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