While I didn’t think that they would go after a dictionary, it’s not surprising that fascists would go after a book full of definitions.
After reading a little bit, it’s not that they banned dictionaries, but it seems the district got ahead of the curve. The law itself is the problem
That’s why they have an overly broad definition of what is prohibited. So they can pick and choose what they will allow.
In this case I think the district is doing this in protest. The legislators intended to pick and choose, but the district is applying it as written, so Dictionaries are out. They’re highlighting how absurd the law is.
That was my impression, similar move to schools banning the Bible citing all the beastiality, rape and mass murder in there
Perhaps, but…
Penguin Random House, five authors, two parents of Escambia County students, and the non-profit group PEN America sued the Escambia County School Board last May, alleging that the board’s actions violate the First Amendment. The lawsuit relates to decisions by the school board, prior to the passage of HB 1069, to permanently ban several books from Escambia schools.
The Escambia County School Board banned most of these books at the request of Vicki Baggett, a high school English teacher in the county. Baggett is responsible for hundreds of challenges in Escambia County and neighboring counties. She also appeared at the June 2023 board meeting and spoke in favor of the emergency rule.
Eh, I think this is going to play into the legislator’s designs.
My thoughts as well. This leads to “only approved books allowed.”
That’s literally and explicitly the point.
From the end of the article:
In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to “convey the government’s message,” and that can be accomplished through “the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”
I agree with both you and HikingVet@lemmy.ca but somehow interpreted that sentence differently. Thanks for helping see it! Not great either way I guess, tho 🙁
Welcome to 1984
Which is the whole point of the law.
Pretty bad way to protest by making your students dumber… If they want to protest, they could ban the Bible and I’m sure countless other Christian-themed books that happen to be just fine.
They did ban the Bible, that was one of the thousands of books they removed. Ultimately the school administrators have limited power in this case. They’re state employees, they have to follow the law. They’re providing the ones who have the actual power here, the voters, with as much ammo as they can which is bad optics. They’re doing their best to make the politicians look like incompetent morons.
The politicians crafted this legislation to be super vague in order to let them pick and choose arbitrarily if a book violated it because they didn’t want their actual opinions on record. They had wanted this to be applied to a couple dozen existing books and then to have veto power on any new book to be added. Instead the administrators are using malicious compliance to apply it to literally any book that even remotely matches the vague wording. This does two things, first it highlights how completely arbitrary this law is, and second it bogs the censorship board down by burying them in work.
They have already stated they want “their people” to be the deciders. It’s just textbook fascism.
Without the textbook.
Check this bit from the end:
In a brief submitted by the State of Florida in support of Escambia, Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that the school board could ban books for any reason because the purpose of public school libraries is to “convey the government’s message,” and that can be accomplished through “the removal of speech that the government disapproves.”
What in the absolute fuck?
Bog brother is watching.
We prefer swamp people.
Blessed Bog Brother Be
Under His Allseeing Eye
Land of the free 🤔
They keep sayin’ we’re free, but we’re all just loose.
…Whoever told you that is your enemy.
The party of small govt (except for pushing christofascism)
Ashley Moody is a fascist traitor
I initially read that as “fashion traitor” and pictured her wearing Gucci in a Prada zone.
Jesus Christ
Ok, I give up. You guys can let me out please. The shit you’re throwing into this simulation is just ridiculous.
That part stuck out to me, too. That is really terrifying.
I’m not surprised. I haven’t read the dictionary but people tell me it talks all about what homosexuals are and what transgender means and it actually defines the word ‘lesbian!’
It has all the banned things!
And teenagers across the land learn the dictionary is actually pretty cool.
I hear it even defines “woke”!
Parents NEED to lodge formal complaints with the police and school boards in EVERY district that still has dictionaries and encyclopedias in the libraries.
Whittle down every district until they’re only allowed to work on coloring books for every grade K-12, or as close as they can get.
Don’t forget to target private schools with massive social media campaigns to inform all parents that dictionaries = grooming. If the private schools refuse to respond, convince the dumber wealthy parents to pull their kids and put them into a safe school, without books.
Conservative = Stupid
Coloring books in place of books is exactly how you grow the Republican voter base.
Mindless exploitable industrial scale human production is the end game of the Republican army of the Oligarchy. It’s industrial cattle, but humans; eat garbage, consume everything you’re told, ask no questions, and barely survive. If anything bad happens, use your gun to take yourself out and/or whatever other farm stock you feel oppressed and frustrated with inside your little pin.
Even if what you’re saying is true, and I’m not going to take a position either way, it doesn’t have any bearing on my suggestion.
DeSantis is a reply guy with power. This bill wasn’t passed because a majority of FL voters want it, not even a majority of his voters. This bill, like many others, was simply him trying to ride the culture war to the White House, but it failed. The only thing keeping it in place in inertia and the desire to save face. That only changes if the political calculus changes.
I guarantee you that if these book bans were exploited to force the closure of ALL public school libraries, remove dictionaries and encyclopedias from all classrooms, and basically made to significantly impact ALL FL parents, or even just the wealthier areas, the public outcry from parents would be enough to reverse it.
Exactly, parents will care when their children who received a Florida education are not competitive enough to compete in a capitalist environment. They’ll realize this soon enough when their children haven’t learned anything in school aside from propaganda.
Let them sacrifice their own children to Mammon. It is what they said they wanted, after all. Maybe this will be the wake up call they finally need. They wanted to “stop woke” and didn’t realize it meant “stay asleep, plebs.”
As someone who train-hooped out of Florida years ago, I fucking warned y’all and now it’s happening. I knew this was the trajectory when Jeb Bush got elected in the 1990s and I was in middle school at the time!
I think when parents realize DeSantis just sentenced their kids to fighting to be menial wage slaves for the local corrupt petty bourgeois of every little shithole county while they have to attempt to convince professionals to move to their state they will regret all this and unfortunately the only way they will ever learn is by once again screwing themselves.
I think when parents realize DeSantis just sentenced their kids to fighting to be menial wage slaves
But that’s not what happened, it’s very clear that brown people came and unfairly took those better paying jobs from our perfectly fine and upstanding American good-ol-boys!
That is the other end of this. No matter how absurd their beliefs are, they will believe them over the facts. No amount of numbers or data will convince them because they have already decided what is true and believe through faith. Republican voters are abusers, pure and simple. They will vote in the manner that maximizes their power and for them that means “parental rights” so they can abuse their own wives and children. It means removing abortion and forcing women to marry their rapists. It means discriminating against and throwing out queer folk in jail to make an example of them and scare others into “integrating” into their “culture” which is nothing more than a breeding program for extra workers.
The challenge is getting normal folks to see that the Republic ideal is a police state enforcing a theocratic breeding and political education program upon the masses and implementing it through the extreme violence against those who dissent.
This isn’t conjecture: their biggest mouthpieces like Bannon, Steve Miller, Chris Rufo, Nick Fuentes, and others who form the ideological core of the “new” Republican parties not only admit it, but vocally advocate it. When they speak, may we should listen and believe it when they tell us who they really are.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Never underestimate the combination of human stupidity, cognitive dissonance, and the sunk cost fallacy all working together. It’s amazing how much the truly radicalized will suffer for their cause. Rational people protect their self-interest, but insane people will often die to protect their delusions.
But that’s their goal, they want kids to be stupid so they’ll vote republican when they grow up.
People, don’t do this. This is exactly what they want. This will only make things worse, and accomplish nothing.
because it exposes students to “alternate sexual ideologies.” Baggett said she was concerned “a second grader would read this book, and that idea would pop into the second grader’s mind… that these are two people of the same sex that love each other.”
This is the kind of people we are dealing with. They are literally trying to prevent children from developing accepting attitudes towards minorities. That is their stated goal. It’s not often I read such blatant disgusting hatred coming from a teacher. The book she was referencing was And Tango makes three. Which is unbelievable in the context of her statement. Were the penguins, who were real actual penguins, somehow a part of an “alternate sexual ideology”? How badly rotten does your brain have to be to think “sexual ideology” when you see 2 penguins raising a baby together?
You see, tolerance is a slippery slope. First you tolerate the Irish. Next thing you know Italians are semi-ok. Then Polish?! Eventually Catholics and Jews are acceptable. So long as none of these marry across lines.
/s
“Whatever you say, Arch.” 😆
Ah, don’t you just love when (a part of) the land of freedom advertises propaganda (or censors unwanted ideas more appropriately) against a minority from the early age
Doesn’t even remotely resemble anything else /s
I hope they’ve alerted their groundskeepers that all trees, shrubs, bushes, and flowers must be mowed over, because pollen and flowers are Nature’s pole-dancers and sluts. Not sure if they can have grass.
Grass is a euphemism for marijuana so they can’t have that or it will give kids ideas
Oh no! We can’t have people, let alone children, getting ideas!
Grass will flower if you don’t mow it.
That book defines “racism” and “slavery” and may contain examples. Conservatives definitely don’t want white kids finding out their ancestors may have been conservatives.
Ancestors? I don’t think you have to go that far back
Is no one else looking at this line the school district is at this point just pulling every possible book that could match the description of the law in purpose to make a point?
One teacher made a complaint about a couple of books so they said fine, well just remove everything else that this bill could possibly touch. Just to prove how ambiguous and far stretching this law can go?
Of course they shouldn’t pull a dictionary but it matches the description. This is to test the law.
Pulling the dictionary accomplishes what they want: a dumber future generation.
Pull the Bible, that’s what riles them up
In Florida you misspelled ‘dummer’. You can only sound out the words now.
What’s that extra m for?
The did that too, and conservative figures books.
Article lays it all out pretty well
HB 1069 gives residents the right to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct,” as defined under Florida law, whether or not the book is pornographic.
I was going to ask how their bible gets around this, but then I found several instances of its removal in Florida.
These librarians. I like them. Assuming they’re doing this as a statement.
/m/MaliciousCompliance is leaking :D
The reality in Escambia County serves as a rejoinder to DeSantis, who has described concerns about book removals as a “leftist activist hoax” and a “false political narrative.”
If Floridians had a dictionary to look up “rejoinder” with, they’d be very upset.
Soon: “All books are now banned because they contain the letters L, G, B, T and Q. Any books containing these five letters will now be banned from public libraries.”
Ernest Vincent Wright: “Hold my beer”
Fascism
I thought this was an Onion article when I saw the title.
I wish I was right.
Guess they got tired tired of hearing “words have meanings” in response to their mindless rambling.
