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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   30267 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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There Are No Viable Political or Legal Solutions (Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)

Imagine, hypothetically, your daughter's teacher was a fucking machine. You might have concerns that this literal automaton that is only capable of fucking might fuck your daughter. I mean, you can plainly look up it's product page, seems pretty cut and dry. This machine fucks. You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines, and they are struggling to understand the nature of your complaints. They actually find them rather hateful, like some sort of personal attack. The police pull your pants down, drag you out of the meeting, and arrest you.

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.

Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids. Although... No, this is more an allegory that it's impossible to change the nature of a teacher, and the hill they've chosen to die on. Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking. Libraries are forgoing the majority of their funding from the county, schools are grandstanding on it, it's a world I can scarcely comprehend. Neither politics nor the law provides any solution. Turns out the physical reality of these people's nature, and the fact that they have exclusive control of your child for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is just immune from votes or the law. It would probably takes the 101st Airborne stationed in every classroom to make it stop, and even then teachers would still do it, confident that the government would never use their monopoly on violence to actually stop them from showing middle schoolers some queer cock sucking.

I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution. What you do with this knowledge is between you and your own conscience. I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values. It's been at great expense, and to my eternal sorrow likely cost me the opportunity to have more children. In a shameful sense, I've chosen to run, because I view my family as something too precious to risk. Other people might have different views, less options, or have already lost the one thing they lived for. I refuse to condemn them for the different choices they may make, nor preface this bare fact, that there are no viable political or legal solutions, with some smooth brained pre-emptive disavowing.

If pointing out the hopeless position we are in amounts to a "call to violence" to you, that is between you and your conscience. It's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if the theater is actually on fire.

I don't understand why you think this is such a big deal, given that it is legal for parents to homeschool their children or send them to private school.

Besides, modern technology means that pretty much any kid who wants to see porn, will see porn. Compared to the stuff that a kid can find in 2 seconds on the web, nothing in some LGBTQ book in school can possibly compare. Now of course, that doesn't mean that I'm a fan of having my tax money spent on such educational content. But then, I'm not a fan of having my tax money spent on about 90% of the so-called education system to begin with. Largely because modern techhnology means that pretty much any kid who wants to learn outside of school and has normal cognitive capacity can easily teach themselves.

Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids.

List of alleged abusers in the SBC

Wikipedia's page for SBC sex abuse

Jehovah's Witnesses

Virginia Beach megachurch Pastor who had this lovely adventure:

Authorities say Blanchard believed he was talking to an underage girl on social media but was really chatting with an undercover detective. They add that Blanchard drove to a county hotel for a sexual encounter with the young girl and was met by police and handcuffs.

Study finds that 1/250 Australians report being sexually abused by Clergy during their childhood

I won't bother recounting the history of the Catholic church scandals, everyone knows them and honestly I think they get overrated relative to what you see at every other organization.

I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values.

Have you considered that you're fleeing the frying pan of fucking machines for the fire of fucking machines?

I've increasingly become blackpilled on the question of pedophilia. It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

Yes, in the sense that pedophiles commonly have the big-brained idea to get a job working with kids.

Child actors are commonly sexually abused by Hollywood executives. I don't think that means the typical Hollywood producer is a pedophile. I think it means the subset of Hollywood producers who happen to be pedophiles make sure to work with child actors.

It's like that with every organization. I don't think the average youth pastor is fucking the kids. But if a pedophile happened to be a member of that church, he might get the clever idea to volunteer to be youth pastor.

It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

Sure there are. They're just the organizations that don't interact with children.

...That doesn't seem better.

In the hypothetical scenario you talk about, it sounds like you only ever considered voting or lawing your way into banning the fucking machine from acting according to their design, and you did not consider to vote or law your way out of letting the fucking machines into schools at all. Why? Alternatively, do schools have some mystical property that gradually converts their staff into fucking machines?

If what you are perceiving is anything close to consensus reality, then surely it should be possible to persuade other people to vote with you, either to kick the fucking machines out, or to shut down schools altogether, or to dedicate significant effort into figuring out if there is a way to change the mystical property mentioned earlier. Do other voters in your country agree about what is going on, but just strongly feel that on the balance it is imperative to continue forcing your kids into the care of fucking machines for 8 hours a day? Then you probably shouldn't want to coexist with them in a democracy, and the obvious solution for you is to legally exercise your still rather generous right to exit to go somewhere where you can live among the like-minded. Do they not see the f(ucking machine)nords like you do? Is there no way to legally make them see?

Nothing about your post suggests that you are interested in exploring serious alternatives and exhaustively searching the space of "political or legal solutions" - you sketch the failure of one fanciful "political or legal solution", declare that its expected failure means there are no viable ones at all, and use this to set up an emotional account of your hardships in coping with this conclusion while also trying to retest the boundaries of anti-fedposting enforcement. At that point, your situation really starts looking like you are reasoning backwards from a specific scenario you wish were real - either you live as part of a free, just and democratic USA that finally recognises the evil of fucking machines at schools and unites to gloriously smite them and restore propriety, or you go out in a blaze of violent resistance against the insanity of the world (or, well, spend your time fantasising about it on an internet forum vaguely hoping that somebody else will light the spark so that following it into the blaze will feel natural and effortless).

This is of course certainly a way to live, and sometimes the "my utopia or exit" approach yields surprising results in politics, but it's worth noting that the successful political movements of the last decades if not beyond generally did this in ways that involved plenty of compromise, "selling out" and delaying gratification. The acolytes of the US Left had to put their signatures on hiring many a competent white male CEO during their Long March through the Institutions, even from their point of view that might have well amounted to complicity in putting a Fucking Machine in charge of their kids (PoCs).

Why is it so important to you that middle and high schoolers do not learn about gender and sexuality? Understanding those things is important for children and adolescents to understand what abuse looks like and how to avoid it and report it. And for them to know what a healthy understanding of themselves looks like and what healthy relationships look like, which is important for any person's happiness and wellbeing.

I believe that you honestly want what's best for your children and somehow think keeping them away from such information is better for them, but I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts.

  • -21

Do you want your children reading cartoon pornography in elementary school? Do you want teachers keeping secrets about them from you? Do you want serious crimes against them brushed under the rug because of the offender's identity, as happened in Loudoun county?

These things are all at issue here. I can say that it is... difficult to disentangle my emotions about them from my more general thoughts about sex ed in middle and high school(I consider myself competent to do this for my kids at the appropriate ages without the need for assistance from the school system in any case; I understand that there are parents who are not and that you might count me among them, given my ideas about sex/gender/sexuality. But this simply makes me more adamant that there should not be sex ed or gender education in schools, parents should do it themselves, and this may suck for those kids whose parents are not competent to teach them themselves but thems the breaks).

I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts

Perhaps this is my bias as a parent, but insulting the way people raise their kids is often a step beyond insulting them personally.

"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".

Take a time out. 3 day ban.

"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".

This is pretty funny in a modhat comment, considering we have an OP saying "Don't paraphrase unflatteringly."

It occurs to me to ask, when talking to a moderator, is it less antagonistic to say "you are an asshole" than to say "your users are assholes, and it is your fault"?

There is a form of comparison

AA : AA :: BB : BB

This comparison is not meant to say that AA == BB.

How about don't say either one?

No, 'You're a shitty parent' is below the belt in a way that 'you're an asshole' isn't.

Gender Queer is, among other things, a book of gay cartoon sex. Targeted at 8 year olds and stocked in public school libraries at my expense.

I support sex ed and some Motte interpretation of the positive things you mention. But the current popular Bailey of sexual cartoon books for young children supplied at taxpayer expense has nothing to do with those positive vibes.

I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts

Sneering contempt against most parents.

Speaking just for myself, I’m not entirely opposed to elementary schoolers (that is, 10 to 12 year olds) learning about puberty in a strictly “changes to the body” sense. I am not opposed to middle schoolers (that is, 14 year olds or thereabouts) learning about sexuality in a strictly heterosexual, pro-natal “this is what sex is and you should wait until marriage” way.

What I am opposed to is a combination of these concepts being introduced at much younger ages (“We’re just teaching them to recognize abuse!!” is a motte at those ages), and the fact that nearly everyone doing the teaching is philosophically opposed to my people’s point of view.

On another note, “Why is it so important to you” questions, and all variations thereof, are silly. It’s clearly important to you or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, so humans being what we are, someone somewhere is going to take the opposite stance from you. Questions like that remind me of the scene in Blindsight where the aliens perceive informationally-unnecessary communication as a hostile attack on their mental processing cycles.

On another note, “Why is it so important to you” questions, and all variations thereof, are silly. It’s clearly important to you or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, so humans being what we are, someone somewhere is going to take the opposite stance from you.

Genuine question to progressives- a nationwide gender and sexuality curriculum is written to be used by all public schools. It reflects my point of view on such matters. How would you take 'Why is this so important to you?'?

Questions like that remind me of the scene in Blindsight where the aliens perceive informationally-unnecessary communication as a hostile attack on their mental processing cycles.

Delightful comparison

This commenter's post is deeply objectionable for a number of a reasons, but the cherry on top is the dishonest framing of the evidence provided. The link to the comic which was provided displays that this book was available in a CITY'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, not some middle school where it was part of the curriculum. Of course the argument that a public city Library should contain zero material for an adult audience is absurd and I believe hardly anyone would defend it (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), which is why I believe this argument which could be defended on truthful merits was ignored instead for this dishonest framing.

Furthermore, a link to an article shows us the news that some female teachers rape their young male students. This is deeply horrible behaviour that deserves to be condemned, but I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is: what is the rate of teacher rape you are asserting (de facto by not mentioning other professions) is so much higher than other positions that come into contact regularly with children? Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join? If so, the evidence has not been provided. In the lack of that evidence, it seems a strange leap to assert that teachers are some uniquely dangerous creatures immune to societal condemnation (especially when incredibly disparate things like rape and allowing a graphic comic to remain on a public library shelf are lumped together)

Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join?

While it's entirely possible that one or more of social workers, coaches, pediatricians, etc have a higher rate of taking sexual advantage of their charges(we really don't know this), teachers and priests have well documented abuse rates and priests both offend at lower rates and are more likely to face consequences when they do.

Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join?

Yes. The rates of abuse documented among teachers are far higher than clerical abuse rates and the intense focus on the latter and not the former is a politically motivated one.

I hate to be that guy, but I'd love some sources for future reference.

That may very well be the case.

I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry. Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves.

I stand on the null hypothesis that public libraries, until very recently, also agreed with me.

Would you like to defend or justify some sort of reasoning for the change?

I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.

Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.

Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer.

I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.

———

It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.

That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.

The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.

There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."

TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Good to know!

I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".

TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Or, to quote Field & Stream,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

"Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping".

Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"

Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.

With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.

Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”

More comments

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."

Sure they are. We can do this all day.

The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.

Not once have I argued this. You brought in the question of text. I’m not sure who you’re arguing with right now.

What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons. Today it’s someone defending cutesy drawings of blowjobs in library books that librarians push or market towards young teens or tweens, 10 or 20 years from now it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them. Maybe sooner! Things are moving fast.

Maybe that will be too much for you, or maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll continue to say, “Well, I read Gor in the school library when I was a kid, and I remember the Gender Queer arguments on the Motte (PBUI) and the kinds of assholes who took the counter-argument to me, so this is fine also.”

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

We are merely having the discussion about Gender Queer because that is where the current battlefield starts. Unfortunately, from my point of view.

What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons...

I agree with the pattern you observe (but I have mixed feelings over whether it is a bad thing), and I also find it very annoying that normie progressives simultaeneously show radical acceptance towards the thing of [current year] and hostile disgust towards the stuff that hasn't yet been normalised.

But I believe that: a) In the specific case of gender queer, it is not happening b) When it does happen (now or in the future), it's not that bad.

... it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them.

And if that does happen in the future, that would also not necessarily be erotica. It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?" (or in the other direction - "would anyone want to read this work with both hands outside of their pants?")

I can easily imagine a serious piece of literature being written on this topic, in the style of "Gender Queer":

  • The author describes feelings of alienation around the time of puberty - the other children keep talking excitedly about having sex with boys, girls, they/thems, and some even express not being interested in sex at all.
  • The author thinks they are asexual, until one day, when they petsit for their best friend, they have a "horrible" revelation that they do have a sexuality after all...
  • Some occassional, short, tasteful scenes depicting their awkward teenage attempts at sex with animals ("Ugh! I didn't know dogs would have such bad breath...", "I guess female ducks really do have corkscrew vaginas!")
  • The author's philisophical musings about the capacity of their partner to consent (how can animals, who cannot speak, convey consent?) and the need for them to consent (we are okay with killing them to eat their flesh - is it that bad to have sex of questionable consent with them...?)
  • Anecdotes about an initially unaccepting friends and family, and teasing/bullying from classmates
  • A saccharine last page showing the author and their non-human SO affectionately licking their face, with captions "I know I've struggled a lot with being your owner... but I love being your partner!"

And yes, we can play this game again for any other "degenerate" aspect of human sexuality that also currently lies to the left of the Overton window (pedophillia, necrophillia, vore, etc)

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

Why is it so terribly awful for children to be exposed to actual erotica? (I am now moving onto point b - I maintain that Gender Queer is not erotica) My school library did not stock "Gor", but it did stock an adult fantasy novel, whose last half was a thinly-veiled femdom porn fantasy:

Soon after, Richard is captured by a beautiful young Mord-Sith named Denna, who tortures him for a month. Mord-Sith wear skin-tight red leather catsuit, blood-red, to hide the blood of their captives during the training sessions. They live to torture and condition men into obedient pets, who live and breathe to please them, and Mistress Denna is the best of all Mord-Sith at this task. After only half an hour at her mercy, he is left groveling on the dungeon floor, begging to please his mistress to avoid pain. She chains him up by his wrists from the ceiling, in order to being his 'training'. She then trains and break him into her obedient slave by the use of several instruments, including a painful small red leather rod by the name of the Agiel. Once Richard is broken, she takes him for her sexual mate

The actual book is even more sexualised than even this account would suggest (his "training" spans many pages) - I recall the "Mord-Sith" telling the protagonist to focus on her latex-clad breasts to avoid the pain of the Agiel (it can read the submissive's victim's thoughts, and hurts them when they think bad things about the domme Mord-Sith), another Mord-Sith who is implied to castrate her "pets", and another still who actually makes them communicate in barks and go on "walks" with her through the town naked, collared and on all-fours.

As a pre-teen, I did indeed find this "confusing" (I was not aware that it was supposed to be erotic, so I wondered if there was something seriously wrong with me for finding graphic descriptions of "torture" arousing), and I remember feeling deeply ashamed about my enjoyment of the book and all the fantasies I had that were inspired by the book. And now... I'm an adult - and nothing bad happened. I don't have some kind of PTSD, I understand that was just a fantasy written by a horny guy (and Denna is not an accurate representation of female sexuality), I didn't develop an irrational fear/hatred towards women because I associate them with Denna, etc. Reading this synopsis of the book now, I can only laugh at how silly and over-the-top the whole thing was in retrospect.

This was not a good thing (as in, I'm not going to encourage any future children I have to read TWFR so they can experience what I experienced) - but in retrospect, this seems to be on a similar level of badness to the long list of other minor things that made my teenage years less than storybook.

But going back to point (a) - I think it's borderline even whether something like TWFR counts as "erotica" (the first half was just a normal fantasy novel, with mature themes, and the book did seriously explore the idea of being tortured - the Mord-Siths were not dominatrices, the torture depicted was very real and non-consensual, with blood and genuine agony)

Gender Queer is nowhere close to this border. Having skimmed the book, it totals 240 pages, of which there are exactly 2 short scenes that are of a sexual nature (the strap-on blowjob mentioned by the media, and also a medical exam showing the author naked without any scenery censor) - all of the remaining pages are just ordinary comic book drawings with pro-LGBT storylines and perspectives.

It is a reasonable position to be against titles like Gender Queer on the basis that you are against their underlying message, and do not want to normalise pursuing sexually deviant lifestyles (especially not to impressionable young children) - as I said at the start of the comment, I also have mixed feelings over the LGBTQ+ movement. But I think it is completely unreasonable to object on the grounds that works like these are pornographic (because they aren't)

It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?"

Poor content: outdated/obsolete on subjects that change quickly or require absolute currency (it’s better to be lacking than to have erroneous/outdated material), trivial subject matter, mediocre writing style, unused sets of books (keep only those volumes used), repetitious series no longer popular, superseded editions (get newer edition), resources never reviewed in standard review sources, unneeded duplicates, material that contains biased, racist or sexist terminology/views, self-published or small press materials that are not circulating.

CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries

Bolded for the part that gets as explicit as possible, but of course most of the other criteria are easy to apply as well. I'm familiar with the general argument you're making, but I'm also aware that this is not how libraries actually work, and I decline to be a rube.

More comments

Sure they are. We can do this all day.

Okay, but using your own personal definitions and saying "Nuh uh" isn't much of an argument.

What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons.

Maybe so, though I am unconvinced by arguments that have been made basically since Roman times about the degradation of morals and the corruption of the youth.

I wouldn't have any heartburn about prohibiting Gender Queer from school libraries, but public libraries (which are meant to serve adults as well as children, and which can impose age restrictions on certain books) do not need to cater to your personal preferred level of acceptability.

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid. I am not saying there is no line, but the line is always going to be fuzzy and negotiable and subjective. You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).

You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).

I actually agree with you on this. It seems that, if I'm interpreting @BreakerofHorsesandMen correctly, anything outside of the most saccharine, banal works would be banned. Does description of child abuse warrant censure? How about descriptions of warfare or violence? Where does the line stop exactly? It seems that trying to ban things based off on their "appropriateness" to different age ranges is an inherently moral/political question.

Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid.

However, I have to disagree with you here. It's well documented that watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia at least. I'd also argue that in terms of how well slippery-scope applies, sexuality is one context in which it best applies. Reading spicy genre fiction can easily lead to reading more hardcore fiction, which can in turn lead to joining adjacent online circles/forums/tumblrs that if not encourage, at least implicitly validate non-standard sexual behaviors and identities. Just see cracking-the-egg in trans spaces, or the public and shameless speculation on and encouragement for identifying as gay for anyone who even seems to be gay; see the anger when it comes to "queer-baiting".

Really, I believe the above is the crux of the argument. On one side, you have people who rightly believe that these works of art encourage or at least lower the activation energy of acceptance, so to speak, for sexual identities and behaviors that they perceive to be disordered or morally incorrect. On the other side, you have people who believe that not only are those sexual identifies and behaviors not disordered or morally incorrect, but should actively be accepted and encouraged in society; so, those works of art that can help to either cause people to tolerate those sexual identities or incorporate them into their person should be, in their view, not only permitted, but disseminated.

In Thomas Sowell terms, it's a conflict of visions.

I'd argue that you could actually make an empirical decision on which specific sexual identities are disordered or not based on empirical material outcomes, but that's beyond the scope of this comment.

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It's a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library.

It's actually a strap-on. And neither of the characters finds it sexy. The scene is meant to be awkward.

Confused teens not even knowing how to fuck might be gross but it doesn't strike me as erotica.

I am well aware it’s a strap-on. The facing page in the book in question specifically refers to the act as a blowjob.

I quote:

“I can’t wait to have your cock in my mouth—I’m going to give you the blowjob of your life. Then I want you inside me.”

“This is the most turned on I’ve ever been in my life. I am DYING.”

This writing is erotica.

IMO that's still missing the point. They were excited about it and tried to do it and found out it was awkward and disturbing rather than exciting. Like the same panel and the next several:

"I can't feel anything"

"This was much hotter when it was only in my imagination"

"Hey Z... let's try something else"

In thought balloons: "But now that I've had sex a few times I'm not sure I really need any more. Trying to get off in front of someone is kind of weird."

"I think when I do orgasm, it's not because of my body but in spite of it"

They were clearly acting out roles assigned to them by others and by media. If anything it was saying "putting on a strap-on and sucking it isn't what being queer is about"

To me this is practically anti-erotica. It's like reading about asexual people describing PIV sex as rubbing their elbows together.

It’s about a kid growing up not feeling feminine, struggling to fit into pre-built sexual and gender roles, experimenting, and ultimately realizing she's asexual and nonbinary.

It's definitionally unsexy as a whole.

Sure, but do we really need drawings of it, and not the character as she (or he, if we're being correct in our terminology) thinking about the experience, what he expected, and how that was different from reality?

This is the fundamental division here between the two sides: one set thinks "no, a depiction of a sexual act in a book for teenagers that will be in a school library is not appropriate" and the other set thinks "this isn't sexy like porn, it's fine".

The recommended reading age, looking it up, is for 14-15/15 and up. But will younger kids be able to access it? What's fine for a 15 year old may not be appropriate for a 12 year old, and that's part of the whole fight. Unless the librarians are ensuring younger kids can't get the book, and it doesn't seem like this particular group feels they should be engaging in what they perceive as censorship, then parents can't be sure their kids aren't accessing inappropriate material.

And that's the other part of the fight: what parents think they should be able to decide is appropriate for their kids, versus what the school or school board thinks is okay. Just saying that hey, kids have always sneaked around and gotten into stuff they shouldn't have at that age isn't good enough. Kids might be sneaking drinks at home out of the parents' liquor cabinet, but do we want schools handing out shots of whiskey to 12 (or 15) year olds on the grounds that "they're gonna do it anyway, might as well do it in a safe environment"?

"Oh hey, it wasn't whiskey, it was wine or an alcopop" isn't that much better as justification.

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Or in other words, it’s oppression pornography (or reverse pornography in the "reverse racism" sense).

It's still devoid of any other literary value and is just a masturbatory aid for progressive women, but the difference is important (and the first step to figuring out that in an environment of equality, unusual in a state of nature, their sexual misbehavior is just as much a problem as it is when men do it).

They were clearly acting out roles assigned to them by others and by media.

By this media! There is no reason for young children to know about strapons or blowjobs. This is a self-licking ice cream cone - teaching children about explicit sex acts and then saying ‘well, children these days encounter sex early, they need to be taught about this stuff’.

When my grandfather was sixteen going on a picnic with a girl and her chaperone was considered risqué. Now they’re teaching pre-pubescents about blowjobs.

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Are all uncensored drawn images of sexual acts erotica or are you drawing some distinction between the two?

"Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves." I don't know what this is supposed to be telling me; this is a fully generalizable argument against having libraries at all. If you want a math textbook, you're also free to pay for it yourself if you like math? Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.

Absent some evidence I am loath to accept your null hypothesis, just as you are clearly loath to accept mine. I will also note that you have chosen a specific slice of the argument I was making to defend by focusing solely on what you call drawn erotica and not, say, graphic images of war in history books. Do you support the latter being available in public libraries? If so, again, why the distinction?

Assuming that you were correct for the sake of argument, I think a pretty good justification for the change would be the Internet. Everyone already has unlimited free access to whatever type of content they want online, so it seems strange to put some special restrictions on an alternative service that is also available to serve the public at large (making it even less competitive than it already is with the Internet). Why would it be incumbent on the librarians to restrict their hub-of-information service when this onus is not placed on the Internet at large to do the same?

I fundamentally don't buy the arguments that children are being nefariously exposed to dangerous erotic content in some unique way through their public (not school) libraries. If their parents are so lax as to allow them to view dangerously inappropriate material in a public physical facility which has demarcated children's sections, when the system requires you to check out books for a defined length of time under a particular name, then those parents are lax enough that restricting the public libraries will have no effect anyway.

And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.

And of course, there is room for nuance in all of these points. There is a great difference between erotic books being available in some clearly marked corner of the library vs. being advertised up front and loudly to all who enter.

Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.

I make the case that erotic images have always been a special category that was treated differently, from the beginning of public libraries. Public libraries were designed and intended to educate, uplift, and edify their users. You have to make the case for why we should change.

My hypothesis is the null hypothesis because prior to May 28, 2019, the question “Should we have comic books depicting blowjobs both in the public library and marketed to under-18s” would have probably caught the questioner a pedophilia accusation. It would have been so uncontroversially a negative that even to ask the question would be suspicious, and yet it only took the release of Gender Queer for a vocal minority to argue that I’m the one who has to explain why it shouldn’t be in the public library.

At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.

The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing. “The Internet is for Porn”, after all, so libraries can and should be for something else.

And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.

This reasoning always shows up eventually. Of course I’m free to not take my kids to the public library. But I also used to be free to take them there and be fairly confident the worst thing they could stumble across was some text erotica. My parents could be reasonably certain the worst thing I would stumble across was a kiss and a fade to black in a fantasy novel. Their parents could pretty much trust the worst thing they were going to come across was a “Damn!”

The point is that my freedom to trust that the public library is in accord with what I and people like me view as the public interest has been slowly degrading for 40 years or more. This limits our access to and trust in the library and when we complain about it or express our grievances, we are met with your reasoning.

———

This is obviously a generational battle and will continue to be so. I don’t fault my predecessors for not understanding what was going on, because it probably felt like having to explain to someone that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that while sometimes the sky is orange and the grass is yellow, they still aren’t the same thing, only to be met with adamant accusations that the sky and the grass are the same thing until their will to resist was exhausted.

Now we are living in the world where everyone is expected to act like the sky and the grass are the same thing, and unsurprisingly it is starting to crack up under its contradictions.

At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.

The weirdest thing about gas stations stocking porn magazines was the 711 policy of stripping the cover off the damaged magazines and giving them away to customers. It was such a weird blend of considerate and inappropriate.

Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.

By internet standards, this feels like extremely tame. In fact, it is tame enough that the very article which is whining about it felt safe enough to include it in the very post without any pixelation on their presumably otherwise SFW website.

From the link:

Left-wing activists have sought to ban Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Salinger's “A Catcher in the Rye” and Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” for using language they say is "offensive" to Blacks and women. None of the three books includes any pornographic cartoon illustrations depicting gay sex.

Now, if the Genoa City Public Library has pulled these other books because some wokes were whining about it, then by all means call them hypocrites. But if they have not, I don't see the fucking problem of having a book with that picture in a library.

If it was required reading, then that would be bad, sure. If it was required reading for six-year-olds, very bad, even. But if it is just sitting in the youth or YA section of a public library, I am okay with it. The odd 8yo who will pick it up looking for more brutal comics will just go "eeew, gross!", not be traumatized for life. From the text, it does not even try to be jerk-off material. Not that there is not a lot of stuff which is borderline pornographic in literature, either.

A good library has someone to offend everyone. I think trying to get people to question their gender identity is generally bad, but I also think trying to push for "abstinence until marriage" is bad. So if that library also carries Twilight, that is already two ideas on offer which I don't agree with -- which is of course the purpose of a marketplace of ideas.

11 reports so far. 2 of them "Quality Contributions" from the usual "AAQC anything that drops a hot steaming turd on the floor" reporters. (To be fair, a couple of negative reports from people who negatively report everything they don't like, as well.)

So just to peel back the curtain a bit, there was a lot of mod discussion about your earlier post, and several of us (including me) thought it really didn't warrant a ban. We didn't roll it back (as we did last time) because it was just one day. However, I predicted you'd come back super angry and spoiling for a fight, and here we are.

I think you're actually hoping you eat another ban, because you really like to feel persecuted. But despite your repeated claims that the mod team (and me specifically) are out to get you, this is not true.

The points you make here are valid, including that it's okay to say "I believe there are no viable political solutions or legal solutions left." You can even talk about the potential/likelihood/sad inevitability of political violence. We're not going to ease up on modding anything that even smells like fedposting, but yes, I think you got an unnecessary timeout (even if you did, as is your wont, come back shrieking like the child who screams bloody murder because he got a tap). And for that reason, I'm going to let this:

(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)

go.

This time.

But to be clear, this is unacceptable and if I didn't think you'd already kind of gotten a ban you didn't deserve, I'd ban you for this. You do not get to call us drooling retards no matter how indignant you are.

Anyway, since you've blocked me, you won't read this, which doesn't mean it won't apply in the future. So be it.

since you've blocked me, you won't read this

Blocking mods does something?

I mean, I didn't block amadan because he's a mod, I blocked him because of his armchair psychology every time he engages with me, seemingly for the sole purpose of goading me into breaking the rules further. Whatever warning I'm missing is worth it to avoid the incitement.

It means you won't be able to read our posts. But if we modhat a comment to you, we treat it the same as if you read it and chose to ignore it.

@WhiningCoil this comment is a reply to a mod-hat comment by Amadan giving you a warning. You deserve the opportunity to read it.

From their links which do not go to youtube or what I presume are amazon pages of sex toys, it seems like the gist of the complaint is that some high school refused to remove two books from their library.

Sure, having a school which allows a book in their library which contains a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ is exactly like the teacher of your daughter and 70% of your school board being fucking machines who are presumably going to rape her or something.

I mean, we had that story with a school district and some ruling wrt religious objections, but that sounded much more serious that this "random school has slightly naughty queer book, and even after possibly someone unsympathetic to these books being elected to some position, they still did not remove them. The soap box, the ballot box have failed, the jury box is just a waste of time so now it is time for the cartridge box!!!11"

a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ

Both women. One wearing a strap on.

There have been school board controversies over Gender Queer when parents discovered what was being presented for elementary schoolers to learn about gender identity.

So, you say you didn’t roll it back because it was just one day, which sounds like there was, at a minimum, no mod consensus that the ban was justified.

In the absence of such a consensus, why is there no wrist slap of the original mod for overstepping his bounds?

If there was a wrist-slap, why is the broader user-base not aware? Justice has to be seen in order to be seen to be done.

I mean, it seems likely to me that the mod discussion around the ban would have taken long enough that it was about to expire by the time the consensus was reached.

@zorbathehut any thought of bringing back the ban registry for the sake of transparency?

the ban registry

Do you mean this page?

We are not cops, and we are often not unanimous. In the event of a serious disagreement, we will very occasionally undo a previous decision, but no one "overstepped his bounds." Mods are autonomous; we will often consult with one another when we're unsure of the most appropriate course of action, but sometimes we'll just act because no one else is around. Sometimes afterwards one of us will say "Eh, maybe that was too much."

You're getting transparency here because I value that, but it's not an invitation to demand a humiliation ritual because you think a mod made a bad call.

So you guys are, internally, an anarcho-syndicalist commune that, externally, acts as an unaccountable oligarchy.

I kinda like it, actually.

Alternatively, if we consider Zorba to be the monarch, mostly focused on foreign policy and economic concerns, you guys are more like an aristocracy.

I like it even more! This is a good experiment. I wish you great success.

I like to think of Zorba, at this point, as a being that has ascended to higher plane and the remaining mods are communicating with his astral essence through sacred rituals and prayer.

Zorbathustrians, perhaps

However, I predicted you'd come back super angry and spoiling for a fight, and here we are.

There was a post where the moderator said:

Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it.

(I originally thought this was in response to WhiningCoil but I'm not sure now. That post seems to have responded to a lot of people.)

It looks to me as though this was an attempt to follow the moderator request. It's certainly annoyingly verbose and has a bunch of disclaimers.

You should really try reading an entire post before jumping on your keyboard to Au Contraire Mon Frer now and then.

If you had, you'd see I am indeed not blaming him for restating his original message with more words.

I am blaming him for prefacing it with the "drooling retards" crack.

Far be it from me to defend WhiningCoil, whose demeanor and positions I find deeply objectionable, but if you will tolerate my nitpicking - I think that in "(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words for the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)", the opening slur refers to the kind of guy who would post a lengthy verbose message instead of a snappy call to violence, i.e. to the persona reluctantly adopted by WhiningCoil himself - not to the people who asked for the verbose version. Note that, although you quoted it as a plural, it's singular in his post.

Of course, this still leaves "the slow kids in the back..." as being obviously directed at the mod team. As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.

As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.

"Your honor, my client could not have committed this robbery, as he was clearly seen committing wire fraud elsewhere at the time".

I'm surprised that modhatted posts don't pierce the blocking feature. I can't imagine that this is the desired behavior.

I asked @ZorbaTHut, and apparently that is how it works currently. He might change it so that mods can't be blocked, but for now, that's how it is.

So if Whining gets banned because he ignored my warning... ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

(No, blocking does not make you immune to banning.)

I was going to tell you you need a double backslash to make the figure work, but for reasons I dont understand that makes both the underscores disappear, and you actually need 3. (It makes sense that they are gone: they cursive the part in between. And it makes sense that one backslash would turn it off and they are there then. But they are there at 0 backslashes also) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution

Not if you treat "politics" as a zero-sum popularity contest to determine whose side will get to steamroll over the other one in all cases and in all respects. There is an obvious solution if we introduce such concepts as negotiation and compromise.

The way I see it, the school boards are stubbornly refusing to give an inch on "stop showing sexually explicit LGBT material" because they think that giving in would lead to a slippery slope. In short order they'd face a general ban on LGBT materials in schools, and, down the line, a federal ban on homosexuality in general. While a few zealots and a few perverts might specifically want the pornography, it is not the primary concern of the school boards or the general-purpose LGBT activists.

The obvious solution here is meeting in the middle, with credible enforcement mechanisms to enforce the compromise in the long term. The Left pledges to have a zero-tolerance policy for pornographic materials in school; the Right pledges not to play any games like redefining non-explicit LGBT material as "pornography" to artificially extend that ban. Write both of these policies into law, and enforce those laws. Solved. Equilibrium.

It is the civilized solution, and the only reason it couldn't work - the very reason the school boards are refusing to be the ones who take the first step in that direction - is the very existence of rhetoric like yours on both sides. If the loudest voices on the opposite side are always ranting about how there's no point in trying to compromise and they should just exterminate the enemy, you're not going to want to play the mug's game of negotiating with these people. You'll conclude that you should just exterminate the enemy. In fact, if anyone on your side looks like they're thinking about negotiation, you might start ranting very loudly about how pointless that would be… And there you have it, vicious cycle. But I believe that vicious cycle of mutual paranoia can be broken; if it couldn't, we wouldn't have civilization in the first place. Someone's just got to be the bigger person eventually.

So although I agree with you that it would be more productive if we could write these compromises into law, I can also see the OP’s point here too. It feels like there is a never ending game of:

  1. Of course no one believes this, you are nutpicking.
  2. It’s just a few crazy kids on campus.
  3. Well, obviously it’s just something people are talking about, it’s not happening in real life.
  4. Well, those people are adults and can do what they want, it’s not affecting you.
  5. Bake the cake, bigot.

Where I think a lot of the frustration is coming from on the right is that these deals have been made, and made many times - and each time, the deal is expanded into merely the vanguard for the next stage of their subjugation. Gay marriage wasn’t a thing, then it was only nice respectable couples, then it became leather daddies walking their subs on a leash through downtown while you have to praise them at the threat of being kicked out of society. There was a deal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants if the border rules were enforced - instead, over 5 million illegals were let into the United States under the Biden administration.

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

There's also a problem where even when these compromises are written into law, that doesn't hold them very long, sometimes even without a new law. The expansion of LawDog's cake metaphor to all of public policy is going to come at some pretty ugly costs, sooner or later.

It feels like there is a never ending game of (…)

I agree, but this sort of disingenuous behavior seems to me like another manifestation of the same lack of trust. It's game theory all the way down. You don't feel you can ask for what you really want up-front without triggering all-out war, so you go for salami tactics and artificially shifting the Overton window. There are other dynamics and incentives at play, like the unrealistic but alluring hope of total victory which means the respective sides pursue dangerous gambits which they dream might give them the edge once and for all, instead of working towards a stable compromise as the expected end-state.

Related still, but distinct, is the endless fool's-quest for the appearance of a total consensus. We as a nation and indeed as a civilization need to be more comfortable with overt compromise. We need politicians who openly say things like "I know 45% of you really want [A] and aren't going to budge. And personally I'm with you, but another 45% desperately want [B], and they aren't gonna change anytime soon, either. Here's what my administration and I are proposing to do to try and keep the peace", instead of pretending they've invented a magic solution that will make everybody happy except for a few meanies on the fringes. I truly think, to an unbiased observer, it would look nuts that so few political issues are phrased in those terms in speeches and think-pieces. Even when they don't actually believe in it, let alone advocate it, almost everyone writes as though the 170 million guys on the other side of the fence are just a temporary inconvenience who can be safely ignored, perhaps reeducated. And yet, this. Never. Works.

If it were easier for opposing sides to negotiate with all cards on the table, we could skip all that tedious, damaging business and skip to the begrudging compromise.

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

Oh, I agree with that, too. The dynamic I outlined was symmetrical for a reason. Alas, I'm not in charge of the Blue Tribe. FWIW, if I somehow was the Blue Tribe Czar, and had a Red counterpart at the negotiating table, there are a number of guarantees I would be prepared to give that differ from my ideal world-state (up to and including "it's the parent's choice whether their child gets to transition before their legal majority, and we will codify into federal law that refusing to aid transition will not, in and of itself, be considered parental abuse").

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

The problem is as soon as they violate the empty promise, they'll say "Well, we didn't make the promise with wording that absolutely forbids that" and/or "Well, the promise was with those other guys over there, not us, we're totally separate". And they can maintain this forever, and half of Red will believe them too.

This is what I was trying to express, but much more succinct; this is what red tribe has seen over and over and over, and many of them are coming to the realization that there are no ways to enforce that the blue tribe actually keep their promises.

To be clear, I do not want a war between red and blue; I want to be left alone, and to leave other people alone. Blue tribe at the moment appears to have adopted the mindset that there can be no 'agree to disagree', and that they must instead must threaten to destroy me unless I am constantly affirming their decisions, and they are willing to use the full force of the government to make me do so. (For what it's worth, I think this is one of the reasons that the blue tribe hates Trump so much - I think he's willing to use the full force of the government to enforce his desires, and there are a number of people who voted for him specifically to do that, and because they perceive his desires as overlapping with their own).

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in my cold dead libertarian heart is that there can be no 'peacefully agree to not use power against one another.' Power will always go to those who want to seize it, while it exists. If you want a credible way to defuse the situation? Splinter the power that lets the sides enforce their will upon each other, so that no one can take it and use it on the other.

Power will always go to those who want to seize it, while it exists.

I'm certainly no libertarian, but isn't this the essence of libertarianism -- that power is so seductive and so oppressive that the only way to deal with its abuse is to limit it to just what's absolutely necessary, so there's less power to abuse? It seems to me like you're just growing in your convictions rather than having to learn a hard lesson.

I believe the libertarian solution to "people are abusing the power of the public library" is something like "abolish the public library." (This is also one of the reasons I think the American right and left are closer to each other in terms of general views on liberty than they think -- the right-wing solution to corrupt US government agencies is to abolish them, the left-wing solution to corrupt police departments is to abolish defund them.)

(I may have misunderstood you, and you were saying that your "cold dead libertarian heart" became that way because of this lesson, rather than saying that it startled you and you had to figure out how to square it with your libertarianism. If so, disregard.)

I won’t grandstand about these woke boardmembers and administrators not deserving to be shot(the teachers are, very literally, just following orders. If those orders were to eat a bucket of shit before starting classes every day- like a five gallon bucket of actual human excrement- they would complain about the necessity of it but it wouldn’t occur to them that the orders are wrong. This is what teachers are like.) but I will point out that kinetic solutions won’t help anything. We’re not there yet.

I do support political solutions that are bad for public schools as institutions, whether it’s schoolchoice, permissive homeschooling, forced budget cuts, whatever. Many of these can actually get done.

Eh, from today's Short Circuit:

Allegation: Colorado middle-school teacher invites student—who has never questioned her own gender identity—to an after-school art club. Student is surprised to arrive at what is actually a Gender and Sexualities Alliance meeting, where she is told that students who are uncomfortable with their bodies are more likely to be trans and is encouraged to come out as trans, which she does. Although the guest speaker warned students that it might not be safe to tell their parents about the meeting, she does. The parents sue the school district and its board of education, alleging violations of their parental substantive-due-process rights. Tenth Circuit: We're not sure what the scope of parental SDP rights are, but it doesn't matter because this wasn't official district policy.

Reading through the factual background in the opinion, I could see this stuff being a pet project of a teacher (and apparently a substitute teacher), just with the district administration providing cover for them. My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

My sense is not that, based on acquiring an education degree and teaching in public schools for quite some time. The trainings lately are so anodyne they are actually contentless -- like to the point of having the ice breaker take up literally the entire training time. For hours if necessary. "Have you heard about the iceberg? Let's talk about your Meyers-Briggs type and your own set of lenses for a few hours."

My sense is more that the teachers lately are very low on autonomy, mastery, and purpose in respect to their main job duties, and some of them have a savior complex which comes out in things like that, or filing false abuse claims against families they don't like.

My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

Once upon a time, when my wife was in her 20's she worked at an organic grocery store. The pay was shit, management were assholes, and the benefits sucked. While this is broadly true for grocery, it was especially true there. Anybody with any sense went to go work for Whole Foods or Trader Joes instead. The people who stayed were true believers in organic food. They'd do all kinds of weird shit, like refuse to help customers find products (like honey) because they were vegan and they didn't think it was ethical.

Increasingly I'm finding the same to be the case with teachers. They are overworked, underpaid, and increasingly the only ones sticking around are the ones with some sort of radical agenda that it's worth sticking around to push. Vaccine mandates, like most ostensibly public institutions, flushed out a huge proportion of the dissenters. Though they occasionally still shitcan a few especially stubborn teachers who've manage to hang on this long over their conscientious objection to trans policies.

I do support political solutions that are bad for public schools as institutions, whether it’s schoolchoice, permissive homeschooling, forced budget cuts, whatever. Many of these can actually get done.

Can they? I'm just not seeing it.

Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.

To me this is why the argument that some institutions are too important to be subject to cullings for political reasons has to be rejected if those organisations shove themselves into political fights. This tactic of crying "but think about the good libraries/public broadcasting/whatever else does" has to be severely punished, even if it extracts a cost from the punisher, if there is ever a hope for the ratchet to stop.

The one to blame for cuts and cullings is the activist who involved an organisation that is supposed to be owned by everyone into his activism, not the politician who finds himself either forced to do the firings and cuts or literally give taxpayer money to fund his opposition and goals his voters find aberrant.

We do not know that this public library is woke.

Two kinds of libraries might carry offensive queer books:

(1) woke

(2) free speech

You can tell them apart by looking at how they treat books that the wokes hate. Did they get rid of Harry Potter because JK Rowling is a vile TERF? Did they get rid of Twilight because it perpetuates heteronormative and sex-negative stereotypes? If so, that is bad and they should just carry material which offends nobody, which will make them terrible libraries.

If not, then I think in a world where virtually every teen owns a smartphone and finding any act of bestiality just by entering it in a search engine prompt, the shock value of that crudely drawn BJ is minimal. Just write your own book in which two straight cis-gender characters do some chaste dating, marry in a church ceremony and then engage in unprotected PIV sex in their wedding night, and you get to draw a crude picture of that process as well if you like.

You can tell them apart by looking at how they treat books that the wokes hate. Did they get rid of Harry Potter because JK Rowling is a vile TERF?

Harry Potter is so enormously popular that the popularity can overcome the outrage. A better comparison would be a right-wing political book, particularly one on a similar subject (such as an anti-trans book or a traditional morals book targeting kids).

This argument is the same as “You already live in a sewer, might as well eat shit, shrug?”

As it turns out, people should not only not eat the shit, but also actively pursue stanching the flow of sewage.

Eating shit has a comparable health effect to living in the sewers.

This is more like "if you sleep on the ground in the woods, it is probably not worthwhile to spend a lot on makeup".

This is a different, less earthy, metaphor, sure, but it means the same thing.

Rather than worrying about makeup, you should stop sleeping in the woods.

Elections have consequences. And I don't mean just one election, but every election, every year, for decades. Somehow in certain districts, 5 year olds have mandatory drag queen story hour, and in other districts this doesn't happen. I wonder why.

Virginia has fallen and it's not coming back. One lucky blip in an otherwise spotless sea of blue results doesn't stop that. So buckle up and get ready for decades more of full throttle insane policies in a race to out liberal California.

I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values.

Good for you. Vote with your feet. The Enemy does not share your values. The Enemy wants schools to be run by fucking machines.

You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win!

Sounds like you voted in the wrong election, if your anti fucking machine constituent turned out across the relevant districts for the school board and won then those board members would be replaced.

The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

Did the voters turn out for the school board election or state level representatives? Or did they just turn out for a single position and then got confused out of ignorance that there's more positions to vote for with their own different appointed powers, many of which are local? It sounds like the latter. An idiot with a great goal is still an idiot and it's not shocking when their plan comes undone. Likewise an idiot voter with a great goal is still an idiot.

When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.

Well yeah, if your side doesn't turn out for your local school board elections then it shouldn't be a shocker that you lost them. And if you're simply outnumbered then that's local democracy. A fucking machine school board for the fucking machine city constituency, just like a Japanese National Diet for the Japanese citizens.

Did the voters turn out for the school board election or state level representatives? Or did they just turn out for a single position and then got confused out of ignorance that there's more positions to vote for with their own different appointed powers, many of which are local?

One pattern that's come up with a particular strain of reactionary thought is that there is an ingrained helplessness (punctuated of course with an occasional going-off-meds incident) with regards to actually learn about the structural elements of governance. It's true at the local level and the national level and everywhere in between.

It is true that liberals have a natural advantage here in the sense of being active in politics as opposed to being based & grillpilled, but it's become so pronounced that it goes beyond merely believing that being active in political causes is cringe. It's gotten so bad you cannot even explain to some of these folks black-letter facts like (just for example) "if the federal government wants to condition grants on cities dropping sanctuary policies, there has to be specific language by congress creating the condition".

Specific groups, specific people. “Some of these folks” is not enough. Show us stats, show us prominent individuals telling people to opt out. If you can’t, consider whether the generalization you’re making actually holds up.

It’s been like a week since I reminded you that mocking one phrase is not a sufficient argument. Mocking zero phrases is not any better. One day ban this time.

That wasn't meant as a generalization, it was an example. Perhaps that could have been phrased better.

It would help if we weren't constantly gaslit about the nature of what's happening.

For example, the relentless bait and switch around Title IX "interpretations". Obama's DOE famously published that "Dear Colleagues" letter, and all the colleges wrung their hands and went purposely insane under the premise that if they didn't, the DOE might withhold their funding. Trump's DOE rescinds that guidance, and those same colleges turn around and sue him in court. Biden's DOE does an even more expansive Title IX "interpretation" making it so there can be no local discretion in how the school system handles trans issues. You need to flee the country if you want to live in a school district that can't secretly trans your kid. The schools "begrudgingly" comply, none sue. Now many states sue, but the schools, suspiciously mum about it. Trump rolls in, rescinds the guidance, even forcefully reverses it, schools sue again.

It's a constant shell game. When a Democrat DOE is top down forcing local schools hand it's "Oh, elections have consequences, don't want this to happen vote harder next time." You win that game and suddenly the locus of control shifts to the local level "Oh, you have to win at the local level too, too bad, so sad". You can't win both in perpetuity, and somehow things never ratchet back in your direction no matter what you do.

The truth is, public schools, pedagogy, teacher training, the unions, etc have all been deeply captured institutions. It doesn't matter what battles you win against them, they are hostile to your interest, and will never comply. No matter where or how you win, they just gaslight you that the "real" battle was over here. In reality, they are just doing what they wanted to do the entire time, and coordinating with where ever they can to launder legitimacy on their immoral actions.

It is certainly strange that whichever elections the right wins, and whichever court battles they win.... those aren't the ones which result in any change.

Is your claim that there haven't been substantial changes since Trump took office?

That seems about right to me. What has substantially changed?

There's been tariffs, since the Democrats don't want to interrupt their opponent when he's shooting himself in the face. Also deportations, though the Supreme Court has put the kibosh on those for now. But mostly nothing that won't just be #resist'ed until he's out of office.

In 3 months the Trump admin has

  • Started a trade war with china
  • Made a deal with El Salvador to ship some of our illegal immigrants there
  • Killed off most of our foreign aid
  • Significantly altered US international relations
  • Ended disparate impact policies (I bet this one sticks)

What were your actual expectations for the first 3 months of Trump II?

Are you willing to put a bet with cash to a charity of your choice on disparate impact? Because that's not one of the ones I'm certain is going to get TRO'd and reversed the second a Dem President is in office, but I'd probably put north of 70% on the former and north of 90% on the latter.

I would want to have some concreteness on exactly what we're betting on here (e.g. obviously the EO didn't make Griggs completely irrelevant forever, obviously the strong form of affirmative action in college admissions was already on its way out).

But yeah if we can operationalize this and still disagree on expected outcomes vs just disagreeing on what it concretely means for disparate impact policies to be neutered I am up for a charity bet.

Dollar amount of disparate impact settlements in the first 4 years of next dem admin, inflation adjusted to 2018 dollars? Though that is a super noisy signal.

I'm sorry, but do you not understand that the elections for governor and the elections for local school board are different elections for different positions? Of course winning a governorship has little immediate impact on the decisions of any individual school because state governors are not meant to be elected kings. They have specifically given powers and limits.

Those particular limits can change as states have pretty broad freedom, but even that still requires more than the governor. It requires a state legislature (something else people vote for).

And if you think it's particularly biased, I recommend looking at North Carolina which has a Dem governor and yet the legislature leans heavily Republican to the point they normally have a supermajority and constantly overturn vetos. In fact just recently they overturned a veto on a law that limited the power of the positions the Democrats won. As supermajority winners of the state legislature, that was their legal right to do and no amount of Dem voting for governor can change that because the governorship is not a king position that assumes full and direct control of everything in the state.

I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.

Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?

If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.

including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own)

Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.

The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.

But it does not get its way in this regard.

It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.

I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:

It's strange, isn't it, how no one feels like they're in charge.

the right never does are simply selective perception

Nah. We all know the issues where the right can make gains and where not, its extremely predictable, and the fact that the typical categorisation of left and right also includes issues where they do have a chance is not actually relevant.

Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?

Imagine a country that is perfectly 50% party A and 50% party B. The representative split in power will be 50% both ways, but for individual topics this might not appear the case because many individual topics can't be split. The divide between "Wants a road here" and "doesn't want a road here" isn't easily mitigated by just having a smaller road since having one at all inherently violates the desires of the second side.

But it might mean some places do have roads and some don't. And with negativity bias, each side looks "Ugh those jerks, they built a road here" and "Ugh those jerks denied us a road". This is the type of thinking that led to Scott's caution on bias arguments piece where both sides of a conversation shown the same video viewed it as biased against them.

Now imagine this in real life where the sides aren't exact, they're not set in stone because people change their views, they're not easy to measure perfectly (one side might turn out while another doesn't), they might be distributed in different ways like a rural republican city vs an urban dem city is the common way those go, there's a wide distribution of power among various positions and there might be established rules intentionally designed to prevent fleeting minor majorities from making major changes like the difficulty in making new amendments for the constitution and lots of times there's not even just two sides.

Which is to say that are you sure there's "more fucking machines" than there should be given the constituency they represent?

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

Although the above post focuses on education, this is true broadly. Your vote does not matter that much. Politicians do not care about the secondary consequences of their policy (e.g. small businesses suffering due to tariffs or covid lockdowns). The only option is to become sufficiently wealthy/self-sufficient where it does not matter as much or you can move to better neighborhoods or choose private options, like private school. This is why FIRE is so popular. It's a way for people to make enough money to choose a better life for themselves and family.

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