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And people deciding which businesses they want to shop at is the free market. And businesses deciding which products they want to carry is freedom of associatio

And people deciding which businesses they want to shop at is the free market. And businesses deciding which products they want to carry is freedom of association. And people ganging up on other people on Twitter is technically free speech and public debate. If you don't think there's a problem with the government banning books from school curriculum for political reasons -- if you don't think that has anything to do with freedom of speech, then I don't see how you have a free speech problem with anything at all. None of the cancel culture that people complain about is illegal or unconstitutional. That doesn't mean it can't be harmful to free expression, but in contrast, "representation with taxation" can actually be unconstitutional if the "representation" people ask for is suppression of political speech. It is not my job to tell people whether or not they should be concerned with cancel culture. But anyone who is concerned about cancel culture and not concerned with educational book bans, or laws that restrict what topics teachers can talk to students about, or restrictions on conversations about sexual orientations/identities at school or with medical professionals, or any of the other speech laws being floated by Republican governments right now -- that person clearly is not interested in free speech itself, they just have an agenda and are using free speech as a convenient narrative tool in pursuit of that agenda. People can be legitimately concerned about cancel culture as a free speech issue, but I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says that cancel culture is real and actual government censorship isn't.

daenz 5y ago
>If you don't think there's a problem with the government banning books from school curriculum for political reasons It's not banned for political reasons, at least from my reading of it. It's banned for the language and the illustrations of nudity. Nobody is asking for the Holocaust to not be taught in schools, so I fail to see where there is a political bend to this. Do I think they're being up-tight and prudish? Yes, probably (but I haven't seen the book itself). Do I think it's politically motivated? No. The author of the article even defers that they don't know the motivation: "Regardless of why this decision was made..."
- danShumway 5y ago
  So two objections. First, from the minutes: > So can we take it, as far as it needs to go, because I don’t know that it is going to end with one book. I think the process needs to include a bigger plan to holistically redact things that we don’t want in there. We hope we have good employees, like minded culture, centric folks that fit with McMinn County, that they’re going to make the right discretionary decisions to redact that literature in an appropriate way for the age related presentation. It is very hard for me not to read this as political censorship in nature. ---- And second, given the teachers were planning to inform parents and censor the nudity/profanity, it is hard for me not to read this as an objection over students being taught about any subject that borders sex or sexual content. I think the "inappropriate" objection takes on a different tone when people are saying that it's inappropriate to teach literature even after the swear words have been whited out -- at that point we're talking about subject-matter, not profanity. I view that as both unrealistic in general (I wonder if parents have the same objections to mature topics in To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare), but I also view it as explicitly political. It is a political statement to say that sex as a topic should not ever be mentioned in middleschool. ---- But last but not least, even if this were only a discussion about profanity (which I don't think is the case), government censorship of profanity in schools is still a heck of a lot closer to a 1st Amendment violation on the sliding scale of censorship than people ganging up on each other on Twitter is. I still don't really accept that someone could legitimately find the first to be irrelevant to free speech conversations, but the second to be critically important.
  - daenz 5y ago
    From the minutes you posted, I can see how one could interpret it as being politically motivated, especially the words about "bigger plan to holistically redact." However, I think there is an alternate explanation, from the last sentence: "in an appropriate way for the age related presentation." To me, that reads like they are concerned mostly about the age-appropriateness of the content, which is not necessarily politically motivated. For example, if they were being anti-gay, they wouldn't say "this pro-gay content is bad for 8th graders but ok for 10th graders." You and I have different views on sexual content being political or not, and that's fine. I can see both sides, but I just don't think it is inherently political. Wrt 1st Amendment violations, teachers are government employees representing the local government. Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.

daenz 5y ago

>If you don't think there's a problem with the government banning books from school curriculum for political reasons It's not banned for political reasons, at least from my reading of it. It's banned for the language and the illustrations of nudity. Nobody is asking for the Holocaust to not be taught in schools, so I fail to see where there is a political bend to this. Do I think they're being up-tight and prudish? Yes, probably (but I haven't seen the book itself). Do I think it's politically motivated? No. The author of the article even defers that they don't know the motivation: "Regardless of why this decision was made..."

danShumway 5y ago
So two objections. First, from the minutes: > So can we take it, as far as it needs to go, because I don’t know that it is going to end with one book. I think the process needs to include a bigger plan to holistically redact things that we don’t want in there. We hope we have good employees, like minded culture, centric folks that fit with McMinn County, that they’re going to make the right discretionary decisions to redact that literature in an appropriate way for the age related presentation. It is very hard for me not to read this as political censorship in nature. ---- And second, given the teachers were planning to inform parents and censor the nudity/profanity, it is hard for me not to read this as an objection over students being taught about any subject that borders sex or sexual content. I think the "inappropriate" objection takes on a different tone when people are saying that it's inappropriate to teach literature even after the swear words have been whited out -- at that point we're talking about subject-matter, not profanity. I view that as both unrealistic in general (I wonder if parents have the same objections to mature topics in To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare), but I also view it as explicitly political. It is a political statement to say that sex as a topic should not ever be mentioned in middleschool. ---- But last but not least, even if this were only a discussion about profanity (which I don't think is the case), government censorship of profanity in schools is still a heck of a lot closer to a 1st Amendment violation on the sliding scale of censorship than people ganging up on each other on Twitter is. I still don't really accept that someone could legitimately find the first to be irrelevant to free speech conversations, but the second to be critically important.
- daenz 5y ago
  From the minutes you posted, I can see how one could interpret it as being politically motivated, especially the words about "bigger plan to holistically redact." However, I think there is an alternate explanation, from the last sentence: "in an appropriate way for the age related presentation." To me, that reads like they are concerned mostly about the age-appropriateness of the content, which is not necessarily politically motivated. For example, if they were being anti-gay, they wouldn't say "this pro-gay content is bad for 8th graders but ok for 10th graders." You and I have different views on sexual content being political or not, and that's fine. I can see both sides, but I just don't think it is inherently political. Wrt 1st Amendment violations, teachers are government employees representing the local government. Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.