Angular and Poorly Sorted

Anti-Book Banning Bingo

1. Coming into MY GOSH DANG LIBRARY, going into the kids’ section, and taking books with titles like “things you are too afraid to ask your parents” or “julian is a mermaid” and either hiding them or straight up stealing them

2. Trying to get teachers and librarians labeled as sex offenders for having books like the above available for children to read

3. Forming giant groups to heavily pressure schools and libraries into removing this content

4. Trying to strip funding from schools and libraries who have The Bad Content

Also it is an absolutely wild point to make that reading banned books is useless. It is actually vital that adults know exactly what is in the books people are trying to ban. Book banners share salacious portions of books specifically to take advantage of people's ignorance and make books seem more sexual/controversial then they are. Understanding the context of a sexual scene, or reading the whole of To Kill A Mockingbird, is not useless. Also when you look at these details you can find connecting threads between banned books.

Like in Alberta, many of the banned books discuss sexual abuse, which is important to know because fighting bans against sexually explicit material looks different than fighting bans against "critical race theory" in books.

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Pauline Hanson claims that there are 872,000 people who can't speak English in Australia as a way to complain about multiculturalism. The thing is: that figure includes over 100,000 babies.

Her claim uses self-reported ABS data, which is not an objective test of someone's English competency. Some of the adults in these figures are likely saying they can't speak English just because they don't speak it as fluently as those with it as a first language.

English competency is a requirement for Australian citizenship (unless you're born here, so babies don't need to prove it). The exception being those over 60, those under 16, or people with a permanent mental or physical incapacity.

So the Australian citizens who were born overseas but aren't competent at English? Probably family members like grandparents, children and dependants. Also, deaf people don't speak English, they use sign language. Oh, and some Indigenous communities focus on their language first as a way to prevent its extinction. There are multiple reasons why English isn't the primary language of many people.

In fact, the level of English competency required was already increased by the Coalition back in 2017. The level required is similar to that to be accepted into a university so those who come here to study, get skills that benefit the nation, and decide they like it here so much as to stay and contribute to our MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY will be fine. But that doesn't fit Hanson’s narrative so she's ignoring all of that.

So Pauline Hanson is trying to misrepresent statistics to stoke racist fears that social cohesion is being undermined by not understanding the idea of BABIES EXISTING and people having grandparents etc. Her solution is something that already is in place. This is just stupidity and racism. That's all One Nation represents.

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

and i always think abt how i kinda resent the fact that now that we have more black and brown princesses they don't really get the sweeping swoony fairytales like the white ones did

raya and moana don't get a love story. tiana was a frog for most of the movie. they retconned the love story for asha in wish

maybe unpopular opinion but yeah its cool to show girl power and girls can be independent from men but man i just want to see a black or brown princess who gets to be the princess the prince saves from the dragon lol

"make your own stuff" and it will go purposely unpromoted and unsupported, and when it fails it's because "diversity is forced and boring" and not "people prefer stories with the same white characters because racism, no matter how worn out the idea is".