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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   18980 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.

The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?

You don't seem to be engaging with Chrispratt's initial point about the dishonesty of the org name. If the 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' is liberty, then anything can be liberty. Can you name an example of a political issue that cannot be framed as liberty in this way? I agree with you that determining curriculum is not anti-liberty. I disagree that it is honest to call it pro-liberty.

I'm more narrowly addressing calling the removal of books censorship. To answer your question I recognize the word game being played. There are positive and negative liberties that live under the same umbrella. welfare is framed as liberty maximizing because it frees the recipient of needing to earn those resources and thus opening up their options. I think this form of positive liberty is something worth considering and in many cases pursuing. But it has little to do with negative liberty which is fundamentally about being unconstrained. Between the two types of liberty you can indeed probably describe nearly all policy, where you constrain you do so to benefit others which is their positive liberty and where you do not constrain you are doing so in furtherance of negative liberty so the only type of policy that could do neither would be one that constrains to no benefit which would be a strange policy indeed.

Because of this reasoning I'm pretty much indifferent to naming a party that isn't particularly constraining after liberty, and on balance I think the "moms of liberty" group falls closer on the side of negative liberty. After all they're just asking for the state to use their resources in a way slightly more aligned with their interests so they aren't clearly constraining anyone besides maybe state employees.

Hell, the books aren't even censored. If somebody wants to go buy their drawn child porn at Borders for their kid, they'll get the full experience.

This in a way reminds me of Bastiat’s claim against statists. He said something to the effect if we object to the public funding of education the statist believes we object to education.

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