5 ms·

How ironic that this is in China where what you are and are not allowed to read is strictly controlled by the government. Indeed, if I posted this comment whil

by lisper 3y ago

How ironic that this is in China where what you are and are not allowed to read is strictly controlled by the government. Indeed, if I posted this comment while in that library, I would very likely be arrested.

nicolas_t 3y ago
It’s been illuminating seeing the hong kong public library « harmonized » after the national security law. No books criticizing the cpp are allowed nowadays. You won’t find cartoons by Zunzi anymore nor will you find back issues of Apple Daily. The entire political history of hong kong as recorded by published media has been sanitized to ensure that the overly sensitive overlords find nothing that might prick their ego. So it doesn’t matter if the public library is a nice space with good architecture and a comfortable reading space. If only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available then it fails at the real objective of libraries: To allow people to enrich their mind by giving them multiple viewpoints so that they may forge their own opinions.
- sandspar 3y ago
  Only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available on all of our current LLM chatbots, and yet we still enjoy them and find use in them.
- dudisubekti 3y ago
  You could just bring your own book you downloaded with VPN and read it there. Having a public reading space is always nice
Aunche 3y ago
Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes. It's not exactly an efficient use of resources to jail everyone who says something they find objectionable on the Internet. China's censorship and punishment mostly aims at maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes. Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.
  - exitheone 3y ago
    The CCP control is strictly about blast radius. Individual citizen in their homes are rarely subject to any enforcement action. Even talking critically on social media in small circles is mostly fine (apart from simple "bad-word" filters that just remove whole messages). The moment you reach a wider audience or "disrupt public harmony", they come down on you.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Yeah but ultimately that is far more dangerous, no? The law enables severe punishments that are applied arbitrarily by those tasked with enforcing it. Knowing there is a clear and reliable line you can't cross allows for opposition movements to take advantage of that line and build within the narrow demarcations. Arbitrary enforcement means you can never know if someone in charge has it out for you that day because you probably already broke laws that could be used against you before coming anywhere near actively participating in political dissent. As the common wisdom goes: Al Capone was not arrested for being a crime boss but for tax evasion. Why bother setting clear boundaries on what behavior is or isn't anti-revolutionary if you can just make sure everyone already violates the law based on technicalities and then just decide who you want to arrest for it as necessary?
      - op00to 3y ago
        No, the DDR “spy on your neighbor” situation is much more dangerous.
        hnbad 3y ago
emsixteen 3y ago
This is ironic in the same way that Alanis Morissette's song is. Beautiful space. I'm sure it's a great place to spend some time.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  [flagged]
paganel 3y ago
There are lots of books that don't get published in ideologically-controlled Western countries anymore. For example trying to write a balanced biography of the military leader that got us (Romania) into WW2 [1] alongside the Germans has become next to impossible, you'd risk breaking several anti-genocide laws. That was not the case before our accession into the NATO and EU ideological structures (the mid-2000s). What's funny is that the one biography of Antonescu [2] that is not entirely about how "he was a very bad genocidaire" has been written by a person of Jewish ethnicity at a very small printing house (almost self-published), I guess the powers that be thought that it would have looked bad were they to go after a Jewish person who had tried to be impartial to Antonescu. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu [2] https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-tesu-TES978-606-95323-5-5--p28595245.html https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-te...
- n4r9 3y ago
  That's a little vague. Do you have examples of banned biographies, and the reasons given for the bannings?
  - paganel 3y ago
    The banning happens before anyone gets to publish anything, so, no, I cannot tell you exactly what samizdat copies of Ion Antonescu biographies there are in the wild. What I can link to is stuff like this [1], meaning the US Embassy here in Romania openly and actively calling out several City Halls for still having streets named after Ion Antonescu. > Several cities and towns still named streets after Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator from the Second World War, and some local authorities refused to change the name despite requests from the Wiesel Institute. After the Wiesel Institute repeatedly requested, in February, Constanța City Hall to change the name of Ion Antonescu Street, Constanța Mayor Vergil Chițac stated in the press that the evaluations of Antonescu's activity are controversial and contradictory and the City Hall will consider renaming the street after members of academia review the topic (via google translate) Hope that that clears up the "vague" thing. [1] https://ro.usembassy.gov/ro/romania-raportul-international-privind-libertatea-religioasa-in-anul-2021/ https://ro.usembassy.gov/ro/romania-raportul-international-p...
sandspar 3y ago
You can't read whatever you want in America either, yet we still have bookstores. The Chinese government controls a handful of things very tightly and is laissez-faire about many other things. Also you wouldn't be arrested. Chinese people aren't automatons. They know how to get around silly rules, just like we do.
- hereme888 3y ago
  What? I've never read a law passed by Congress that makes any reading material illegal. Are you referring to the inappropriate sexual books pandered to little children in schools?
  - sandspar 3y ago
    Examples of publication bans might include the government level publication ban on mass shooter manifestos. And the quasi-government Amazon bans of books. America also sees activist-led retractions of scientific studies. More prosaically, non-legitimate possession of classified material is illegal.
    - philipkglass 3y ago
      More prosaically, non-legitimate possession of classified material is illegal. People who leak classified material can be prosecuted, if discovered, but the press is not bound by classification directives in the United States. It was established in this 1971 court case around the classified Pentagon Papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > What? I've never read a law passed by Congress that makes any reading material illegal. That's correct. In the US, we have the First Amendment to prevent government interference, and the genesis of that law goes back to John Milton's Areopagitica. On the flip side, that same document gives private business broad economic freedom, and businesses are not afraid to use their economic power to suppress or bury ideas that threaten their profits.
l3mure 3y ago
> Some of the tentacles of Total Literary Awareness have been unraveled by literary historian Claire Culleton. Delving into the Bureau’s 234-page file on commercial publisher Henry Holt, she uncovers evidence of Hoover’s “custodial relationship” with the pillars of the Cold War book market. > Holt employees sent the Bureau all manner of literary foreknowledge, from book proposals to page proofs to advance copies—so much material that an editorial staffer wrote Hoover with the news that “I am beginning to feel like a member of the FBI myself.” > Predictably, Hoover and his ghostwriters were asked to provide blurbs for The Hidden Russia and other anticommunist titles. Just as often, however, the Bureau was granted uncommon rights of pre-refusal. Holt editor Milt Hill, for example, asked FBI contacts for “advice as to whether we should do or not” a McCarthy autobiography, receiving a green light since it “would be a friendly book from a Bureau standpoint.” > Books less kind to the Bureau were rejected with its help at Holt and other firms. The manuscript of Fred Cook’s muckraking The FBI Nobody Knows, eventually published in 1964, was refused at Random House (home of The FBI Story) after publisher Bennett Cerf shredded professional ethics by forwarding a copy to Hoover. > Editorial informants such as Cerf, recruited in the wake of the Lowenthal embarrassment, made it practically impossible to criticize the FBI through a major New York publisher without costly delay. With the FBI fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness. To adapt Louis Nichols, there was now most always a body poised to throw itself between the presses. https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-the-fbi-pre-read-african-american-writing/ https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-t... Of course that all stopped after the 70s/80s, right?

by lisper 3y ago

nicolas_t 3y ago

It’s been illuminating seeing the hong kong public library « harmonized » after the national security law. No books criticizing the cpp are allowed nowadays. You won’t find cartoons by Zunzi anymore nor will you find back issues of Apple Daily. The entire political history of hong kong as recorded by published media has been sanitized to ensure that the overly sensitive overlords find nothing that might prick their ego. So it doesn’t matter if the public library is a nice space with good architecture and a comfortable reading space. If only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available then it fails at the real objective of libraries: To allow people to enrich their mind by giving them multiple viewpoints so that they may forge their own opinions.

sandspar 3y ago
Only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available on all of our current LLM chatbots, and yet we still enjoy them and find use in them.
dudisubekti 3y ago
You could just bring your own book you downloaded with VPN and read it there. Having a public reading space is always nice

Aunche 3y ago

Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes. It's not exactly an efficient use of resources to jail everyone who says something they find objectionable on the Internet. China's censorship and punishment mostly aims at maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

lisper 3y ago
> Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes. Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.
- exitheone 3y ago
  The CCP control is strictly about blast radius. Individual citizen in their homes are rarely subject to any enforcement action. Even talking critically on social media in small circles is mostly fine (apart from simple "bad-word" filters that just remove whole messages). The moment you reach a wider audience or "disrupt public harmony", they come down on you.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Yeah but ultimately that is far more dangerous, no? The law enables severe punishments that are applied arbitrarily by those tasked with enforcing it. Knowing there is a clear and reliable line you can't cross allows for opposition movements to take advantage of that line and build within the narrow demarcations. Arbitrary enforcement means you can never know if someone in charge has it out for you that day because you probably already broke laws that could be used against you before coming anywhere near actively participating in political dissent. As the common wisdom goes: Al Capone was not arrested for being a crime boss but for tax evasion. Why bother setting clear boundaries on what behavior is or isn't anti-revolutionary if you can just make sure everyone already violates the law based on technicalities and then just decide who you want to arrest for it as necessary?
    - op00to 3y ago
      No, the DDR “spy on your neighbor” situation is much more dangerous.
      - hnbad 3y ago

emsixteen 3y ago

This is ironic in the same way that Alanis Morissette's song is. Beautiful space. I'm sure it's a great place to spend some time.

flanked-evergl 3y ago
[flagged]

paganel 3y ago

There are lots of books that don't get published in ideologically-controlled Western countries anymore. For example trying to write a balanced biography of the military leader that got us (Romania) into WW2 [1] alongside the Germans has become next to impossible, you'd risk breaking several anti-genocide laws. That was not the case before our accession into the NATO and EU ideological structures (the mid-2000s). What's funny is that the one biography of Antonescu [2] that is not entirely about how "he was a very bad genocidaire" has been written by a person of Jewish ethnicity at a very small printing house (almost self-published), I guess the powers that be thought that it would have looked bad were they to go after a Jewish person who had tried to be impartial to Antonescu. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu [2] https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-tesu-TES978-606-95323-5-5--p28595245.html https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-te...

n4r9 3y ago
That's a little vague. Do you have examples of banned biographies, and the reasons given for the bannings?
- paganel 3y ago
  The banning happens before anyone gets to publish anything, so, no, I cannot tell you exactly what samizdat copies of Ion Antonescu biographies there are in the wild. What I can link to is stuff like this [1], meaning the US Embassy here in Romania openly and actively calling out several City Halls for still having streets named after Ion Antonescu. > Several cities and towns still named streets after Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator from the Second World War, and some local authorities refused to change the name despite requests from the Wiesel Institute. After the Wiesel Institute repeatedly requested, in February, Constanța City Hall to change the name of Ion Antonescu Street, Constanța Mayor Vergil Chițac stated in the press that the evaluations of Antonescu's activity are controversial and contradictory and the City Hall will consider renaming the street after members of academia review the topic (via google translate) Hope that that clears up the "vague" thing. [1] https://ro.usembassy.gov/ro/romania-raportul-international-privind-libertatea-religioasa-in-anul-2021/ https://ro.usembassy.gov/ro/romania-raportul-international-p...

sandspar 3y ago

You can't read whatever you want in America either, yet we still have bookstores. The Chinese government controls a handful of things very tightly and is laissez-faire about many other things. Also you wouldn't be arrested. Chinese people aren't automatons. They know how to get around silly rules, just like we do.

hereme888 3y ago
What? I've never read a law passed by Congress that makes any reading material illegal. Are you referring to the inappropriate sexual books pandered to little children in schools?
- sandspar 3y ago
  Examples of publication bans might include the government level publication ban on mass shooter manifestos. And the quasi-government Amazon bans of books. America also sees activist-led retractions of scientific studies. More prosaically, non-legitimate possession of classified material is illegal.
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    More prosaically, non-legitimate possession of classified material is illegal. People who leak classified material can be prosecuted, if discovered, but the press is not bound by classification directives in the United States. It was established in this 1971 court case around the classified Pentagon Papers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > What? I've never read a law passed by Congress that makes any reading material illegal. That's correct. In the US, we have the First Amendment to prevent government interference, and the genesis of that law goes back to John Milton's Areopagitica. On the flip side, that same document gives private business broad economic freedom, and businesses are not afraid to use their economic power to suppress or bury ideas that threaten their profits.

l3mure 3y ago

> Some of the tentacles of Total Literary Awareness have been unraveled by literary historian Claire Culleton. Delving into the Bureau’s 234-page file on commercial publisher Henry Holt, she uncovers evidence of Hoover’s “custodial relationship” with the pillars of the Cold War book market. > Holt employees sent the Bureau all manner of literary foreknowledge, from book proposals to page proofs to advance copies—so much material that an editorial staffer wrote Hoover with the news that “I am beginning to feel like a member of the FBI myself.” > Predictably, Hoover and his ghostwriters were asked to provide blurbs for The Hidden Russia and other anticommunist titles. Just as often, however, the Bureau was granted uncommon rights of pre-refusal. Holt editor Milt Hill, for example, asked FBI contacts for “advice as to whether we should do or not” a McCarthy autobiography, receiving a green light since it “would be a friendly book from a Bureau standpoint.” > Books less kind to the Bureau were rejected with its help at Holt and other firms. The manuscript of Fred Cook’s muckraking The FBI Nobody Knows, eventually published in 1964, was refused at Random House (home of The FBI Story) after publisher Bennett Cerf shredded professional ethics by forwarding a copy to Hoover. > Editorial informants such as Cerf, recruited in the wake of the Lowenthal embarrassment, made it practically impossible to criticize the FBI through a major New York publisher without costly delay. With the FBI fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness. To adapt Louis Nichols, there was now most always a body poised to throw itself between the presses. https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-the-fbi-pre-read-african-american-writing/ https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-t... Of course that all stopped after the 70s/80s, right?