A HS student to their TX school board, which is banning books:

“I’m not going to sit here and talk about the slippery slope that book banning leads to because I learned from a book, that I checked out from my school’s library, that I don’t need to resort to logical fallacy to make a point. I’m simply going to say that no government – and public school is an extension of government – has ever banned books, and banned information from its public, and been remembered in history as the good guys.”

FedoraChronicles (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image I’ve been saying this, for years, Prohibition does nothing but increase demand. If you prohibit a drug, drink, or a book, or any other kind of media, you will increase interest in that thing exponentially. Forbidding me to read anything worked out really well for my parents. I read everything they told me not to! #ReversePsychology.

Mastodon 🐘
@johnno We need a centralized searchable website for banned books where students can see a list of books that their school district has banned, linked to reviews and to sources of the books (e.g. to combat censorship, NY public library allows young people from anywhere in the US to become members).
Banned & Challenged Books by School System | Open Library

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

@kali @johnno Well, that's a start, but it only has seven school districts from the whole of the US (plus the state of Texas, not broken into school districts). It's also run on a volunteer basis. We need something well-funded and comprehensive.
@bodhipaksa @johnno I don’t think well funded and activism go together…
if you want change, you probably need to start it yourself.
@kali @johnno Often that's true, but right wing authoritarian activism is often very well funded. They're well organized, and get money from people like the Kochs. Liberals need to start emulating that model, or they're doomed.