#deselection

NPD Ortsvorsteher before deselection in Wetterau municipality

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The NPD politician Stefan Jagsch is about six weeks after his election to the mayor in the Hessian Altenstadt-Waldsiedlung be discontinued. His deselection is planned at the local council meeting today. The election of Jagsch, who is also Deputy National Chairman of the far-right NPD, had triggered nationwide outrage in early September.

The present Ortsbeirat members of the CDU, SPD and…

I really don’t see how she continues as an MP.

She is sitting as an independent - Labour expelled her in December after she had been convicted - but can she really spend three years in The Commons as a convicted criminal?

I understand the reason that MPs are not automatically recalled for sentences under a year (okay - I kind of understand it) but this is it. She has been refused leave to appeal, and that’s it - she’s a convicted criminal and it’s not going to change. 

Connie Willis is a great author, but on this she’s wrong.

Let me start with the end: She claims that libraries are “supposed to be archives of literature and history.” But they’re not. Not most of them, anyway.

The major academic libraries? Of course. Specialist libraries? Within their specialties, quite possibly. The grand metropolitan systems, with cathedral-like main buildings? Most definitely . . . at that main building. An isolated rural library half a county away from its nearest compatriot? Only to the extent that it has the space and budget, and history is probably best left to the local historical society. A single-location suburban public library? Only by chance and happenstance.

Now, if applied as a collective allegation against libraries in general, perhaps she’s correct to say that we should be archives of literature and history. But if you’re evaluating libraries in the aggregate, then we actually are, so the allegation that we’re not is still incorrect.

Let’s me take my situation. I work for a suburban public library district in Illinois. We have roughly 66k people in our district. There are a number of other libraries within fifteen to twenty minutes drive, all of which have reciprocal borrowing agreements with us, so our cards work there and vice-versa. Like most public libraries in the state, we do interlibrary loan (ILL) to and from not just other libraries in the area but throughout the state. Academic libraries also participate in the ILL system, and for that truly rare item we can always try going out-of-state. So if you come to us and we don’t have something, there’s a very good chance that you’ll have your choice of popping over to a nearby library and picking it up that same day or having it delivered to us in one to two weeks. In the rare case that that’s not possible, if the book’s still in print then we can usually buy a copy. It’s very difficult to stump us.

So what is available in Illinois? Well, according to WorldCat—the catalog we’d use for finding out what other libraries have and requesting it from them—just the 25 most popular editions of Moby Dick have a combined 965 copied owned in Illinois. (And there’s a lot of editions of Moby Dick.) Our Town? 916. Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog is much rarer, at only 121, but that’s still enough to guarantee that I could get you a copy if you wanted one. But if we wanted every public library to keep a copy of every book as good as Three Men in a Boat on their own shelves, we’d all have to be monoliths approaching the size of the main branch of Chicago Public Library and would collectively own thousands and thousands more copies of every single book than would be in use at any given time. Also, it would bankrupt our constituents. Instead, we spread the load. (And yes, whether other copies are available nearby is a selection/deselection criteria!)

>not calling people comrade

>not purging deselecting internal opponents 

>not resurrecting lenin

>not seizing the means of production 

>not calling for mass worker liberation