelters or housing needed, and it is totally unacceptable to let things like public libraries or most public spaces be held hostage for decades, just because every level of government involved is incapable of doing anything about homelessness. The homeless understandably want to go somewhere that feels safe, but so does the general public, and there are many more of us.

Here's a compromise: a huge operational shelter, complete with three hots and a cot, and you can stay as long as you want and even get basic medical services. You can even camp on the outside where no rules are enforced. The only catch: it's in the middle of nowhere. If you're arrested for aggressive vagrancy in a metro area and can't prove you have a residence or employment, you are put on a bus and sent to the camp shelter. You are not required to stay, but the state will not give you a free ride out.

Reminds me of the Charity Centers from "Down And Out In Christania" by AntiDem (and, less optimistically, the terrafoam projects from Manna by Marshall Brain).

But then what do we do? We either have a place to go (day shelters, library, etc) or put them in jail. But the US already has really high incarceration rates to the point even the "soft on crime" states look pretty extreme compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe some of this is explained by a difference in definitions (and I definitely think we should discount some of the countries like Russia and China since they might even be faking data) but it's hard to imagine there's much categorical flummery available within the question of "is a person locked up against their will by the government?", especially compared to western peers so I'm not sure how effective just keep locking up even more is going to work out for us.

At the very least it seems there's a deeper issue to be addressing in why the US seems to have way more visible homeless than Taiwan or Japan or New Zealand or the UK.

But then what do we do?

Institutionalize them. Not jail. These people are deeply unwell and need care.

Do you earnestly believe that everyone in a night shelter who goes to a library or mall during the day due to lack of a day shelter being available are so deeply unwell they need forced hospitalization?

It seems to me the first step should be "make a day shelter available" and then the second step for stragglers who are too unwell to use it is the mental institutions.

I thought the topic of discussion was homeless people who are scary and make formerly good public spaces ruined because regular people now feel unsafe in them. Those people need to be institutionalized.

My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.

Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.

The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.

(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)

Oh, I am well aware of why libraries are hotbeds of woke - it's for precisely the same reason that certain fields in universities are (and with substantial cultural and demographic overlap). Although I understand the general comparison to religious soup kitchens here, though, I believe there are actually also severe constraints on how and in what ways religious charities can be overtly religious or proselytize when dealing with public money, aren't there? I have that general sense, and Claude suggests there are indeed extremely strict behavior limits imposed on such charities. And I know the question of, say, if Catholic adoption services could reject gay potential parents has been a culture war flash point previously, for example.

Recognizing the social dynamics of why libraries have been taken over by a very specific, very radicalized niche subculture seems like the start of the conversation when it comes to public funding and public goods, not the end of it, at least to me anyway. It feels very similar to the issue with universities, where the people who dominate them use some extremely narrow, extremely particular definitions of "inclusive" and "global" that, in practice, exclude way, way too many people in a destabilizing and social mission undermining way.

I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.

But the fact they're religious doesn't make their [secular context] mission of "offering soup" worse, and we're generally not using government funding to run them (though it does still happen occasionally; most of the handout comes in the form of being tax-exempt though).

The same cannot be said for the librarians- and the problem is that most of what they like has no literary value. When we were more neutral, those beliefs had to pay rent (so to speak); gay literature is perfectly acceptable (and the pretense that it isn't because muh socons has finally worn out its welcome) but it first and foremost has to succeed on its merits. We pay for those salaries and programs directly with government money, too.

As a child I loved libraries. My family went to the library every week. Its so sad to see their current state in blue areas of two different states.

Yeah, children's books are fucking terrifying these days. Our local library, that our daughter's school occasionally takes the older kids too, had a bit of a kerfuffle with them pushing inappropriate books on kids, Gender Queer chief among them. There were protest, the usual mealy mouthed euphemisms about "book burning" to dodge the issue of graphic novels with graphic depictions of gay sex being recommended to children. Instead of removing the books or putting them in an "adult only" section, they created some fake "New Adult" section, which really changes nothing? Because their terminal goal seems to be showing pornographic material to children.

Turns out the library was being run by an NGO despite being funded 75% by the county. The conservative county has now forced a conservative board onto it by threatening to withhold funds. So I guess sometimes you can vote your way out of problems. At least until the state or the feds decide to steal the institution away from you, or some interloper in a black robe decides "Actually, making pornography available to children is mandatory".

I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing. I made the mistake of wondering into a random bookstore with my daughter in my state capital, and virtually every book was queer. A curious girl falls in love and kisses a mermaid. A curious girl falls in love and kisses another girl. A curious girl pony falls in love with another girl pony and they kiss. Some lesbian unicorns, etc, etc. Basically there was a book for every type of little girl with the subtext of "Have you considered being gay?" With rainbows and sparkles, and god damnit the mermaid one really caught her attention because she loves mermaids. It was virtually every book prominently displayed cover out instead of spine out. That and some picture books proselytizing about Taylor Swift. Weirdest fucking shit I ever saw. Had to distract my daughter with something shiny behind her and then make an excuse about needing to be somewhere.

My wife, who does more of the shopping and the picking out of books notices this shit a lot more than I do, and virtually every day she comes home with tales of what she saw in a kid's section today.

Just, what the fuck? It's exhausting all the directions this shit keeps flying at us from. And then some parent you've been friendly with the last few years of your daughters school invites you to see a "family friendly drag show" and you wonder if all the people in your life have been replaced by pod people. There was a before time right? Like.... 5 years ago? 10 years ago? I'm not imagining it, am I?

Edit: Upon further research, the library in my anecdote chose to have their funding cut rather than accept a more conservative board of directors from the county, and ceasing showing pornography to children. I guess some thing you actually can't vote your way out of, and these.... people get to destroy one of the oldest libraries in my state. Alas.

Luckily, that kind of propaganda is only a small subset of the children's books available in Germany.

Most is still propaganda of the sort of "be a good little meek cheek-turner", "work smart, not hard, or don't work at all" and "a just-so solution will come to you", or ethically incomprehensible gibberish. And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals? It's not a new trend, I didn't mind it as a kid, and I don't want to make a big deal out of it now, but it does frustrate me.

Other than those, we subsist on children's books from 30+ years ago. Those are far from perfect too, of course, but at least you needn't worry about the very modern maladies. Something something C.S. Lewis.

And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals?

There is something fundamentally entertaining about an animal acting like a person to a vast swathe of humanity. Look at YouTube videos where a cat or dog is "talking" or using a doorknob. Or flushing a toilet. I don't personally get it, either, but YouTube view counts tell a compelling story.

And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals?

Something something C.S. Lewis.

Err...

Yeah, I'm not arguing. I just feel like after decades of that being water to swim in, I'd like to know why.

As a father of a young children I recommend Usborne books. They are high quality and lack all that stuff you just mentioned.

I have never in real life discussed Gender Queer. I think people would think I am a crazed conspiracy theorist if I gave a plain description of it. Rather than accept an actual published book available in schools and libraries across America and recommended for 8 year olds has cartoon gay porn in it.

I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing

I should be the change I want to see. Who would buy my half-written (in heroic couplets!) children's book about heroicism, exploration and science? I can put a fire under it.

Try pitching it to BRAVE Books? They are an explicitly conservative and Christian children's book company.

It seems likely that the "before time" was when they were actually successful in their propagandizing, before the snake started eating its own tail. Back then, they knew to slip subversive material in subtly - one gay book in a stack of normal ones, not a whole stack of gay books. The parent's less likely to notice the one gay book in the normal stack, and even if the parent does notice, it's likelier to be dismissed as a harmless aberration. The whole stack of gay books isn't actually more useful for their aims - it's a self-defeating result of their fifty-Stalins purity-signaling spiral.

For a middle-school student, I think one gay book in a blue moon would be kind of ideal. You want 99% of books to portray kids and adults in the world and how they live virtuously despite adversity, and 1% of books to provide a framework which the child can latch onto if they find themselves at puberty with no opposite-sex attractions. Where I have problems with the genderqueer books is when they tip over into pornography or into brainwashing. There's a fine line between having a gay character who is happy with their life and telling kids that it being nonbinary is a shortcut to being cool, special, or rebellious, or even worse, telling them that coming out as trans will solve their feelings of being lost in the world.

Of course, I also assume middle-school students are sufficiently exposed to portrayals of gay characters in other media, be it sitcoms or movies...

portrayals of gay characters in other media

The average middle-schooler is aware of media portrayals of lesbianism. Actually, the upper half of elementary too provided they have an older male sibling. They won't admit it to you, of course, but they do know.

how they live virtuously despite adversity

The actual issue isn't "muh gayness".
Actually, it isn't even the naked people[1].

It's the fact that, more than anything else, it's oppression pornography. It hopes to show oppression, either real or imagined, as the only virtue you need. Hence, if you can find some oppression (the demand vastly exceeds supply in modern societies), or identify with some oppression, then you have the cheat code to life.

That is the harmful message, why people whose political identity is wrapped up in being as much of a victim as possible love reading and writing these books, and they should be removed because books that are written like this are inherently garbage.

[1] Adult traditionalist men usually call this "pornography", but that refers to media that's supposed to be sexually stimulating, and these books are very far from that. Everyone but them understands this instinctively, though, so that complaint falls on deaf ears.

The parent's less likely to notice the one gay book in the normal stack, and even if the parent does notice, it's likelier to be dismissed as a harmless aberration.

They're also more likely to be actually a decent book (since they had to at least try and be convincing). Now, it's just taken for granted that the gayness makes the book good (since the group progressives form their identity around hating takes for granted that the gayness makes the book bad, and they think that reversed stupidity is intelligence), so you just get a bunch of Chick tracts.

You need a new filter bubble.

Children grow up to be members of communities and not to be whatever their parents want. That means they absorb whatever is fashionable among their peers. If that means cutting their breasts off and pretending they want to kiss other girls, they’ll do that. If that means joining the army they’ll do that. If that means committing crimes and bragging about it on SoundCloud they’ll do that.

Children also like to rebel against the status quo. Zoomer's increased relative conservatism compared to millennials is partially explained by the dominant culture being progressive. You're not completely wrong, but you're not completely right either.

Adolescents like to become adults. Young men turned to the right because they thought the right was at least trying to help them do that. ‘Rebelling against the status quo’ is usually either 1) fun thing the status quo doesn’t like or 2) burning down rules they identify as keeping them from growing up.

The first one is straightforward, but I'd love to see you expand on the second. I think everyone has seen it happen, but I don't think I've ever seen it framed quite that way.

You know teenagers generally don’t actually like beer? They drink it because that’s what grown men do, and the valence is only there because of relevant laws. If it was about enjoyment they’d drink margaritas(which actually taste good when you aren’t used to alcohol).

Lots of things are like this. There’s an interesting psychological study I once saw- teenaged boys who worked in workplaces alongside normal grown men(think specialty stores, country clubs, etc as opposed to fast food) behaved better in aggregate and had a few other outcomes society would mostly consider ‘good’. This is because their role models for how grown men behaved were normal working class men as opposed to frat boys(and you can’t stop high school and college aged types from being exposed to each other, they’re too close in age). I can’t find it right now, and no doubt it has the usual issues of psychological studies, but it accords with what we’ve all seen.

Our society’s understanding of a woman’s role is too messed up to show the same thing for them. But I would expect it to be true for them too.

Beer isn’t the best tasting drink in the world but I don’t remember it tasting bad as a teenager.

This. I use libraries occasionally and for the most part ours (fairly red part of the Midwest) are not super overt with the pro LGBT stuff, but it’s still, even in a red state there, and while I don’t have kids myself, I can understand the complete frustration that they can’t even take their kid to a library without having to police the area first to keep their young child from being exposed to sexual content. And it’s only going to get worse if there’s no strong pushback. I’m not sure that such a thing couldn’t be done by coming up with a sort of Hayes Code for books appropriate for kids under 16, but it’s very clear that something needs to change. And Trump now has their attention.

“I didn’t start this” could be applied to most any CW topic. We still ask that you take more care with your words.

It might not be a particularly new / original / enlightening thing to say, but how is this a warning?

Did you see the original version of the text marked in brackets?

Oh, I didn't. I also thought that "I didn't start this" somehow was the offending part, lol.

In a deep blue area, mine are similar. Except, they're also places that double as homeless shelters. Last time I went to one for a change of pace, in front of me there was literally a man looking up images of preteen boys in briefs on a computer, and he was zooming in on some... Very suspect areas. And no one dares go to a bathroom, because you've got an appreciable chance of stumbling across someone who ODed on fent.

I like libraries and in theory want them funded, but I want them to exist to serve the local community. They would have more defenders if they served their purpose of being places to borrow books instead of being places to enact an ideological agenda.

Can you take some pics next time you're there?

That's the worst part of this. I volunteered at our library as a kid. I found my dead mom's old newspaper column in the archives and spent days reading them all.

Then they stole it, murdered it, and wore its skin as a suit. And they used our money to do it.

Probably for the best that the stuff in museums just gets locked up in some Indiana Jones esque storage somewhere given the current religious hysteria among that class of people. Otherwise they might end up throwing it all back in the dirt like in Australia https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-19/mungo-reburial/105014182

I would like to apologise for my people's barbarism.

What's the atmosphere like over there? I see all this weird culty phrasing like "return to country", but do people IRL just smile and nod at it all?

My experience has been that outside the small group of professionals and academics who live on the politics of deference, most people don't notice and don't care. I work in a role where I give weekly talks, and the organisation officially prefers an acknowledgement of country before every talk. I mouthed my way through them for the first couple of months, but then gave up, as nobody reacted or seemed to notice. I have since not done an acknowledgement for around a year and not once has anybody even mentioned their absence to me, much less complained. Likewise one of my managers once had a few compulsory seminars about reconciliation within the organisation, brought that to a team meeting, I offered to help (because I have had much more training with this nonsense), and I never heard a peep from her again, nor was any other thing actually done on the ground. The most we do in practice is put up posters and things during NAIDOC Week and similar events, but there is at least a 50% chance that when that happens, people will put up the Aboriginal flag upside down. (In their defence, it is really tempting because the Australian Aboriginal flag's correct orientation looks wrong. Intuitively you want the black on the bottom.) My workplace is heavily Asian so it may not be entirely representative - in my experience Asian migrants generally don't give a damn about Aboriginal people - but I would be shocked if it's completely off-base.

I think that the situation is basically:

A small group of intellectual and media elites like Aboriginal representation, deference, welcomes to country, and so on.

Elite or aspirational white Australians generally defer to this. They imitate the behaviour of the most prestigious class, the media, and so on. They will generally go along with or support any or all symbolic statements, but will get cold feet whenever it might affect their hip pockets.

Lower-middle and lower class white Australians generally find this all pointless, or they actively resent it. They will usually not sign on with it, though they will sit quietly in the back of a compulsory work meeting and zone out if need be.

Non-white non-Aboriginal Australians generally either do not understand these issues, or just don't care about them one way or the other. "What does this have to do with us?" is a common refrain. That said they won't get involved or do anything either - they seem to largely accept it as some weird thing that white Australians do.

Aboriginals themselves... genuinely poor Aboriginals either don't notice or don't care, because they have more pressing issues, but will be willing to do a smoking ceremony or a welcome dance if the whitefellas ask for it. Middle class or aspiring Aboriginals are more likely to see that they can benefit from the politics of deference. I think most see it as white hypocrisy, but it's generally not advantageous to point that out, so only a few do that. But pushing the politics of dfference can be a path to individual or career success, so some do use that.

My outsider's perspective is Australia is in a tough place, because trumpism is imo actually a natural fit for the Australian red tribe, and in several ways builds on the Australian nationalism of the nineties and noughts. But the nationalism of those days was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the public, smeared by 'both sides' of the mainstream and balkanised, so while there is a tremendous undercurrent of support and hope for something similar here it is tempered by suspicion and the Australians' natural proclivity for cynicism. Their greater willingness to accept temporary hardship for future prosperity gives me hope though, as does the visible anger you can often see on people's faces when you talk about covid. The land acknowledgement business seems to be dying down more recently thank goodness.

I don't actually think it's a good fit for the Australian Red tribe equivalent, for two reasons.

Firstly, Trumpism relies a lot on charismatic authority and trust in the leader. Americans have a lot more reverence for leaders and especially for businessmen than Australians do. Tall poppy syndrome is still a very powerful force in Australian culture, which means that a Trump-style campaign would not work. There's a reason why, despite its success in both the US and the UK, the Australian series of The Apprentice failed to attract an audience. (Meanwhile The Celebrity Apprentice did well over here, but that's okay because it's all about making celebrities look like an idiots, and if there's one thing Australians love, it is bringing people who think they're better than everyone else back down to earth.) This can be a subtle thing, but in general we just don't feel good about people who put themselves forward like that. Trump-style braggadocio would fail in Australia. If you'd like an example, businessman Clive Palmer has been trying to run Trump-style campaigns here and has mostly failed. Trumpet of Patriots is very blatantly trying to run the Trump strategy here and it is not working. The language is totally alien to Australians, especially the kind of working class or regional voters they need to swing.

Secondly, I think the Trump base is characterised by a kind of defiance or rebelliousness that does not exist in Australia, at least not in the same way. For all that Australians typically dislike authority, and especially proud people, we also tend to be compliant or obedient in a way that Americans are not. The default Australian posture is to grumble about the idiots and bastards in charge and then follow all their instructions faithfully anyway. (You'll notice this in e.g. Australian war drama, where common themes are firstly that our British officers are all a bunch of morons with their heads up their arses who don't know what they're doing, and secondly that nonetheless we are faithful and dutiful and do everything we ought to. We complain, but we obey.) You'll notice this if you look at the covid lockdowns, for instance - Australia had some of the longest lockdowns on the planet, but we also had relatively few protests. There were a couple, but they were few and small especially if compared to those seen in the US. Australians may not like popular authority, but we also tend to view it as legitimate. I trace a lot of this back to the early experience of colonisation - convicts ruled by appointed officers and governors. A prison is a context where you resent the people in charge, and you may be quietly insubordinate where you can get away with it, but you mostly obey orders. While only the very first generation of colonists were convicts and free settlers came to outnumber them very rapidly, I think the political structure of a penal colony influenced the Australian mindset in formative ways.

Anyway, long story short I do not think Trumpism would work in Australia. You would need to find a way of advocating for similar ideas that nonetheless resonates with the Australian psychology.

Bjelke-Petersen always seemed pretty Trumpy to my British sensibilities (his son is working with Clive Palmer, which confirms the theory). He was hugely successful inside Queensland and politically toxic in the rest of Australia.

By Trumpism I meant the ideology of populist nationalism and fixing the economy. We're probably going to have to come up with a proper term for it untied to Trump. I strongly agree that the boastful Trump style is totally unworkable in Australia, but every party outside of the major ones is trying to ape him - and Dutton is also trying to ape him. Bob Katter, Clive Palmer, One Nation, People First - there's even a left wing variant with Jacqui Lambie.

That's a good point about the rebellious impulse though, it's a subtle but important distinction. Although the reactions up here to the recent cyclone are heartening - competency crisis has started being a bit of a normie meme.

Yes, I'd agree with this. There is definitely a strain of Australian populism, especially combined with resentment of the Canberra bubble. Palmer is, I would say, pretty incompetent, but Katter and Lambie have made very good runs at it and carved out niches for themselves. To an extent some of the other rising independents of the last decade or so also show the possibilities of political entrepreneurship - Nick Xenophon, more recently the Teals, and so on.

The wider context for all of this, which I imagine would be familiar to anyone in the US or UK, is the continuing decline of the major parties. It's been a relatively smooth decline without major shocks (there was no Australian Trump or Australian Brexit; the closest equivalent is the failure of the Voice, but even that was just preventing something, not actually changing the established order), and preferential voting has maintained the appearance of business as usual, but you can definitely see the yearning for something other than the current two-party system. Both Labor and Coalition primary votes have been steadily declining.

Unfortunately no minor parties seem to have really picked up the slack. The Greens have periodically had ambitions of eclipsing or even outright replacing Labor, but they seem to have hit a ceiling. There just aren't that many yuppies and they struggle to grow past that. One Nation is ramshackle and tends to shoot itself in the foot. We haven't seen any unified alternatives to the major parties. Instead it's just been more and more fragmentation, to independents and to doomed micro-parties like Trumpet of Patriots or Australia's Voice, while the major parties keep winning on preferences.

That can't last forever. Eventually either the major parties pivot towards what the electorate actually wants - Dutton's experiments with populism seem like an attempt to try this - or eventually someone gets their act together enough to overcome one of them. I think, barring some massive exchange in external circumstances that shifts the landscape, the former is more likely than the latter, but we'll see.

Although the reactions up here to the recent cyclone are heartening - competency crisis has started being a bit of a normie meme.

I'm a bit curious to know more.

I slightly regret mentioning it now, because as you are about to see it makes me very shirty. I had to do a ridiculous amount of heavy lifting because of it, because every woman I know owns a hundred curios and sculptures and pots that weigh twice their body weight scattered haphazardly around their backyards. Just kidding, I am happy to bitch about this and I was happy to help, because my friends were out of their minds with worry (two of them even called me in tears asking for help) but it was a frustrating waste of effort I could have put towards my primary hobby, avoiding other people.

See, Cyclone Alfred hit South East Queensland two weeks ago, and while I know internationally the news barely covered it, if you were listening to the local news the week preceding it, it was the end of days. And the media weren't alone in their teeth gnashing - the state government and most local governments were very excited to deal with a catastrophe whether it was coming or not, and people who worked for the bureau of meteorology were guaranteeing it would be a disaster on the radio. Meanwhile social media was about ten percent bogans (Aussie word for rednecks) saying things like "don't cyclones usually follow a week plus of rain, don’t they need that kind of weather to build up?" and "if it's only category 2 now won't that mean it will be category 1 once it hits land and starts to dissipate?" and "of course it's a good idea to stock up and make sure you and your house are secure, but this cyclone doesn't look like it warrants things like the fistfight over toilet paper I watched two ladies engage in earlier today" (or maybe 9% that and 1% actual bogans screaming that it was made up entirely) and ninety percent conniptions at these fucking bogans telling people not to panic.

The Monday prior to Alfred making landfall it was claimed it was a category 4 cyclone - the second most powerful type - that would hit within days, with reminders attached that cyclone Tracy was a category 5 and it destroyed Darwin in 74. As a consequence, on Tuesday there was no packaged water or toilet paper (Australians are still obsessed with hoarding toilet paper) in any shops and there were 5 hour long queues for sandbags in some areas. However the cyclone was downgraded to category 2 and was now expected to hit Thursday morning.

By Wednesday the ports were closed and a lot of trucking operations were placed on hold, so there was nothing in the shops at all - no fresh produce, no meat, no milk bread or eggs - if you hadn't stocked up you were living off tinned spaghetti (all the baked beans and braised steak were gone), creamed corn and jerky.

Thursday morning the state was basically shut down. Schools were closed, public transport was shut off and people were told to avoid driving if possible. About one in four supermarkets stayed open - the rest closed - and hospitals started sending people home if it wasn't medically necessary to keep them admitted. The cyclone wouldn't hit until Friday now, the reports said, but due to the warm water it was now passing over it could potentially turn into a category 3 cyclone, so whatever prep you did you better make sure it's good! (Some suggestions Facebook offered preppers were things like put any extra sandbags you have on your roof to hold it in place, or grab your wheelie bin, give it a wash, and then take it into the bathroom and fill it with water - then you have extra water! Various mayors then had to put out statements begging people not to do anything like that.)

Friday hits and now Alfred has been pushed back to Saturday, and by Friday afternoon it has been downgraded to a category 1 - but it is really slow, so it might be even worse because it will just hang around fucking shit up! The only supermarket within walking distance of my place that is still open has to shut at 2:30 in the afternoon because they don't have any stock. A reporter is made to look foolish after doing a report on flooding next to a flooded area that turns out to be a large puddle when a car drives through it. She still assumes the moral high ground on the issue though, somehow.

Saturday felt like we were back in the covid lockdown. The streets were completely empty and service stations were open, but nothing else. Alfred finally made landfall but aside from lost power and minor flooding in places, Brisbane was pretty much unscathed. Having heard that it caused flooding and power outages on the Gold Coast (The city just south of Brisbane) I travelled down to help clean up the school my Saturday market is held at, but it hadn't been touched either. I ended up just helping some friends who live down that way whose house had flooded.

In the end Alfred was closer to a wet fart than a cyclone for many in South East Queensland, but the establishment were really really hoping it would be a disaster closer to the 2011 floods if not cyclone Tracy. In their eagerness they generated a preposterous amount of stress and unrest, and due to the aforementioned tempered rebelliousness there wasn't a way to dial it back. Anyone who tried was instantly declared a bogan who wants to watch the world burn, even if they just helped you unnecessarily move bunch of stupid shit you shouldn't own. Even after it was over people were getting torn to shreds in Facebook community pages and reddit if they complained about the over hyping - the fact that some places were hit was used to suggest panic was a sensible response. Nobody is demanding consequences yet, but the amount of grumbling going on is off the charts.

Tldr: It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia S07E06 The Storm of the Century but with Aussie accents.

Fake edit: this is the motte so I know where this is going - no I'm not saying nobody should have bothered doing anything and this whole thing thing was a conspiracy to drive up woolworths stock price or something. It is always sensible to secure your belongings and to stock up on essentials in a storm. And its path was unpredictable, and even if the cyclone itself doesn't hit you, the flooding that follows it follows a completely different pattern. But panic never helps and the way the media hyped it was flagrantly irresponsible. In a sane world they would be flogged, but in this one I assume they all got promotions. And while some of the local governments handled it well (Logan city's mayor was a welcome beacon of common sense in a sea of insanity), many others ran about like beheaded chickens. That 5 hour wait for sandbags? That was because the complicated system they had set up to fill sandbags broke down constantly and was just shitty when it did work. The worst part though? They had to keep using it that day because they didn't have any shovels.

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That reddit thread is fucking insane. It doesn't sound like human speech any more, just some sort of 40k corpse-robot with a speaker in its skull droning prayers.

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Last time I went in my local library they had a David Horsey exhibition. They'd thrown out all the books I wanted to read in an "equity-based weeding" process, as well as destroying their local history archive, including the only copies of our local newspaper. (I only found that out because the museum called asking if my mom's copies still existed. They were pissed, because they'd always used the library copies for research until this outsider with a library science masters came and took over the place)

In 2020 the head librarian decided the volunteer staff were too white, so she got a grant for replacing them with no-show equity hires. The old man who took care of the expensive computer system (also grant and tax funded) got the boot, and now the public wifi, meeting room projector, and several of the computers have been non-functional for several years.

All the new books are five copies of whatever schlock her Tumblr feed and the kirkus Diversity & Inclusion Digital Catalog tell her to buy.

They recently had an expensive rebuilding that more than doubled the size of the library, but have fewer books than before. Only half of one of the wings is now dedicated to the stacks, the same area as their DVD collection.

Now they're lobbying for a higher property tax levy so they can hire more librarians.

Pick out any decent books they haven't already destroyed, herd the board inside, bar the door, and torch the place. Guilt-tripping people to protect the guilty isn't going to work any more. I'm so fucking sick of everything I ever loved being murdered and turned into a skin suit for leftist brain parasites it's unreal.

equity-based weeding

This is one of the most nauseating things I've read in a long time. Thanks for ruining my day.

Keep bringing the the facts next time once you get unbanned, we need it.

Pick out any decent books they haven't already destroyed, herd the board inside, bar the door, and torch the place.

I believe this is known as fed-posting.

leftist brain parasites

This isn't good for being boo out group.

You have been on thin ice. Normally I'd just make this a warning, but this needs to stop. One week ban.

I believe this is known as fed-posting.

Yeah, don't fed-post. It might feel good, but one day you may have to actually resort to violence. And you don't want to end up like the Charlottesville guy where a bunch of private, semi private, and anonymous online conversations were used against him while he was railroaded in court.

I agree with this mod action and I also agree with @SteveAgain's sentiment.

What would be a rules-compliant way of expressing violent disgust?

I don't usually express* violent disgust or other anger-adjacent emotions on the Web, but I didn't get in any trouble for this despite it pretty much being a disgust-only top-level post. Avoid hyperbolic language (especially calling people or ideas by snarl words like "parasite"), and obviously avoid specific incitement or threats of violence. Helps a lot if your disgust isn't with your interlocutor in particular, though.

*NB: I choose the word "express" carefully. Checking offsite records, there is at least one time my first reaction to a reply notification here was "take a swim in H2SO4". I just, um, didn't actually post that, because it wouldn't have been very productive.

@Amadan: I guess this might be sort of what you were looking for? It wasn't aimed at you, though.

Probably with some introspection about why you feel violent disgust, so you can control that reaction I think. The below is my own interpretation and idea of the space.

The whole point of the space is I should want even (or especially perhaps!) the people I find violently disgusting to read what I say and want to respond to me so we can have a dialogue.

So if I am going to talk about something I find disgusting I have to take a distant view of it and try to be more dispassionate.

You'll note many people who catch repeated bans it's because they can't (or won't) disguise a seething anger that underlies their post. They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with. They are writing from emotion first and foremost.

I could rant for days about the damage the Christian "brain parasite" does, and have in other places, but here if I post about it, it has to be with the idea I WANT Christians to read and engage. And calling their faith, something they feel very seriously about a parasite is not going to optimise for light over heat. It's starting an argument not a discussion. Its already a steep ask for them to try and discuss their own heartfelt beliefs with criticism, so my job is to try and make that as easy as possible for them, by trying to remove as much heat as I can.

I rewrite my posts usually after thinking if I were an X, how would i feel about the language being used to talk about the principles and actions I hold dear? How do I alter it so we can engage in a discussion not a fight? Try to put myself in the shoes of whoever I think believes the things I hate or find disgusting and edit my wording to offend them the least possible to make my point. I'm not always successful I don't think, but I have never got a ban or even a warning (that I recollect), so I think I get reasonably close.

You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space. But of course for most people they don't want to communicate with people like that. So not everyone is a good fit for what the space is supposed to be. If you can't at least pretend you WANT to engage with someone whose ideas you hate viscerally and are critiquing and make some effort to aid that, you'll probably be picking up Mod actions sooner rather than later.

Edit - spelling

They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with.

Several years experience and the fact we're on our... third? fourth? retreat location is indicative that there are, in fact, absolutely zero ways to write complaints in a way a progressive gay librarian would want to engage with. The door is shut, the conversation is closed, the person who objects to the librarian's choices has been locked in the cultural closet.

This is of course not to suggest that violent, vehement vichyssoise of verbiage is a valid or vigorous variant. Verily, we must vanquish such venal vexations, those vestiges of vanity!

And yet! You can't make them listen, and out here in this hive of scum and villainy there's so many invisible dog fences that they won't even enter the same state, much less zip code or conversation. There is no degree of openness or obsequiousness so extreme that would invite their consideration.

Avoiding expressions of hatred for the sake of some impossible imaginary reader is a fool's errand and a waste of energy. Most people trying that will burn out and find themselves worse off than before. Doing so for the sake of not corrupting your own heart, now there's an idea worth considering.

Several years experience and the fact we're on our... third? fourth? retreat location is indicative that there are, in fact, absolutely zero ways to write complaints in a way a progressive gay librarian would want to engage with.

That does not follow. Just because there would not be many doesn't mean there are none. We are all unusual here in one way or another. After all I consider myself on the left and I am here. And we have had people farther to the left of me. Most white nationalists probably don't want to post here either. And very few Red Tribe normie conservatives. But we should want them as well.

And if that means hewing close to our mission statement and "writing as if everyone else is reading and we want them to be included." then I am more than happy to do it.

Otherwise we aren't doing anything here we couldn't do on Red State or Truth Social.

We are all unusual here in one way or another.

Well, yes, we're also more-or-less a closed ecosystem at this point.

"writing as if everyone else is reading and we want them to be included."

I think that mission statement is good, it's the reasoning that irked me in the moment.

99.9% of the time, they don't want to be included, and writing in such a way to appeal to them is debasing yourself for nothing exhausting and thankless. No amount of hedging and rephrasing and begging can overcome those gulfs, and it serves as fuel for resentment. I'm not trying to deny that goal, just shift the angle on it slightly.

We should write in ways that do not feed the wolf of anger, as the old parable goes. We should write such that others are not explicitly excluded. But there's no way to avoid all the possible tripwires.

We should write in ways that do not feed the wolf of anger, as the old parable goes. We should write such that others are not explicitly excluded. But there's no way to avoid all the possible tripwires.

Nope, but we can get most of them. It's not that difficult, I don't think. And the main issue that gets people banned is they don't even try as far as I can see. It's just the same repetitive reflexive boo outgroup stuff.

But I disagree above, we can in fact overcome those gulfs. And in fact if you find it makes you resentful that is (in my opinion) part of the problem. It doesn't make me resentful when I have to rephrase something so I don't offend a Christian or a white nationalist. Why should it? I WANT them to read and engage. I want to hear from them, so spending a bit of time to hopefully increase their engagement is a positive thing in my mind.

Letting go of all of the emotional baggage of what people do outside of this space, is I think key. Treat it as its own world. Even if 99.9% of gay librarians or white nationalists would just yell or seethe, we are writing for those who come here and want to engage. Don't resent rewriting your words, that's the whole point of the space. See how well you can predict those you disagree with, if you have a good understanding of them, then you should be able to do well in reducing heat, if you don't, then that's the other thing this space is for!

I've been here and back when we were on Reddit for years, and I don't think I have ever even picked up a mod warning let alone a ban. I am sure I will at some point, but avoiding the most obvious boo outgroup stuff, and wording that is likely to enrage or annoy your opponents is fairly easy. You just have to want to spend the time and energy to do it. Regardless of (to go back to my original point) how much you hate or despise or think they will be ungrateful, or wouldn't do the same in reverse. Do it for you, not for them. Because you want the conversation that might result. Those moments when you can for a second connect with someone you think is entirely wrong about the world and might even be harming it, when you can see through their eyes for just a second. Even if they never see through yours.

What we do here has no impact on the outcome of the culture war, there are no stakes. It's just for the love of the game.

More comments

I suspect this will all go nowhere because no matter how gently the criticism is phrased, who would want to stand up on the other side, in favor of equity-based weeding? Who's going to take that stand? I doubt we'll find anyone here.

Even if no-one does respond, we have to do our best to write as if they will and we want them to. Otherwise we'll get fewer and fewer people who will.

And I did have a response, I was rewriting when he got banned. I don't know if I would stand up for all of it, but he is wrong about leftism murdering his neutral libraries and wearing the skin suit. It was already murdered when anti-Christian and anti-American books were banned back in the day and libraries had a very different lean. When the Wizard of Oz was banned because witches are theologically evil or portrayed women in leadership roles. It was already a weapon in the culture war, that's why leftists got involved. Because they felt just as disgusted by the way it was previously as he does now. It's a new zombie in the skinsuit that he doesn't like but there will always be a zombie.

"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"

"Pressure was brought to bear not only on the materials in the library but the staff who ran it. Loyalty programs sprang up around the country beginning in 1947, the year that President Harry Truman enacted a federal program for employees in the executive branch. Typically, these programs required that employees sign an oath indicating whether or not they had had or continued to have any affiliations with organizations considered subversive"

"The 1960s brought about turmoil in libraries across the southern United States. African-Americans attempted to access white libraries across the American South."

Once libraries are used as a cultural weapon, you cannot be surprised when your opponents decide it is a weapon they need to contest.

Whether equity based weeding is right or wrong is irrelevant, you can prefer one or the other, but starting history 20 years ago obscures WHY these things happen now. Why did a coalition of the left want to control libraries? Because those libraries had previously been weaponized against their coalition - feminists, leftists and black people at a minimum. Free and neutral libraries had already been skinned and inhabited long ago. It's just a fight over which zombie gets to wear the skin so to speak. And I am sure the Christians in the 1920's would argue that libraries had been corrupted and that is why they needed to assert control and ban ungodly books ,and the patriots of the 50s would cite the rise of un-American communists for why they had to fire people and so on and so forth.

If you hit someone with a club and then they wrest it away from you and hit you with it, your complaint about your opponent using a weapon is void. Your real issue is that your opponent has the club not you, not with the concept of the club being used as a weapon at all.

"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"

I can't believe this is what dragged me back, but damn it, you're talking about books and this is important. After this, I will sink back into my bog and decent obscurity.

So the tl;dr here is "that's a myth".

The longer version? What I'm always banging on about: go to the primary sources! Where did you get this factoid? Apparently from a site named Canterbury Books. Okay, where did they get it? Well, there's a couple of possible sources, since this gets quoted around the place.

An aside: "The Wizard of Oz" was not banned by all public libraries in 1928 but only by the Chicago Public Library and the reason isn't readily available. The Oz books have been banned at various times, for reasons ranging from (yes) concerns about witchcraft and occultism to Communism! since Oz doesn't have money or an economic system, to "it's outdated, irrelevant to modern children, it's fantasy and they should be reading about the real world, kids today want to read about submarines and missiles". That one comes from a lady library professional in Florida in 1959 and she was tweaked about it by an article in Life:

Dr. Dorothy Dodd, state librarian, has urged all public libraries in Florida to withdraw from circulation the following books: Uncle Wiggly, Tom Swift, Tarzan, the Bobbsey Twins, the Wizard of Oz, Horatio Alger, the Campfire Girls, the Hardy Boys, and others of that ilk. Dr. Dodd says these books are “poorly written, untrue to life, sensational, foolishly sentimental and consequently unwholesome for the children in your community.”

Nothing there about Stronk Female Wammen being Leaderines. So where did this come out of? Seemingly from an essay by some lassie writing a thesis:

Do many Americans still have a problem with accepting women as leaders? I personally don’t think there’s much of an argument there, and people who see the question as redundant marvel at how long archaic attitudes about women in power have persisted. At least these days we can openly have the—often highly inflamed—conversation about sexism in business, entertainment, and government. And we can support a cultural industry thriving on strong female characters in fiction, film, and television. Not so much in 1928, when the Chicago Public Library banned The Wizard of Oz, writes Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa Department of Special Collections, “arguing that the story was ungodly for ‘depicting women in strong leadership roles.’”

Okay, so what did Ms. Rosenthal say? Well, that's hard to find because the link keeps timing out, but it looks like she might be relying on what some other guy said:

Back in March 2013, R. Wolf Baldassarro posted a blog essay about objections to the book. Baldassarro isn’t a librarian, educator, or scholar. He’s a “seasoned paranormal investigator” who happens to feel strongly about book banning.

I found several faults with that essay, including falling for a 2004 Deadbrain hoax about Jerry Falwell and misquoting sources.

Baldassarro’s essay also said about the book:

Nevertheless, it has come under attack several times. Ministers and educators challenged it for its “ungodly” influence and for depicting women in strong leadership roles. They opposed not only children reading it, but adults as well, lest it undermine longstanding gender roles.

In 1928, the city of Chicago banned it from all public libraries.

Note that the words “depicting women in strong leadership roles” were Baldassarro’s own. While ascribing that thought to “Ministers and educators,” he didn’t cite any source, person, place, or date for that complaint.

Despite (or because of) how it overstated the evidence, Baldassarro’s essay got quoted on Buzzfeed and other sites.

Then this February Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa’s McFarlane Library posted her own essay on the book’s troubles with librarians and censors, which said:

In 1928 all public libraries banned the book arguing that the story was ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles”. This argument remained the common defense against the novels from ministers and educators through the 1950s and 60s.

Baldassarro’s statement about a supposed policy in Chicago thus became a statement about “all public libraries,” and his phrase “depicting women in strong leadership roles” appeared as if it were a direct quotation from those 1928 book banners. That’s shoddy scholarship.

So to sum it up: the Oz book(s) were banned at various times for various reasons, but not a blanket ban in 1928 and, so far as I can tell, not for having Strong Independent Lead Female Characters Who Don't Need No Man.

As ever, when engaging in historical discourse, GO. BACK. TO. THE. PRIMARY. SOURCES.

Now I submerge back into the mud and darkness. Glub, glub.

I regret you were too late but Nybbler already beat you to it, so we had traced back to Baldassaro and also to another article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which has another unsourced quote about the 1928 ban in Chicago. Though as knowledge is its own reward so I hope you do not feel your time wasted!

Still being banned for being communist means my overall point holds thankfully.

Don't know who you were originally, but this is the kind of comment I read the Motte for.

"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"

Bing's AI tells me this is false. Since Bing's AI (like all AIs) is idiotic (and cites Iranian state media as its source!), I'll check myself. I find claims that it was banned in Chicago in 1928 and Detroit in 1957. The Detroit ban is backed up by a newspaper article, but it was not banned for "depicting women in strong leadership roles". Rather, it was banned because "There is nothing uplifting or elevating about the series". Elsewhere, Ralph Ulveling, the library director, said the books were old-fashioned* and "inferior to the modern books we stock". I can find no contemporary evidence for the Chicago ban. The language "strong leadership roles" is suspiciously modern; I suspect this is merely a just-so story made up to back up arguments like yours. Another figure implicated in banning Oz is Anne Carroll Moore, who it is claimed removed the books from the Children's Reading room at the New York public library, in the 1930s, without giving a reason. I believe it is unlikely this was for "depicting women in strong leadership roles", if indeed it happened -- the oldest reference to this story I can find is in the 1970s.

  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900.

So I tracked back that quote to Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa in 2014 but it seems she sourced the quote from R. Wolf Baldassarro in 2013 who doesn't appear to have named a source that I can find. The "strong leadership roles" wording does appear to be his paraphrasing with just the "ungodly" wording being a quote in his original piece.

"Nevertheless, it has come under attack several times. Ministers and educators challenged it for its “ungodly” influence and for depicting women in strong leadership roles. They opposed not only children reading it, but adults as well, lest it undermine longstanding gender roles."

I did find an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which said this:

"In 1928, you would not have been able to find “The Wizard of Oz” at the Chicago Public Library; librarians there considered the book “not literature, but, somehow, rather evil for children.”" but again the quote is unsourced. The Chicago Tribune was extant in 1928 so I assume they would maybe have internal archives so as to verify that the banning actually happened, but it isn't specified in the article.

I do concede however that I cannot find a contemporary source for those quotes. Though I also can't find a contemporary source for the 1928 banning at all. Possibly buried in a newspaper archive I would need a library card to access, ironically enough.

For the 1950's though I think we have better evidence (this piece is about state librarians in Florida):

"When it came to employing the tactic of using the public’s anticommunist sentiment to remove the works of Baum from public libraries (and thereby empower the library in its fight against communism), Dreier and Dodd were not alone. These localities joined Detroit, Washington, D.C., Chicago, (ironically) Kansas City, and other local library districts across the nation in purging their shelves of the works of Baum. "

"Dreier was arguing that his movement to improve the quantity and quality of Florida’s libraries was a necessary front in the Cold War. He viewed libraries as extremely important institutions that would create a populace capable of defeating the Soviet Union in the marketplace of ideas"

This paper is sourced from letters held in the Florida State archives from the 1950's and illustrates that seeing libraries as a cultural weapon was already happening then.

"Outside the pages of his library newsletter, Dreier was an even more strident anticommunist. Elsewhere he wrote vitriolic propaganda pieces with stark depictions of leftists:

"The socialist is smarter than the capitalist. He has to be to get what he wants. The capitalist is the producer. He raises the fruits and vegetables. He makes gadgets. He accumulates profits. That’s when the socialist, himself unable to create anything, steps in and passes laws that compel the capitalist to turn part of his profits into socialist projects. The time will come when the socialist will actually pass laws that compel the producer to surrender complete control of what he has created."

"Given his antipathy toward leftist politics, the fact that Baum’s work was often suspected of containing subversive political ideas gave Dreier additional impetus to support Dodd’s list of books to be removed from Florida’s libraries."

Whether it applies to Baum in 1928 or not, the evidence is that libraries were already seen as a battleground for cultural clashes well before the current timeframe.

Spelling out specific plans for violence puts us in a shit spot. It's very unlikely any of you carry out such plans, but if you were to and had posted about them what happens to the mods or other forum goers afterwards? Will victims sue us for not reporting it to the police?

Our solution is to not be put in the spot. Any expressions of preferences for violence puts us in this bind.

Expressing disgust towards people falls afoul of other rules like boo out group.

The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".

"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."

The rule compliant way to express things in both cases is "dont hate the player, hate the game".

"The progressive ideology has ruined libraries for me. It seems to ruin everything it touches. I wish the ideology was dead and buried with other past terrible ideas."

Do you promise? Cause I can just quote that word for word when I short circuit in rage and disgust.

I think I like what @SSCReader said better.

And no I can't make any promises on moderation because someone will be obnoxious with it. There is a gradient from bad to good. Fed posting, and specific calls for violence are very much on the bad side. Trying to engage with people you disagree with, or at least targeting ideas rather than individuals is on the good side.

There are ways to make the bad side acceptable, I'm sure there is even a quality contribution that did it at some point. And vice versa there are ways to make the good side a bannable offense.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I got banned for that -- in fact, a longer version of that. But to be fair it was a long time ago on a site far, far way.

What would be a rules-compliant way of expressing violent disgust?

Write about how irreconcilable your values are with those of the people you're criticizing, how no compromise that doesn't involve separatuon is possible, and how insisting on imposing these values top-down will inevetibly lead to society falling apart, and quite possibly violent conflict, if they are not reined in by more reasonable people.

It may be a lot of worm, but it's a low price for preserving the quality of discourse here.

That sounds a lot like @FCfromSSC. We already have him, and I don't presume to do his job better than he, so I guess I'll do my part by shushing up.

It’s the Motte, so of course the topic that really kicks off the fedposting is libraries

The fire rises

How much money are they actually giving out here? How many local libraries are going to disappear because they don't have federal grants?

You can search their list of awarded grants here (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded-grants) and for calibration's sake I looked up the town whose library I spent the most time in as a wee one, wandering the stacks. Looks like that library has received zilch from the IMLS. They did give a local wildlife park near the town $1,775 back in 2003, and the local "Pioneer Farm Museum" (which is just a little farm all done up in historical style where kids can take a trip and learn how to churn butter or whatever) got $6,370 in 2002. That's it.

Searching around, they seem to give out a lot of $10,000 grants to native tribes, presumably for village libraries. So where is the big money?

So I went ahead and searched for Tacoma, which was the closest city to where I grew up that had proper museums, big ones that people like to go to. What did I find? $400k to the University of Washington, $630k to something called "Environment & Culture Partners" which appears to be an NGO that tries to get museums to talk more about climate change, $170k to the Museum of Glass (a great museum I must admit, check it out if you're in Tacoma), $250k for the Children's Museum, $145k for the 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers Museum (never heard of it), $140k to the Washington State Historical Society, and $25,000 (Back in 2014) to the Pierce County Library System (which, come to think of it, my hometown library was part of. Still, 25k spread over all the libraries in Pierce County is kind of small potatoes).

My test seems like a mixed bag, since the Glass Museum and Children's Museum were pretty nice to go to as a kid (and even today, for the glass one). On the other hand, shouldn't a big city like Tacoma be able to support their own museums? I doubt either of these places would close their doors without the IMLS in any case: the Museum of glass got exactly two grants, one in 2024 and one in 2006, so I doubt they're relying on the money to stay open. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of this money gets funneled to universities and NGOs.

The buffalo soldiers museum well might- this is presumably a super-woke museum about black soldiers which alienated people who like woke shit by being about soldiers(who earned their stripes beating up Indians) and alienated people who like museums about soldiers by being woke.

An additional bit of info: for 2024 their largest grantees were:

California State Library: $15,705,702

Texas State Library and Archives Commission: $12,512,132

State Library of Florida: $9,533,426

New York State Library: $8,125,215

Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries: $5,891,819

The big grantees are all state libraries, looks like they give a grant to each state. The lowest state library grant? Wyoming State Library, $1,220,427.

The smallest grant of 2024? $2,510 to the Seneca Nation of Indians, in a grant they will use for a "Kid's Reading Project".

I don’t believe this good. I do believe that Libraries and Museums are institutions nearly entirely dominated by progressive Progressives and outright antagonistic to any conservative ideology, Drag Queen Story Hour and all.

I’d much rather have seen reform, but courts and Resist makes that harder than padlocks for some reason. I’d try anyway, but it’s not up to me, and barring that, I’d instead work to shift the funds to the States directly for disbursement. Total ideological capture by the enemy is a giant beacon to those already in the business of fucking shit up.

Ok, well since the Trump Administration is in power, seems to me like instead of shutting things down, why don't they just....change how they grant the money? Yes, do just that, grant more directly to the state library services so that the regional politicians can be more judicious and be capricious with how the money should be spent. Take a step further and give all the money to the red states so they can go build some beautiful civic architecture, I am very much in agreement with that. What I disagree with is cutting the funding and that libraries and museums would have to reduce hours etc.

change how they grant the money

Earmarking is hard. Starving the beast may be more effective

Ok, well since the Trump Administration is in power, seems to me like instead of shutting things down, why don't they just....change how they grant the money?

Because they don't have the fine control of the system necessary to keep the progressive librarians from distorting their intentions.

I will try to illustrate my frustration with this argument. This is like two groups of kids in a playground where one group is building this sandcastle and yes those kids have these weird rules or behaviors or rituals that ranges from annoying to abhorrent for the other group of kids. But then the other group of kids come and just destroys the sandcastle. I think my feelings about gutting the IMLS would mirror some gun range enthusiast’s feeling if a liberal president went and hampered the Pittman-Robertson Act with regards to federal grants to gun education.

PS: I’m extra frustrated because conservatives do demonstrate their ability to grow and nurture their own ideologues of specific professions such as the Federalist Society. But then I can’t think of a reverse equivalent (other than liberal gun owners which isn’t a profession) so my argument isn’t going anywhere.

This is like two groups of kids in a playground where one group is building this sandcastle and yes those kids have these weird rules or behaviors or rituals that ranges from annoying to abhorrent for the other group of kids.

You missed the part where the kids building the sandcastle are taking many of the the tools they use, as well as a good bit of the water and sand, from the second group.

It sounds really silly in reverse because conservatives simply have not been able to do it in reverse. But suppose there was a thriving community theatre culture, funded by various government programs. But over the years, conservatives infiltrated these community theatres and all the drama programs, and now the community theatres actually do weapons drill. Oh, they retain the trappings of community theatre -- they still have a stage and a curtain, and they put on "performances". But it's all weapons drills, no acting. And now some leftists who really liked community theatre get control of the funding. When they try to direct the community theatres to do theatre or they won't get money, the theatre directors agree and keep doing what they're doing, which they insist on calling theatre. A few get their money taken away, so those theatre directors make an absolute stink in the conservative-controlled media and eventually the funding is restored. The other theatre directors, meanwhile, change their terminology a little bit and continue on. Now what?

Libraries and museums have gone full woke, e.g. giving indigenous tribes veto power over exhibit contents, so it's not surprising.

giving indigenous tribes veto power over exhibit contents

I'm going to assume you're referring to what is discussed here, which is really covered by NYT here. From my read of it, it wasn't that the museums system went full woke, it was the Biden administration that went full woke, given that:

The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.

To me, it doesn't seem like the museums themselves are really trying their hardest at compliance in the last 35 years. It took the wokest administration so far to lay down new regulations for:

Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations

I would imagine that if the museums went full woke they would have already done it willingly and without being asked instead of the "scramble" that's mentioned. I don't see anything that is intelligent or creative about shuttering museums. If we talk about the indigenious tribes veto power specifically, seems like simply reversing the situation is already enough, why must go as far as shutting off funding for the museums themselves?

Also I would like to hear your arguments on why libraries should also receive less funding and possibly need closing.

I’m firmly in favor of publicly funded museums, opera, theater, art. But this stuff should be funded by states and cities, not by the federal government! There’s an extraordinary obfuscation in this kind of thing being funded federally.

All this agency dismantlement will have negative consequences in many ways. But the principle of it is fair, that this huge expansion of the federal bureaucracy occurred without the consent of the public and for no good reason other than that people involved wanted to expand their fiefdoms and preserve their sinecures.

A federation of states! Why not? Why shouldn’t it be so?

I don't really understand the middle paragraph here. IMLS was created by Congress and is codified in 20 USC Ch 72. It was created in 1996 and re-authorized in 2003, 2010, and 2018. Their funding is also appropriated annually by Congress. What does it mean for a bureaucracy to be expanded with "the consent of the public" if an expansion happening over the course of years by laws passed by the people's elected representatives does not qualify?

I believe @2rafa was referring to the expansion of the federal bureaucracy as a whole, rather than this specific bureau. But your point is still a fair one: the federal bureaucracy is the will of the people as far as I can tell. Look at FDR: he massively expanded the federal government, and he was so popular that he was elected more times than any other president in history. I hate the sprawling federal government, and it certainly exists in blatant violation of the constitution. I too would love to see it dismantled, and have the states handle those tasks. But unfortunately it seems like support for federalism is in the extreme minority in the US, so it would seem that the status quo is what the people of this country want.

Maybe we should just stop pretending that this is a federated system any more, and repeal the 10th amendment. At least that way we wouldn't have a federal government which blatantly violates the constitution any more. I would certainly prefer to go back to federalism, but as far as I can tell that ship sailed 80 years ago (much to our detriment today, as the ever-increasing federal power is why we have such bitter fights over federal elections). May as well dispense with the legal fiction and admit what we have become.

why the distinction?

Museums, libraries, etc., primarily benefit local communities. Why should my tax dollars go to a local library 1,000 miles away: can't they fund their own library if it matters so much to them?

You've replied to my comment here so I do believe you see the numbers there too. $268m/168m taxpayers = $1.59/taxpayer that goes to the IMLS. I would argue that:

  1. $1.59/taxpayer is a very small price for US citizens to help each other, even if it's across state lines or 1000 miles away.
  2. As explained in that comment, most of library funding is already local, and in the case of Alabama, you pointed out that Alabama effectively got $0 from the federal government for 2024.
  3. Since we want to encourage local and regional brilliance, shouldn't that be argument that more funds should be given to states and local municipalities to do what they will? Seems to me like the major funding from IMLS are exactly just that.

I think you’d have to demonstrate that the program in question was of actual benefit to anyone in the public, and in far too many cases the benefits are: promoting progressive values, serving as safehouses for drug users, and occasionally providing something educational to a kid.

The amount per taxpayer is small, sure, but the question is whether the amount should be used to fund other people's libraries. That question remains the same whether the tax is $1.50 or $1,000 per taxpayer.

As explained in that comment, most of library funding is already local, and in the case of Alabama, you pointed out that Alabama effectively got $0 from the federal government for 2024.

Puerto Rico got $2,147,080 and they're not even a state.

And I don't want to encourage local and regional brilliance, I want to encourage people paying for the services they enjoy instead of getting other people who don't enjoy them to pay for it.

How many other distinct topics are you willing to let others obligate you for $1.59 each before you consider it a not-small price below the level worth arguing over?

Ten line items? Hundred? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

Naturally, each and every one could use the same defense- it's only a few pennies or dollars.

In time, though, you reach the total government spending / # of residents, which in the US is somewhere north of $30,000 per citizen... or roughly $60,000 per taxpayer, going by your taxpayer estimate versus rough American population.

I would counter-argue that this is the slippery slope argument/fallacy. That I definitely can make a choice that of the various $1.59s line items on a receipt, I want this particular line item to stay $1.59 and/or even increase it. Now let's say the IMLS was not just dismantled but replaced by something similar to the Pittman–Robertson Act I would support it even more.

What?

A slippery slope argument rests on the premise that you aren't already at the bottom of the greater warned costs.

I am not arguing that if you spend 1.59 on libraries, you will spend 60k on more. I am noting you are already spending 60,000.00 on more if you are a taxpayer, of which 1.59 on libraries is one of many, many such 'small' costs.

The attempt to separate 1.59 from 60,000.00 is simply budgetary salami slicing. Who takes issue over one slice of salami?

well, seeing that I feel strongly about this 1.59, then yes I am doing budgetary salami slicing, and yes I am taking issue over one slice of salami. I think it's this exact freedom with which American citizens can feel strongly about their slice of salami that makes Americans great. We can argue over everything, we will fight (reasonably and without violence) over anything, and that's fine. I think this salami is important and I'm speaking up about it. I feel strongly that this slice of salami has great public utility, that decreasing this slice is not good for the American people, now or in the future. I do not feel that America is at the bottom of the warned cost as I can envision far worse use for America's money in far greater amounts (special military operation in Canada, let's say) leading to way more slices of salami being sacrificed than I am comfortable with.

More comments

why the distinction?

Madison in Federalist No. 45 wrote that "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

The Tenth Amendment explicitly states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Of course, all this assumes that people will be most involved in their localities and states, with only sporadic contact with national-level politics. That theory didn't really survive contact with modern communication and transportation technologies.

Because America is too large. If you look at other nations of comparable or greater size (India, China, even Brazil) regional governors and politicians often have far more control over the local political economy than in the US. Chinese provinces vastly differ in terms of economic and social policy, for example.

Looking at this federal funding data sheet, I am reading that IMLS funding in 2024 was $268 million, with $211m distributed through the Library Services and Technology Act, which based on this 2022 factsheet by the American Libraries Association is the "only source of dedicated federal funding for the more than 116,000 public, school, academic, government, and special libraries across the nation."

I would agree that damn, look at that $268m - $211m, there is waste here of $67m somehow. And yes, for the 168million people that live in America that file taxes, they should either get their $0.40 back or DOGE can get it better spent.

But let's circle back to the federal disbursement of funds to libraries. Let's assume that $211m was equally distributed among the states, that's $211m/50 = $4.22m per state. Let's pick a random state, like Alabama, and look at their state budget for 2024. Specifically we can go to page 66 on the pdf (or 61 by the page numbering) to see that $18.3m was the total appropriation and $6.6m of that going to "amount earmarked for state aid to local libraries". I'm going to assume $4.22 would have been extra to the above, which would account for 4.22/(18.3 + 4.22) = 18.7% of funding for libraries in Alabama.

Is 18.7% a lot? Maybe. Is 81.3% a lot more? Absolutely. We can see that a lot of library funding is already dominated by local spending. I don't see how libraries are examples of where there is federal overreach or forcing the hand of states in terms of state-federal relationships. In fact if we look at the budget of Alabama on page 6 of the pdf (or 1 by the page numbering), the state had on hand 8.8b + 3b = $11.8b, which is then supplemented by 18.6b + 15b = 33.6b from elsewhere. This is the total inverse relationship where local funding is dwarfed by federal funding.

Actually, I found this pdf from Auburn University at Montgomery from 2022 which on page 7 has a diagram of 2019 funding where it shows 0.9% of Alabama funding for libraries was from the federal government. That in 2022, Alabama received $2.7m, which is way less than the $4.22m assumption I made above.

I can understand where you're coming from with regards to the balance of powers between national/federal and regional/state actors or the power of the purse and the carrot/stick strategy every administration uses against the state governments. But in this particular situation about library funding, I don't see how it holds water.

Let's assume that $211m was equally distributed among the states

It is not. They make their largest grants to state libraries, but they don't distribute it evenly. In 2024 they didn't even give Alabama state libraries a grant at all! California got $15,705,702 for their state library system, the only grant that went to anybody in Alabama whatsoever in 2024 was $184,876 to the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium.

Here's the full list of 2024 grantees under their "Grants to State Libraries" program:

California State Library $15,705,702

Texas State Library and Archives Commission $12,512,132

State Library of Florida $9,533,426

New York State Library $8,125,215

Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries $5,891,819

Illinois State Library $5,736,330

State Library of Ohio $5,448,084

Georgia Board of Regents $5,162,498

North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources $5,089,381

Library of Michigan $4,788,124

New Jersey State Library $4,506,420

Library of Virginia $4,289,358

Washington State Library $3,948,629

Arizona State Library $3,804,635

Tennessee State Library and Archives $3,689,581

Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners $3,642,371

Indiana State Library $3,589,836

Missouri State Library $3,338,467

Maryland State Library Agency $3,332,465

WI Div. for Libraries and Community Learning $3,230,831

Colorado Department of Education $3,218,246

MN Dept of CFL/Library Development & Services $3,165,524

South Carolina State Library $3,028,013

State Library of Louisiana $2,726,161

KY Department for Libraries and Archives $2,708,198

Oregon State Library $2,597,695

Oklahoma Department of Libraries $2,529,938

Utah State Library Division $2,289,874

State Library of Iowa $2,210,343

Nevada State Library and Archives $2,205,502

Connecticut State Library $2,164,184

Arkansas State Library $2,157,781

PR Dept. of ED/Public Library Programs $2,147,080

Kansas State Library $2,109,780

Mississippi Library Commission $2,109,457

New Mexico State Library $1,797,977

Nebraska Library Commission $1,746,652

Idaho State Library $1,741,500

West Virginia Library Commission $1,668,036

Hawaii State Public Library System $1,541,630

New Hampshire State Library $1,529,144

Maine State Library $1,526,754

Montana State Library, Natural Resource Information System $1,427,530

Rhode Island Office of Library & Information Services $1,413,623

Delaware Division of Libraries $1,389,442

South Dakota State Library $1,346,956

State Library, North Dakota $1,295,858

Alaska State Library $1,276,792

District of Columbia Public Library $1,256,248

State of Vermont Department of Libraries $1,244,357

Wyoming State Library $1,220,427

Right, I think this furthers prove my point that in terms of "economic and social policy", regional governors and politicians often have far more control over their library system than the federal government.

I agree, which is why they'll be fine if the IMLS disappears. They don't need other people's money to get by.

Very interesting. I'd have expected China to be way more centralised because it's, well, China. Maybe the much larger population plays a role?

According to Wikipedia, this decentralization was instituted by Deng Xiaoping back in the 1980s. Quoting various books published since 2008:

The governance of China is characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization. Policy instruments or processes are often tested locally before being applied more widely, resulting in a policy that involves experimentation and feedback. Generally, central government leadership refrains from drafting specific policies, instead using the informal networks and site visits to affirm or suggest changes to the direction of local policy experiments or pilot programs. The typical approach is that central government leadership begins drafting formal policies, law, or regulations after policy has been developed at local levels.

After [Deng's] economic reform, China has been characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization.  The central government sets the strategic direction while local officials carry it out,  including developing the details of policy.

Laboratories of <del>democracy</del> <ins>socialism with Chinese characteristics</ins>

The recent "laboratories of socialism with Chinese characteristics" is correct. As far as I understand, regional governors have great latitude to experiment with policy, with successful cases transplanted into other provinces (as with the original "laboratories of democracy").

But the heightened autonomy also makes sense, looking back further in history. The division of China into its provinces goes back a long way; though the modern system (with adjustments) dates back to the Mongols, many of these territorial units trace their origin to antiquity; going into the 20th century, provincial feeling within China would have been much stronger and more deep-rooted than e.g. the same between US states. IIRC early observers of republican China thought that China would most likely be heavily federalised in large part due to this; even with Maoist destruction of China's cultural heritage, some of this still stays.

And historically while imperial China was theoretically totalitarian, in practice -- especially late into the imperial era, where the bureaucracy was increasingly lean and population increasingly large -- regional leaders had quite a lot of freedom as long as they were sufficiently obsequent to the Dragon Throne. (When central power was weak, of course, even that didn't apply -- see how the Beiyang fleet was snubbed by the other three Chinese fleets during the first Sino-Japanese war, or how during the Boxer rebellion governors of the southern provinces refused to heed the declaration of war on the Europeans and Japanese and withheld knowledge of the edict from their populations.)

Edit: a word

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