The board's conservative majority is "using lawyers as a weapon against the public, basically to create roadblocks hoping that you just eventually give up," he told Salon. "The more they did that, the more I was just like, f**k this. It just pissed me off, so I've spent, like, so much goddamn money trying to beat this." --from the article at Salon, linked to in this post
That's the crux: MONEY. I only have so much to spend on politics and sites like Wonkette. I'm fortunate that I live in a place where so far, KKKlanned Parenthood hasn't been able to get a toe hold. So before I judge districts and counties and their school board infiltrations, I remember that White Hoods for Liberty is astro-turfed and has lots of $$$ and advice and materials given to them by RW dark money operatives. Your average parent with multiple jobs, multiple kids, and very little time has almost no chance against them unless they band together with people who have the time, money, and legal representation to help them fight back. There are groups forming to help parents fight back, with less money than the other side, so it's going to be much more difficult and take longer for them.
I've been a book fair chair for several years. There's a FB group for chairs that I belong to where this has also be a big point of discussion. There's lots of sharing about exactly which titles are included to try and encourage people not to opt out. There have been some outstanding impassioned pleas to include the case. The thing I keep coming back to is that every charge made at the fairs shows on my credit card statement as coming from Florida. So I suspect a lot of this nonsense is coming from their attempts to comply with DeSantis's insane laws. But, at the same time, there are so many posts from chairs at religious schools and in conservative communities complaining about the need to remove certain titles. There are posts about specific books that parents complained about "warning" other chairs that they might want to look hard at it and second guess putting the title out for sale, etc. This strikes me as Scholastic attempting to respond to customer feedback, which is incredibly sad, but just how things are at a lot of schools. As a few of the teachers/librarians have commented, their teaching licenses are on the line, so as much as they want to include these titles personally, there's a lot on the line professionally for them if they do. It's just a shitty situation all the way around thanks to fucked up politics.
The book fairs are nice, but as a poor kid in the south, I was lucky if I got to purchase one or two new books each year. But hey! I had unlimited, unsupervised, full access to ALL THE SECTIONS in the library throughout my life, including the teen section, so I got to read a lot of the books that way.
The most socialist book I had access to in my middle school library was "My Teacher Glows in the Dark" - the third entry in the "My Teacher is an Alien" series. In it, the main protagonist is taken to his mentor's home world, where there are (gasp) no poor people! At all! And when asked where the tired, the poor, and the yearning masses all were, the teacher shrugged and said, "We decided we didn't want it to be that way."
The upside of Scholastic (outside of this bigot button) is that they do generate funds so that schools and teachers can provide classroom and library books the rest of the year. A lot of schools complain about Scholastic for a lot of other reasons (pricing, delivery, the plastic non-book crap they force on the schools for the book fair, etc.), and a few alternatives have emerged. Many of those, though seem to lack the types of diverse titles being targeted by these bans. I cannot tell, however, if those books are missing from these non-Scholastic fair companies by choice, or because Scholastic has a lock book fair distribution of things for a lot of titles. There are a lot of Scholastic exclusive books -- Dog Man, R. L. Stine, Harry Potter, Wimpy Kid, Hunger Games -- that are reading gateways for a lot of kids, but are not available through these other companies.
Well, there's still actual, important national and international news for adults at Daily Kos and elsewhere (not those shitty war porn and etc. gossip site people often link).
I'm eternally thankful I missed this nightmare horror show and brouhaha in real time. Guys, I can't handle this shit. This is more than I can take in and process. I don't think I want to process it.
With this country being so fucked up that Rs fuck us over in every way possible so to read about it so literally makes me want to scream and throw up.
This morning I glanced at my computer which was parked on last night's open thread right where I left it at around 1 am. Something had changed on the page. The avatar of the person who may have been Rebecca's last straw was blank with a slash and instead of the nym, it said REMOVED (BANNED). I've never seen that before. That person was quite the jerk.
The board's conservative majority is "using lawyers as a weapon against the public, basically to create roadblocks hoping that you just eventually give up," he told Salon. "The more they did that, the more I was just like, f**k this. It just pissed me off, so I've spent, like, so much goddamn money trying to beat this." --from the article at Salon, linked to in this post
That's the crux: MONEY. I only have so much to spend on politics and sites like Wonkette. I'm fortunate that I live in a place where so far, KKKlanned Parenthood hasn't been able to get a toe hold. So before I judge districts and counties and their school board infiltrations, I remember that White Hoods for Liberty is astro-turfed and has lots of $$$ and advice and materials given to them by RW dark money operatives. Your average parent with multiple jobs, multiple kids, and very little time has almost no chance against them unless they band together with people who have the time, money, and legal representation to help them fight back. There are groups forming to help parents fight back, with less money than the other side, so it's going to be much more difficult and take longer for them.
I've been a book fair chair for several years. There's a FB group for chairs that I belong to where this has also be a big point of discussion. There's lots of sharing about exactly which titles are included to try and encourage people not to opt out. There have been some outstanding impassioned pleas to include the case. The thing I keep coming back to is that every charge made at the fairs shows on my credit card statement as coming from Florida. So I suspect a lot of this nonsense is coming from their attempts to comply with DeSantis's insane laws. But, at the same time, there are so many posts from chairs at religious schools and in conservative communities complaining about the need to remove certain titles. There are posts about specific books that parents complained about "warning" other chairs that they might want to look hard at it and second guess putting the title out for sale, etc. This strikes me as Scholastic attempting to respond to customer feedback, which is incredibly sad, but just how things are at a lot of schools. As a few of the teachers/librarians have commented, their teaching licenses are on the line, so as much as they want to include these titles personally, there's a lot on the line professionally for them if they do. It's just a shitty situation all the way around thanks to fucked up politics.
wrong thread.
My parents were not perfect, but they let me read ANYTHING I wanted, including the
"Electric Koolaid Acid Test" when I was barely 13. It mostly bored me! LOL.
"Love in the Library" is an absolutely beautiful book.
The book fairs are nice, but as a poor kid in the south, I was lucky if I got to purchase one or two new books each year. But hey! I had unlimited, unsupervised, full access to ALL THE SECTIONS in the library throughout my life, including the teen section, so I got to read a lot of the books that way.
The most socialist book I had access to in my middle school library was "My Teacher Glows in the Dark" - the third entry in the "My Teacher is an Alien" series. In it, the main protagonist is taken to his mentor's home world, where there are (gasp) no poor people! At all! And when asked where the tired, the poor, and the yearning masses all were, the teacher shrugged and said, "We decided we didn't want it to be that way."
The upside of Scholastic (outside of this bigot button) is that they do generate funds so that schools and teachers can provide classroom and library books the rest of the year. A lot of schools complain about Scholastic for a lot of other reasons (pricing, delivery, the plastic non-book crap they force on the schools for the book fair, etc.), and a few alternatives have emerged. Many of those, though seem to lack the types of diverse titles being targeted by these bans. I cannot tell, however, if those books are missing from these non-Scholastic fair companies by choice, or because Scholastic has a lock book fair distribution of things for a lot of titles. There are a lot of Scholastic exclusive books -- Dog Man, R. L. Stine, Harry Potter, Wimpy Kid, Hunger Games -- that are reading gateways for a lot of kids, but are not available through these other companies.
Didn't Scholastic publish the US versions of the Harry Potter books? They should have enough money to not have to worry about Moms for Fascism.
Unless they're under orders from uber-TERF JK Rowling to not be so "woke".
separate and not quite equal. how quaint.
Well, there's still actual, important national and international news for adults at Daily Kos and elsewhere (not those shitty war porn and etc. gossip site people often link).
Scholastic: DON’T PROACTIVELY OBEY NAZIS
Publishing is just like everything else in capitalism, some do it because they value books and some do it because they value money.
flames on the side of my face gif
I'm eternally thankful I missed this nightmare horror show and brouhaha in real time. Guys, I can't handle this shit. This is more than I can take in and process. I don't think I want to process it.
With this country being so fucked up that Rs fuck us over in every way possible so to read about it so literally makes me want to scream and throw up.
I just saw that a book called "Read Me a Story, Stella" was banned for being sexually explicit. The reason? The author's name is Marie Louise Gay.
OH THE HORROR.
This morning I glanced at my computer which was parked on last night's open thread right where I left it at around 1 am. Something had changed on the page. The avatar of the person who may have been Rebecca's last straw was blank with a slash and instead of the nym, it said REMOVED (BANNED). I've never seen that before. That person was quite the jerk.