@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Your list is pulling from the tails of the distribution of books being affected. It is not representative. I'm sure DeSantis self-servingly likes to think of criticism as a hoax, but that doesn't make it so.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Because most of us think the book is probably fine for high schools. Genuinely. We are with the Miller definition that includes as a criterion "whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". A book that addresses controversies about and the experience of gender and sexual minorities may well meet that test, despite a few pages of graphical depictions of sex. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock I'm glad to say it shouldn't be in elementary schools. And I wouldn't be outraged if public schools were more vigilant about narrowly excluding just this kind of thing, I'd consider it understandable.
I could turn that question around. I see very few people who consider the presence of books like this in the library to be an important problem making any effort to ensure that the scope of removals is surgically narrow. Why is that? /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock As a Dad of a Florida elementary school kid, if my choices are a law that lets random parents remove The Bluest Eye from his library or one that lets stuff like that through occasionally, I'd easily pick the latter. I'm much more concerned that schools will fail to take the opportunity to expose him to important things than that he might be exposed to what he's exposed to anyway online. 1/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock Note that FL *high schools* were removing this book when it came to their attention before DeSantis made inclusion in schools of anything colorably controversial a felony risk for teachers and librarians. I think the book is probably fine for high schools, but it's not like school districts were actively promoting books like this, even if some individuals might.
From 2021, my kid's school district: https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2021/11/19/pinellas-school-district-orders-removal-of-gender-queer-book/
2/
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock This book is far, far from representative of what DeSantis' inteventions are curtailing.
The direction in which you "err" reflects your values as much as what you claim to be trying to achieve. If you err on the side of killing them all and let God sort it out, it means very little that you don't intend to kill the innocent. /fin
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock It's not exactly unintended if you don't care, it was a foreseeable result, and you are happy with it. If a politician were to say eliminate any review of capital cases and lots of innocents die but you continued to tout your tough-on-crime accomplishment, whether you really "intended" to kill innocents may be an interesting philosophical question but your negligence and complicity is not.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock it’s the first paragraph of the piece. he’s not defending these laws as hypothetically justifiable, he’s going before camera to defend what is actually occurring and to characterize the criticism of their actual application as misguided. but it’s not misguided. the best you can claim is he’s deluded and believes the law is being applied very differently than it is. i’d say that’s, um, a stretch.
@taoeffect @toyotabedzrock he seems pretty clearly to be endorsing what has occurred.
@paninid don’t let it end. don’t settle for any shade of blue with the blues.
you drop by twitter to lurk a little, and it’s not kindergarten, it’s lord of the flies.
@mimsical probably shoulda spelt it right, gonna edit.
@mimsical autoextroverts
@Alon a good distillation of the better part Florida politics. (dissembling grift is better than fascism any day of the week, right?)
@Alon an informative and thoughtful post.
how i yearn for a world in which transit (even miserable American bus transit) would be anywhere on anyone’s radar in the Tampa Bay exurbs.
super-NIMBY, one home per acre way too dense. or should we consider this good, actually, preventing suburban sprawl in favor of infill or at least denser development? https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-hillsborough/keystone-residents-fighting-to-stop-housing-development-in-rural-neighborhood
i’d like to have a word with whoever invented the car alarm.
“Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.” #TedChiang https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey ht @KathyReid @snipe
i would like to see a television show
that would be a kind of police procedural, only the “detective” would be an IRS investigator going after the ever-more-elaborate tax dodges of very high-net-worth cheats.
which is worse, for things to go sideways or pear-shaped?
@curtosis @ryanlcooper whoever is likely to be stiffed. if the administration were to announce some prioritization plan (obviously for now they refuse, rightly) under which some payments would not be made to prevent exceeding the ceiling, the recipients of those payments would face a very concrete injury.